cybersoc.com

links for 2008-07-25

• BBC - Music - Shoot The Summer
  "‘Shoot The Summer’ is a film about festivals shot entirely on mobile phones... by our DJs and our artists at festivals this summer. You can get in on the action by sending us your mobile clips. "
  (tags: mobile video bbc usergeneratedcontent)

what social media people really do

Robin refactoring client workshop output
Originally uploaded by Larsz

For the past six years, whenever someone asked my mom what it is I do for a living, she simply replied that I worked for the BBC. And then, I suppose, whoever was asking would simply assume that I was a journalist or producer somehow involved in television.

On the day before I started my new role at Headshift, my mom asked what I'd be doing. I explained - sparing much of the detail - that Headshift helps clients of all shapes and sizes use social media to improve the way they do things. Her reply was something along the lines of "so, you're in marketing".

I wonder what she'll think when she finds out that what I really do is rearrange colourful post-it notes on glass walls...

new media douchebag: a commoncraft show parody

I'm a big fan of the CommonCraft Show, a collection of short videos which make it easy to understand social media tools and techniques. This parody does the same for New Media Douchebag...

[Link hat tip to Anne who pointed me to the embed here: http://leehopkins.net/2008/07/25/new-media-douchebags/]

links for 2008-07-24

• What ‘Facebook Connect’ Means for Corporate Websites
  "Facebook Connect will allow corporate websites to authenticate, interact, and share with their Facebook network –all without leaving the corporate website. Boring, static corporate websites can now become social."
  (tags: facebook socialnetworking)
• BBC NEWS | UK | Facebook libel case damages won
  A businessman whose personal details were "laid bare" in fake entries on the Facebook social networking website has won a libel case at the High Court.
  (tags: libel internetlibel internetlaw law facebook privacy)
• Attaching an external mic to Nokia N95 at ExperienceCurve by Karl Long
  (tags: nokia mobile audio)

iphone returned

I don't really know what went on behind the scenes, but my iphone has been returned to me by Carphone Warehouse. I got a call from the manager saying that they'd had a call from the headquarters and it was all sorted, all I had to do was go collect it. Which I did. So thanks if you had something to do with sorting this out behind the scenes, or maybe it was just lucky or sense prevailing. Still, it shouldn't have happened and I'm going to be asking for some compensation... will keep you posted.

Off to set up my new phone!

how carphone warehouse took my iphone & ruined my credit rating

Last Friday I queued up with all the other early adopting Apple fan boys to collect my new 3g iphone on launch day. I took photos of it. I hyped it. I even taught my two year old to say "daddy gotted iPhone" in anticipation of my shiny new toy. As of a short time ago, I no longer have that iPhone and have a ruined credit rating to boot. Here's what happened...

I'd pre-ordered from Carphone Warehouse which, when 02 ran out of stock prior to the launch, still had a few of the 16gb version available. I ordered it and got a confirmation that I'd passed the credit check. Then I got another email, saying they'd run out of stock. A day later, I got yet another email saying that I did in fact manage to secure an iphone and it would be delivered to the branch of Carphone Warehouse at London Bridge Station, as I'd specified.

So on Friday I came in to London early and joined the queue at the shop only to be turned away an hour later when staff told us it was unlikely any of us would be leaving with an iPhone because their system was down.

I went back after lunch and collected my iPhone. They didn't check my ID, ask for me to sign, look at a receipt or anything. I just walked in, told them my name and was handed an iPhone. I took it back to the office and showed it to my envious colleagues. Then I tried to sync it with iTunes which, as those who tried to do the same on Friday know, took many attempts - in my case, several an hour for around 12 hours. Eventually it worked. I registered. I put some of my music from itunes onto the iPhone. I waited patiently for my iPhone to register on 02, the network provider chosen by Apple in the UK.

I waited. And I waited until Sunday when I could wait no more and went into my local branch of Carphone Warehouse where I bought a nice case for my iPhone and asked when it would be online. The member of staff there laughed and said it could be another day or two, such had the problems been on launch day.

On Tuesday, a fully 96 hours after I'd collected my phone, I began to get a bit upset. It still wasn't on the network. I phoned the Carphone Warehouse helpline. The friendly person on the other end asked me my details and found my order but said that, as far as she could tell, it was still open.

I hadn't, from what she could see, collected or paid for my phone.

I explained that I did in fact have it. She phoned someone in their web sales department, then another in their IT department, trying to close the order so that I could get connected to the network. After a while she asked if I'd prefer for her to phone me back. I said yes but, two hours later, still hadn't heard from her and went home for the day.

