Category: Social Software

Categories
Journalism Politics Social Software Technology

Trump blocked me on Twitter. But for democracy’s sake, we can’t ban him.

I was commissioned to write this Op Ed by NBC News after discussing the matter on Twitter at length. It was a fun if surprisingly hard thing to write. I never managed to get paid for it and never signed anything, so I think it’s probably okay that I republish it here. The original home on NBC News is here: Trump blocked me on Twitter.

A little over six months ago the President of the United States of America blocked me on Twitter. He or his people decided — over the course of one weekend in June — to purge those of us who had been fact-checking him online. By Monday morning, most of us were gone forever.

In a normal administration, a fairly minor micro-scandal like that might represent the high-water mark of public interest in the president’s social media life. Even in this case, there’s more to the story than perhaps meets the eye — blocking critics from official public fora could arguably be illegal — but still, I can’t imagine any previous president spending much time worrying about the effects of Twitter on their agenda.

But things have changed. Today, the censoring of President Donald Trump’s critics represents only the tiniest part of the Trump and Twitter love story — a never-ending 24/7 horror show focusing on and around a profoundly irresponsible and incompetent man’s willful and occasionally terrifying use of social media.

Let’s review: Trump — in the last year alone — has used Twitter to systematically lie to the American people, attack the very idea of the free press, undermine public trust in America’s core institutions, underplay racist terror acts, support alleged child molesters, call himself a genius, alienate America’s allies and perhaps worst of alltaunt the world’s most autocratic and unstable nuclear power.

It’s no wonder that so many activists now argue that Twitter has a moral responsibility to ban the president. At protests outside Twitter’s San Francisco offices earlier in January — protests that eventually triggered an anemic and half-hearted response from the company — activists argued that Trump’s appalling behavior had broken the company’s Terms of Use regarding abuse and harassment and should result in him being banned.

They also said that Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey — by creating a space where Trump could circumvent normal media checks and balances — had directly contributed to the president’s rise to power. Enough is enough, they argued. Ban this man.

I have a lot of sympathy with this argument. I also know some of these activists personally and they are honorable and decent people. But ultimately I believe Twitter must fight to keep Trump on the platform.

For good or ill, Twitter is one of the closest things we have today to a de facto “public space” on the internet. I believe we need such a space. And I believe over the last couple of years, under extraordinary (if deserved) pressure, Twitter has just started to really understand the full range of responsibilities that occupying such a role entails.

One of these responsibilities is to provide a space for the political discourse of a country to play itself out. These are the spaces we now use to debate the issues, to campaign and — now — even to discuss and announce policy. Ideally they wouldn’t be spaces owned by for-profit corporations, but truly public places with rights and responsibilities defined and protected by law. But the U.S. government has shown no inclination or ability to fund or build or run such places, so instead we are where we are.

And where we are is in a country where almost half of the electorate voted for Trump. He did not organize a military coup. It wasn’t a massive administrative error that secured him the job. It was, as much as some people may dispute or dislike it, the will of the people. And until such a time that he’s removed from office, if Twitter is to remain the de facto public space we all need, the will of the people matters.

I’m not going to pretend there isn’t realpolitik in play here too. Let’s face it: Banning the president from Twitter would not remove his platform, he’d simply move to Snapchat, or Facebook or Ello. And if he were banned, the partisan outcry over the decision would probably rend Twitter in half in the process, potentially killing the product and the company in the process. There are no victories there.

Because in the end, the only victories can come from the same processes that got us here. We need to take responsibility as an electorate. If we want him to stop debasing the presidency on Twitter, we need to remove him from the presidency, not remove him from Twitter. We need to support our courts in the fair implementation of the law. And we need to hold our elected representatives to account as they attempt — in turn — to keep Trump from going off the rails.

Meanwhile, there is something we can ask of Twitter. We can ask them to be clear about how they see their role in the world. We need to know what they believe in; what they stand for. We need them to demonstrate that they fully understand they’re not simply a neutral communications mechanism. Today’s Twitter is a place where business happens, elections happen, government happens — and with the arrival of Russia onto the scene — international tensions play out. We need Twitter to show us they understand this and that they’re up to that challenge.

And perhaps we can ask them one more tiny thing — to review their policies on politicians blocking or banning users engaged in legitimate, non-abusive political debate. Twitter’s own statement stood up for “necessary discussion around [politicians’] words and actions, but we can’t have that discussion if those politicians shut us down. And in this post-truth world, we need all the help we can get.

Tom Coates is an entrepreneur and technologist who has developed software products for the BBC, Time Out, Yahoo, Nokia and Jawbone among others. Over the last 20 years he’s written and spoken extensively about tech culture, social platforms, location and the Internet of Things and his work has been featured on the BBC, The Guardian, New York Times, MIT Technology Review and in the Daily Mail. His most recent project was the smart home software company Thington, which was acquired last year by eero inc. 

Categories
Design Personal Publishing Radio & Music Social Software

Visualising your last.fm listening…

I’ve been having enormous fun playing with Lastgraph over the last week or so. You tell it your last.fm username and it runs off and plots you a nice colourful graph that visualises your listening behaviour.

I’ve been with last.fm for a very long time (since 2003, when it was still really audioscrobbler) and have scrobbled a good 50,000 tracks. As a result, my graphs are pretty nice. You can get them visualised in various ways, but I would recommend using the ‘rainbow’ style and allowing it even to plot artists that you’ve only played once. That gives you the greatest detail and most beautiful results.

