Future Media

Media Futures Conference 2008

I recently programmed and produced the Media Futures Conference, a one day exploration of the dynamics and trends shaping the future of media. Attended by 250 people representing a cross-section of disciplines and roles, it hosted thought-provoking presentations, panels and lively debate, while showcasing innovative projects that took place on 20 June at Alexandra Palace in London. The conference was run by the BBC. We discussed future media in broader terms, and in a more grounded fashion, than it is usually addressed. The societal and social context of media was also key, and we looked at social trends shaping media adoption and use, and the real lives of the people we knew as 'users'. We will also hosted an open invite for provocations and Show and Tells. There was no cost to attend the conference. The event will be documented, and we have started posting material and references on the Discussion and documentation page. We hope the outputs will be stimulating.

The opening keynote, Unknown unknowns: assessing media futures, was given by Dr Brian Winston, Lincoln Professor of Communications at the University of Lincoln. Among his messages were to "Avoid the hyperbolic... Don’t see things as more than they are... Stop talking about content: focus on creativity". Winston's keynnote was controversial, but suprisingly well.

Reflections on The New new journalism

Last week I programmed and chaired an Innovation Forum event in the Future Media series entitled The New new journalism. The event was supported and produced in collaboration with POLIS and the LSE Media Group. The discussion was rich, and well-informed and heartily contested. The most substantial post-event discussion has been on Strange Attractor, where Suw Charman-Anderson posted a write-up and response. My response to this and the related comments, including one from panelist Charlie Beckett.

The programme was considered in three parts: the changing role of the journalist in society; the new possibilities presented by technology and design; and the nature of the story in a dynamic medium. In reality we covered about half of the programme. I am over-ambitious as ever! These themes will all be picked up at the Media Futures Conference.

However, it is necessary to establish what journalism is for (and if this has changed) before we can address what forms it should take, business models it might adopt, changes in organisational form that might be needed, and new groups that might contribute. As the designland aphorism has it: You need to 'design the right thing before you design the thing right'. Most discussions of journalism start from an assumed agreement about its role. In reality, its character, even in 'old media', has changed profoundly. These changes are responses to, and causes of, the 'dwindling audience, dwindling trust and dwindling revenues' to which Charman-Anderson refers.

Panelist Tessa Mayes argued that journalism has a role in "searching for the truth", which needs to be differentiated from being an oracle of The Truth, and which can lead to a 'pointless philosophical discussion' (Charman-Anderson). But just because much journalism is 'written on tight deadlines' doesn't invalidate this as a goal. Noting the importance of going beyond reporting information Mayes said "the question is how ideas connect". The debate about citizen vs professional journalism was also quite subtle. Peter Day spoke about the need for time and resources for journalism, and noted that to the extent we train citizens to be journalists "then it becomes a profession, which is difficult and sometimes nasty". He also noted that "to build a Web site you need reporting".

My observation on business models, albeit made in conclusion, was that we are wealthier than ever yet we are less prepared to underwrite the value represented by journalism in particular, and media in general. Is this because in a 'post-politics' world we value it less? It has been commoditised by access to more suppliers and decreasing cost of that access? It is too hard to pay for material? Or we haven't invented the new forms of journalism that are worth paying for? Dennis Howlett's comments are of interest here.

On technology being subservient to information, in the developed world we have spent the first 15 years of the commercial Web largely playing with technology. I don't object to this: it is necessary to investigate the 'texture', the affordances, and the possibilities of any new technology. But at the risk of continually looking for problems in need of a technological solution, and as Mayes put it "being so caught up with IT you forget the story", we do need to consider technology as a toolset that is at the service of organisations and their primary functions. I also believe, as I argued in my talk at the PPA annual conference, that design comes before technology. Designing the right thing again.

Charman-Anderson makes a valuable point about 'dysfunctional management'. In the media business, as in many professions and industries, the doers get promoted to be the managers of the doers. However, the media industry, and particularly publishing, has tended to be low profit with high people costs, leading to a culture of low pay and little professional development. This may partly explain the character of management in media organisations. Media managers also tend to be poor at thinking about systems, as noted in Charlie Beckett's comment, partly because, at least in publishing, the processes and manufacturing systems relatively simple and well understood. Sarah Rink's comment about the ability of ethnographers to deliver insights into system problems is worth noting.

But her point about 'senior management in the legacy business fighting to retain their primacy and pushing digital staff and managers aside' may reflect as much the 'innovator's dilemma'. In this scenarios, newspaper publishers still bring in most revenue from cover price, display and classified ads, and can not be made up for in the short term from digital publishing operations as the cannibalise print revenue. Thus analogue media is given primacy. But it is a no-win situation, as Clayton Christensen describes in his eponymous book The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.

I have only addressed some of the issues discussed at the event. A write-up of the discussion will be posted shortly on The New new journalism event page.