On Wednesday I phoned again. They tried to do the same as the previous helpline employee and also encountered difficulties. They suggested I take my iPhone to the shop where I'd bought it which, at the end of the day, I did despite realising that I could probably have simply kept the thing without ever paying for it.

On Wednesday evening I spent an hour in Carphone Warehouse at London Bridge Station. The staff were genuinely helpful and here's what they found out:

1. I'd ordered my phone and asked for it to be delivered to one of two Carphone Warehouse outlets at London Bridge listed on the website.
2. That London Bridge shop had actually been closed... more than 3 years ago.
3. The City Link courier knew that the other shop was closed so delivered, as it was on his daily round, my iPhone to the store where I collected it.
4. Only the store that no longer existed could close the order.

The guy in the shop tried to sort it out over the phone and, after an hour, got the store helpline people to cancel my original order. I then went home so it could go through the system.

Today I spoke to the manager. He had the phone transfered into his system, reopened the order, and set everything up so that at lunch all I'd need to do is pop in and confirm my identity using a chip and pin credit card. I did this but it wasn't at all straight forward and what happened next is totally unbelievable.

I could see on his screen that I had passed the credit check done originally. I could also see that there had been a subsequent check made, also passed. I'd asked the manager earlier, and had been assured that, no subsequent credit check would be made on me. For those who aren't familiar with the system, each credit check undertaken actually reduces your credit rating, particularly if you happen to get declined.

I wasn't pleased, but the excitement of my iPhone finally getting onto the phone network - after 6 days - kept me from getting upset.

Then there was some sort of problem with the system so I was asked to do the chip and pin check again, which I did. Again this was fine. He hit some buttons and told me I'd have to have a new sim card. I selected a number from the screen, he put it in the system and hit some buttons. Suddenly there was a problem. He could see the results of the two previous credit checks on screen but the system was telling him to contact Carphone Warehouse because another credit check had been run and I'd failed.

The manager explained this and calmly called the store support line who he spoke with for around half an hour. It transpires that they'd actually run as many as five credit checks on me (he wasn't entirely sure) and that although I'd passed the earlier ones, I'd failed the last one - precisely because they kept running them and, perhaps, because they'd authorised, deauthorised, then authorised my setting up of a new account with 02.

After hanging up the phone, the manager told me that I could, if I want to, go to the Carphone Warehouse and immediately order an iPhone and, because I'd already passed the credit check there, they wouldn't run another one.

Yeah, right.

Then he told me that the phone - the iPhone I'd queued up for and, as far as I knew, had paid for, installed stuff on, put music on, personalised, etc - was in his store's stock. He was very sorry, but he couldn't let me leave the shop with the iPhone because it belonged to Carphone Warehouse, not me.

So I handed it over.

Because of the incompetence of Carphone Warehouse I was given a phone, after quite a long time waiting in queues, that I never should have been given. And because of Apple's incompetence in planning for the sale of millions of the new iPhones, I had to spend hours trying to sync that iPhone. I spent hours then switching the phone on and off hoping that would trigger the network ping from 02 needed to activate it. I moved music, some of it purchased from the iTunes store and thus with DRM which limits the number of devices I can install that content on, over to the iPhone. I spent hours configuring bits and pieces of software, downloading apps (over wifi) and getting to know my new phone. I spent several hours at the Carphone Warehouse store and on the phone trying to sort it out.

Up to that point I didn't have a working phone but at least my credit rating was in tact. Now, because I was honest and took a phone that had been given to me with NO attempt to verify my identity, acquire my signature, or anything else - making it totally untraceable - back to the store beacause I just wanted it to work, I've now come home with NO IPHONE and a RUINED CREDIT RATING.

So thanks Steve for the new iPhone and for choosing as your partners a company that has demonstrated to me over several days and several ways that they are totally and utterly incompetent.

clay shirky talks politics and cognitive surplus at demos

Clay Shirky @ Demos
Originally uploaded by robinhamman

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, spoke today at a free event organised by Demos.

He discussed, amongst other things, my.barackobama which, soon after it launched, faced a backlash from within because some users had high expectations of participation that weren't met by the system. Barack had to respond, and did so by saying he wasn't going to change anything, but the fact that he felt it was important to engage is, according to Shirky, what's really telling about how the campaign is being run. What did they learn? Well, what the campaign has done since suggests that they've decided that "you don't let people near policy" but use social media tools for fundraising and getting out the vote, but not to shape policy.

Moving away from politics, Shirky also spoke about the decline - for the first time since WW2 - in hours people, particularly those under the age of 35, spend in front of a television each week. "People don't just like to consume, they like to produce and share... we've finally got a hold of a medium that [allows us to do that]."

A television producer asked Shirky how people find the time to create wikipedia articles - resulting in one of my favourite posts of all time:

"She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation."

