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Badge title: more sleep : less booze

Badge author: claire_w

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- claire welsby -

A brilliant and rather ordinary moment came to my attention this week. Both brief and mundane, it provides a cute example of the kind of lateral thinking and connective action that occurs as a result of networked existence. The type of daily minor event that can prompt you to imagine, get excited, try something out and share in a matter of minutes.

From Star Trek to real life astronauts

During a rather self-indulgent evening watching Start Trek (I feel oddly compelled to mention that I haven’t been so well this week – I’ve had the snivels tweet01 tweet02 tweet03 tweet04). Mid episode of What are little girls made of, an inspired acorn of thought sprung to mind. Wouldn’t it be awesome if real-life astronauts were tweeting. I could follow them and get real-time updates on real-world space missions – wowser, that would be brilliant!

So I immediately paused the show to conduct a few quick searches…

…Now although none of these particular queries resulted in my finding a ‘real-life astronaut,’ (even my search for ‘astronauts on twitter,’ offered results for NASA feeds), what I did find was a good start. Decent enough for the time-being.

As a result of my compulsive imagination and action, I am now the privileged receiver of a number of NASA tweets. Alerts that provide me with glorious insights of space age shenanigans:

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Tweet01 – ‘More than four centuries after the brilliant star explosion witnessed by Tycho Brahe and other astronomers o…http://tinyurl.com/5thgkx’

Tweet02 – ‘With a diameter of about 170,000 light years, galaxy Messier 101 (M101) is nearly twice the size of our Milk.. http://tinyurl.com/56237x‘

Tweet03 – ‘Students will participate in a live in-flight education downlink on Dec. 9, with the astronauts on the Space.. http://tinyurl.com/5jfdzh‘

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As you can tell by the somewhat abrupt ‘cut off,’ point, these tweets are automatic, produced via updates to NASA’s website. Their purpose therefore is simple, to provide real-time alerts (with minimum effort) about NASA’s universe pushing astronomical projects and space missions and drive traffic to the website. With a brisk click through, you can read more about a particular event that caught your eye and see some awesome ‘real science,’ like this.

What was particularly interesting about this experience for me, was that almost as soon as I’d clicked ‘follow @NASA,’ I became instantly annoyed. Annoyed that the same search on the UK’s equivalent organisation, the BNSC (British National Space Centre) failed to offer a similar level of service. I thought if NASA is doing it, why isn’t the BNSC? The benefits are obvious:

1. Auto micro-blogging provides an easy, quick and inexpensive way for public organisations to improve ‘real-time’ access to their work. In NASA’s example, it enables them to spread the word about fascinating science work, discoveries and research innovations with public value.
2. A publicly positive action, micro-feeds can yield significant interested and connected audiences (NASA for example is followed by 4401 people). These audiences more than likely include people that organisations like NASA and the BNSC would otherwise not be in touch with, or be able to engage by any other means.
3. Establishing a presence in micro-blogging spaces (like twitter) enables otherwise often hidden and impenetrable organisations to engage audiences in new ways. As the examples above illustrate, this can include making the people and history tied to an organisation more visible, offering quick and fun ‘crowd pleasing,’ facts (invaluable for dinner parties and playgrounds) and promoting public events to a captive audience – in this case an ‘in-fight down link’ for students….and the benefits go on…

So, through a simple action of finding and following NASA (in this case on twitter), I immediately wanted the UK’s equivalent organisation to do better. I wanted the BNSC  to help me follow my interest more closely and enable me to become a more informed UK citizen. And I wanted them to do this by engaging with ‘the micro-blog network.’ I’d be interested to hear from anyone that’s experienced similar of late.

The future is multi-channel

For me at least, it seems that having a website no longer ‘cuts it,’ in terms of public engagement and/or enabling access to information. Interestingly (and again in my case), neither is just offering an email alert or RSS feed. And the reason being is this.

