Category: Social Software

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Radio & Music Social Software Technology

On the BBC Annotatable Audio project…

This post concerns an experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow users to collectively describe, segment and annotate audio in a Wikipedia-style fashion. It was developed by the BBC Radio & Music Interactive R&D team – for this project consisting of myself, Tristan Ferne, Chris Bowley, Helen Crowe, Paul Clifford and Bronwyn Van Der Merwe. Although the project is a BBC project, all the speculation and theorising around the edges is my own and does not necessarily represent the opinion of my department or the BBC in general.

It’s officially my last day at the BBC today, but with the permission of my outgoing boss Mr Daniel Hill I’m going to make the very best use of it by talking about a project that we’ve been working on for the last few weeks. I consider it one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever worked on, and BBC Radio & Music Interactive one of the only places in the world where I would have been able to have done so.

If you’re impatient, you should probably skip straight to the clumsy screencasts I’ve done to illustrate the project – playing an annotated programme (4 Mb) and editing / annotating a programme (4Mb).

But for everyone else, maybe a little context. The media landscape is changing incredibly quickly – ten or twenty years ago in the UK you might have had a choice of a dozen or so radio and television stations broadcasting at any given time. Over the last decade that’s grown to hundreds of stations, plus a variety of on-demand services like Sky Box Office. Over the next few decades, it’s pretty clear that the massive archives of content (that every broadcaster in the world has accrued over the last seventy or eighty years) will start to appear on-demand and on the internet. You can already see the evidence of consumer interest in the sheer number of conventional stations that broadcast repeats, and on the international sales of DVDs across the world. An on-demand archive is going to make the number of choices available to a given individual at any point almost completely unmanageable. And then there’s the user-generated content – the amateur and semi-professional creations, podcasts and the like that are proliferating across the internet. In the longer term there are potentially billions of these media creators in the world.

All of this choice, however, creates some significant problems – how on earth are people expected to navigate all of this content? How are they supposed to find the specific bit of audio or video that they’re looking for? And how are they supposed to discover new programmes or podcasts? And it gets more complicated than that – what if what you’re not looking for is a complete coherent half-hour programme, but a selection of pertinent clips – features on breaking news stories, elements in magazine programmes, particular performances from music shows?

In the end, the first stage in making any of these processes possible is based on the availability of information about the audio or video asset in question – metadata – at as granular a level as possible. And not only about that asset, but also about its relationship to other assets and services and other information streams that give individuals the ability to explore and investigate and assess the media they’ve uncovered.

The project we undertook was focused on Annotatable Audio (specifically, but not exclusively, of BBC radio programming) – and we decided to look in an unorthodox direction – towards the possibilities of user-created annotation and metadata. We decided that we wanted to develop an interface that might allow the collective articulation of what a programme or speech or piece of music was about and how it could be divided up and described. Our first ideas looked for approaches similar to del.icio.us, Flickr or our own Phonetags – which create collective value by accreting the numerous annotations that individuals make for their own purposes. But after a fascinating discussion with Jimmy Wales, we decided to think about this in a different way – in which (just like Wikipedia) individuals would overtly cooperate to create something greater and more authoritative.

So here’s what we’ve come up with. First off, imagine yourself as a normal user coming to a page about a particular programme or speech. What you see is a simple interface for playing and scrubbing through the audio at the top of the page with marked ‘segments’ highlighted. If you hover over those segments they brighten up and display the title of that section. If you click on them, it starts the audio playing from that point. This correlates to the sections below which could be filled with any amount of wiki-style content – whether that be links or transcripts or background information or corrections or whatever. Beneath that are tags that users have added to describe the programme concerned. If you click on any of the segment permalinks to the left it starts the audio at that point and changes the URL to an internal anchor so you can throw around links to chunks of a programme or a speech. So basically you get a much richer and fuller experience of the audio that you’d get by just listening to it in a media player. Here’s a screen cap:

But it gets much more exciting when you actually delve a bit deeper. If you want to edit the information around a piece of audio, then just like on a wiki you just click on the ‘edit / annotate’ tab. This brings you up a screen like this:

Here you can zoom into the wave form, scrub around it, and decide either to edit a segment or create a new segment. Once you’ve decided (in this walkthrough I decided to edit a pre-existing segment) you simply click on it, at which point the editing interface appears:

And on this screen you can change the beginning and end points of the audio by simply clicking and dragging, you can change the title to something more accurate, add any wiki-style content you wish to in the main text area and add or delete the existing fauxonomic metadata. If you want to delete a segment you can. If you need to keep digging around to explore the audio, you can do so. It’s all amazingly cool, and I’m incredibly proud of the team that made it.

This final screen represents that last core aspect of wiki-like functionality – a history page that allows you to revert back to previous versions of the annotations if someone has defaced the current version:

So that’s the core parts of the project – a demonstration of a functional working interface for the annotation of audio that’s designed to allow the collective creation of useful metadata and wikipedia-like content around radio programmes or speeches or podcasts or pieces of music. If you’ve worked through the rest of this piece and managed to not watch the screencasts now, here are the links again – although be warned, they are a few Mb in size each. The first one shows the functionality of the playback page(8 Mb) and how people might use the information to navigate through audio. The second shows someone editing the page, editing a segment and adding a new segment (4 Mb), and it really shows off Chris Bowley‘s astonishing work on the Flash components and how it connects to Helen Crowe’s Ajaxy HTML.