The most important thing about any visualisation is that it should give you another perspective on a dataset you already knew, and these graphs certainly do that. You really can get a sense of what kind of listener you’re dealing with. When you look at mine you’ll see a hell of a lot of thin lines. I listen to a lot of different artists, normally as part of ‘Most-played Five Star’ playlists and stuff like that. But alongside those classics there’s a decent and consistent injection of new albums and artists that are played more consistently. If you compared it with one of Cal’s graphs (download / pdf) at similar levels of detail then you’d see a very different picture. He listens to albums–only albums–and he listens to them over and over again until he gets bored of them. Then he sticks another album on. This is because he is from the past and hasn’t worked out that it’s all about disaggregation and stuff like that. Foolish boy.

The graphs that lastgraph generates are pretty enormous and full of detail, and because they’ve been generated as vectors, you could quite easily get one printed out onto canvas and put it up in your sitting room. I’m thinking about doing that now. I quite like the idea of decorating my home with beautiful infographics about my behaviour. When people visited they’d get all this extra easy-to-parse information about me, just as if I were a variety-sized packet of Fruit’n’Fibre. I’m a little concerned that it might seem self-involved, but not quite concerned enough not to do it. Perhaps we should make it obligatory for people to put up information on their electricity usage in their sitting rooms and see what impact that had on global warming.

If you want to see my whole graph then I’ve put up a decent-sized jpg of it that you can download and move around. It’s pretty beautiful and interesting, although I have no doubt your graph would be more interesting to you.

And if you’re interested in knowing more about the music that I’ve listened to over the last few years then my Overall charts on artists will reveal my love of Beck, Goldfrapp, The Arcade Fire, Nina Simone and Pixies. Meanwhile my most played tracks would reveal Goldfrapp’s Number 1 and Utopia, The MFA’s The Difference It Makes, Orbital’s Halcyon + On + On, Nouvelle Vague’s Friday Night, Saturday Morning among many others. It’s nice to be able to see the soundtrack of the last four years. I wonder what it’ll be like four years from now.

Categories
Books & Literature Net Culture Personal Publishing Social Software

On Andrew Keen…

Andrew Keen makes me furious but I don’t write about him as a rule. Why not? Because you don’t feed the trolls. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so clearly acting like a troll. I mean, you only have to read his post Etes-vous elitiste in which he declares that people have labelled him an anti-Christ and then uses that as a platform to sell his speaking gigs, while the right-hand column of his website lists all his media appearances. He wants to stir up an argument to get attention. We’re not supposed to enable behaviour like this in our children. We have to be firm. He must be placed on the naughty step.

Andrew is the chap who thinks that the whole internet is full of amateurish morons and that nothing rises to the top and that professional media has become corrupted and less good as a result of all this stuff. I could agree with his comments about mainstream media losing the plot if it didn’t seem to be quite the other way around. As far as I can see in the US at least, mainstream news became about entertainment way before the bloggers came along, there’s lots of money in cinema still and Harry Potter sells by the ton. I watched a TV programme about how in the US they sold Life on Earth as basically animal on animal bestial snuff movies. Presumably also the effect of the nascent internet, even if about four people in the world were using it back then. And clearly the blunt utility of Wikipedia counts for nothing, the beautiful pictures in Flickr aren’t worth looking at, Keen’s own blog presumably yet another indication of how low you now have to stoop to make an impact in the world rather than something we should celebrate – another citizen gets to express their opinion and try and persuade the world he’s right.

The thing is about this, all this conversation is a total waste of time. I don’t understand why he gets the traction he does. I mean, what is he actually trying to accomplish? Does he think that the millions of bloggers will get bored and go home if he explains why their voices don’t count? Does he think that Wikipedia will stop being useful to people (even with its inaccuracies) or YouTube will stop being entertaining? No, of course he doesn’t. He can’t honestly think he can accomplish anything. The future comes, for good or ill, whether you like it or not. The best you can do in such a situation is try and work to fix the issues you see. No market for decent commentary and opinion? Look for a business model that could support it! No way that Encyclopedia Britannica can compete with Wikipedia? Well then why not move some of the resourcing of Britannica towards creating a trusted version of Wikipedia? Check articles every so often for factual accuracy, pull them aside and enhance them and make that your business.

The world we have as a result of technologies of the internet is not a world I find particularly troubling, because it’s a world finding its feet and its a world that has also created significant beauty. It’s a world I feel comfortable in, and there is always a market for what people want and often for what people need. I don’t doubt that journalism will survive or resurge but it will have to adapt.

People like Keen are professional complainers, stirring up fights, decrying the state of the world that we find ourselves in without facing the fact that it is where we are and wishing won’t make it not so. If you don’t like the way the world is, then use the tools that exist and push them further and find a way to compensate for the problems that you think the existing technology has created. I’m afraid it’s a clich√© but it’s true. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The world we have is the world we can work with, and anyone wanting to push it back to the fifties will fail.

And that’s what really gets to me. Because it’s pretty clear that he knows this. He’s writing his own bloody blog for a start. He knows he can’t win the battle, but he’s put himself on the side of respectability, trustworthiness, reliability and is decrying all the terrible new things in the world. As I once said of Nick Carr, this is a brilliant strategy to make yourself like a terribly intelligent and responsible, serious person without actually having to go to any of the trouble of thinking. That’s why he’s a troll – because his opinion cannot do any good, cannot change anything for the better, but in its decrying of the nascent environment of millions of people finding their voices for the first time, he can get nothing but attention, media coverage and book-sales. It’s not an appeal to better standards, it’s not an appeal to quality or tradition. It has no aspirations to honour. It’s disingenuous to the core, manipulative of the people, anti-progressive, cynical and hypocritical.