Rediscovering the value of letters page design

In a well-research and reflective piece in Media Guardian, Iain Hollingshead captures well the value of newspaper letters pages with respect to online comment (From our home correspondent, March 31 [shared bookmark]):

[What is surprising now] "letters to the editor" are no longer the only point of contact between newspapers and their readers, is that letters pages still appear to flourish on the broadsheets... [The] relatively novel facility of commenting at will online... appears to have led to a renewed respect among journalists and readers for the old-fashioned skill of careful editing...[But letters pages] haven't yet adapted convincingly to the internet itself... what none of the papers have done yet... is to find a way of bringing together all the best reader responses and commentary in a single, readable forum, both online and in print... comment may be free, but editing the gems and sifting through the drivel is expensively time-consuming.

The 'design' of the letters 'function' has evolved over centuries: online comment has only had a decade to mature. Unfortunately, newspaper publishers have not learned all they might from these established designs, or from the successful design of other public spaces such as chaired debates – a point well-made by Jonathan Freedland in the last year (The blogosphere risks putting off everyone but point-scoring males, April 11, 2007 [shared bookmark]). Publishers are also poor at 'reader-centred design'.

Such an approach might, as Hollingshead advocates, involve bringing together all reader responses in one place. And this should include responses posted on readers' own Weblogs (something Guardian Technology has done, but in print only) and connect to a single reader profile for comment posted online and letters submitted for print. In the meantime, publishers might consider including in the online instance of their letters page links to stories in question (as the FT recently started to do on its letters page). Reciprocally, they might include links to related letters, and Weblog posts, in the story context. Through these simple steps the value of letters and online comment would be increased.

Published as a letter in Media Guardian, April 7, 2008 under the heading Writer's request: not for blog dissemination [free sub may be required required], along with a suggestion that a convention of submitting letters 'For Letters Page Only' might be appropriate. It would be churlish to note that there are no links from the letter in Media Guardian to the stories in question.

Hacking the iPlayer, and innovation in media forms

That the BBC iPlayer has been 'hacked', as the Guardian reports, is unremarkable (BBC 'opens floodgates' to iPlayer hackers, March 13), and BBC News Online reports the hack is being fixed (BBC releases fix for iPlayer hack, 13 March 2008).

All human systems are subject to mastery by other humans. But most people won't have the wherewithal, or time and energy, to take advantage of such a hack. A few will. Part of the design of a digital rights management (DRM) system, and most other control systems, is to make circumventing it sufficiently difficult that a sufficient number are discouraged, such that the business model remains viable. But circumvention is taken for granted.

The flip side of difficult is easy, and Apple and others have demonstrated that when you properly design an entire service experience – for instance music finding, acquisition, listening, management and sharing – around the people who will use it, and reflect accepted patterns of sharing, people will gravitate towards it.

However, the little acknowledged challenge is the creation of new media forms that are of the medium, rather continually peddling old forms that are simply acquired over it. Just as Web-based software cannot be pirated, these new forms will lay the basis for viable future businesses. Neither the music and broadcast industries, nor the 'media should be free' crowd, has seriously addressed this exciting challenge.

Published as a letter in the Guardian, March 14 2008 under the heading Rights and wrongs of the BBC iPlayer

In the BBC we Trust

Earlier this month I was invited by David Wilcox of Designing for Civil Society and Lizzie Jackson to a BBC Trust event about how blogging could extend the Trust’s engagement with the public in the review of bbc.co.uk, and in the Trust’s other work. From the invite, I guess I qualified as someone 'with a strong interest in Public Service Broadcasting' (as I focus on substantive writing over blogging). The other participants included Charlie Beckett, Lloyd Davis, Simon Dickson, Mick Fealty, Sunny Hundal, Ed Mitchell, and JP Rangaswami The aim of the event was to:

Explain the role of the BBC Trust, how and why it reviews the BBC's services, and the current review and consultation process; invite ideas on how blogging could extend the reach of this and other Trust public engagement; discuss what topics are likely to prove good conversation starters, and guidelines on how best to promote these

Mark Rogers of Market Sentinel also gave a short and engaging presentation on how blog conversations and blog influence can be mapped.

A number of participants have already reflected on the event, and an overview of these responses can be found on David Wilcox's Reaching out to bloggers? post. My thoughts, which I largely expressed during the discussion, follow.

It is a positive step that the Trust is innovating around its consultation process. But as ever in media-related discourse we need to consider the broader context. This initiative has been taken, it was explained, partly as there is a regulatory requirement to consult but also as there is a 'desire for legitimacy'. This ties into the broader contemporary discussion of the legitimacy of and trust in the established media -- a phenomenon that is more profound than might be understood by the hoo-ha around the naming of cats or, even, fraud in audience interaction models.