Over the last couple of years I’ve both consciously and sub-consciously compartmentalised my online information life. For me, offering information updates via email and RSS is great, but doesn’t always fit with how I choose to keep informed. Particularly with my hobbyist interests. I feel happy for example, subscribing to email alerts to receive ‘What’s On’ information i.e. event listings (in fact I prefer it), and I check in with my RSS on a daily basis to catch up with news related to my profession and avid interest in all things ‘art-tech.’ But for this particular ‘information type,’ (what I call hobbyist) these lines of communication no longer meet my ‘data habits,’ or ‘info-needs.’ It doesn’t make sense for me to engage with hobbiest information via these channels because the pipes are ‘already full.’ It would confuse ‘the system.’ [Do I sound like a bot...?! :-/ ]

Twitter on the other hand is perfect for this kind of hobbiest information.  Very much a social and information news feed, I run Twhirl on my desk top to keep up to date with my network and dive into recommendations and news throughout the day and catch up with a lot of my news when I’m on the move. I’ve also started to favourite recommendations to catch up with together later, when I have the time.

Dear BNSC…

In the spirit of doing my bit, when I get a spare moment over xmas I think I might drop the BNSC a little note of encouragement for the new year. A ping that urges them to follow NASAs lead, embrace the network and get micro-blogging! I’ll let you know how it goes.

- claire welsby -

A few examples of NASA on twitter (there are many more): @NASA | @NASACoLab | @MarsPheonix | @LRO_NASA | @SSDiscovery | @NASA_SDO_HM

There was some interesting data released about twitter in the August 08 edition of Hitwise Media Round Up. The most surprising headline (for me at least), was that twitter is officially more popular with Brits than Americans – and it’s the stats that say so.

A social media fave for many ‘early adopters,’ Twitter has started to ramp up its UK user base in 2008. In the 12 months up to 12 July 2008, UK internet visits to www.twitter.com increased by 631%, with 485% of that growth coming this year. And for the week ending 12 July, the nations favourite tweety site’s share of UK internet visits was 70% higher than its share of visits in America. As a result, twitter entered Hitwise UK’s rankings of the top 50 Social Networking and Forum websites for the first time in July 2008.

Although it’s still relatively modest in terms of user base (particularly in comparison to the ‘big liners’ like myspace, bebo and facebook), this development is not insignificant. The question is, why is twitter doing so well in terms of growth in the UK? And who’s using it..?

Hitwise say that Twitters service demographics in the UK are starting to point towards more wide-spread adoption. Over the 4 weeks to July 12th, visitors were split 50/50 male and female, with only 15% originating from London – so growth is national. 25-34 year olds are the most over represented age group visiting the site, while 37% of visitors are aged 45 and over.

The two most over represented types are City Adventurers (High-salaried, twenty-something singles in smart flats in inner urban areas) and Town Gown Transition (Students and academics mix with young professionals in terraces relatively close to universities). There are a number of other over-represented types that indicate more mainstream appeal, in particular Settled Minorities (Young families and singles of varied ethnic descent, in high density, pleasant urban terraces) and White Van Culture (Younger owners, many in good quality ex-council properties, taking advantage of local economic opportunities). So although growth isn’t ring fenced to ‘media centric’ London, it is tied to that ‘city living urban thing,’ for the moment at least. Another sign of maturity (says Hitwise) is that mainstream media organisations are starting to pick up traffic from Twitter. For example, BBC News accounts for 1.46% of the site’s upstream traffic, but 1.73% of its downstream traffic. So, the Beeb is receiving more traffic from Twitter than it sends.

