loose wire blog

The Freshness. and T-Shirt Worthiness, of News

(cross-posted from a Loose Wire sister site, ConvergedMedia.net)

CNN.com has a good way of informing readers of the 'freshness' of news by adding notes in red to indicate when the story was added or updated. (In the example above it also adds a 'developing story' label.)

This kind of thing is helpful in that the site can still order stories by their importance, but also flag those that are being updated:

(It also adds a rather cute touch to its whacky stories, allowing readers to order a T-shirt with the headline on it:)

Click on the T-shirt logo and you're taken to a page where you can order the shirt:

Technorati Tags: cnn,news,presentation,visualization,monetisation

Burma's Firewall Fighters

Another good report on Burma's failed efforts to stop information getting out, from the Commitee to Protect Journalists:

Those fears are driving Burma’s undercover reporters to become more innovative. DVB’s Moe Aye said his in-country reporters now check in with editors by pay phone at predetermined times to mitigate the risk of communicating on lines that may be tapped by authorities.

In-country journalists have their own clandestine procedures. One undercover DVB reporter secretly reported on the trial of a popular political prisoner by using his mobile telephone to record the detainee entering the courthouse. Later that day, he used the Internet to transmit the footage in time to meet DVB’s production deadline.

“They say, ‘Don’t ask me how, just wait and it will be there.’” Moe Aye said. “I don’t ask, so I can’t tell you how they do it. They have their own ways.”  

Although I still believe it's important not to overstate the influence of the Internet in opening up a country and placing a brake on the brutality of regimes (Burma has shown no lack of appetite for repression, and can pull the plug on the Internet at will, firstly, and secondly information and images still found their way out even in the pre-Web uprising of 1988), it's great to read of how young Burmese are finding ways to report on what's going on there.

Burma's Firewall Fighters

Technorati Tags: burma,myanmar,censorship,repression,journalism,media

Facebook is Dead. I'm Not Being Facetious

Either there's a glitch in Facebook, or else it's dead. Well, not dead, exactly, but I noticed that, at nearly 10 pm, none of my friends have done anything today to merit appearing on the News Feed of stuff (see above).

(The News Feed, for those of you with real lives, lists recent activity by your friends in adding little widgets, updating their photos, tagging other photos, and all that sort of thing that merits an evening at home.)

(And no, I'm not filtering my News Feed at all:)

(And yes, I do have some friends. Well, Facebook friends. They're like fairweather friends except they don't even hang around when the weather's good:)

Now, this could be a glitch. A glance at one of my most active Facebook chums indicated she's accepted flowers, a caveman and a fire in the past hour.)

And we should distinguish between activities and updates. Status updates are still going fine: 22 of my chums have updated their status in the last six hours. But none, as far as I can work out, have added an application, tagged photos or done anything that merits being put into the News Feed (indeed a lot of the activity in the News Feed seems to be a couple of days old.)

To me that's kind of significant. If my friends have tired of Facebook as a place to hang out and do stuff, then how long has it got left?

Technorati Tags: facebook, networks, status, presence, lifestreams

Filtering Communications So They Don't Drive Us Mad

A dear friend was supposed to drop something off around 11 pm last night. I turn in around that time, so I just nodded off. Luckily I didn't hear her SMS come in around 1 am. But I could have. I consider the phone the primary communications device--if someone has an emergency, that's how they're going to reach me--and so you can't really close it off. But how do you filter out stuff like my ditzy friend SMS-ing me at 1 am to tell me that after all she's not going to drop something off?

In short, how can we set up filters on our communications channels so they don't drive us mad?

One is not to give out your phone number. I keep a second prepaid phone around and I give that number, and that number only, to people I do business with. That phone gets turned off on weekends and evenings. I often don't answer a cellphone call if I don't recognise the number; if it's important enough, I figure they'll SMS me first, or else they'll already be on my contact list.

Another is to confine and contain online. I don't accept contacts on Facebook unless I've met them in person (and like them.) Everyone else I point to LinkedIn. I've noticed a lot of people are now following me (and everyone else, it seems; I'm not special) on Twitter so I've scaled that back to 'public' observations.

Indeed, Web 2.0 hasn't quite resolved this issue: We've been campaigning to bring down those walled gardens, but we've failed to understand that garden walls (ok, fences) make good neighbors.

Email is still a burden: I'm still getting a ton of stuff I didn't ask for, including press releases from UPS, just because I once complained to them about something, and stuff from a PR agency touting posts on a client's blog (that's pretty lame, I reckon. What would one call that? "My-Client-Just-Blogged Spam"?)

One way I've tried to limit incoming stuff is through a page dedicated to PR professionals. I then point anyone interested in pitching to me to that page. I'm amazed by how few people who bother to read it, but I'm also amazed at how good the pitches are by those that do. (And of course, I then feel bad that I don't use their painstakingly presented material.)

I like this from Max Barry, author of Jennifer Government, who gives out his email address but says If you put the word "duck" in your subject (e.g. "[duck] Why you're an idiot"), it's less likely to be accidentally junked. What a great idea.

Then there's simple things that help to keep the noise level down: Subscribe to twitter on clients like Google Talk and you can turn it on and off just by typing, well, on or off. (You can also turn on and off individuals, so if scoble is getting a bit too much for you, just type 'off scoble'. I've always wanted to be able to do that.)