To the extent there has been a decline in trust in the BBC, this is a secular trends across all 'established' institutions. The decline is not a product of a lack of consultation but of a general loss of direction and purpose among these institutions and their leaders. This can't be fixed with more (methods of) consultation. In fact a higher profile consultation process may even be seen as an admission of lack of authority, particularly if the process is more about attempting to connect and a desire for legitimacy. However, there are clearly many informed and smart people who have not been part of past consultations who might well contribute valuable reflections and insights.

At the level of process I suggest the following:

• Set an agenda which frames and situates the discussion at a high level, asking for instance 'What is media for?'. (And this may well still be answered by the BBC's Purpose, Vision and Values statement.)
• Provide some background notes on data on the key developments that frame the challenge, from social, business and technological trends and trajectories to BBC specific factors and developments.
• Take note of all the 'live' discussions that are going on around the role of the media in general and the BBC/bbc.co.uk in particular, from the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion list (which often strays from its geeky heart into these bigger issues) to contributions at the level of the Royal Television Society's Fleming Memorial Lecture lecture 'What the BBC is for' to be delivered in London later this week.
• Develop a mechanism that will allow (most) related blog posts to be found. This might involve agreeing a tag or tags, or creating a page that supports (moderated) trackback, thus allowing links to posts to be aggregated.
• Bring together relevant writing and criticism in this area and give it an (objective) editorial context (kind of a literature review for you academics out there) -- including contributions from bloggers.
• If there were more time for the process I would suggest setting an agenda for the discussion, starting with 'What is media for?', 'closing' and summing up this discussion and moving on to the next item, and concluding with specific questions around the service review. (Of course the bloggerati don't won't be so constrained but it is important to be clear whose agenda it is.)

Meanwhile, I have been asked by the BBC (rather than the Trust) to propose an essay for the bbc.co.uk Service Review which, if it is commissioned, I will write in the next week, and hope to be able to post online.

Technorati Tags: bbctrust, bbc

New forms of entertainment needed

In his Entrepreneur column in the FT Luke Johnson reflected on the cultural and commercial threat of the Internet, and re-hashed some of the themes of The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen, which we recently discussed with the author at the Innovation Reading Circle on Amateurism, culture and excellence (see The web bonanza that will damage us all, Luke Johnson, FT, June 26 2007).

For a paper of record, it would be appropriate if Johnson at least acknowledged the provenance of his thesis. His Entrepreneur column would make a fairly comprehensive praesie of Keen's book, with who the FT recently published a Q&A. Keen himself claims little credit for his ideas and, as Charles Hazell intimates (Letters: The invention of printing was an even bigger threat, June 29 2007), techno-cultural scare stories have been around for centuries.

Johnson's key mistake is to assume that technology drives society, and that by making available these tools we are encouraging destructive behaviour. In fact, the phenomena he describes pre-date widespread use of the Internet, and its take-up may in fact be as much a product of those behavioural trends. As Tony Foster notes (Letter: Successful companies embracing internet, June 29 2007) smart companies have seen that these trends portend new forms of entertainment that are of the network. To the extent that they are, these entertainment forms will be less easy to pirate. As the IT industry has discovered with 'software as a service', the Internet makes it easier to prevent piracy. You won't find copies of Salesforce.com on an underground file sharing service.

I outlined this thesis in a recent essay in Wordrobe (see Media Futures 'Not your father's media' Nico Macdonald, Wordrobe, Issue .1, August 2006) where I argued that if media incumbents are to survive and prosper they will need to cultivate more imagination, be bolder and take more risks.

Johnson's piece stimulated a number of other interesting responses. Michael Keary argued that the music industry isn't central to music anyway (Letter: Internet lets new acts survive outside the mainstream, July 3 2007) and Martin Percy countered Johnson's claims for the negatives effects of computer games, noting that their technology "generally lends itself to games centred on chat, co-operation and turn-based play" (Letter: Alarmist claims on ultra-violent games don't fit online technology, July 3 2007).

Incidentally, as well as failing to flag or link to related ideas, I have not found one newspaper which links from letters published to the original article or in the other direction. Nor have I found any which prioritise published letters in any comment- or trackback-based discussion of an article. I would welcome counter-examples of good practice here.

NMK Forum 07 panel: Media, Publishing & Advertising: Old Guard, New Tricks

13 June Taking part in a panel at the NMK Forum 07 (sub-titled ‘What Comes After Content?’) in London, looking at how traditional media companies are managing to integrate aspects of social media interaction into their activity, including around debate. The other panelists are Jem Stone, BBC Future Media & Technology; Tom Bureau, (soon to be former) UK Managing Director, CNET Networks; Meg Pickard, Guardian Unlimited; Adam Gee, New Media Commissioner, Factual, Channel 4 Television; Paul Pod, co-Founder, TIOTI (Tape It Off The Internet); and Ashley Norris, co-founder, Shiny Media. The panel, entitled 'Media, Publishing & Advertising: Old Guard, New Tricks' and chaired by Mike Butcher, asks:

How is so-called MSM (Mainstream Media) facing up to the new wave of interest in social media? Is it absorbing social media strategies or ignoring it? What does social media mean for the bottom line of big media? And how do the social media startups view their efforts?

