loose wire | blog – Page 68 – Jeremy Wagstaff: ex Reuters/BBC/WSJ etc. Now consulting and writing. Blogging here since 2001

The Shape of Things to Come

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

This is from my weekly newspaper column, hence the lack of links.

By Jeremy Wagstaff

We’re all touch typists now.

Of course, the definition of touch type has had to change a little, since most of us don’t actually learn touch typing as we’re supposed to. Watch people tapping away at a keyboard and you’ll see all sorts of cobbled-together methods that would make the office secretary of yesteryear blanch.

But for now keyboards are going to be with us for a while as the main way to get our thoughts into a computer, so some sort of touch typing is necessary.

But the mobile phone is different. After ten years most of us have gotten used to entering text using the predictive, or T9, method, where the phone figures out you’re trying to say “hello” rather than “gekko” when you tap the 4,3,5,5,6 keys.

Texting has gotten faster—Portugal’s Pedro Matias, 27, set a new world record in January by typing a 264-character text in less than 2 minutes, shaving 23 seconds off the previous record—but that’s still slower than your average touch typist, who manages 120 words-say 480 characters—in the same amount of time.

Blackberry uses have their QWERTY keyboards, each key the size of a pixie’s fingernail, and while some people seem to be quite happy with these things, I’m not.

And the iPhone has given us, or given back to us, the idea of little virtual keyboards on our screen. I’ll be honest: I’m not a big fan of these either.

The arrival of the Android phone hasn’t really helped matters: The keyboard is usually virtual (some of the earlier phones had physical keyboards, but most have dropped them in favor of onscreen ones) and I really didn’t enjoy typing on them.

To the point that my wife complained that she could tell when I was using the Android phone over my trusty old Nokia because she didn’t feel I was “so reachable.” By which she means my monosyllabic answers weren’t as reassuring as my long rambling Nokia, predictive text ones.

But that has changed with the arrival of software called ShapeWriter. ShapeWriter is software that provides the same virtual keyboard, but lets you swipe your words on it by dragging your fingers over the keys to, well, form a shape.

Typing “hello,” for example, is done by starting your finger on “h”, dragging it northwest to “e”, then to the far east of “l”, lingering there a second, then north a notch to “o.” No lifting of the finger off the keyboard. Your finger instead leaves a red slug-like trail on the keyboard, and, in theory, when you lift your finger off the keys that trail will be converted to the word “Hello.”

And, surprise, surprise, it actually works. Well, unless you’re demonstrating it to a skeptical spouse, in which case instead of “hello” it types “gremio” or “hemp.”

Now this isn’t the first time I’ve used ShapeWriter. It has been around a while—it was first developed by IBM Labs in the early 2000s. It’s gone through quite a few changes in the meantime, not least in the theory behind it.

But the main bit of thinking is the same as that with predictive text (and speech recognition): what is called the redundancy of language. Taking, for example, the whole body of emails written by Enron employees, the most frequent email sender wrote nearly 9,000 emails in two years, totalling about 400,000 words.

That’s a lot of words. But in fact the number of actual words was about 2.5% of that: That email sender only used 10,858 unique words.

Now of course, Enron employees might not be representative of the wider population, but researchers have to work with data, and the Enron case threw up lots of data. The Enron Email Dataset is a 400 megabyte file of about 500,000 emails from about 150 users, mostly senior management of Enron. Making it a goldmine for researchers of language, machine learning and the like.

Learning from the words used—though presumably not their morals—researchers are able to figure out what words we use and what we don’t. Thus, ShapeWriter, and T9, and speech recognition, are able to tune out all the white noise by only having to worry about a small subset of words a user is typing, or saying. Most words we either don’t use because our vocabularies aren’t that great, or because we haven’t invented those words yet.

ShapeWriter has 50,000 words in its lexicon, but it gives preference to those 10,000 or so words it considers most common (presumably

In ShapeWriter’s case, they produce a template of the shape of each word they decide to store in the software, so the shape you’re drawing—left-far right, up, down, along—is recognised.