I'd like to see more and better filtering so we don't have to succumb to the babble.

Stuff I'd like to see:

• Phones that change ringtone or volume after a certain time unless they're from some key numbers.
• SMS autoreturns, that say "The person you sent this message to is asleep. If you need to wake him/her, please enter this code and resend. Be aware that if the message is not urgent or an offer of money/fame/sexual favors you may face disembowelment by the recipient."
• Oh, and while I'm at it, the ability to opt out of Facebook threads if they lose your interest.

And, finally, a way to turn down friends and contacts from my communication channels without them knowing. A great service, in my view, would be one that appeared to authorise their requests to be your buddies, but didn't. Call it faux-thorising.

Technorati Tags: facebook, privacy, communications, web 2.0, pr, email, filters, filtering, sms spam, phones, sms, cellphones, ringtones

Learning in the Open

Here's a piece I wrote for the WSJ on open source education resources. It's part of the free section of WSJ.com.

A revolution of sorts is sweeping education.

In the past few years, educational material, from handwritten lecture notes to whole courses, has been made available online, free for anyone who wants it. Backed by big-name universities in the U.S., China, Japan and Europe, the Open Education Resources movement is gaining ground, providing access to knowledge so that no one is "walled in by money, race and other issues," says Lucifer Chu, a 32-year-old Taiwanese citizen and among the thousands world-wide promoting the effort. He says he has used about half a million dollars from his translation of the "Lord of the Rings" novels into Chinese to translate engineering, math and other educational material, also from English into Chinese.

The movement started in the late 1990s, inspired in part by the "open source" software movement, based on the notion computer programs should be free. Open-source software now powers more than half the world's servers and about 18% of its browsers, according to TheCounter.com, a Web-analysis service by Connecticut-based Internet publisher Jupitermedia Corp. Behind its success are copyright licenses that allow users to use, change and then redistribute the software. Another inspiration was the proliferation of Web sites where millions share photos or write encyclopedia entries.

Free Online College Courses Are Proliferating - WSJ.com

Technorati Tags: open source, open source learning, open education, open education resources, education, teaching, universities

Tibet and the Information War

From EastSouthWestNorth

Rebecca Mackinnon of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre in Hong Kong does a great job of looking at how Chinese are increasingly skeptical of Western news agencies' perceived bias about what has happened in Tibet:

Hopefully most of China's netizens will draw the obvious conclusion: that in the end you shouldn't trust any information source - Western or Chinese, professional or amateur, digital or analog - until and unless they have earned your trust.

She provides some great examples including the apparent cropping of photos on CNN.com to shape the story. It's well worth a read.

Ethan Zuckerman takes issue with one BBC reporter who, he says, take all the criticism of coverage he has received as coming from government stooges: "In other words, there may be angry Chinese citizens contacting BBC reporters to complain about their coverage, but they’re being controlled by Chinese state media." (There's no link for the report so I can't follow this up.)

This is a fascinating discussion, because it represents something of a watershed in different ways:

• What was originally perceived to be a crisis for China's image of itself in the world may end up being something else. Too early to say yet;
• The first big international story that may, in the final analysis, be defined not by the (Western) mass media but by an online debate (kind word)/'information war' (probably more accurate word);
• The extent to which a country/nation defines itself is drifting from an official function to an informal, online one. An online fightback, and one which is done by its passionate and angry citizen, has much more credibility than a state-sponsored one.

'Stories' are shaped early on and it's a brave journalist who defies preconceptions and refuses to pander to them. (Brave usually because their editors will yell at them to provide copy and content to match their competitors, but also because they face viewer/reader harrassment.)

The Tibet story, which has not yet played itself out and may have more twists to come, is one of those stories any media should be mature enough to cover in a nuanced and unbiased way.

RConversation: Anti-CNN and the Tibet information war

Technorati Tags: bridgeblogging, china, tibet, censorship, blogging, information, truth, hong kong, ethan zuckerman, rebecca mackinnon, kazakhstan, borat, cnn, bbc

Power to the Consumer. (Is That All?)

Jan Chipchase, roving Nokia researcher, as ever inspires and provokes with this piece on the psychology of the coffee cup:

This Akasaka coffee shop includes a row of accessible power sockets (running a long the edge of the window) primarily to support laptop use - though over the course of an hour a number of people charged their phones (yes people here sometimes carry petite phone chargers). Recharging mobile devices in coffee shops is nothing new - but to what extent does the explicit nature of the infrastructure lead to new behaviours? Like? Well, maybe plugging in a printer? Or setting up a server. Or, or...

Jan points to the issues raised by offering power to consumers:

In some ways customers that don't use the power socket are subsidising those that do - after all they pay a the same for a cup of coffee. Or do power using power-users spend more money either on more items or on items that will last longer? What if the electricity socket was a stand-alone working micro market? As you plug into the socket your devices authenticates itself to the system, negotiates how much power (or fuel-cell fuel) it needs and charges away. As with the explicit presence of the socket to what extent does the explicit presence of a micro-market for power this extend existing behaviours? And given the relaxed ambiance that this coffee shop is trying to create is it desirable to create a market in this context?

It fascinates me that the average high street these days is as likely to have as many coffee shops as it is other kinds of outlets. And that people work, live, play, cry and get divorced in them. Why do we need the hustle and bustle of others to be productive?