Categories
Design Social Software Technology

Methods for the social archiving of mailing lists…

Imagine you’re on a mailing list that archives URLs that people share in some form, and that this creates indirectly some kind of archive or directory. Imagine that this archive has generally been maintained by hand and in a formal taxonomic structure. Imagine that the weight of maintainance started to get the list owner down and they decided they could no longer justify the time they’d need to spend on it. How to distribute the work effectively? How to maintain the utility of the directory without killing the people upon it? What follows are some freeform, stream of consciousness-style notes written off the top of my head. Better out than in.

Your most obvious territory for thought might be the categorisation scheme and how to dismantle the formal structure in favour of something lighter and less complex to maintain. The most obvious direction change you could make here would be to move towards a folksonomic tagging approach. But a true folksonomy must emerge from the overlaying of many people’s efforts otherwise what you’ve got is a personal, informalor just plain badtaxonomy. So straightaway you may end up having proliferated the work rather than reducing it. It may be more distributed, but is it any more likely to get done? That’s a difficult question to answer.

Skipping away from the question of annotation for a moment, let’s look for a moment at how to get the first order objects (links) in the database in the first place. one approach would be to put every unique URL sent to the list directly into a database. Conceivably you could organise those URLs by tags imported from other locations – for example you could just go and get the folksonomic information for that URL from del.icio.us.

There are problems with this approach of course. For a start, you have then a repository of information about links that’s completely editorial free and doesn’t necessarily represent the context in which the URL had originally been shared. That is to say, you don’t have any of the original posters thoughts on the link, just the link and some tags. You could apend the whole e-mail to the URL, but then you you’re stuck with what happens if the list is private. Obviously then you’d be stuck.

An alternative: when an e-mail is sent to a list containing a URL, why not get the server to reply immediately to the original poster with a post containing a link to the place they could annotate or categorise their link to be added to the directory. That way the link originator could take responsibility for their particular piece of maintenance and the directory could grow through the individual actions of multiple individuals. Conceivably, links could be added to the database immediately they’re sent to the list, but not made ‘public’ until they’ve been annotated by either the link originator or the list owner. Because you’d be able to track the originators of the e-mails, you could then easily create a queue of URLs to subsequently annotate or approve.

There’s still a problem here, although it’s not a big one. If you take the folksonomic approach to categorisation then you’d have to rely on the individual’s personal taxonomy rather than on the wisdom of crowds bubbling up ‘correct’ categorisations. So then you have to ask yourself whether there were ways that you could usefully allow other people to enhance these URLs with more information after the originator or site owner has done the initial work. One option is to mine del.icio.us or another social bookmarking site as I proposed above. The other might be to allow other users in the mailing list to add their own annotations and tags to the link concerned. A server could usurp all e-mails containing links and add in additional link to a place where they could be annotated subsequently. The readers would automatically see the original link and then a link place where they could annotate the item. My big concern here is that individuals would be compelled by the software to move the conversations about links off-list and thus deform or split the conversation more than necessary.

One sideline… Of course you don’t necessarily need to get people to follow a URL to add in their information about a link – particularly if they’re the originators. Another approach might be to send the originator an e-mail (as above) with an identifiable string in the subject. Then simply replying to that e-mail with a message only containing a paragraph of text or a few Flickr style tags could add those tags and that annotation to the database. One anxiety there might be people incorporating accidentally great tracts of their previous e-mail into their annotations. Not ideal. Too fragile.

On the other hand, instant messaging in the Twitter model might provide some good options. Imagine if all users on a mailing list added their IM details to their profile, and added a bot to their IM friends charged with handling their mailing lists. When a message was sent to the list with a URL in it, the originator could be sent an IM request to describe the URL and everyone else on the mailing list could be sent the URL without comment. Once they’d observed the link, they could simply reply with their own comments or annotations which would then be saved to a database. Easy. If they didn’t want to keep getting URLs, a simple ‘off’ command could cease the flow…

The most obvious problem there would be if another URL came in as you were typing or if there were substantial communication delays, but I suspect these could be resolved one way or another.

Another option: individuals could choose to categorise URLs within the mailing list by hand using a third party service like del.icio.us which could then be aggregated by a local piece of software. They could either use their own personal accounts and mark things ‘for:{name of list}’ or they could use a shared account. This way you could bootstrap off other tools rather than build everything yourself. The most obvious problem: Is this work that people would want to do? If it is, would using del.icio.us (and conceivably then having to change accounts if you were already a user or having to mix in other people’s links with your personal linkstream) be a greater impediment than another approach? Tricky one.

A few other approaches leap to mind, but I think I’ll leave it there. If anyone has any other ideas, I’d really appreciate hearing them. A good way to think around the territory would be to think about which groups of people could do the various tasks associated with saving or annotation. In some models it’s likely to be the posting user who does everything, in others their peers take on spotty bits of work and all the annotation. In still others you can imagine a dedicated admin doing all the work, and in others still, people off list completely could be categorising and annotating what people on-list are doing. Finding the correct approach will rely on working out where the motives for contributing might be for each group of people and how to build something that meets that particular groups needs. Any thoughts?