In its latest incarnation it actually works surprisingly well, and I’d recommend anyone with an Android phone to check it out. (It’s free.) There’s a version for the iPhone too, as well as Windows Mobile and the Windows Tablet PC. Only downside: For now, at least, only five–European–languages are supported.

I am not convinced this kind of thing is going to replace the real keyboard, but it’s the first decent application I’ve come across that has gotten me back into actually enjoying tapping out messages on my device.

My wife, for one, is happy.

The Future Of News: Wet Paper and Scissors

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

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(This is a copy of my weekly column for newspapers and print media.)

By Jeremy Wagstaff

Waiting to board a train in London, knowing my smartphone battery was flat, and that the UK trains are too cramped to open a laptop on, I bought myself a magazine or two.

It was like a trip down memory lane. I’ve caught that train to the ‘burbs many a time in my life, but not for a decade or two, and I’d not bought a magazine to read on a train for probably the same length of time.

It was great. Of course, the choice of magazine mattered: in this case Wired and Private Eye.

Flicking through each for a first inspection, mentally noting the places I wanted to go back to, removing all the detritus that would otherwise drop and litter the platform, enjoying the contrasting feel of Wired’s gloss and the Eye’s rough-hewn paper.

Wired is now on the iPad and, I heard, pretty impressive. The Eye, meanwhile, looks identical to its earliest iterations in the 1960s. Same layout, same paper, same logo, same jokes.

The point is this: physical magazines—paper—are not going to die out. Any more than radio is going to die out (I learned from Wired that 80% of music is still listened to on the radio.) Any more than torrents will kill TV. Or laptops will kill desktops. Or netbooks will kill iPads. We think too binary, too winner-takes-all.

But some things have changed, and I am surprised that print media hasn’t caught up.

Whereas in the past I might, had I felt the urge, snipped out a story I found worth keeping in the magazine I was reading, I’d be a fool to do that now. My days of cuttings are over: Since all my libraries are digital, why on earth would I want to start building one of bits?

Of course, there are tools for this: Evernote, for example, lets me take a photo of something and will store it in a database having scanned it for words, so I can use those words to search for it in the future.

But it’s not a good solution. Nowadays we save, clip, annotate and share on the fly, and we expect to be able to do so. ( Although, as I outlined in a column a week or so ago, this isn’t as easy as it could be.)

The world of Facebook and twitter is a world of annotating and sharing, and we’re used to see articles online whore themselves out with little icons at the bottom encouraging us to do just that.

But what I’d like to see is traditional media, having already embarked on a bipolar world of digital and atoms with their online versions and their print editions, do a better job of matching the two.

For example: I have really enjoyed reading Wired in print. I’ve read stuff I would never have read online: partly because I’ve bought the magazine for $7 (shocking myself and the shop assistant who I felt was about to say “You know you can read most of the stuff in here online for free, right?”) and I want to get my money’s worth.

But it’s also partly because it’s so dang portable. And my that I mean not that I can read it on planes and on the sofa, a la ebooks and iPads, but also at all stations in the bathroom bar the shower, if you know what I mean.

And at breakfast, spilling coffee and muesli over it.

But the problem is the annotation.

Nowadays we expect to be able to share and store stuff. I found myself wanting to share some of the stuff I’d read and realizing I couldn’t. Well, I could have grabbed a passing waitress and told her about the interesting snippet I’d come across, but that would have been weird.

I wanted to be able to save some of the stuff online for later.

But I couldn’t. At least I couldn’t easily and seamlessly.

I could search online for the same article, but Wired are smart/dumb: they don’t put all the stuff in their magazines online.

This is where I think publishers need to be smarter. I would like to see them use QR tags—barcodes—to help those people dumb/smart enough to buy their premium print copies save what they have in post-print formats.

Each article, for example, would include a barcode which you could snap with your camera phone. That would automatically save a copy of the article to your online account, or email it to you, or however you want to save it. It wouldn’t be fiddly: it would be easy as highlighting it.