But for me the biggest mystery is why these outlets don't bother to try to sell something more than just coffee, crappy CDs and bad finger food to these customers. Selling power to them might be a cheap shot, but let's face it, you're not really selling them coffee. You're selling them a place to work. A noise, an ambience. You're selling them the chance to feel cool. To show off their Air. To furtively check out members of a sexually appealing gender. To have physical proximity. To engage with engaging staff. A chance to get away from the office/family/silence.

That's what they're buying. But what about what they'd like to buy, that they just haven't considered yet? A chance to meet the people around them? A way to build an informal network with other users? To be able to print from their computers? To arrange pick up by FedEx? An ATM machine?

To me, Starbucks is never really about the coffee. Well, it is for the people who go in there, queue and then take it with them (and then, I think for a lot of them it's about delaying arrival in the office, or having something in their hands as a sort of weapon to take on the day; if it's halfway through the day it's a chance to get out of the office on an errand that is acceptable.) But for the people who stay in Starbucks, they're buying something else. And who knows what else they might buy if you try to sell it to them?

Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect: Behaviours Reflected

Technorati Tags: starbucks, jan chipchase, nokia, japan, power outlets, social space, work, coffee, environment

People's Daily Most Read: Tibet

The annoying thing with social media is that you can't really control it. If you insist on having a section listing the most-read stories, say, you can't really fiddle with it without making it pretty meaningless.

The English-language version of the People's Daily website, for example, doesn't have any story on Tibet displayed prominently on its front page (at least now; it did before) but that doesn't mean it's not there. Just check out the Most Popular box near the bottom on the right hand side:

Three out of five stories on Tibet, two of them unpatriotically above a piece on the NPC:

• Tibet regional gov't: Sabotage in Lhasa masterminded by Dalai clique
• Death toll rises to 10 in Lhasa riot
• Dalai-backed violence scars Lhasa

Of course the stories themselves, let alone the headlines, aren't exactly paragons of journalistic objectivity, but I'm guessing you don't read the People's Daily for that.

It's kind of funny. I wonder whose idea it was to include a 'Most Read' box on the site. And how long it will be before the feature is quietly dropped, or some filters applied. 

People's Daily Online - Home Page

Technorati Tags: tibet, censorship, media, social media, journalism, china

The Revolutionary Back Channel

A tech conference appears to have marked yet another shift in the use of social tools to wrest control and flatten the playing field.

Dan Fost of Fortune calls it Conference 2.0 but I prefer the term (which Dan also uses): The Unconference Movement. (I prefer it because anything with 2.0 in it implies money; calling it a movement makes it sound more like people doing things because they want to.)

Dan summarizes what is being billed as a pivotal moment: an 'interview' session where columnist Sarah Lacy faces a growing discontent of the audience for her interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg. (You can see the interview here, and the comments are worth reading.)

Jeremiah Owyang pulls it altogether and tags it as a Groundswell, which happens to also be the name of a forthcoming book by his Forrester colleagues. A Groundswell, he says, is "a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions."

Shel Israel sees it as "revolutionary in the same way that American colonists wrested power from the British; that Gandhi did it with homespun cloth and boycotting British-supplied salt and in the same manner that students attempted to do it in America of the 60s."

Tools used: twitter, meebo.

What's interesting here is this:

Twitter has changed, at least for some people, from a presence/status tool ("doing the ironing in my underwear") to a communication tool ("@burlesque you were right to slap him. where's the altavista party?")

I must confess I haven't caught up with this trend. When I complained to a geek friend that tweets were no longer entertaining and now more likely to feel like eavesdrops on other people's conversations, he said that was the point. But it's not eavesdropping: these conversations are public and, by definition, open to including others.

Indeed, that's how, at SXSW, a lot of the parties and gatherings evolved: one tweet offering a party in an empty bar attracted 100 participants in minutes.

But we need to recognise this isn't for everyone. Twitter tools work great for people who share the same interests, or inhabit the same area. And the difference with Facebook here is instructive: Status messages are just that, while postings on friends' walls can be seen by other friends, which makes those messages social (while messages can't).

Which is more social? Facebook is a walled garden of trusted friends; Twitter is an anarchic network that allows users to hunt down new friends based on what they're talking about. In a way it's more like music taste-sharing sites like Last.fm than Facebook: I join a service like that not because I only want to hang out with the people I know, but to meet people I'll draw value from via a shared taste and interest.

So what else is worth noting from this 'Groundswell'?

Is this revolutionary? For those of us who have nodded off in presentations and dull panel discussions that could, for all the lack of connection with the audience, be on another planet, this can only be a good thing. Allowing the audience to participate is clearly a must, and any interviewer or moderator in that format who denies that is wasting a key resource: the audience.

That was always true, but the audience is not passive anymore: They have the tools to discuss and organize among themselves, and, in the case of the Facebook session, to fight back. It can get ugly (at times the video felt more like a mob lynching than a 'Groundswell', but after 45 minutes of poor questions, maybe my patience might have snapped too.)