Categories
Social Software Technology

Social whitelisting with OpenID…

My ex-colleague Simon Willison has recently been doing some profoundly good work out in the wilds of the Internet promoting and explaining OpenID. In fact, the best articulation I’ve seen anywhere on the Internet of the OpenID concept is his screencast which I think neatly sums up the value of the concept as well as how easy they are to use.

You’re going to need to understand OpenID before I go much further, so if it’s an area that’s new to you, this is the point where you need to either go and watch that screencast or follow carefully the simple description of the service that follows…

OpenID—fundamentally—is a solution to the problem of having a million user accounts all over the place. Instead of getting hundreds of user names all over the place you go to a site that provides OpenIDs and choose one username and password. These sites then give you a pretty simple web address which is probably easiest to think about as a profile page for you. Then when you want to sign into any other site on the Internet with an OpenID all you do is type in the address of this profile page. The site you’re on wanders over to that address, the other site asks you for your password, you tell it your password and then you’re bounced back to the original site where you are logged in and can get on with your business unfussed. Sometimes the local site will ask you if you want a different user name. That’s all there is to it.

Having the same ID across a number of sites can also make a number of other things possible. You could hook up all the stuff you do over the internet really easily, and aggregate it and get a handle on it. You wouldn’t have to share your passwords with lots of different people either. All good. From my perspective, given my long term interest in technologies of moderation and social software, Open ID also provides one super-significant thing – relatively stable, repurposable identities across the web as a whole that can develop levels of trust and build personal reputations. But more on that in a moment.

Of course with new solutions come new problems and the most obvious problem associated with OpenID is ‘phishing’, which is to say that a site could ask you for your OpenID and then pretend to be your central provider. You type in your password thinking that you’re safe, but in fact you’re giving out your details to a rogue third party, who now can use it across all of your registered sites and services. This—let us be clear—is a very real problem and one that Simon talks about again in his piece on OpenID phishing. I’ve heard some really interesting ideas around how you might do this stuff effectively, but I’m still not completely sure that I’ve heard one that I think is totally convincing. This isn’t such a problem for the phishing-resistant old dogs like the people who read my site, but could be an enormous problem for real people. In the endif such a project is to take offI suspect this problem is going to be solved by a combination of design and education. People are going to have to get their heads around web addresses a bit more. Or we’re going to have to build something into browsers that handles distributed identities a bit more effectively.

The area that I really wanted to talk about today though was social whitelisting, which Simon and I were discussing the other day and which Simon has already written about on his site. This emerged out of some conversations about a very weblogger-focused problem, ie. comment spam. I’ve written about problems that I’ve been having with trackback and comment spam before, but every single day it seems to get worse. I get dozens of comment spams every single daysometimes hundreds. And this is even though I use extremely powerful and useful MT plugins like Akismet. And the spam is profoundly upsetting and vile stuff, with people shilling for bestiality or incest pornography, or apparently just trying to break comment spam systems by weight of empty posts.

Over the last year or so, it’s stopped being a problem that I’ve been able to deal with by selectively publishing things. Now every single comment that’s posted to my site is kept back until I’ve had a chance to look at it, with the exception of the few people that I’ve marked as trustworthy. It has now very much become a problem of whitelisting for meof determining which scant number of users I can particularly say it’s okay to post. And if this is where I am now, with my long weblog history and middling okay technical abilities, I can only dread where everyone else is going to be in a couple of years time. This is unsustainable and we have to change models.

Which is where the social whitelisting concept comes in. Most whitelisting has been around approving specific individual people, but this doesn’t scale. A large proportion of the people who post to my sites are doing so for the first time and may never post again.

The solution that Simon and I came up with was really simple and sort of the opposite of Akismet. Jason Kottke deals with a hell of a lot of comments every day. So does Techcrunch and GigaOM. Every day they approve things that people have written and say that it’s okay for them to be more regular posters. So each of these people is developing their own personal whitelist of people that they trust. More importantly I trust Jason and Techcrunch and GigaOM along with Matt Biddulph and Paul Hammond and Caterina Fake and about a thousand other people online. So why shouldn’t I trust their decisions? If they think someone is worth trusting then I can trust them too. Someone that Caterina thinks is a real person that she’s prepared to let post to her site, I should also trust to post on mine. This is one of the profound benefits of OpenID – it’s more reliable than an e-mail address that people can just spoof, but it’s just as repurposeable. You can be identified by it (and evaluated and rewarded for it) all across the whole web.

So the idea is simplicity itself. We switch to a model in which individual sites publish lists of OpenIDs that they have explicitly trusted in the past. Then individually, site owners can choose to trust anyone trusted by other site owners or friends. People who are trusted by you or your friends or peers can post immediately while the rest are held back in moderation queues for you to plough through later. But with any luck the percentage of real comments held back over time would rapidly shrink as real people became trusted and fake people did not.

Another approach to this idea would be to create a central whitelisting service with which you could share your specific trusted OpenIDs and associate them with your weblogs. Through a central interface you could decide to either accept a generic trusted set of whitelists from the top 100 weblogs on the planet to get you going, or add in the specific weblogs of friends, family and colleagues that you know share the same interests or readers. And of course individual weblogs can be rated subsequently for whether they let through people who subsequently turn out to be troublemakers, or rewarded for the number of real people that they mark as trustworthy. I want to make this particularly clear – I’m not talking about one great big web of trust which can be polluted by someone hacking one whitelist somewhere on the internet. I’m not talking about there being one canonical whitelist anywhere either. I’m definitely and specifically talking about you deciding which site owners (or groups of site owners) that you trust and that being the backbone to your personal service. People that your peers trust may be different to the people that my peers trust. And so it should be.