Bill Thompson is doing a good job of twittering the event...

(r)editorialise [v.] ~ to build value through editorialised linking

I've long thought that the BBC's public service content, paid for as it is by the license fee payer, is effectively owned by those who paid for it.

Unfortunately, that's not, for a whole slew of reasons - some real and some imagined by the corporation - the way it plays out in reality.

You can, within fair use guidelines, record BBC programmes for personal use using a PVR or other device and iPlayer allows you to catch-up on missed programmes (for those outside the UK, iPlayer is the BBC's seven day catch up service, available through a range of internet capable devices) without requiring users to actual set up recording beforehand.

But for most people, most of the time, missing the actual transmission means missing out completely. The valuable content, which has already been paid for by the license fee payers, is lost.

Speechification (see screenshot) aims to help those interested in speech radio, primarily from BBC Radio 4, to very quickly find, listen to and even subscribe to the very best bits. Watchification, a sister site, does the same with the BBC's video content.

The BBC broadcasts some wonderful content but, after transmission, makes little attempt to help audiences find there way to it. This is where Speechification and Watchification step into the void, and provide an excellent example of how value can be created through the simple act of editorialised linking.

These aren't the first sites to editorialise the BBC's content in ways that extract value from making that link. One of my favourite sites to do this is Speak You're Branes, which highlights, with humour, some of the worst (eg. anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-everything, etc) posts from BBC News Have Your Say. [Also piggie-backing on HYS is Newssniffer's Watch Your Mouth, which tracks "censored" discussions - the quotes are there because I don't actually believe that moderation, based on the fair enforcement of transparent house rules, is censorship. It's entirely automated so outside the scope of this post.]

By sifting through content and filtering out the best (or worst) bits - something only skilled, living, breathing humans can do, not algorythms -  these three sites have created their own compelling offerings from BBC content that otherwise would probably be lost. Imagine what could be done if, instead of simply putting out content and letting a few keen users get away with editorialising and reusing that content, the BBC (and other public service broadcasters) actually encouraged and harnessed the will of their audiences to help sift, categorise and rate content. Rather than the valuable content dropping off the edge of a cliff following transmission, and rapidly fading from the minds of those who did catch it first time around or on iPlayer, value could be retained and built upon over time.

Journalism has it's networked journalism, the harnessing of audiences to help gather information and report aspects of a story. I call the act of reviewing, sifting and helping audiences find content (r)editorising. Fans are ready and willing to do the work, they just need to be networked.

Just for fun, I've aggregated the RSS feeds of the four sites listed above [speechification, watchification, speak you're branes and newsniffer] to create a feed of sites which aren't particularly good bedfellows. It's a bit like getting a free DVD with your newspaper.

a good set of slides explaining social media

Marta Z. Kagan, who describes herself as a "marketing/communications professional (and confessed start-up junkie) with a knack for using the Web and non-traditional marketing methods to build new brands—and breathe life into old ones" has put together a shared a smashing set of slides explaining social media.

Provocatively titled What the F**k is Social Media?, I nearly gave it a miss because I figured it was going to be the usual tired "change or die" sort of thing but it's not at all. Expect visually attractive slides, points concisely made, appropriate messages, use of stats that aren't too over-revved, etc. Sure, there's nothing really *new* here but it does strike me as one of the better social media introductions I've yet come across. Nice work.

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links for 2008-07-04

• Polish Ponglish dialect arrives in England - Telegraph
  Ms Pustola said that the word "highstreet" had quickly been adopted by Poles in London "because we just don't have the equivalent of how London is made up of lots of little towns, each with a main street".
  (tags: polish london dailytelegraph language)
• UK extends ecommerce directive to terrorism laws | The Register
  ...which means there is now a clear notification and takedown procedure with regards to user content and comments which fall foul of anti-terror laws banning incitement of terror, etc
  (tags: terrorism law lawacrossfrontiers internetlaw europe)
• Google must divulge YouTube log
  "Mr Davies said: "Governments and organisations are realising that companies like Google have a warehouse full of data. And while that data is stored it is under threat of being used and putting privacy in danger."
  (tags: bbcnews google copyright law internetlaw youtube privacy)
• Faceparty tells critics to F*** Off, suspends entire site
  "Owners of the somewhat idiosyncratic FaceParty, one of the UK’s oldest social networks, appear to have had an altercation - with almost their entire user-base. On Tuesday night the normal home page was replaced with a diatribe against users..."
  (tags: onlinecommunity onlinecommunitymanagement socialsoftware socialnetworking)
• Eight Ways to Orientate Yourself Anywhere » tomtaylor.co.uk
  (tags: maps howto conference)