I am not sure this is a revolution on the par of Shel's comparisons, but there are lots of things happening here. Destructive as it may appear on the video, this is actually an example of collaboration, however chaotic, and alliance-making, however brief, that is social media at its best. A group shared a technology that allowed them to communicate, and they collaborated. The mood of the room could be felt by those present. But the mood defined itself on the backchannel chat ("Am I the only one here who is finding the questions boring and irrelevant?") and then expressed itself vocally--one individual, initially, but supported by the applause of others in the face of the interviewer's defensiveness.

I'd love to think that audiences, with their collective knowledge, enthusiasm and, let's face it, investment in being there, can turn the traditional format of dominant speaker/moderator and appreciative but docile mass on its head. If that's a revolution then I'm up for it.

Technorati Tags: sxsw, twitter, meebo, groundswell, conference 2.0, social networking, web 2.0, shel israel, forrester

The Other American Idols

My wife's in the other room watching American Idol, and while I'm amazed it's been going so long, you gotta admire its emphasis on quality and professionalism. And no mention of money (isn't there something vaguely obscene about a program like Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader where avarice and greed are paraded before kids as incentives to learn?)

Anyway, while my wife's watching idolatry on a production line, I'm trading emails with the guy who wrote my favorite software of the moment, SuperNoteCard and a composer whose music I discovered as pirate tapes on the streets of Bangkok 20 years ago: Tim Story.

His Glass Green was the soundtrack to a dark period of my life and I still can't listen to those deceptively simple songs without being transported back to the night bus north to Sisatchanalai, pulling out of Morchit in the rain.

Anyway, I once confessed this to him in an email (after I'd tracked down the originals) and he was forgiving and very pleasant, so I'm proud to be one of the first to sign up for his new CD, Inlandish, not needing to listen to know it's going to be well worth the money. (Yes, it could be on MP3, but who cares?)

The point? I hate it when I can't even find an address on a website when I'm buying something. But that's so old wave: The new world is when we can discover and communicate directly with our heroes, whether they write great software that makes us more creative, or music to inspire us. And it feels good to support them.

American Idol fulfills an important role: finding the hidden gems scattered across America. But maybe the Internet does something even better: helps us find artisans who may be less interested in becoming idols to just making enough to be happy, and making others happy in the process.

Technorati Tags: software, mindola, tim story, music sharing, american idol, web 2.0

The New Newswire: a Dutch Student Called Michael

Twitter is now a news service in its own right. ReadWrite Web, an excellent website dedicated to Web 2.0 stuff, points out that the recent earthquake in England–not that unusual in itself, apparently, but rarely actually strong enough to be felt by humans—was reported first by Twitterers and by a Twitter-only news service called BreakingNewsOn (www.twitter.com/BreakingNewsOn): 

This story broke over Twitter in the past half hour, and nothing is up yet on the BBC sites, the Guardian, or the Telegraph. This story is breaking live on Twitter.

Looking at the situation a few hours later, it’s certainly true that mainstream websites have been a bit slow with the story. From what I can gather, the timeline is something like this (all times are in GMT):

Quake hits south of Grimsby	00:56
First tweets	00:57
BreakingNewsOn	00:59	(“Unconfirmed reports of earthquake in London”)
BreakingNewsOn	01:01	(“Reports of earthquake, working to confirm”, followed by lots of tweets)
BreakingNewsOn	01:10	(confirmation from European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre)
Dow Jones Newswires	01:29	(quotes BBC report)
Associated Press	01:30	(garbled alert)
Reuters	01:36	(“Quake shakes Britain, no casualties reported”)
AFP	01:45	(“Moderate quake shakes Britain”)
BBC twitter feed	01:56	(“Tremors felt across England”)

There may be some holes in here: I don’t have the exact time when the BBC website first carried the story, but I’m guessing it’s a few minutes before the wires. And this is not the first BreakingNewsOn has been ahead: It was, according to some reports, first on the Benazir Bhutto assassination, although I’ve not been able to confirm that. 

So who or what is BreakingNewsOn, and how does it scoop the big guys on their own turf? The service is actually pretty much one guy, a 20-year old Dutch student called Michael van Poppel, according to this interview by Shashi Bellamkonda. He is a news junkie, and makes money from it too, doing something called web-trawling—searching the net for stuff he can sell to the big players. (He was the guy who last September dug up a videotape of Osama bin Laden, which he then sold to Reuters.) 

Van Poppel works with a couple of other people and is clearly experienced and voracious in hoovering up web content. But it’s also about citizen journalism, crowd sourcing, whatever you want to call it: in the case of the UK quake, the first alerts actually came from witnesses, who twittered about the jolts they felt; it was BreakingNewsOn’s skill in harvesting that information, and staying sufficiently close to its readers for them to think to share their experience, that led to the fast turnaround. 

Of course, there’s much about this that is new. Everyone is now a reporter, if they find themselves in the middle of news. And everyone can be a media publisher: In this case it’s one 20-year old student with a twitter feed and an Internet-connected computer. And, finally, everyone can now subscribe to that once holiest-of-holies: a newswire service that updates in real time. Only now it’s not called a Reuters terminal or a Bloomberg but Twitter. 

But behind that, not much has changed. I’ve covered a few quakes in my time, and it’s all about finding the stuff out quickly by getting it out quickly. Nothing much has changed. No one was injured or killed, and it sounds like there was no falling masonry or damage to buildings. But that’s no excuse: earthquakes are news, and especially if they’re the strongest in the country for more than two decades. 