There’s even a business model here. I’d pay (a small amount) for any service that allowed me to have vibrant and enthusiastic conversations on my weblog without having to manually approve every single message. I’m sure other people would too. And of course, much like OpenID itself, there’s no reason that there should only be one such whitelist provider online. There could be a whole ecology here.

So what do people think? Does this have legs? Is it a sufficiently interesting idea to play with further? Where is the OpenID community on this stuff at the moment? Could social whitelisting of OpenIDs be the thing that rescues distributed conversation from death by spam? There’s a discussion over on Simon’s original post on the subject, or feel free to post below (but be warned that it may take me a while to approve your messages…)

Categories
Conference Notes Social Software

Thoughts around "Social by Design"…

No doubt tomorrow when they’ve sobered up there’ll be a good bit of reportage from the Techcrunch UK guys about the Beers and Innovation: Social by Design event that I got back from a couple of hours ago, but since I wasn’t drinking I can catch a bit of a march on them and give you my thoughts straight away. All in all, not a bad evening – it was lovely to catch up with some of the people that I don’t really see that often and see what people are talking about, although it’s also a little frustrating to see some of the same conversations making the rounds that we heard three years ago about Friendster and six years ago about Six Degrees. Still the speakers were pretty good value with Meg Pickard‘s talk being particularly cool. I should expect that, I’ve known her for years and I count her as a friend, but still, it’s worth saying.

It wasn’t all super good fun. There were a bunch of questions and comments from the audience that I got really tense about and wanted to jump in for, but being stuck in the audience meant that there was a limit to the amount I could effectively stick my oar in before I felt I had to be quiet, but hey – I’ve got a weblog, so I can give my opinions on a bunch of them now instead.

Things that particularly stuck in my head – a statement about design being irrelevant in social media environments, which I’ve heard around a hell of a lot, normally with MySpace presented as evidence. I’ll agree that shiny graphic design doesn’t always carry along a conversation or make a place feel friendly and informal enough to talk and connect, but there are two things that it’s important (albeit obvious) to say about this – firstly that design is not about purely the visual layer. Design in social software is about creating functional social environments that fulfil user needs, extend or enhance the social or collaborative abilities of the people within them, are clear and easy to use and avoid falling foul of trolls, griefers and internecine conflicts. If you can create mechanisms for helping people create something collectively of aggregate value as well, then that’s profoundly important too. These are all places which involve considerations of design and I’ve yet to see a single site that doesn’t take these seriously do well in this space.

And secondly, I think it’s worth debunking the MySpace example for a minute – people find it genuinely entertaining and engaging, it meets social needs, but sure it’s not totally usable and it’s ugly as all buggery. But on the other hand, it was bootstrapped with a list of millions of e-mail addresses and heavily marketed towards aspirational communities (musicians). If you look for the features that distinguished MySpace from Friendster before it, there were only really a couple. One of which was massive personalisation, which is definitely a big deal however badly it was implemented. The other is in the sheer innovation and focus of the marketing. The fact that it flies despite the fact that it doesn’t look great doesn’t mean that it thrived because it didn’t look great. There are other factors involved in a site’s success other than what it looks like and MySpace did a pretty extraordinary job in a bunch of these.

Another comment or question that arose from the crowd was about the social benefits of social software – was there any evidence that it might engender a cultural revolution? How was it being used for the good of mankind? I heard a room full of people talk around this stuff but absolutely none of them said the obvious things which we really need to be aware of. I look to the net and I see Wikipedia (a massive repository of free data available for everyone to use), Open Street Map (a collective effort to map the world for the good of the world) and Flickr a photo website full of millions of photos free for anyone to use. I see a resurgence in the commons, with creative work being made collectively by hundreds of thousands of people across the world. I see fifty million weblogs giving individuals the ability to express their opinions and organise and collectivise, forming relationships and arguing their particular political perspectives helping to form the news (for good or ill). One way or another this stuff is having an impact and it’s such early days. It’s not obvious what changes this stuff will engender over the next twenty years, but this stuff has already changed the discourse forever, even if at the moment the way it’s reshaping the world is far from clear.

And a final comment that I’ve heard frankly far to many times already but which we have to start refusing to take seriously – where is the money? Some people seem to find it impossible to believe that social media can create value even as all around them people seem to do so. Look to the grandfather of ecommerce – look to Amazon and tell me that there’s no money. Look to MySpace and eBay and Flickr. And don’t just look to advertising. Look to premium accounts. Look to affiliate sales. Look to brand building. Look to the creation of content with financial value. Look at the creation of marketplaces. There are endless possibilities, and it’s time peopleparticularly in the UKjust recognised that and moved onto the more interesting discussions…

Categories
Social Software Talks Technology

Slides from my Future of Web Apps (SF06) talk…

Last week I talked at the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco as detailed in my euphoric debrief on Saturday. It was not a talk that I looked forward to enormously, but I have to say that the response has been really positive with a decent number of people asking me to post up the slides. So that’s what I’m here to do – providing one (large/75Mb) PDF version: Greater than the sum of its parts and the other a Keynote-produced (and partly self-optimised) small web version.

The talk is about how to generate systems and models wherein large groups of people can publically create something together that’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s about Wikipedia, Flickr, motives for social engagement, how to derive value from innumerable small contributions and what challenges this form of creation may be causing in a world of proprietary data. All fun stuff. Hopefully.