The other panelists are Jem Stone, BBC Future Media & Technology; Tom Bureau, UK Managing Director, CNET Networks; Meg Pickard, Guardian Unlimited; Adam Gee, New Media Commissioner, Factual, Channel 4 Television; Paul Pod, co-Founder, TIOTI (Tape It Off The Internet); and Ashley Norris, co-founder, Shiny Media. My brief position statement follows:

[The panel has now taken place and this post will be updated accordingly.]

Social media is the latest of many fads that have swept the media industry in the last 15 years. This doesn't mean it isn't a phenomenon, or a trend which can be taken advantage of, but it is over-hyped. Previous fads have included CD-ROM and CDi, interactive editorial, portals, push content (Pointcast, etc), WAP sites, syndication, and documentary-style content. The other current fads don't need elaborating.

To the extent it exists, the desire to engage with media using social tools is a product of the disappearance of other forms of social or civic engagement, which have left the media, brands and celebrities as the last vestiges of authority. But the allegiances are double-edged, as the media is also seen as untrustworthy.

It is also a product of our more confessional culture. The social networking trend is currently driving technology, and is not a product of it. For instance, confessional and emotive culture pre-dated the rise of the Web, with a key point being the Martin Bashir interview with Princess Diana and the responses to her death. (Would people growing up in the 50s have created social networks online if the Web had existed then?)

The media industry needs to better understand these trends so it can more effectively leverage them, and see what the next trend will be. (It also needs to understand its role in enhancing these trends.)

To the extent it is possible to leverage them, the media industry needs to work on the nature of the conversation it is facilitating, learn from what works well in real world interaction, consider how to use editorial more effectively to shape these conversations, identify which characteristics of these services will bring out the best from users, and use design and technology to create services that fit into people's lives and with which they can easily understand and engage.

Guardian network home re-design misses the point

Last week's Design Week (23 May 2007) Vox Pop [paid sub may be required] asked: Mark Porter has defended The Guardian's decision to put functionality over aesthetic considerations when the paper relaunched its homepage last week. Did it deserve a more sympathetic response to its redesign? Some moderately enlightening responses were published from Denise Wilton (moo.com), Ryan Shelton (BD4D), Rick Lippiett (Glass) and Michael Dorrian (Start Creative).

I should first note that Guardian creative director Mark Porter deserves credit for being one of the few established British editorial designers to pro-actively embrace online interaction design. He can also talk about his work more cogently than some of his peers in the online news industry.

As Porter has found, unlike other areas of design, everyone is a critic when considering the Web. Yet the quality of our discussion of this areas of interaction design is less developed -- even in the design media. For instance, it is crude to to juxtapose functionality and aesthetics. This imposes on the Web a print-derived model of evaluating design. Although graphic design has influenced Web design -- as I discussed in my contribution to Rick Poynor's 'Communicate' book -- they can't be evaluated in the same way. In fact, good aesthetics can improve functionality, or at least usability, which Denise Wilton champions in her Vox Pop. And functionality also has an aesthetic, which profoundly influences user experience -- but there is little mainstream discussion of, for instance, the design of the forms that we interact with all over the Web.

In the case of the Guardian, the real problem is that the wrong functionality is being addressed. As we embrace new news models around syndication, Weblogging, story rating tools and customisable portal pages, newspaper home pages become increasingly unimportant. But the new design challenges are increasingly important -- and we need them to be engaged with by more of our talented, established designers.

Published in Design Week magazine (UK) letters as The Guardian homepage is OK, but an irrelevance, 30 May 2007 [paid sub may be required]

Post-submission

Jeff Jarvis, in this week's Media Guardian, makes a similar point in his column 'Home pages, such a quaint old-fashioned notion ...': "I think this aesthetic confluence [of the home page design of major newspapers] demands that we reconsider – or explode – not just the home page but our conception of the web page and even of the website", he writes.

We should see BBC innovation in a broader context

"The BBC’s desperate attempt to lead the new media revolution has been fraught with controversy, delays and huge costs. How did it all go wrong?" writes Bobbie Johnson in a recent Media Guardian cover story (Situation critical Media Guardian, May 14, 2007). [See the article with comments on his own Weblog.]