Twitter is perfectly suited for breaking news, because it’s all about short pithy sentences and updates. As ReadWrite Web points out, during the California wildfires last year, Twitter and other citizen journalism tools were used by people on the ground, scooping the mainstream press. And all this offers some lessons for the mainstream press that it would be wise to absorb: 

• Mainstream media cannot afford to be slow off the mark on stories like this, since their value to high-paying subscribers is intimately tied to their speed;
• Alert streams are no longer the province of market traders;
• Traditional media needs to find a way to work with these new sources of news, or else find a way to add value that such services cannot. In this case it could have been finding a way to reflect in the headlines the unusual nature of this event;
• Traditional media has to both monitor these new sources of news–the tweets from ordinary folk surprised to be shaken awake by a tremor—and work with them to ensure that they, too, benefit.

Some might say that what van Poppel does isn't news. I'd contest that. He did everything right in reporting the story: it's big enough an event to merit an "unconfirmed" snap, a quick follow-up which contains what we old newshounds would call an advisory letting subscribers know what he's doing and to expect more. When he got confirmation he put out, all within 10 minutes. That's a time-tested, old-fashioned and reasonable news approach. He leveraged the new media, but he showed an understanding of news values and what his readers needed. 

Kudos to him. We all could learn a lesson.

(An extended version of this post is available for publication to newsprint media as part of the Loose Wire Service. More details here, or email Jeremy Wagstaff directly.)

Technorati Tags: twitter, news, journalism, breakingnewson, crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, newspapers

Beyond Information Delivery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Newspaper delivery guy, Jakarta 2007

Over at Loose Wire sister site ten minutes I just wrote a review of ShifD, a new Web 2.0 clippings service that works, in theory, between desktop and mobile. More interesting, I reckoned (quoting myself; sorry), is that

it’s developed by two guys from within The New York Times’ R&D Lab, so you can’t help wondering where something like this might fit into the world of newspapers.

I’d love to see, for example, a five-digit code at the end of each news story in my newspaper/magazine that I could key into my phone and which would then store a copy of that story on my desktop. Would save me carrying a  magic marker around and then forgetting to clip it when I got home. Forget reading the NYT on my handheld: That ain’t going to happen to an old fogey like me; but I’d love a way to store what I liked somewhere useful so that I wouldn’t forget it.

Maybe this is how newspapers need to think of themselves. The medium is not really the problem: I want my newspaper in traditional form, because it's tried and tested and works for me. But it doesn't me I don't want it in other forms too: For when I'm crushed on a subway, where flipping back the pages of the IHT might not be welcomed by my fellow sardines, or when I'm stuck without reading matter waiting for a friend (hi, Mark!)

And of course other people have their requirements too. The medium is going to always be different, depending on the individual. So it's the content that is the constant, the one element you want to ensure your readers/users are able to access whenever and wherever they want.

And that doesn't mean just reading it once. Nowadays, as information bombards us, we are more selective about what we read. Two points here: We get a lot of stuff thrown at us, so our ability to recall stuff is weaker. And, because our time is precious, when we do allocate it to something, we don't want to feel that time is wasted or lost.

Ergo, the value comes in being able to help us users store information we've already decided to commit some of our scarce resources to so we can maximise our benefit from it. Whatever article or piece of information it is, chances are that if we bothered to read it, or read most of it, we'll hope that we retain some of it for future usage.

That, I reckon is where something like ShifD comes into its own. But not if it's a standalone service. Then it will merely fight with all other services out there that offer something similar. Its power will come if it can be harnessed with NYT so that however, whenever and wherever I dedicate some of my time to reading that august rag, I can be sure of a simple way, via my phone or desktop, of storing anything I read that I consider to be valuable and worth keeping.

In this sense, if you want to get all grand about it, the future of media lies not so much in the format and medium of delivery to the consumer but in the format and delivery of retention by the consumer. I as a consumer want the media provider to provide a way for me to maximise my utility from reading it, by recognising that reading something is not the end of the relationship with that article.

For me, the consumer, it's the beginning: I'm hoping the piece will change my life sufficiently, from advice on buying new shoes to understanding the threat to my future from a Second Cold War. That, I suspect, is the challenge of today's media.

Technorati Tags: journalism, media, newspapers, delivery, web 2.0, nyt

Breaking Out of Those Silos

If you're looking for the future of news, a pretty good example of it is at UK startup silobreaker, which isn't a farm demolition service but a pretty cool news aggregation and visualization site. In other words, it lets you look at news in different ways. And it's caught the attention of Microsoft, who today announced it had select the company for its Startup Accelerator program.

The website itself looks pretty normal on first glance--news on the left, three columns of stuff. But look closer. Four boxes on the right offer different sorts of information: a trends chart showing "media attention" (presumably the number of mentions in the news) of different Windows products:

Another shows the relationships between Rio Tinto, other companies, topics and cities:

And my favorite, a map showing all the places where things are happening in the news. Move your mouse over them and details will pop up in a small box:

Drop down lists of topics along the top of the website allow you to select your area, and it's a satisfying range to choose from. Open the terroism page, for example, and you get a bunch of stories on terrorism, as well a map of hotspots (already zoomed in on the Middle East and Central/South Asia), and a trend map showing how media interest in terrorism in Afghanistan has risen markedly in recent weeks against that of Iraq and the U.S. Who knows how accurate this stuff is, and where it comes from, but it's still an interesting way to slice and dice the data:

Not everything works quite as it's supposed to but there's still lots of quality in here, and it puts pretty much every other news site to shame. And it's not even as if these elements are particularly new; I've long sung the praises of newsmaps and mindmaps as a way for online newspapers to get with the program, and it's frankly been disappointing that so few have tried these things out.