As always with projects from the R&D team, the Annotatable Audio project is unlikely to be released to the public in its current form. We’re using it as a way of testing out some of these concepts and approaches – some of which will probably manifest in upcoming products in one way or another. In the meantime if you want to know more about the project or you’re inside the BBC and would like a play, then either leave a comment below or contact the awesome Tristan.Ferne {at the domain} bbc.co.uk who’s going to be running the project now I’ve left.

Anyway, I’d just like to take this final opportunity again to say thank you to the BBC and to all the people I’ve worked with to make cool stuff. It’s been a blast and I genuinely couldn’t be happier with the final project we worked on together. You guys rock. But now… Something new!

And just to give you the disclaimer one more time. The Annotatable Audio project was developed by Tom Coates, Tristan Ferne, Chris Bowley, Helen Crowe, Paul Clifford and Bronwyn Van Der Merwe. Although the project is a BBC project, all the speculation and theorising around the edges is my own and does not necessarily represent the opinion of my department or the BBC in general.

Categories
Design Navigation Radio & Music Social Software

A quick review of Yahoo! Podcasts…

Double disclaimer time here – firstly I’m knackered and what follows is badly written and I will edit it later for clarity, punch and drama. The other thing is that – of course – the viewpoints represented here do not necessarily reflect those of my employers (the BBC) who may be much much more intelligent than I.

A few short months after iTunes installed a podcast directory and client comes Yahoo! podcasts, and frankly I think Yahoo are more on the money with this one. The current implementation is a bit clumsy, it’s true – there are loads of things wrong with it – but fundamentally they’ve got the idea that podcasts should be linkable, that social media navigation is fundamentally important and they’ve got that creating a platform for amateur creativity is going to be the thing that really demoncratises the medium and changes audio forever. In this – as in so many other things – they’ve taken a huge lesson from Odeo, which remains the best service on the net (and will blow people’s heads off when they launch their create tools please god sometime soon.

I wrote an enormous post about Odeo a while back, which I never published after a friend said it was ‘a little hyperbolic’. That post contained much of my thinking about the evolution of podcasting and why it was so important (and why Odeo had got it so right as far as it had got so far). I’ll dig that up later and try and get it up by the end of the day. But in the meantime, I thought I’d write a little bit about the design and implementation of podcasting on the Yahoo service (with occasional reference to some stuff that Odeo have done).

The big problem both services have is that they don’t own the audio clients that people will use to listen to (and probably download) podcasts. This unfortunately leaves iTunes with the most seamless (if truncated) experience. Odeo finds some ways around this. Yahoo! Podcasts doesn’t. The problem really is in the web interface elements. You want to be able to subscribe to a show with just one web-based click and have that be reflected with a download to your client-side audio player. Yahoo don’t even try to solve this problem, which brings us the first major problem with their product – the subscription process is a multi-stage horror of downloaded podcast files and double-clicking. It is, frankly, clumsy as all buggery. Odeo’s syncr app is a much more elegant solution – a small client through which you login to their site, and which then downloads your ‘queue’ of episodes. But Odeo’s app still has its problems – much of the great functionality of iTunes is concerned with deleting old episodes and with handling how many shows remain on your iPod. Odeo’s approach makes it harder to use that functionality.

What we really need, it seems to me, is some form of OPML-style file that a client can subscribe to that contains a collection of podcast feeds. The list of your subscriptions (in whatever appropriate format) could then be updated by web clients around the web and have that reflected in your podcast client next time it updated. I don’t know if anyone’s working on that kind of stuff. If you know anything, let me know…

So what else is going on with the Yahoo! podcasts service? Well can I just say to start off with how nice it is to see a Yahoo service that isn’t plain white! If this is a beginning of a trend for their more lifestyle / entertainment brands, then it’s something I’m in favour of. Obviously I’ve seen Yahoo Music before – but this seems to me to be a much more elegant solution – a simple top navigational structure that keeps the Yahoo brand but which could be colour-coded to represent different Yahoo products.

The rest of the page is a bit … busy … though. It’s the same problem I have with the Yahoo homepage actually – there’s just too much damn stuff on it. Or at least (in this case) there’s too lines and gaps and bits of black. It is – however – far from terrible and has take a lot of the lessons from Odeo’s implementation of subscribable programme blocks (complete with preview functionality). It’s just a bit inelegant, and doesn’t have the sheen of an iTunes or an Odeo. But generally, it’s far from sucky. Mostly well done!

One final thing I want to talk about is the implementation of tags. I think this is something that they’ve fouled up – although in this case slightly less than Odeo have. Both services allow users to add tags to describe shows, but neither builds in any impetus to do so other than pure, good-hearted altruism. The individual doesn’t bookmark or collect the shows in question, they just write stuff. There’s little or no (enlightened or otherwise) self-interest being met, and as a result I think it’ll probably fail.