Johnson is right to flag up the BBC's delays in developing and launching the iPlayer. But rather than reflecting badly on the BBC, with its myriad stakeholders in government and beyond, we might note that compared to the rest of the UK media industry the Corporation has demonstrated the will to innovate and to lead in new media. That concepts such as the iPlayer are more quickly, if quirkily, cloned by others broadcasters demonstrates the value of setting the bar high.

Another under-appreciated characteristic of the BBC is the enthusiasm of its new media staff. At events I have programmed over the last decade they have been among the most enthusiastic about learning and debating, and presenting their own work to their peers. This kind of spirit is invaluable in any organisation, and their evangelism has benefited the new media sector more generally.

The BBC has also played another role in facilitating development beyond its own people. A project in which I was involved, the Innovation Labs, has allowed independent design and technology companies to spend time on media-related research and development. The goals are the BBC's, but there are benefits for all parties involved -- including license fee payers.

Published as a letter in Media Guardian, May 21, 2007 under the heading Enthusiasm at the BBC [free sub may be required required]. On the same page Emily Bell took up the cudgels again with a piece entitled BBC new media innovation stops at the website door (Media Guardian, May 21, 2007).

Encouraging civility in online debate

Jonathan Freedland recently addressed the issue of civility in online debate (The blogosphere risks putting off everyone but point-scoring males, Comment, Guardian, April 11, 2007).

In his considered reflections on democracy and online debate, Freedland is right to note that "the more democratic encounter is the meeting properly chaired, allowing everyone their say". Media and other organisations developing online complements to their real world activities would do well to replicate in the former the formats that have successfully evolved in the latter.

However, Freedland then advocates the blogosphere concept of moderation in place of the real world format of chairing that he rightly values. Online debate hosted by media organisations really does need more chairing and, as happens at a public meeting in the real world, more response from the writers and presenters to who people are responding.

We should also bear in mind that the lowering of the quality and civility of debate is not the sole responsibility of those occupying the blogosphere. Among some established commentators and politicians there has also been a tendency to debate at the level of personality rather than ideas, to use pejorative language and infer guilt by association, and to ignore or dismiss good counter-arguments. It is up to the media and our political class to lead the blogosphere back to more civil, informed and thoughtful debate.

Published, in edited form, in the Guardian, Letters 'Democracy in cyber-space', April 16, 2007. Note the following letter draws out one of my points, albeit more crudely and with a specific target. I also posted my comments in the comments following Freedland's article. No direct responses have been posted. This letter is also reproduced in The Guardian Book of Letters to the Editor (Guardian Books, November 2007).

We Media fringe event, 3 May 2006 (London)

The We Media fringe event this week was an example of poor event programming and the arrogance of some (self-appointed) members of the citizen journalism crowd.

[Image from noodlepie]

The 'official' We Media Global Forum: The Power of Trust has been taking place this week between BBC Television Centre and the Reuters Building in Canary Wharf. Noting that it was expensive to attend, Robin Hamman (who runs the cybersoc.com resource) proposed a We Media fringe event [initial link], which took place at 01zero-one in Soho, London.

As someone who had wanted to attend the We Media Global Forum, I was interested in attending. An interesting crowd turned up, and a different one from those at other 01zero-one-hosted events, some of which I have programmed with InSync. However, the dearth of information about the  event on cybersoc.com should have alerted me to the lack of programming that had gone into the event. While there were some useful contributions from the presenters (see below) the key lessons from the event were about this model of programming.

The event started half an hour late and then went on for the best part of three hours. There was little context about the objectives or content of the We Media conference for which this was a fringe event. Most of the presenters weren't involved in the We Media Global Forum, and most of them just 'did their thing' anyway and didn't attempt to relate their presentations to the Forum, so the notion of it being a 'fringe' event was notional. Alan Connor [not Conner], the event 'maitre d'' (as he was styled), was very engaging but also failed to provide any context or attempt to tie the talks back to the themes of the Forum. From Hamman's final comments it was clear he had had even less involvement in programming the event. "This whole thing has been quite a strange experience for me", he concluded. And for this audience member too.

There is something of a vogue for 'self-organising' events, from the extensively considered Policy Unplugged 'open space' model to the leaderless Barcamp approach (see Barcamp London, which at its present rate won't happen "sometime in June/July"). But too often this seems to be an excuse for not creating well-considered and -designed events. Hamman was clear that he didn't have much time to put the event together given his day job as a Community Producer for BBC English Regions, but even with this limited level of input this event could have been better.

It is not entirely Hamman's fault that many of the speakers failed to address the supposed themes of the event, or willfully spoke for more time than they were allotted. However, it is a bit much to hope that eight speakers will all stick to their five minutes, and the over-runs multiply. The irony is that for all the 'citizen journalism', 'coming up from the streets', 'empowering the demos' rhetoric that pervades these discussions, speakers who don't stick to time clearly aren't interested in engaging with the responses of their peers -- let alone with the people for who they supposedly advocate.