Technorati Tags: visualization, news, media, microsoft, startups, UK, newsmaps, mindmaps

Computers: Right Back Where We Started

A lot of my time is spent writing for and talking to people for whom the computer remains a scary beast that is best kept at arm's length, or, better, in a closet. I feel for these people because I'm not naturally a techie myself.

I failed science and math in school and almost certainly would again if I retook those exams. (I blame the science teacher, an evil vicar who tormented me, but that's another story.) But perhaps these technophobes have a point? Perhaps computers and the Internet haven't really done us any favors?

Firstly, the stats. Has the computer/Internet boom made us more productive? Apparently not. Well, it did the first time around: the 1990s technology surge (the steep red bit in the chart above) made us all productive, and that continued until about 2003 (the extra years beyond the bubble burst helped by the momentum of the surge, and some serious cost-cutting. But since 2004 the U.S. has been in decline in terms of the rate of productivity growth (or trend productivity, to give it its proper name), to the point where we're pretty much back where we started in 1995. I know it doesn't exactly follow, but given a lot of us didn't have BlackBerries, ultraportable laptops and ubiquitous Internet connections in those days, does that mean we're doing about the same amount of work then as we are, with all those gizmos, now?

Scary thought. And in some ways the answer is yes. According to research firm Basex, nearly a third of our day is eaten up with interruptions from e-mail, cell phones, instant messaging, text messaging, and blogs like this one. In financial terms that's a lot of

McKinsey sees it differently: We've outsourced or automated all the simple stuff, so we're left with people whose jobs can't be done by computers.

I see it a little differently again. I believe that we have mistaken ubiquitous computing -- in other words, the ability to do stuff anywhere, anytime -- as making us more productive because we're filling "dead time". It's this misunderstanding of time that I think is causing us problems. Take some of these quotes from a story on how BlackBerries make us more productive, from July last year:

I can now use downtime--waiting to collect daughters, train journeys--to continue to read and action e-mails, which means I don't have a huge queue waiting for me when I'm next in the office

After a recent long weekend, I would normally have returned to around 150 e-mails ...Instead, I spent an hour on my PDA the night before I was due back into work, and the next morning, I walked in to only six mails that required attention. Not only did this make me more efficient, but it totally reduced my stress levels

The technology both increases output by enabling what would otherwise be unproductive downtime to be used positively, and is liberating in that it allows flexibility and responsiveness.

The BlackBerry has definitely extended the capability of utilizing 'dead' time effectively--trains, taxis, 10-minute waits or answering questions like this

We are all benefiting from quicker response times to things that need actioning 'now ... Communication between department managers is much quicker.

Each statement is usually followed by a 'I realise I need a balance/the wife hates it' comment, as if the user is aware of the pitfalls. But the pitfall is not the 'always on' culture this creates, or even the lack of awareness that the ability to react quickly to something will simply prompt another reaction and require another response. The pitfall is that the "dead time" of waiting for your daughter to finish school, or the "unproductive down time" is actually an important component of our lives, and therefore of our productivity.

Sitting in your car waiting for your kid, the lazy hour on a Sunday evening after the washing-up's cleared away and the kids are in bed, used to be time when you'd think about what needed to be done, or to reflect (on your daughter, hopefully, so you're mentally ready for her rather than still mentally scanning emails when she's gushing about gym class.) Dead time was there for a reason: a chance to think outside the box, reflect, think about that email you're going to send the boss rather than jab a misspelled couple of lines on your BlackBerry so you can cross that item off your Getting Things Done list.

Productivity may be slowing because we've just filled every second of that dead time already and there's nothing left to fill. If that's even partly true, then the productivity was fake, since it was based on a false assumption: that the dead time was empty, an unused resource. Anyone who has sat in a moving vehicle and looked out of the window reflecting on stuff knows that this is actually the most important part of the day, and by removing it most of our BlackBerry-wielding friends/colleagues/bosses/spouses have turned into zombies, unable to locate themselves in the here and now.

The solution then, to this productivity crisis is to use technology less, not more. I'm not suggesting we don't use BlackBerries -- although I don't -- but I'm suggesting we stop deluding ourselves that these gadgets are saving our marriage/hearts. They're not. They're like ping pong paddles with the ball on a piece of elastic -- we think are batting the problems out of our lives but they're just coming back at us. Time to put the bat down and look out the window.

Satellites to the Rescue

Here's a piece I wrote for the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation on how satellites and space technology are helping, and might help, in the case of big medical emergencies, from earthquakes to Ebola. It's a slightly different tack for me and perhaps not the usual fare for loose wire blog, but I thought I'd throw it in here anyway.

When former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was seen leaving a conference in Geneva in November 2005 clutching maps of the south Asia earthquake disaster, it was evidence that satellites – as a key weapon in humanitarian emergencies – had arrived.