The problem really comes in trying to derive value from the interactions of hundreds or thousands of people. The first rule is that the individual needs to see some value in what they’re doing (ideally personal value). It’s unclear what that value is in either Odeo or Yahoo’s implementation. But the second rule is that you should be able to aggregate individual interactions to create something bigger than the individual. Odeo gets this completely wrong – a show can be given a tag, but only one of any given tag. A bit of metadata that a thousand people think is useful is given the same conceptual weight as a bit of metadata that only one person thinks is useful. The end-result, an easily spammable system with no sense of weighting that could make searching or ranking results easier.

Yahoo tries to fix this by making it possible for a show to be tagged multiple times with the same term, but doesn’t give any clear explanation to people why they should tag a show with a word it has already been tagged by. And because there’s no obvious reason to retag something with a pre-existing word, and because there’s no value to the individual to undertake that tagging other than altruism, I can’t believe it’s going to be enormously successful.

What they need to do instead is think about a generic implementation of tagging (and a representative user interface widget) that a logged in Yahoo user can carry with them around all of their services, showing how an individual search result or review or news story or web page or podcast has been tagged by them personally (and making each tag a link off to browse their annotated collections of stuff), as well as showing the aggregate. That would make much more sense, and could be much more powerful.

Categories
Design Navigation Radio & Music Social Software

How to build on bubble-up folksonomies…

[This post takes up some of the themes that Matt Webb, Paul Hammond, Matt Biddulph and I talked about in our paper at ETech 2005 on Reinventing Radio: Enhancing One-to-Many with Many-to-Many. A podcast of that talk is available.]

A few days ago I wrote about Phonetags, an experimental internal service that we’ve been running inside the BBC which allows you to bookmark, tag and rate songs you’ve heard on the radio with your mobile phone. Now I want to talk briefly a bit about one interesting way of using folksonomic tags that we developed conceptually while building the system.

The concept is really simple – there are concepts in the world that can be loosely described as being made up of aggregations of other smaller component concepts. In such systems, if you encourage the tagging of the smallest component parts, then you can aggregate those tags up through the whole system. You get – essentially – free metadata on a whole range of other concepts. Let me give you an example.

In Phonetags, we allow users to bookmark, rate and tag songs. They do so for a combination of personal gain and to add their voice to the collective. But music radio shows can be loosely understood as a collection of songs, and music radio networks can be equally understood as a collection of shows. So if ten songs that are well-rated and tagged with ‘alternative’ and ‘pop’ are played on one specific radio show, it’s quite plausible to argue that the show itself could be automatically understood as being tagged with ‘alternative’, ‘pop’ and that it should be considered well-rated. Similarly if all the shows are equally tagged with ‘alternative’, then it’s likely that you could describe the network that broadcasts them as an ‘alternative’ station.

How you handle the aggregation up the chain is an interesting question. My first instinct is that you would aggregate all the tags for a song, slice off the top ten or twenty and then throw away the rest and all the quantitative information. Then you do the same for all the other songs played in a show, and then reaggregate to see which tags have been played over the most songs. The alternative would be to simply add together all the tags that people sent in during that timeslot, but I think that would skew things towards the popular songs that people tagged a lot and wouldn’t necessarily reflect the character of the show itself. But that’s up for debate.

Another, and perhaps more intriguing, way of aggregating tags up through a conceptual chain would be to view albums as collections of songs and artists as a collection of albums/songs. This would mean that from the simple act of encouraging people to tag individual songs you were getting useful descriptive metadata on radio shows, radio networks, artists and albums:

The upshot of all of this is that you start getting a way of navigating between a whole range of different concepts based on these combinations of tags and ratings. The tags give you subject related metadata, the ratings give you qualitative metadata and from this you can start finding new ways to say, “If you liked this song, you may also like this album, network, album or artist“. You can start to generate journeys that move you from network to that networks most popular songs, through to the best albums on related themes (or which conjure similar moods or associations even if they’re by radically different artists) and so on.

And because you have a semantic understanding of the relationship between concepts like a ‘song’, an ‘album’ and an ‘artist’ you can allow people to drill-down or move up through various hierarchies of data and track the changes in an artist’s style over time. For me, this is a pretty compelling argument that understanding semantic relationships between concepts makes folksonomic tagging even more exciting, rather than less so, and may indicate a changing role for librarians towards owning formal conceptual relationships rather than descriptive, evocative metadata. But that’s a post for another time.

Are there other places where this kind of thing could be applied? Well, off the top of my head I can’t think of anything useful you could do with photographs, but I think folder structures on web-sites could prove an interesting challenge. I’d be fascinated to see if it would be possible to find well-structured websites with usefully nested folders and to aggregate tags from the individual pages up to section homepages and eventually to the site homepage. A little over a year ago I wrote about URL structure we developed for broadcast radio sites at the BBC built on the Programme Information Pages platform which you can see in action on the Radio 3 site. The URL structure mirrored a formal heirarchy much like the song / album / artist one – except for episode / programme brand and network. I’d be fascinated to know whether you could get a useful understanding of what Performance on 3 was about by aggregating all the tags from each of the episodes contained within its folder, and whether aggregating still further up to the frontpage of Radio 3 would give you a good description of the network’s philosophy and approach. One for Josh at del.icio.us, perhaps?