Not only did they fail to engage with their peers, but I noticed a number of speakers having private conversations at the back of the room while the other speakers were presenting. For all of Suw Charman's legitimate comments on the mis-match at the Forum between what was on the stage and what was happening on IRC, I will bet the speakers and panelist there either listened to one another or discreetly left the room rather than rudely distracting from the presentations. (And at least IRC, snide as it often is, doesn't audibly interrupt presentations.)

For much of the Fringe event, many of the attendees were also chatting at the back of the meeting area, again demonstrating the disingenuous nature of their advocacy of media democracy. The embrace of this outlook by organisations such as the BBC and Reuters has given some of its advocates a particular sense of importance -- and a license to behave rudely. New Labour politicians exhibit a similar contempt for the people they supposedly champion, but at least they were elected, and they have the good grace to be polite.

Another slightly surreal aspect of the event was the number of people filming and photographing the activities, writing Weblog posts, and recording interviews with one another. This slightly obsessive activity gave it even more of a feeling of being insular and detached.

Key points from the presenters:

Dr Chris Yapp, Head of Public Sector Innovation, Microsoft: Koji Kobayashi, future head of NEC, coined term 'convergence' in 1962, and convergnence has finally arrived. [See note on 1977 announcement on the integration of computers and communications technologies on NEC Group History site, 1964-1977 .] IT was about labour substitution. No longer about access but also about contribution. UK creativity has the possibility to help ensure people are creating content that is relevant to them. [I was a little unclear about the last point.] If we get it right this city/country has the possibility of empowering the world. Focus on the 2012 Olympics. "We can change the world. You are going to do it!"

Suw Charman, Executive Director, Open Rights Group: [Charman was an online curator for the conference but critical of it] There was a mis-match between what was on the stage at the Forum and what was happening on IRC. The BBC and Reuters on stage were very smug. How can you have a conference about citizen journalism with one citizen journalists attending? "Let's kick some arse tomorrow, for the sake of my sanity". [During the discussion] You can't buy a community and then exploit it. This is harder than it looks! Giving back is the source of the success of Flickr or Friendster.

Ben Metcalfe, Project Lead for backstage.bbc.co.uk [speaking in a personal capacity, discussed his concerns about the BBC considering putting adverts on the international Web site]. There is a danger of content becoming advert-friendly, including content generated for home users. Will the revenue come back to the content that drives the ads? What about user-generated content? 

Michael Tippett, founder of NowPublic.com: NowPublic is a site to which anyone can contribute, and it is easy to use the content on your site. [His demo of the interface for commenting material was impressive.] We have 2,000 people contributing [?] from the affected area of Hurricane Katrina. [During the discussion] We are trying to create a person-to-person news channel.

Tim Ireland, online marketing expert and activist who blogs at bloggerheads.com: [Discussed the importance of search engine optimisation. Update: see his comments below.] In comparison to personal home pages, Weblogs allow people to represent themselves a paragraph at a time, and through what other people say. It is important to understand the value of permalinks, comments and trackback -- and particularly the blogroll -- for promoting your Weblog. A small community of Weblog posters can influence many readers. Often bloggers stories  are becoming the story. I can get the top search result for such a story because bloggerheads.com already had the reputation. For instance, if you search for Vote Labour you will get backingblair.com. "If you want to vote Labour, we give you a f***ing good reason not to".

Paul Evans, who manages a project called Councillor.info [and works for Poptel Technology Ltd.]: We are [involved in?] training councillors, some of who think you can turn the Internet off. We need a network of bloggers who bring policy issues to the masses, and get around the media. [See an outline of his talk on his site.]

Neil Dixon, creator of BritCaster.com: Blogging is over. I am a podcaster!

A political blogger who goes by the name of 'Guido Fawkes': I started this Weblog as a result of despair with 'Fiskers' writing longer articles taking apart other articles. The key is having good writing, vs Tim's emphasis on search engine optimisation. As a result of publications lifting copy from me, I started the Press Plagiarist of the Year Award, which lead people to start paying me.

In conclusion...

I won't reflect extensively on the talks. There were many interesting ideas, stories and examples, albethey largely unrelated to the Forum. It was interesting to learn from Tim Ireland how easy it was to gain presence in the search space, though unfortunate in his case as his politics are so unoriginal, poorly argued, and bile-driven.

We sorely need more thoughtful, well-programmed (and -organised) reflection on themes such as media democracy, and we also need to avoid taking for granted their value.

Technology is not the active agent in society

"The internet is only doing to politics what it has done to other industries: it disaggregates elements and then enables these free atoms to reaggregate into new molecules" claims Jeff Jarvis (New media: Why the internet will revolutionise politics, April 24, 2006).