In the hours and days after the October 8 quake struck killing more than 73 000 people and injuring some 150 000, experts from France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United Nations scrambled to gather and interpret images data from satellites to assist rescue workers on the ground from local authorities to nongovernmental organizations (NGO), like Télécoms Sans Frontières.

WHO | Space technology: a new frontier for public health

Technorati Tags: satellites, health, medical, emergencies, WHO, space tech

We're All Information Gatherers Now

When we talk about the future of newspapers, the future of education, the future of media, and the future of learning we tend to ignore the most important aspect. We tend to focus on information delivery and not on the nature of information seeking. We think, somehow, that we still need to get the same kind of information to people, but just in a different way. But the bigger shift is how the Internet has changed what kind of information we're looking for and how we go about finding it.

A British Library report on the future of libraries [PDF] hits the nail on the head:

Library users demand 24/7 access, instant gratification at a click, and are increasingly looking for "the answer" rather than for a particular format: a research monograph or a journal article for instance. So they scan, flick and "power browse" their way through digital content, developing new forms of online reading on the way that we do not yet fully understand (or, in many cases, even recognise.)

A page later, the report says:

In general terms, this new form of information seeking behaviour can be characterised as being horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature. Users are promiscuous, diverse and volatile and it is clear that these behaviours represent a serious challenges for traditional information providers, nurtured in a hardcopy paradigm and, in many respects, still tied to it.

 John Naughton at The Observer helps put this in context:

What Marshall McLuhan called 'the Gutenberg galaxy' - that universe of linear exposition, quiet contemplation, disciplined reading and study - is imploding, and we don't know if what will replace it will be better or worse.

This is true, of course, not just of libraries and academia. It's true of newspapers and pretty much any medium that delivers information. The Internet has forced us, encouraged us, to develop scanning techniques way beyond the simple quick-reading skills of old. Now if I'm looking for information on the Gutenberg Galaxy I can do so quickly on Wikipedia simply by selecting the words on the page, right-clicking and selecting Search Google for... in the pop-up menu. Time taken: 2 seconds. (Indeed, Naughton and The Guardian/Observer could be considered somewhat backward by not providing the link in the piece itself.)

This ability to secure, and appetite for, quick access to snippets information (what I guess we used to call "gobbets") is part and parcel of the web and of the lives of those who spend any time on it. Why hunt for a dictionary if you can look it up on your cellphone/laptop/fridge display? The impact is still not properly understood or studied, however. If we satisfy our curiosity so easily, does our curiosity grow in all directions, both in breadth and depth, or does it flit from flower to flower like a bumble-bee in summer?

The British Library research seems to suggest the latter. Using words like horizontal, bouncing, checking, viewing, promiscuous, diverse and volatile seems to suggest we're entering a world where people are fickle and their attention spans short. Once the initial curiosity is satisfied ("What the hell is a gobbet?") the reader moves on, following the Serendipidity of the Hyperlink.

On the other hand, the word seems to suggest the readers have built-in safeguards against misinformation and inaccuracy. Our scanning skills are honed beyond merely being able to take in a page of information quickly. We -- or most of us; Facebook seems to presenting a challenge, if all the gullible messages my friends send me are representative -- are able to judge the source of information too, based on the layout, design and style of a web page and its contents.

This latter skill may be more important in the long run. Perhaps the shift is more about our understanding of what we need to know, and the time we can dedicate to knowing it, than to any shift in our attention span or ability to absorb deep columns of information.

The Gutenberg Galaxy, in fact, was bound to come to an end sometime. We simply have too much information to digest nowadays to be able, most of us, to take a leisurely stroll through the literature. And, frankly, in academic terms, much of the literature could be better and more tightly written. (I admit, I scanned the BT report and was mildly irritated it was a) in PDF format which slows digestion, b) didn't conform to usual layouts and c) lacked an executive summary and conclusion).

If there wasn't much information out there, and not much access to it, I would probably be quite happy dedicating my time to knowing a lot about Chaucer or the sex life of the fruitfly, and not much else. But the Internet has taught us a valuable lesson that we, as a race, seem to have forgotten: That there is so much stuff to learn out there we should be in a mad race to learn as much as we can about it as we can before we're run over by a Sat Nav-dependent truck.

Perhaps our generation will be the last to be stupid enough to think we know enough as individuals to be smart (or conversely, happy to wallow in our specialist expertise and general ignorance). Future generations may look back at us and ask why we were so incurious about all the things in front of us we didn't know anything about. Right now, I'd settle for knowing why the sky is blue, how many Grand Slam tournaments there are, what a grommet is and why there seem to be so many different types of plug to go on the end of a coaxial cable.

Thank God we're at last beginning to learn the skills necessary to find that stuff out before breakfast.

Reading:

John Naughton: Thanks, Gutenberg - but we're too pressed for time to read | Media | The Observer

Gutenberg and the changing nature of how we read and find information

'Google Generation' is a myth: pioneering research

Technorati Tags: printing, information, data, libraries, gutenberg, british library, research, web 2.0, future, guardian

Who Needs Enemies When You Have Facebook Friends?

It might be time to remove a) all your data and b) all third party apps from your Facebook profile. Here's why.

Add a Facebook app -- SuperPoke, all that kind of stuff -- and you're required to agree to "allow this application to...know who I am and access my information." Disagree and you can't install it.