Much as with my last Future of Web Apps talk there’s an extent to which the slides will only make sense if viewed alongside some coherent notes of the talk around them. There are luckily some of those available online. I want to make sure to thank Matt Webb, Simon Willison and Matt Biddulph again (in addition to everyone else who helped me get it together) before I post up the thing in question. Mr Webb in particular deserves a mention since there’s a great chunk of thinking in this piece that – while I’m not sure he’d agree with all of it – was definitely the result of conversations that we had together at the BBC.

Like last time, I will promise right now to properly write up the talk in question, but – again like last time – it’s quite likely to be a while before I can get my act together!

Categories
Gaming Net Culture Social Software

On things that aren't fun, and fun that is bad…

Last Friday – around ten in the evening – Pentheus, my main character in World of Warcraft, hit level sixty. Thinking back, I’m now not entirely sure where he was when this happened, although I believe it was in the wastes of Silithus. I waited until I’d got to the Altar of Storms to start my quests for my Dreadsteed before I took the above picture.

I honestly don’t know how I feel about the whole thing. It was – frankly – sort of an anti-climax. Nothing happened, I just remained being level sixty. There was no sense of a threshold being reached. My character – the same character I’ve been playing on and off since November – was just slightly more powerful than he was before. And a whole range of long extended new quests wandered off before him. There would be no new spells, no new pets, no real development – except in sets of armour and property. Each quest, each raid will now be longer and more involved than they were before – a dungeon taking two or three evenings to explore properly and requiring a group of people to play with that I’ve struggled to collect along the way. The whole game now feels very laborious and slow – the simple pleasures of earlier in the game, where you were picking up new abilities and developing quickly have just disappeared, to be replaced with something more drudgelike, robotic and … as the people in game describe it … grinding.

Now the interesting thing about this is you’d think that was a very good reason to stop playing the game immediately – but somehow no. My relationship with World of Warcraft is a lot more complicated than that – so complicated that it’s forced me to reconsider a lot of my assumptions about gaming. These assumptions have been further challenged by reading Raph Koster’s book and weblog, A Theory of Fun for Game Design. The two experiences – reading and playing – have not pushed in the same direction however – they’ve not led me to the same conclusions – and this has resulted in me spending a lot of time wondering about the relationship between entertainment and productivity, fun and work, drudgery and compulsion. I’ve started wondering whether a game could still be considered good if you want to play it a lot but at the same time resent the time that it takes from you. What if you find it boring but still somehow can’t put it down. Can you love and hate a game at the same time and still call it ‘fun’? Can a game be a narcotic, or a guilty secret or an addiction? Can it be a fruitless activity without value that still feels good

Raph’s book includes a really interesting analysis on what games are, and what fun is and is not which is far too long to quote in full here, but which includes this summary:

Games aren’t stories. Games aren’t about beauty or delight. Games aren’t about jockeying for social status. They stand, in their own right, as something incredibly valuable. Fun is about learning in a context where there is no pressure, and that is why games matter.

This sort of fascinates me because it contains a weird twist of logic – that fun is learning without pressure, and that therefore games matter – presumably because learning is de facto a good thing. But what if you’re learning a system or a landscape with no transferable value – what if a specific game presents you with a structure designed to purely generate the sensation of perpetual fun by short-circuiting the learning impulse and misdirecting it into valueless territories? There would be a memetic advantage in being a game that could be intoxicating in that way without requiring that people learn skills that were transferable elsewhere. For a start, real-world skills are harder to develop and perhaps less short-term satisfying. Secondly, a process that teaches you real-world skills would result in you evolving and changing. A game that could short-circuit your learning instinct wouldn’t have to do that. There would be no reason for you to leave.

There’s another quote in Raph’s book which is about what happens when you get older and why people stop playing games. He says, “We don’t actually put away the notion of ‘having fun’ as far as I can tell. We migrate it into other contexts. Many claim that work is fun, for example (me included). Just getting together with friends can be enough to give us the little burst of endophins we crave.”

I think this is really interesting, because it hits on a few more weird contradictions – working can be a learning exercise, it’s true, but there’s normally some risk involved. if you do bad things in a job, you can be fired. There are consequences. So that seems rather at odds with his earlier sense of fun. And a work environment has no formal ruleset, has no structure that you’d recognise as game-like. And of course it can have real-world rewards. If work can be fun, then I’d argue that’s not because it’s like games – an environment in which you can learnwithout risk, but precisely because it’s not like games, the productive element generates a satisfaction that is totally missing in World of Warcraft. The creative and generative element is also absent. Perhaps the reason we think of games as a childish activity is because play in our youth is supposed to inform work in our adulthood. Perhaps then, a game that feeds on our desire to learn and our childlike instincts but cannot give us the satisfactions of creation or real dangers, is a con, a short-cut, a parasite. Perhaps adult gaming is nothing more than an opiate, designed to provide satisfactions and a sense of development or progress that the real world is unable to provide for most people, or that people are too nervous to fight for.

Apparently you can get a character on World of Warcraft to level sixty in about three months of consistent after-work play. Personally, my experience has taken me three times that length of time, and has been squeezed around long hours on work projects and more travelling than I’ve ever done before. Given that it hasn’t massively compromised these parts of my life, I’m guessing that the level of compulsion I’ve felt to play has not been massively excessive – but it’s still felt like a time sink that somehow claims me for my out of work creative time. That really worries me.