Why today is the Internet (or whatever technology) always cast as the active agent in social, business and political change? Although the Internet may not have been invented with its contemporary uses in mind, has it never occurred to our technology-lead commentators that its development and success may actually be a _reflection_ of social, business and political trends as much as their driver?

Contemporary Western politics had disaggregated well before the popularisation of the the Web, Weblogging, or mobile phones, and the cleaving of the population to these media is as much anything a reflection of the disaggregated character of these technologies.

Of course, while we shape technologies they go on to shape us. But event if the Internet "lowers the barrier to entry... in politics" it cannot create engaging and compelling ideas -- and these will be key to creating any political worldview worth having.

Published as a letter in Media Guardian, May 1, 2006 under the heading Politics is about ideas, not the internet [free sub may be required required]

Update: Jarvis chose to quote my letter on BuzzMachine. I also heard him speak at BBC Broadcast Centre on 8 May and asked him a similar question: if we had had the Internet 50 years ago, would it have had the same effect? He argued in response that there used to be a greater proliferation of voices historically with more, smaller newspapers. However, this doesn't seem to be the same phenomenon as many individual voices that don't represent larger political narratives. I will return to this theme of techno-determinism, as it keeps cropping up in debate.

The error of counterposing media

Simon Jenkins is one of the most interesting mainstream commentators on his own industry, and recently addressed the enthusiasm for online publishing (Comment Three cheers for Gutenberg - and long live dead trees, Guardian, January 6, 2006), arguing that the personal computer isn't fulfilling its potential, online publishing is still immature, talk of the death of newspaper journalism is as ill-informed as it was with the coming of television news, and that newspapers "have shown that they can grasp each new technology" and adapt it accordingly.

Jenkins is right to note the ability of newspapers to adapt to the rise of new technology and "bend it to their will". And in reality, modern computers were in part adapted for the needs of newspaper publishers: for authoring, composing, editing and transmitting pages -- once quaintly referred to as 'desktop publishing'.

However, Jenkins is wrong to endorse the counterposition of new and old media. It is true that TV journalism didn't kill its print sibling, but it certainly pushed newspapers towards features and opinion (of which he is an exemplar). Neither will the Web kill print journalism, though it has already changing it significantly.

Far from being damned, print is a wonderful complement to online publishing, and to broadcast -- as the Guardian's 'Today on the Web' excerpts and Ricky Gervais podcast demonstrate. The challenge for publishers and broadcasters is to use each medium for what it does best, and to facilitate ease of movement between them. If there is a complaint to be made it is that, after ten years the Web being used for publishing, too little progress has been made in these respects.

Read on...

Under my keyboard the desk shakes. The bloggers are on the march, Simon Jenkins, The Times, March 11, 2005, and my comments on the article on Perfect.co.uk.

Publishers can't manage their digital assets

HarperCollins pro-active move to digitize its titles (HarperCollins Plans to Control Its Digital Books, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12, 2005, page B1 [paid sub required]) and allow search engines to index but not archive them shows a grasp of online publishing models still lacking in most periodical and newspaper publishing houses). Chief executive Jane Friedman is reported as saying "We didn't like being seen as Luddites", but the Journal article goes on to report that HarperCollins sought quotes for scanning, digitising and tagging its titles.

Over the last quarter century the book publishing industry has moved to digital word processing, copy exchange, page make-up and printing, and could, in theory, produce an electronic facsimile of any title more easily than print it. That HarperCollins is planning to scan and digitise printed books, rather than use the digital files it has paid to create, is a terrible reflection on the poor and inefficient management that prevails in publishing.

As a published author I am aware that these poor practices extend all the way from commissioning through copy-editing, asset management and indexing to marketing and sales reporting. For all its modernising intentions, the publishing industry has a lot more than book archiving strategy to fix if it is to compete, or even collaborate, with its upstart challengers.

Read on... Publishing by Design: Time to Make Human Factors a Concern, Nico Macdonald, Online Journalism Review, 20 May 2004

Weblogging solutions looking for problems

In his paean to Webloggging (A click and a tick, and you're a blogger too, Guardian Technology, December 22, 2005) Victor Keegan rightly identifies the significance of ease of use in the success of these services – and one we trust publishers who invested millions in content management systems in the late 90s have taken to heart.

But Keegan appears to be in solution-looking-for-a-problem mode. 'Why do it?', he asks, and suggests these tools might be useful as research aids, for 'storing photos, useful Web links and text that I write from time to time'.

I can think of dozens of better software tools and Web-based services that could be brought to bear on this problem – and it is a real problem, largely ignored by the software industry and tech media alike. But just because something is easy to setup and use doesn't mean it is the best solution to a problem, even if any tool affords adaptation to new ends.