Now this may be fine for you. But what the application doesn't say is that the application is also now able to access the private data of your friends. To be clear about this, I'm not talking about friends who also agree to install the app; I'm talking about all your friends, period.

And most applications do access this data, without really needing to, according to research by the University of Virginia. In other words, by accepting someone's friendship on Facebook, you're agreeing to allow all the third party apps they install to access your private data.

What is private data? Well, think your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location...your current location...your political view, your activities, your interests...your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history,...copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums...a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends. (from Facebook's Application Terms of Service, via Webware.)

This is not good. Especially when you consider that this data is stored, not on Facebook's computers where you and they might be able to keep an eye on it, but on the computers of the third party apps. And this is where it gets tricky.

Facebook's response to these revelations, detailed and explored by Chris Soghoian over at Webware, is that it's basically up to us users to gauge whether a Facebook app is kosher and going to be careful with our data. But who are these third party developers?

I explored this a bit last November, when I tried to find out who was behind one app called ATTACK! I eventually was able to, but it wasn't easy, and it definitely wasn't just a question of visiting their homepage (they didn't have one, although the developers have since posted a comment there saying they hadn't had time to set one up, and have changed certain features. It still doesn't have a link to any webpage that might give a user any insight about who is behind the app, though the developers do provide links to their Facebook pages.)

The points are twofold:

• Our data is vulnerable to the weakest link in the chain, which will be a friend we've given full access to who installs every third party app there is. Do you know who all your friends are, and can you trust them not to install every app they come across?
• We're endangering our friends' security by installing third party apps.

For me the bigger issue is this. Facebook is already facing investigation in the UK for making it too hard to delete one's personal data. So, if these third party apps are storing our data without our knowledge on their own computers, what happens to that data if we decide to delete our private data from our Facebook account, or our Facebook account entirely? How do we know what is deleted and what isn't?

Exclusive: The next Facebook privacy scandal | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone

Technorati Tags: facebook, privacy, third party developers, webware, social networking, data issues, data

Poffertjes and Power

Continuing my search for a place to plug in and work at airports, I was pleasantly surprised to find that HSBC has laid out the red carpet for its Premier account holders, at least at Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta Airport. If you have one of their fancy accounts, anywhere in the world, you and your partner can partake of their lounge services.

It's all a bit new, and, dare I say it, charmingly Indonesian: More people (three men watching one female doing the work) were involved in making my poffertjes (a Dutch batter treat popular in the former colony) than there were actual poffertjes:

HSBC's Poffertje-Making Team (4)

HSBC Poffertjes (3)

But that's not to say I wasn't pathetically grateful. Food is never good at these kinds of places, so that the HSBC PMT (Poffertje-Making Team) took such care with my poffertjes was in itself a cause for celebration.

What impressed me, though, was that there was ample room there to work -- several little cubicles, a couple of actual offices, and, blow me backwards, lots of power outlets -- either in the walls, or in the floor. Like these, which pop up at the flick of a little switch. No Wi-Fi or anything, but you can't have everything. Well done, HSBC.

Technorati Tags: pofferthes, indonesia, airports, power, outlets, wifi, laptops, travel

Bye Bye, Laptop?

The day seems to be getting closer when we can do something that would seem to be pretty obvious: access our pocket-sized smartphone via a bigger screen, keyboard and a mouse. Celio Corp says it's close.

Celio Corp have two products: their Mobile Companion (pictured above), a laptop like thing that includes an 8" display, a full function keyboard, and a touchpad mouse. At 1 x 6 x 9 inches and weighing 2 lbs, the Mobile Companion promises over 8 hours of battery life and boots instantly. After loading a driver on your smartphone you can then access it via a USB cable or Bluetooth. (You can also charge the smartphone via the same USB connection.)

Uses? Well, you can say goodbye to coach cramp, where you're unable to use a normal laptop. You can input data more easily than you might if you just had your smartphone with you. And, of course, you don't need to bring your laptop.

The second product might be even better. The Smartphone Interface System is, from what I can work out, a small Bluetooth device that connects your smartphone, not to the Mobile Companion, but to a desktop computer, public display or a conference room projector  -- these devices connect via a cable to the Interface, like this:

The important bit about both products is that the Redfly software renders the smartphone data so it fits on the new display (this will be quite tricky, and, because it will carried via Bluetooth, would need quite a bit of compression. The maximum size of the output display is VGA, i.e. 800 x 480, so don't expect stunning visuals, but it'll be better than having all your colleagues crowding around your smartphone.)

The bad news? Redfly isn't launched yet, and will for the time being be available only for Windows Mobile Devices. Oh, and according to UberGizmo, it will cost $500. The other thing is that you shouldn't confuse "full function keyboard" with "full size keyboard": this vidcap from PodTech.net gives you an idea of the actual size of the thing:

this is the keyboard size relative to Celio CEO Kirt Bailey's digits:

Until I try the thing out and feel sure that the keyboard doesn't make the same compromises as the Eee PC, I'd rather use my Stowaway keyboard.

For those of you looking for software to view your mobile device on your desktop computer, you might want to check out My Mobiler. It's free software that purports to do exactly that for Windows Mobile users.

Technorati Tags: keyboards, celio corp, redfly, foleo, umpc, ultramobiles, smartphones, bluetooth, windows mobile, microsoft, usb