In terms of use, twitter sits somewhere between the public and the private space. Or what Matt Locke more accurately terms, the personal and the social. On the one hand it’s a chronological log of personal day-to-day activity. A place to tweet nougats on daily existence, what you’re doing, what you’re thinking and how you feel for example. It’s also a social space. Tweets are public and shared with your network of twitter followers. Alongside people, many ‘organisations’ and ’service providers,’ have a presence on twitter too. I follow The Guardian, Animate Projects, BBC Technology, Hitwise, Number 10, the Central Line and Ars Technica for instance. This combination (of people and organisations) is interesting because it is evidence of twitters flexiblity as a service. A service that meets the needs of different ‘kinds’ of user – from personal micro-blogger to news alerts and social marketing.

In terms of my own experience (I joined twitter in 2006), I initially used twitter to ‘find out what it was,’ and promote my niche website interventtech.net and associated news and threads blog. Tweeting provided my network with a ‘heads up’ on new posts, and when I added a twitter widget to the site home page, visitors could instantly find out what’s new. The widget also made the home page feel more dynamic. Over time, I began to build up my very own ‘tweetwork,’ and strarted to use twitter to more social ends. I feel that I’ve got to know many fellow tweeters pretty well – and I hope they feel the same about me. I know for example that @billt likes coffee and beer breaks, @freecloud loves robots, @davewiner supports the Obama campaign, @benmatthews sits next to @domw at work and @cridland gets annoyed with blipfm twitter spam! Much like other online social networks, although I know a proportion of my twitter network in real life, many I have never met but found connection through common interest. I have also forged what I term ‘tweetships,’ with many people in my network. Many of these friendly interactions that occur via twitter have resulted in positive real world introductions too. All good…

What I like about twitter (and in part why I think it’s successful), is that it’s simple, flexible and makes time spent on the network (which is still mainly via desktop or laptop) feel more personalised and ‘human.’ As well as posting tweets and keeping up-to-speed with activity in your network, users bounce off each other and conduct ’sociality,’ too. This happens in public via @name (so tweets are visible to others) in private via direct message (hidden) and in communities around events using #event. Using twitter via applications like Twhirl enables users to feed tweets to their desktop in real-time (well almost), making personal and interactive tweeting much quicker, easier and arguably more meaningful. For me, Twhirl transforms twitter from a disconnected social archive to an real-time enabling social news network. So, in between the human insights, heads up’s, recommendations and messages that I receive via my trusted network (the people), I also receive real-time news alerts spanning politics, technology, culture and transport for example.

Since I started using Twhirl, my level of tweeting has soured. I have also established my own 70:30 rule for posting to help manage my tweeting. The purpose of my 70:30 rule is to make sure that at least 30% of my tweets add some level of value to my twitter community, above and beyond ‘day-to-day insights.’ In other words, tweet about stuff that people in my network may find of interest (e.g. recommendations, niche news, heads up on blog posts, local traffic info, live reviews etc) or entertaining (reviews, jokes and humorous observations)! Of course, not all tweeters follow my special rule . A friend of mine for example uses twitter solely to keep in touch with his close group of friends (so they block people they don’t know). For them, the purpose of twitter is to share recommendations and ’stay social,’ throughout the day. They let each other know where they are and what they’re up to, making it easier for others to join in. But that’s the joy of twitter – you can use it your way.

So I’ve touched on why I think twitter works, why it’s popular among it’s user base. But why is the service growing faster in the UK than the US? What is it about the the UK experience that is spurring this surprising level of growth? A difficult question to answer, but my instinct tells me that in part, it’s tied to the locality of Connectors and Mavens within the twitter network. Connectors are the socialites, they have many followers and invest time in maintaining and fueling social networks. From the networks perspective, Connectors are central nodes in the health of the social network. They drive user growth and social momentum. A Maven on the other hand is someone who has a disproportionate influence on other members of the network. The role of Mavens in social networks is to propagate knowledge and preferences across domains, from politics to pop and other social trends. The Maven is the opinion leader while Connectors pick up on information, opinions, taste, advice and insights drawn from Mavens and distribute this to broader networks, their way. So in terms of the social architecture of twitter, it could be that in proportional terms, there are more Connectors and Mavens based in the UK than in the US.