Let me put it this way – while I feel no massive compromise to my life is occurring now, while my relationship with the game is merely grudging at the moment, I can imagine coming to hate the game and yet still wanting to play it. Is that an extraordinary statement? Is that a piece of self-insight there, or is it something about the game? I can’t tell where the fault lies if there is a fault? Can you build something that is too addictive simply in the way it presents challenges and rewards, to the extent that it becomes psychologically addictive. Can something with no pharmaceutical components be a drug? Or is this simply a matter of self-discipline and self-control? How tempting does an alternative world filled with mechanisms for alleviating status anxiety have to be before the space between fun and craving gets crossed? Is television any different? Am I just coming to some weird form of Protestant neurosis in my mid-thirties?

One of my older posts is currently full of people talking about their problems with World of Warcraft in particular – wives saying that her husband ignores his children to play, men who say they would rather play WOW than have sex with their wives, teenagers who say that they’re failing school so they can play, and it’s led me to this weird point. Are they all making excuses? Is the game a scapegoat? Are they weak-willed and to be pitied? Or are we as a culture starting to construct toys that are too effective and end up hurting people? I know it sounds alarmist, but I really want people’s opinions. What do you think?

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Politics Social Software

On Massively Multiplayer Propaganda…

Simon drew my attention to a site called GIYUS.org the other day and it’s been in my thoughts ever since, and I’ve come to think of it as a really troubling kind of troll-supporting political malware, representing a technologically-empowered massively-distributed form of propoganda that I’ve never seen before. The site’s full name is Give Israel Your United Support and it works like this – individuals download a tool (the Megaphone Desktop Tool) which then alerts people to new articles and polls around the web that question Israel’s policies in the Middle East or ask for public opinion about them. The people concerned are then supposed to visit the site directly and respond to the poll or story or write an e-mail or whatever. They present an example on the page of one of the things that you could be alerted to:

The reason for this activity? Stated at the top of the page, “Today’s conflicts are won by public opinion. Now is the time to be active and voice Israel’s side to the world.” The software is designed to do two things – firstly to make it clear that there’s a large active pro-Israel population in the world, but also it’s there to make sure that the pro-Israel point of view is over-represented in the popular media. These are – let me repeat – the project’s stated goals.

Now I want to make it very clear here very early on that I’m not going to be making an anti-Israeli tract. It’s pretty much irrelevant to me who is using this particular tool – just that the tool exists. Or more specifically – since there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle – that tools like this exist and will continue to exist from now on as ways to attempt to deform the social discourse – whether that be for Democrats, Republicans, Israelis, Iraqis, Americans, Conservatives. This should be troubling to all of us, although I’m not sure that there’s very much we can do about it.

The short term consequence will be that all large scale public discussions and polls on the internet will become highly suspect – none of these groups are set up to deal with this kind of political spam yet. And that has to heavily affect the ability of organisations that deal with feedback from their audiences to do so fairly or to respond to a real constituency rather than just innumerable interest groups. This is, in effect, a way of harnessing hundreds of thousands of people to massage the public debate – the massively distributed conversation of the internet now has a form of PR – a form of propoganda – to match.

In substance, of course, there is little that has changed here – politicians and religious groups have always wanted to get out their vocal supporters, they’ve always wanted to move public opinion and help people spread the word. And they’ve used all kinds of techniques to do it – right back to the simple letter-writing campaign. And it’s far from the first time that new communicative, democratising technologies have been co-opted or bought ought by organisations who believe that they have to – or simply wish to – take every advantage they possibly can to win, even if it devalues the environment for all in the process. But it’s still something to be pointed towards with anxiety, to be acknowledged as it is recognised – if only so we can mourn the passing of a particular open spirit as the gamers and the trolls colonise the public spaces and set-up shop. We can expect to see this kind of campaigning tool being used in the next US elections I should think, and who knows – perhaps people I know, people like me, will feel they need to use them to see the change they want in the world, or to fight fire with fire.

Of course there is another way this could end. Because a tool that alerts people to points of debate around Israel isn’t only useful to Israelis, any more than a tool that alerts the Green lobby to big issues is of use only to environmental activists. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see the same tools exposing the same data being co-opted by the direct opponents of the various groups that set them up. Each poll or news article may become nothing more than flashpoint fights between radicals of every persuasion in which the quieter, more average voices get completely drowned out. So there you have it – flashpoints of argument, massively multiplayer campaigning and propoganda techniques, the loss of the common voice and a scouring of the commons. So much for a democratising medium…

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Business Navigation Net Culture Radio & Music Social Software Technology Television

Who's afraid of Ashley Highfield?

Today it was announced that the BBC’s New Media operations are going to be restructured radically. At the moment most of the content creation parts of the organisation are kind of co-owned – for example, Simon Nelson who was the ‘controller’ of the part of the BBC that I used to work for (BBC Radio and Music) reported equally to Jenny Abramsky (in charge of the BBC’s radio and music operations) and to Ashley Highfield (in charge of the BBC’s New Media Operations). Ashley himself had pretty much direct control over a centralised part of the organisation known internally as New Media Central.

After working at the BBC for a few years, it seems to me that this structure was a sort of clumsy compromise that had a lot of problems but a lot of benefits. I wasn’t in the right positions to see the whole picture but there seemed to be organisational and communication problems with such a layout, and a certain splitting of resources. But on the other hand – and this is a big other hand – increasingly the divisions between ‘new media’ stuff and content creation were able to blur, creating new opportunities for each to support the other which couldn’t help but be a good thing.