Now it’s over to you guys – can you think of any other heirarchies or places where we could encourage the tagging of the smallest practical component part and then derive value from aggregating up the semantic chain? Could the same thing work for non-heirarchic relationships? Anyone?

Categories
Navigation Radio & Music Social Software

Reinventing Radio: On Phonetags…

This post concerns an experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow users to bookmark, tag and rate songs they hear on the radio using their mobile phone. It was developed by Matt Webb and myself (with Gavin Bell, Graham Beale and Jason Cowlam) earlier this year. Although the project is a BBC project, all the speculation and theorising around the edges is my own and does not necessarily represent the opinion of my department or the BBC in general.

We have more television stations than we have time to watch, more radio programmes than we can fit in analogue frequencies, more music and film availablethan any human could consume in their lifetimes and a huge ever-growing world of information growing every day on the internet. And this is just the beginning. The next push is the archive – decades of programming coming online, lost films recovered, libraries being digitised. But the scale of even this content is dwarfed by the third push into the world of the amateurised content-creator, where potentially billions of people are putting information and media out into the world as a matter of course.

The most substantial challenge to technology creators, media creators and distributors is – then – to find ways of making this enormous and every-growing repository navigable and sensible to real people. There are substantial rewards to be found in finding ways to help people find their way around this space – and people familiar with the challenges of the web over the last ten years are in exactly the right place to work out what these navigable mechanisms are likely to look like. But you don’t only have to create the navigation to reap the rewards – the organisations that can supply the right metadata, supplementary and structured relationships about and around their media will be the ones that will survive most easily inside this new ecology.

There’s also one more major challenge. Current media distributors and large-scale media creators are going to find themselves suddenly operating in a market of peer creators, where hundreds of people can create and interact and respond to the media around them. The network is already a challenge to broadcast – people who use the internet a lot use television less – but this is a new challenge. It’s a challenge of participation – where one-to-many broadcast-style content has to figure out how to find new ways of getting their ‘audience’ involved. This is a challenge that’s all over the place – and it’s a problem of bandwidth. How does one show or product or team respond to and respect the input of hundreds of thousands of individuals, and reflect it in what they make? If you’re last.fm it’s easy – you give everyone something different. But if you’re a popular content creator with one outward channel that’s the same for everyone, things get a little harder. How will they adapt?

This is the world that a few of us went to ETech this year to talk about. Mr Biddulph and Paul Hammond talked about BBC Radio’s current offerings and live work, particularly digital radio, on-demand streams and RadioPlayer and the famous Ten-Hour Takeover. Meanwhile Mr Webb and I talked about some more experimental work we were doing (in collboration with people like Gavin Bell) on the assumption that navigation, interaction and user-creativity were the core media issues of the next twenty years. We talked particularly about two projects: Group Listening and Phonetags. At the time, I promised to post something about the latter project at the time, but I never got around to it. After renewed interest from the FooCamp crowd, I thought I’d do it now.

Radio networks have always been interactive, but they suffer from bottlenecks. If you ask people to vote in a poll and then report the results, then you are to an extent reflecting your audience on air. But it’s a fairly homogenised and averaged-out view of their beliefs – pushed through a fine-meshed sieve. The variety is completely lost in the aggregation.

On the other hand, if you want to get some of the spice and individuality of the individuals concerned you can pick out specific individuals from your audience and put them on air (or mention them). Unfortunately, many individuals find the prospect of being on air more than a little intimidating – and of those that don’t, still only a fraction can actually be featured on air.

Both of these approaches have worked perfectly well for many years – but we’re now at a point where we can start thinking beyond them. So the question now is – what is beyond aggregation and lottery? What new patterns of interaction can we form around and within broadcast now that we have a networked world to hybridise with it?

Phonetags is an experimental project designed to try and help us get some purchase on some of these questions. The best way to describe it is to start off with some Principles for Effective Social Software that we developed as a result of working on the project. I’m not going to pretend that they cover everything, but they’ve proven very useful for us. We believe that for a piece of Social Software to be useful:

  • Every individual should derive value from their contributions
  • Every contribution should provide value to their peers as well
  • The site or organisation that hosts the service should be able to derive value from the aggregate of the data and should be able to expose that value back to individuals

So this is how it works. Phonetags is about bookmarking songs you hear on the radio using your mobile phone. The way you use it is very simple. If you’re listening to a radio network (initially BBC 6 Music) and you hear a song you’d like to make a note of, you pull out your mobile phone, type an ‘X’ into an SMS (remember: X marks the song) and send the text to a BBC short-code. Later when you come to the site, you type in your mobile number into the search box to see a list of all the songs that you’ve bookmarked:

As you’ve probably already noticed, bookmarking isn’t the only thing you can do with Phonetags. You’ve typed in the ‘X’ to bookmark, but you can type in other stuff too – any words you type after the X are considered tags in the same style as Flickr and del.icio.us. You can navigate your own tags and explore other people’s tags – both in aggregate and individually as you see fit:

You can probably start to see in the latter screenshot why this stuff starts getting so valuable for us, at least. Those keywords – along with their reflected popularity – are starting to provide a pretty clear articulation of what the concept of ‘rock’ means.