A second (and perhaps related) reason for twitters growing success in the UK, could be to do with the breadth of the new media media industry here in comparison to the States. As well as commercial start-ups, media agencies, games producers and digital production companies, the UKs creative industry also includes public service media production companies and social enterprise start-ups. Although it’s early days for these emerging sectors, public service media and social enterprise is certainly gaining pace as a result of new and revived commissioning players such as BBC 24/7, BBC multi-platform, BBC THREE, BBC Vision and 4IP. They also reflect aspects of the UKs media industry that just don’t ‘fit’ as well in the States where market growth is more often than not driven by commercial business models.

The fact is, twitter is a user driven social space that values and enables knowledge sharing and transparency in interaction. Levels of knowledge sharing and transparency that we might like commercial industry to get more involved in, but just doesn’t seem to fit with their business case right now, particularly in terms of how they relate and interact with consumers. Public Service Media and Social Enterprise on the other hand fits much more neatly with the kind of social values and architecture that underpins twitter. These industries are all about knowledge sharing, public participation, conversation and audience engagement. Now, it’s worth mentioning in closing that I have no hard evidence or even ‘indicative’ audience research to back this final piece of analysis up…just claire_w intuition. But it’s an acorn worth sharing no…?

-claire welsby-

Playing with my friend Victors iphone over lunch on Friday, i noticed that Google have ditched ‘Enter’ on their iphone app…and they’ve swapped in ‘Google…’

In all honesty, on pressing ‘google’ to submit my search query something funny happened inside. My stomach definitely turned. And the only thing that could of caused it was my fondness for ‘Enter.’ I missed it.

I’ve grown up with ‘Enter’… I know what it does, and I respect its objectivity.

So…I got thinking. Now Google’s redesigned the laws of the keyboard…what’s next? What else might Google try its hand at? A perfume range perhaps…

Now just to be clear, I generally like Google. They’ve been ‘exposed,’ as acquiring a bit of a lazy bone of late (with the old Chrome T’s & C’s)…but Google engineers have developed some fantastic applications and services over the years. Applications and services that genuinely make my life easier and better…

Although I’m confident that any fragrance that Google might release would be a sweet.x mass market smash! what my turning stomach told me was that I’m worried about ‘Enter.’ And perhaps even more importantly…that I’d prefer it if Google focused it’s efforts on the improvement of ’search’ and the development of new brilliant apps.

NOTICE – my wish list excludes the unnecessary brand’adisation of iphone applications…

-claire welsby-

Chaired by the infamous natural search guru (and all round lovely) Steve Johnston, Search vs Recommendation at Chinwag Live unfolded as an evening of zingy SEO chit chat with a dash of sexy talk!

Like most chinwag events (in the main attended by commercial media/advertising types), this event followed suit with a strong commercial edge. The panel included a good mix of talent from both sides of the fence. Walid Al Saqqaf (Trusted Places), Lisa Ditlefsen (Base One), David Maher-Roberts (The Filter), Luke Errington (Reevoo) and Jon Myers (Media Vest)

Pitched in a ‘what’s better?’ format, the recommendation chaps all conceded that a high percentage of site traffic arrives via search. So no surprises there then, recommendation sites are dependent on search to ‘get found.’ Where the panel felt recommendation services offer mileage, is in the richness of information, credibility of voice and social value offered. So, even though people use search (aka Google) to find stuff they want, recommendation services can often offer users more relevant and helpful results. Particularly when it comes to ‘product,’ queries.

For example, when searching for earphones to replace the crappy ones that come with your ipod, conducting a query in Google will return results that take you straight to purchase. As a user, what I really want is for search to point me to independent reviews about different earphone models that I can compare. Credible recommendations that enable me to make a more informed decision about the best earphones for me.

So, the independence and social credence of recommendation services has weight and value for users. But, because ’search’ is our universal starting point, we often miss out on useful review content. There is an opportunity therefore for search to up it’s game and ‘get wise,’ to recommendations. Offer users results that blend ‘direct to product purchase’ and ‘credible independent reviews.’