The other thing which almost seemed to me to be a good thing – sort of by accident – was that it created an environment where parallel parts of the BBC could operate independently and in a rather more agile fashion. More specifically still, it meant that certain parts of the organisation with a kind of critical mass of smart and clued-up people could really thrive and generate their own culture and goals and get things done, even as others weren’t doing so well. It may be just because I worked there or Stockholm syndrome but I rather think that BBC Radio and Music was one of those places, and despite the fact that a bunch of my favourite people have since moved on, I think it probably still is.

Having said that not all parts of the organisation were similarly dynamic, despite the often amazing number of talented people working within them – specifically, in my opinion, Central New Media under the direct management of Ashley Highfield.

You’ll have heard a lot of announcements coming out from his part of the organisation over the last few years, but surprisingly few of them have amounted to much. They all made headlines at the time, but they’ve all rather disappeared. Do you know what happened to the grand plans of the Creative Archive or the iMP? They were both being talked about in press releases in 2003, but the status of the iMP now appears to be a closed content trial and the Creative Archive has amounted to nothing more than a truncated Creative Commons license used by several orders of magnitude less people and a few hunded short clips of BBC programmes. Highfield’s most recent speeches from May this year are still talking about these projects, with him showing mock-ups of potential prototypes for the iMP replacement the ‘iPlayer’ that could be the result of a collaboration with Microsoft. Are you impressed by this progress? I’m not.

And then there’s BBC Backstage – a noble attempt to get BBC APIs and feeds out in public. What state is that in a couple of years down the line? Look at it pretty closely – despite all the talk at conferences around the world – and it still amounts to little more than a clumsy mailing list and a few RSS feeds – themselves mainly coming from BBC News and BBC Sport. There’s nothing here that’s even vaguely persuasive compared to Yahoo!, Amazon or Google. Flickr – a company that I don’t think got into double figures of staff before acquisition – has more public APIs than the BBC, who have roughly five thousand times as many staff! This is what – two years after its inception? Even the BBC Programme Catalogue that came out of this part of the organisation a while back has gone into a review phase (do a search to see the message) without any committment or indication when it’s going to be fully opened up.

I’m sure – in fact I know – that there are regulatory frameworks that get in the way of the BBC getting this stuff out in public, but these long lacunae go apparently unnoticed and unremarked – there’s an initial announcement that makes the press and then no follow-up. If Ashley Highfield really is leading one of the most powerful and forward-thinking organisations in new media in the UK, then where are all these infrastructural products and strategy initiatives today? And if these products are caught up in process, then where are the products and platfoms from the years previous that should be finally maturing? It’s difficult to see anything of significance emerging from the part of the organisation directly under Highfield’s control. It’s all words!

And that’s just the past. This is a man who decides to embrace social software and the wisdom of crowds in 2006 – clearly waiting for Rupert Murdoch to buy MySpace and show the self-appointed R&D lab of the UK new media industry the way. His joy for this space is expressed in lines like, “The ‘Share’ philosophy is at the heart of bbc.co.uk 2.0 … your own thoughts, your own blogs and your own home videos. It allows you to create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you”, which is ironic given that earlier last year he stated in Ariel that he didn’t read any weblogs because he wasn’t interested in the opinions of self-opinionated blowhards. This is a man who apparently coined the term, Martini Media and thinks that expressing your future strategy through smug references to 1970s Leonard Rossiter-based adverts is a surefire way to move the ecology forward. This is a man described by the Guardian in its Media 100 for 2006 as follows:

Exactly how much the impetus for such initiatives stem from Highfield, and how much from the director general, was the source of some debate among the panel.

“Ashley Highfield is among the most important technology executives working in the UK today,” said one panellist. “Yes, but talk about being in the right place at the right time,” said another. “Mark Thompson should be credited with the vision, not him.”

This is a man – bluntly – whose only contact with Web 2.0 that I can find is a pretty humiliating set of pictures on Flickr of him on a private jet and ogling at half-naked dancing girls. (Note: This set of pictures has now been taken down).

So it is, I’m afraid, with a bit of a heavy heart that I can report that the restructuring of the BBC is going to result in a much larger role for Ashley Highfield within the organisation – managing (according to the Guardian, and I’d take this with a pinch of salt) up to 4,000 people throughout the organisation. All the new media functions that have currently been distributed will now it seems be directly under his auspices, and presumably more under his influence than those of the programme makers and pockets of brilliant people around the organisation. I don’t know enough about the nature of the restructuring to know whether it’s a good or a bad thing at a more general level, but it’s pretty bloody clear to me that it’s an ominous move.

Which is what makes me so surprised when people outside the organisation talk about how scared they are of the huge moves that the BBC can make on the internet, because the truth is that for the most part – with a bunch of limited exceptions – these changes just don’t seem to be really happening. The industry should be more furious about the lack of progress at the organisation than the speed of it, because in the meantime their actual competitors – the people that the BBC seems to think it’s a peer with but which it couldn’t catch-up with without moving all of its budget into New Media stuff and going properly international – get larger and faster and more vigorous and more exciting. I want the BBC to succeed. I want it to get stronger – I think it’s a valuable organisation to have in the world and I think it sits perfectly well alongside the mix of start-ups and corporates that’s emerging on the internet. And it’s for precisely this reason that I’m concerned about these moves.

Who’s afraid of Ashley Highfield? I am, and you should be too.