Alongside the bookmarking and the tags, we added a new concept called ‘magic tags’. Basically these are special tags – like magic words – that perform some action upon the song that you’re bookmarking. At one level you could view them as nothing but compensation for a lack of UI widgets in an SMS interface, but there could be value in having tags that were both semantically interesting and also performed an action of some kind.

The tag we used in this circumstance was a simple ‘rating’ tag. If you wrote a tag of the form *one, *two, *three, *four or *five, you would mark the song as having been rated one-five stars for quality. This seemed to make a lot of sense in the music space, as it’s something people are familiar with from applications like iTunes, and you could imagine a range of circumstances where people might wish to express their opinions on songs played.

This view results in my favourite view in the entire system – that of the top-rated songs for any given ‘tag’:

A page like this exists for every tag in the system – there are pages of the top rated indie songs, pop songs, guitar songs, summer songs. You can imagine a whole range of possibilities for extending these pages to make them permanent or to atrophy with time / create weekly charts. It’s a huge mine of interesting musical information and a great way to discover new songs.

Anyway, the point of Phonetags was to try and find a different way for a user or audience member to participate in programme-making and to collaborate with one another without any of their contributions being lost, and with the value accreting over time.

In this model, a user gets value from their very first contribution – by having a song bookmarked that they can return to later. They gain extra value by being able to keep track of and comment upon the songs that they’re listening to – and when they do so, everyone else starts gaining value as well.

The peer benefit is in music discovery and navigation. There’s an incredible amount of new music being produced all the time. Our increased access to it means – in principle – that we should be able to find music that we felt more appropriately suited us, but the sheer volume makes it hard to explore. With a service like phonetags, an individual can start exploring music by axes of quality, or by keywords or by discovering people with similar tastes to themselves. And it gets updated in pretty much real-time.

Radio DJs gain a little bit of this experience too, in that they’re able now to operate as a peer in this exchange – tracking a bit more rapidly how well people are responding to songs, and using the live site as a way of mining for songs on any given theme (give me ‘happy’ songs, songs about ‘summer’, songs about ‘mum’, songs about ‘fruit’). They can also court reactions from their audience – rate all the songs in this week’s shows and we’ll play the best at the end of the week…

But it’s behind the scenes that I think the most substantial value could be created. We’re getting in incredible metadata on music that we simply didn’t have before – metadata and descriptive (emotive!) keywords that we can analyse and chop up and use as the basis for all kinds of other navigational systems. This is metadata that is often sorely lacking and could help us enormously in the future.

Anyway, I’d be delighted to hear any comments or thoughts that anyone has on Phonetags. All the images above can be clicked on if you want to see a larger version. If you want to contact me, then it’s tom {at} the name of this website (as usual). At the moment, we’re testing this particular version of the service inside the BBC (it’s available to all BBC staff to use so if you want the URL, then just let me know). The project is unlikely to be released to the public in its current form – but we’re using it as a way of testing out some of these concepts and approaches – some of which will probably manifest in upcoming products in one way or another.

And just to give you the disclaimer one more time: Phonetags was developed by Tom Coates and Matt Webb with Gavin Bell, Jason Cowlam and Graham Beale. However, all the opinions expressed in this piece should be considered as my own personal take on the developing media landscape, and not necessarily those of my employers or the department in which I work.

Categories
Navigation Social Software

On Live Journal mood tracking and zeitgeists…

There are two or three major things I’m thinking about at the moment – and one of them is zeitgeists. Which brings me rapidly to The World according to LiveJournal which is an awesome tracking system of LiveJournal moods over the last seven days. If you go and look at it now and try moods like ‘sympathetic’, ‘distressed’ or ‘nauseated’ you can see that the bombings in London have had a real impact on people’s moods. If you invetigate more thoroughly you can see that other moods have been inversely affected or show more complex relationships. There was a parallel drop on ‘horny’ during the coverage, an enormous drop in ‘irritated’ which then turned into a spike. Fewer people felt ‘guilty’, more felt ‘grateful’.

A couple of obvious things fall out of this for me – you could use this data to articulate relationships in moods really effectively – which things in the world cause reactions, what kinds of reactions do they cause, which moods are more closely correlated or act against one another. I keep looking for clear moods that you’d expect to see appearing twenty four hours after an event like this, but so far I’m only seeing a few (people seemed to become irate in two major spikes – I wonder why).

Another obvious thing would be to use this data to alert people to things that were going on in the world or to track trends over time. I believe that LiveJournal knows which country people are from – combining that data with the stuff from the site would be tremendously useful. Sending alerts to news gathering organisations would be interesting too. Mood expression and collation is such a fascinating area and has some real possibilities for data-mining and zeitgeist taking. Can anyone else think of good ways to get this information from people and to employ it – ideally in an open way? The best I can come up with off the top of my head is AIM status messages using controlled vocabularies and opened up in some spiderable fashion…

Categories
Social Software

Two cultures of fauxonomies collide…

There’s been an enormous amount of good stuff around about tags and folksonomies recently, which I’ve not really had enough time to interrogate fully. One particularly interesting experiment has been the Cloudalicious service. Cloudalicious was apparently inspired by the Grafolicious service which tracks changes in the rate of bookmarking for any given URL as well as creating browsable interfaces for getting to grips with tags. Cloudalicious takes this one stage further – showing how the actual tags that people use to describe a given URL change over time. This blurry mess of semantic data is known as a ‘Tag Cloud’.