It’s not all sunshine and roses in recommendation land though. While search often fails to pick up on reviews, recommendation services fall short in terms of completing the deal. They rarely link users through to the information, products and places discussed (directly to purchase/action). Other issues facing recommendation services include managing the quantity of reviews, integrating personalisation and broadening content coverage – plugging the gaps. Depending on the information I’m looking for, the number of recommendation results I’m offered can often feel overwhelming. This makes it difficult to compare, make judgment or digest the information on offer. Because recommendation services are generally underpinned by a commercial business model, there are gaps in the recommendation service market. Services rarely reference public service ‘products’ for example, across health (e.g. doctors and hospitals), arts and culture (e.g. plays and exhibitions), education (e.g. schools and colleges) and other local services and information. So, as well as helping with ‘what to buy,’ it would be great if recommendation services started to emerge around broader areas of public life.

Thinking about the future, a feature of recommendation sites applauded by the panel was the possibility to search ‘emotionally,’ and discover new things. On Trusted Places for example, I can search for the ‘type of place’ that I am looking for as well as by a specific name, type of food or location. I want to go somewhere romantic, somewhere cheap, somewhere sophisticated or somewhere quirky for example. Although it’s less intelligent, I Feel London offers a similar kind of service. A user generated location based mash up, I Feel London is designed for emotional search. Where’s good to go if I feel hungover, naughty or broke? Like Lastfm in the music market, these newer services represent a next generation of recommendation website for emotional, location based and social decision making.

Following this theme, one of the more interesting representatives on the panel was David Maher-Roberts of The Filter. Currently in beta, The Filter promises an intelligent and personalised recommendation engine for entertainment (music, films and online video). With ambitions to raise the bar for recommendation, The Filter invites users to plug The Filter engine into their local media applications (i.e. itunes, lastfm and winamp) and social networks – the people that hold social currency and credibility in their networks. Sucking in this kind (and level) of data will enable The Filter to ‘get to know’ their users better and generate more intelligent and nuanced recommendations. Recommendations informed by a users media consumptions habits, taste and social world. The social element of The Filter however (the element that could really make it stand out from the crowd), still feels a little manual at the moment. Users need to invite their friends to join The Filter community in order to share and connect media consumption data. Oh joy – another social network to spam my pals with

What I’d personally like to see (and this may very well be where The Filter is heading) is a recommendation service that plugs into my distributed ‘vapour (data) trail.’ An engine that links up to my broader networked activity sucking in data about the products I choose to buy and the conversations I engage in online (e.g. via IM, facebook and twitter, the blogs I consume and contribute to, the media sharing services I use and the videos i watch on youtube). It’s not an easy task for sure, but with services like BBC Sound Index emerging, the possibility of a distributed recommendation model must be getting closer to a reality.

As the next generation of recommendation services start to emerge, I imagine that assessments of social currency and review credibility, data context and privacy will become increasingly important in the design and development of new services. Whose opinion do I want when I’m looking for new music or films to try? Is this different when I’m looking for advice about other products, for example a digital camera, a bike, a car or a home? Whose tips are most relevant when I’m visiting unfamiliar territories – when I’m on holiday or away with work? Suggestions from a friend that visited 5 years ago or local people with similar tastes and social habits to my own? A complex set of questions with implications for ‘back end’ development, IA and editorial integration. These are some of the questions that need thinking about in the development of new kinds of recommendation services…

If you’ve got this far, thank you for reading. As a gesture of thanks, the ’sexy talk,’ bit that I promised at the top follows right now…

EXCLUSIVE FROM CHALKBOARD – Between a question from the floor (@chinwag) and a comment by Jon Myers, it emerged that ‘Google personified’ has a penis and a set of breasts. Probably more than a handful

-claire welsby -