The tendency abroad to lazily re-define distinct activities, including many forms of publishing and online communication, within the framework of Weblogging leads to 'solutions' that aren't thought through and will tend to fail. Let's instead try to move the software industry to new models of information management, require ease of use and adaptability from its products, and push it (and ourselves) to be more ambitious.

Letter sent to Technology Guardian for publication

Read on... 'The future of Weblogging' Nico Macdonald, The Register, 18 April 2004

BusinessWeek's impressionistic approach to Weblogging

BusinessWeek made Weblogging the cover story, with gushing nine page feature which mimicks Weblog style using timed postings ("Blogs Will Change Your Business," May 2, 2005 [paid sub required]). A nice trick, but the piece suffered from the same impressionistic approach that undermines current practice in the phenomenon it described.

To what problem is Weblogging the answer? No problem in reality, and every problem in the minds of its boosters. Haven't we seen this trend before, in push media, home page building sites, portals and viral marketing? In each case any similar activity was subtly redefined to reinforce the apparent rise of the vogue phenomenon.

But the totality of communication cannot be shoe-horned into the form of short, reverse diary entries, based around links, with added comments. This format is unlikely to suit corporate communications, internal knowledge sharing, organisational home pages, or even news publications. As for Weblogging CEOs, much as I enjoy Sun exec Jonathan Schwartz's posts, is this really what we want our corporate leaders spending hours a day doing? [Now the hype is over see Carphone Warehouse boss shuffles off the net, The Register, 1st February 2008]

There are a number of important characteristics and elements of Weblogging, including ease of use, contextualised linking, visibility, structure and malleability, syndication, trackback and comments. To its credit, the piece does consider new models for writing:

If this were a real blog, we probably would have posted our story pitch on Day One, before we did any reporting. In the blog world, a host of experts (including many of the same ones we called for this story) would weigh in, telling us what's wrong, what we're overlooking. In many ways, it's a similar editorial process. But it takes place in the open. It's a discussion.

Most other characteristics and elements are skated over in the piece, but if they are properly understood and carefully harnessed they present tremendous possibilities for information, opinion and knowledge sharing -- and for journalism. However, in the blizzard of journalistic hype these subtle forms they create are being lost.

Earlier draft published as the lead letter (with pull quote) in the Business Week Readers Report section, as Cheers and sneers for the blogsphere, 23 May 2005 [paid sub required]

Don't berate people for not adapting to the digital world

Maggie Brown, in a column in Media Guardian, argues that although Rupert Murdoch probably is something of a 'true digital native' the digital divide, especially between people of his generation and the rest, is a silent election issue. And she references a recent Oxford Internet Institute study revealing that Internet access in Britain has plateaued.

Brown is right to note that the culture of fear is deterring some older people from using the Internet (The great internet boom has stalled, April 25, 2005). But to use perjorative terms such as 'hard core' and 'refuseniks' is inappropriate. So is the idea that there is a digital divide, when the reality is that we all live in digital poverty -- and all needed to be pulled out of it.

It is also wrong to imply that you need an Internet-connected personal computer to be 'digitally wealthy'. Everyone who uses a mobile phone uses a network, and if you send picture messages you are likely to be using Internet protocols. Likewise, every Sky Plus PVR, PlayStation games console, and car-based satellite navigation system is in reality a sophisticated (and connected) computer.

The beauty of these products is that they neatly hide their underlying technologies, in order that they might be fit for purpose, simple to use, and usable where they are wanted. The only people for who this is true with respect to personal computers are desk-based office workers -- and journalists.

When network-connected and computer-powered devices are as extensively and well-adapted to our lives as consumer electronics then people will willingly take them up, just as they have mobile phones. The onus should be on industry to create compelling and well-designed products, not on berating 'late adopters', or pushing for government regulation to fix a mythical digital divide

BBC New Media: research lab to the nation?

I was inspired to read about Ashley Highfield's vision of BBC New Media as a research resource for the nation (‘Auntie gets personal’, Guardian Online, 16 September 2002). I hope the rumour that the BBC may “allow anyone who wants to use existing BBC content to do so” is true. Allowing individuals and publishers to pull selected ranges of stories from the BBC servers could lead to a flourishing of ‘new journalism’ akin to that seen with Weblogging. Even a humble site such as the British HCI Group’s UsabilityNews.com, to which I am an advisor, has a configurable and free-to-use news feed.

Given that almost every story the BBC has published since 1997 is searchable I would also like to see more emphasis on the visualisation of search results. We are still stuck in the 1994 Yahoo! model for presenting them, and readers could really benefit from innovation in this area, as they look for the information they need in this veritable haystack of stories.

I am currently writing an article on information visualisation. Please contact me if you would like to know when it is published. See ‘BBC Haystack’ Feedback, Online Guardian, 26 September 2002 [Subsequently the BBC did, to its credit, publish a number of RSS feed. They are documented on DaveNet.]