But what do changes in a tag-cloud mean? Probably the most obvious underlying cause for a change in the words used to describe a site would be that the site itself has changed. You could probably use an analysis of the changing tag-cloud to get a handle on what’s happening to the site. That’s quite interesting.

After that – or alongside that – another underlying cause could be a change in the vocabulary around a subject. At a really grand level, if you can imagine a one hundred year tag-cloud around a gay novel, then it might start with lots of people using the tag invert, with this gradually giving way to homosexual, then gay and potentially after that, queer.

There’s a really nice illustration of this on a weblog called P.S. which has a post called Tagclouds and cultural change. In it, there are a lot of illustrations of the take-up of the tag ‘Ajax’. You could argue this one in a couple of ways – a new concept emerges and a weblog might change direction to deal with it. In that case it’s just about the content changing. But for the most part the examples that the article uses are about specific unchanging individual articles, not whole weblogs. The vocabulary around the posts is changing, not the posts themselves. In the following graph from that article, Ajax is the pale blue line that – over time – becomes the tag of choice for the article in question:

But there’s also a third potential cause for changes in a tag-cloud over time – that people might approach the very act of tagging differently – that their understanding of what they’re doing might develop. This is a change in the nature of tagging itself. And this is what I want to talk about really briefly.

Matt Webb and I did a fair amount of work around tagging with a project called Phonetags that I never get time to properly write up. As we were working on it, we came to realise that each of us had a radically different understanding of what a tag was. Matt’s concept was quite close to the way tagging is used in del.icio.us – with an individual the only person who could tag their stuff and with an understanding that the act of tagging was kind of an act of filing. My understanding was heavily influenced by Flickr‘s approach – which I think is radically different – you can tag other people’s photos for a start, and you’re clearly challenged to tag up a photo with any words that make sense to you. It’s less of a filing model than an annotative one.

When I came to use del.icio.us I approached tagging in the way that made sense to me from Flickr. So any and all links were covered with loads of keywords with no thought for how they ought to clump together. I just tried to describe what the link was about in some way. Joshua and I had a bit of an argument about the way I was using it, actually. The browsing interface didn’t really suit an approach that had an enormous number of orphaned tags. You can get a sense of how out of control it all got with this visualisation of my tags. At the end of the argument I said to Joshua that it was almost like he was treating tags as folders. And he replied, exasperated, that this was exactly what they were. It was just that now an object could exist comfortably in a number of folders so you didn’t have to enforce an arbitrary heirarchy on your filing…

So two radically different forms of tagging that really share very little in common with one another – which leads to the question, is there room for two different paradigms here (at least) or will there be some refactoring and adaptation that moves us towards one or other model?

To help answer this question, here’s a representation of the tag-clouds surrounding my weblog over time (you can see the original in context on Cloudalicious):

So this basically traces my weblog over the last year. Each coloured line represents a particular tag – its height on the graph indicating its ‘weight’ – how often it is used in relation to the other tags. Here’s where it gets interesting – there’s at least one really significant shift of emphasis that happens over the year, between the blue and the red lines. This really does look like an ongoing shift of emphasis in the community of people who have bookmarked my site. And here’s the really interesting bit – the two tags are almost exactly the same. The blue one is blogs and the red one is blog. But why such a dramatic shift between the two tags?

Now of course, this is only one weblog and it’s difficult to come to any significant conclusions based on one example like this. But we could use it to form a hypothesis for other more technical people to test elsewhere. So here is that hypothesis – that the shift from people using blogs to blog represents the increasing dominance of a Flickr-style paradigm of tagging. Imagine the process of annotating a weblog – if you tag it with ‘blogs’ it seems clear that you are adding it to a collection of some kind. ‘Blogs’ is clearly the name of a folder which houses links to weblogs rather than an attempt to describe the weblog itself. But tagging something with the term “blog” suggests quite the opposite – to tag a link ‘blog’ suggests that I’m attempting to describe the link not as belonging to a bin labelled ‘blogs’ but simply as a ‘blog’ in and of itself. It is my conjecture, therefore, that the folder metaphor is losing ground and the keyword one is currently assuming dominance.

To test if this theory is correct – to see if one model of tagging is becoming dominant over another – should be relatively simple. You could use tag-stemming to spot tags with common roots in popular URLs, and then look for significant changes in their proportionate usage over time. I’d be particularly interested in tags that described the format of the object on the page (article vs. articles, quiz vs. quizzes, searchengine vs. searchengines) rather than the subject (trees, nuclear fission, cats). If someone was to do this kind of research then I’d be delighted – because it’s those kinds of studies and observances in user behaviour that allow us to design better interfaces to support these innovations.

Categories
Personal Publishing Social Software

Trackback is dead. Are Comments dead too?

I think it’s time we faced the fact that Trackback is dead. We should state up front – the aspirations behind Trackback were admirable. We should reassert that we understand that there is a very real need to find mechanisms to knit together the world of webloggers and to allow conversations across multiple weblogs to operate effectively. We must recognise that Trackback was one of the first and most important attempts to work in that area. But Nevertheless, we have to face the fact – Trackback is dead.

It has been killed by spam and by spammers – by the sheer horror of ping after ping pushing mother/son incest and bestiality links. It has been killed by the exploitation of human beings quite prepared to desecrate the work of tens of thousands of people in order that they should scrabble together a few coins. It has been killed by the experience of an inbox overwhelmed by the automated rape of our creative endeavours.

In a way it should have been predictable from the beginning – we should probably all have spotted that functionality that allows individuals to place links on other people’s sites could be exploited by spammers. Some people did spot these problems, but even they had no sense of the scale. Their responses were – at best – muted. But now I think we have to accept that the evidence is in. The situation is clear and it is not good. We’re engaged in an arms race with the worst kind of people, an arms race that has raged across other communications media and which we show no sign of winning. For me, the negative experience of dealing with trackbacks has long-since overwhelmed the benefits it brings. For these reasons, I’m turning off all incoming Trackbacks on plasticbag.org from this moment on.

Of course the problem isn’t restricted to Trackbacks. The systems we’re using to manage comments on our sites are probably under even more strain from spammers. The only reason I’m prepared to put up with this in the short term is because the comments seem to be more useful to more people at the moment. But I’m clear in my mind – we’re rapidly approaching a crisis here as well, and it is likely to be one that ends in the abandonment of comment systems as well.

And how to solve this problem? I don’t think it’s a matter of iterative improvements. I don’t think this problem can be solved by engaging in the arms race. MTBlacklist has saved my life, but it’s a patch, not a fix. No, any solution for this problem will be conceptually distinct from our current approaches. It could be a centralised approach – letting professionals manage the data that links our communities together. It could be a radically decentralised one beyond what we’re working with at the moment. I don’t know for certain. But I think we should be looking back to the origins of the weblog and seeing how things operated then.

Originally there was no weblog spam and yet conversation and discussion still existed. If an individual posted something and another individual wanted to respond to it, they simply wrote a post on their own site linking to the original. This environment was entirely free of spam. It was completely clean. I can’t help thinking that maybe we need to start thinking in terms of approaches like that – where there is no automated functionality that could be robotically exploited. Or perhaps we should be looking in other directions – how can we abstract out the kind of social networks that lie behind Flickr to structures that we could overlay across the internet as a whole. A question I think we should be asking is how could we build services that let you decide precisely which groups of people should be able to see, link to, ‘trackback’ or comment on the work you do in a decentralised, disaggregated way?

But this is to get ahead of ourselves. Today, we are here to mourn the passing of a great friend and a solution designed for happier and less cynical times. Trackback, I come to praise and bury you. May you rest in peace…

Categories
Social Software Technology Television

Social Software for Set-Top boxes…

You can download the core part of the material that follows as a PDF presentation entitled Social Software for Set-Top Boxes (4Mb).

A buddy-list for television:
Imagine a buddy-list on your television that you could bring onto your screen with the merest tap of a ‘friends’ key on your remote control. The buddy list would be the first stage of an interface that would let you add and remove friends, and see what your friends are watching in real-time – whether they be watching live television or something stored on their PVRs. Adding friends would be simple – you could enter letters on screen using your remote, or browse your existing friends’ contact lists.

Being able to see what your friends were watching on television would remind you of programmes that you also wanted to see, it would help you spot programmes that your social circle thought were interesting and it could start to give you a shared social context for conversations about the media that you and your friends had both enjoyed.

Obviously there might be some programmes that you might wish to view with a significant other, but wouldn’t necessarily want to advertise to the rest of the world that you were watching. For this reason your personalised settings would have to have all kinds of options to help you control how you were being represented to the wider world that were as simple to use and unobtrusive as possible. Primary among the tools at your disposal would be your ability to tell your set-top box not to advertise that you were watching any shows marked as for adults only and to mark certain channels as similarly private. These settings would obviously be on by default.

Presence alerts:
One of the core functions of a socially enabled set-top box would be to create the impression of watching television alongside your peer group and friends – even if you were geographically distant from one another. One key way to do this would be to create a sensation of simultaneity – to remind you that there are other people in your social circle doing things at the same time as you. This would allow you to create a mental impression of what your friends were doing.

Here are two versions of an alert that could fade up gently onto the screen when someone on your buddy list changes channel. These alerts would work in two ways – if the person was changing channel and landed on a station as a programme was just about to begin or within the first three or four minutes of a programme, then the alert would be immediate. This would give you the opportunity to change over to that channel as well without missing too much of the show. If – however – they were changing over to a channel in the middle of a show or they changed the channel again within ten seconds, then the alert would not be sent. They would have to have been watching the new channel for a few minutes before an alert would be sent. There would be nothing more intrusive and irritating than watching someone compulsively flick between channels at a distance (except perhaps being in the room with them as they did so).

The most important part of all these alerts is that they provide you with the option to join the person concerned in whichever programme they happen to now be watching…

Watch with your friends:
Now we have the concept of joining a friend to watch a show, we have to ask what should that experience be like? How should your parallel engagement manifest itself. Traditionally, net-mediated social spaces have tended towards text as a communicative medium. But this would seem like an enormously clumsy way to interact during a television programme.

Television is an audio-visual medium and there’s no reason why your engagement with your friends shouldn’t also be audio-visual. For this reason a simple high quality webcam above the television would help you see how your friends were responding to what was on screen – it would help you feel an experience of shared engagement without there being a need for overt discussion. By default your conversations with your friends would be muted, and you could – of course – minimise their images if they started to get annoying, but if you wanted to shout and scream alongside your friends, then you’d simply turn the sound back on. This would be the perfect form of engagement around certain sporting events, or for making a well-known television programme or film just the backgrounded context for a shared conversation.

In the mock-up below, you can see the cameras of three of your friends on the right. One person has wandered away from their TV…

Chatting and planning:
If your friends were in the room with you during an ad break, you might chat about the programme you’ve just been watching or bitch about the adverts in front of you. You might turn the sound down low for a few seconds and talk about something else completely. There are lots of contexts where the programme on television might not be the main focus of activity around the television. These might be times when it’s still important to have a sense of what’s happening on the screen, but where the social activity has been dragged to the foreground.

Set-top box social software would have to support such engagements. So how about a second view when you’re in one of these social situations? From having the programme in the foreground, one simple switch of the button could drag your friends into the limelight. The programme could be fully or partially muted, and your friends automatically unmuted. Then you could chat to each other about the programme you’d just watched, or wait for the adverts to end together. You could even use these opportunities to plan what to watch next. If this was handled in a similar way to group formation and parties in online gaming structures like Halo 2, then perhaps one person could even set up the next programme and stream it to everyone else, or cue forward to show their friends the best part of a particular dance sequence or the key quote from a political interview.

Choosing channels and playing games:
Having this technology in place under your television could create a tremendous platform for all kinds of other applications or games to be layered on top of your television experience. And these could be equally usable with people in the same room as yourself. If you gave everyone a personalised remote control (or installed universal remote control software in something like a mobile phone) then people could propose changing channels but be over-ruled by other people in the room. The wonderful browsing experience of flicking through music video channels could be turned into a game, with each song being rated on the fly by everyone present or telepresent and records kept of channels and songs that people tended to enjoy. The same controls could be hooked up to other forms of interactive television or to net-enabled functionality on the boxes themselves…

Sharing a social library:
And finally, to return to the idea of media discovery and regenerating a social context around television programming, how about if the shows that many of your friends had decided in advance to record were automatically recorded by your device too. How would it be if you never missed the show that everyone was talking about? And if you had – your box could ask its peers for some kind of swarmed download if anyone still had a copy and it could appear in your local library overnight.

All this of course, is just the very beginning of the kinds of things that you could create with a socially-enabled TV set-top box. It’s all basically just extensions of stuff that we’re already doing in other media. There are still technological barriers of course – bandwidth and synchronisation being core problems. But we’re gradually on the way to solving them.

To repeat – If you’d like to download this piece as a simple to read and print PDF presentation then you can do so here: Social Software for Set-Top Boxes (4Mb).

Addendum:
Here are a few related links that people have brought to my attention since posting this stuff up or since I finished work on the presentation and illustrations. I’m a little cross with myself for not posting this stuff up before, but hey…

Categories
Social Software Technology

Preamble towards a post on Social Software for Set-top boxes

The following post contains some of my thoughts about Social Software for Set-Top Boxes. But before I do so, I thought maybe I should write really briefly about some of the context. I’ve been thinking around this stuff for a very long time now, but I’ve been too disorganised and busy to put any of it out in public. The last thing I wrote around this area was several months ago, and was in fact entirely an attempt to set the scene a little for what I’m going to write next. It was about conceptualising how a connected media hub might operate in the home. For more background on that, you should read the three posts I wrote back then, the last of which has enough pictures to give a sense of the whole concept without the effort of ploughing through my clumsy inarticulate prose:

I started writing this post and the following post immediately after producing the pieces above, and the illustrations and design work you’ll see were well on their way before Christmas. I decided to postpone publishing it for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I felt it had a certain amount of synergy with the paper that Matt Webb and I were going to be presenting at ETCon with Paul and Matt Biddulph on “Reinventing Radio”. But with that paper now out of the way (and available here: Reinventing Radio: Enhancing One-to-Many with Many-to-Many) I think it’s probably the right time to launch into it. So with no further ado: Social Software for Set-Top Boxes.

Categories
Social Software

An addendum to a definition of Social Software

I’m loath to wake the old evil beastie of definitions of social software, but I came across some old notes that I sent off to someone in October and I’d like to keep track of it for later. Basically the question was could you produce a short and pithy, mostly accurate short-hand description of social software that mostly worked. I came up with:

Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour – message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking.

I slapped a lot of examples in there because it seemed to clarify the issue a bit. Note, this is a shorthand, and nothing more – my fuller posts on the subject include: My working definition of social software but I think maybe I prefer this shorter, rotted-down and composted version.