The article could be stored in a subscriber/print purchaser’s corner of the website. It would require users—even casual purchasers like me—to sign up, and then the publisher would get all sorts of interesting data about what stories are being stored (and, if you want to be clever, where, since the cellphone is a moveable beast.)

For me, I’d rest easier knowing that my reading is not ephemeral. For the publisher, they will collect data about their offline readers, and, at least in my case, start to rebuild a relationship with a reader they lost about a decade ago.

(Some publishers are doing something a little like this, but their efforts lack imagination. The Post-Gazette in Pittsburgh sports a barcode at the bottom of its print edition first page, and users can use that to jump on their mobile phone to the online edition.)

The equation has changed. Just as journalists must now think beyond the next headline in the way that they produce news, media publishers need to think beyond getting eyeballs to their new content. In the end, publishers should try to make it as easy as possible for consumers to not only access their content, but to store it, because that’s the way to build loyalty.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I need to find some scissors to cut out these articles I found interesting. Once the magazine’s dried off from being dropped in the bath.

Bangalore Social Media Journalism Training

By jeremy | February 3, 2012

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There are still some spots available for a two-day training session I’m conducting in Bangalore, India for WAN-IFRA onJune 17-18 2010 on Integrating Social Media to Journalism:

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, Orkut have all changed the way that people learn, confirm and share information. How can journalists and editors make use of this new social media for their stories? How can social media be used to increase the productivity of our journalists and editors? How can social media be used to promote content and to build loyalty and trust with readers? What are the tools that they have to use?

The training programme has three modules:

1.) Digital tools for reporters
2.) Integrating Social Media into the workflow and
3.) Writing for online

The training contents include Web 2.0 and its impact on media, cellphone basics: how to get more out of cellphones, reporting tools: a look at ways of reporting better using Web 2.0 services, gadgets and software, plus modules on Wikipedia, mashups, twitter, GPS and others.

The participants will learn how to use the hardware and software to be a better journalist and how to integrate social media into their reporting, editing and newsroom. A considerable amount of time will also be used to help print journalists looking to upgrade their skills to be able to think, report, write and create for online.

Target Group
Management executives, publishers, editors, reporters, journalist and producers who want to get familiar with the new tools for convergent journalism.

If you’re interested contact V Antony by email or by phone on +9194442110640 or fax: +9144424359744.

(A translation of this page into Haitian Creole is available, courtesy of Susan Basen.)

AboutFacebook

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

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This is a copy of my weekly Loose Wire Service column for newspapers, hence the lack of links.

By Jeremy Wagstaff

A few weeks ago I talked about Facebook’s brave new world of connecting your profile to all the other bits and pieces you leave on websites. I erred, and I apologize.

I thought that people wouldn’t mind the reduction in privacy that this would involve. At least I didn’t think they’d mind as much as a couple of years ago, when Facebook tried something similar.

But people did. And Facebook has been forced to respond, simplifying the procedures that allow users to control who can see what of the stuff they put on Facebook.

So was I really wrong? Do people still care so deeply about privacy?

Hard to say. Back then I said that we have gone through something of a revolution in our attitudes to privacy, and I think I’m still right about that. But I hadn’t taken into account that just because our attitudes have gone through wrenching changes doesn’t mean we’re comfortable with them.

Social networking—itself only a few years old—has forced us to shift our approach. When the Internet was just about email, that was pretty simple. We might balk at giving our email address out to weirdoes at parties with hair growing out of their ears, but that was no different than handing out our phone numbers, or home address.

But social networking is different. By definition the barriers are down, at least partially, because the network demands it. Networks require nodes, and that means that Facebook and every network like it needs to make it easy for people to find other people—including your folically resplendent stalker.

So already we’re talking a question of degree of privacy. And of course, we insist on these services being free, so the relationship we have with the purveyor of the social network is an odd one: Our investment in it is one of time, not money.

But nowadays many of us value time more highly than money, so we feel oddly possessive about our social networks. It’s not, I hasten to add, that we wouldn’t take our business elsewhere, as we did with MySpace and Friendster, but Facebook is somewhat different.

For one thing, the numbers are astonishing. Facebook has more than 400,000 active users—half of them logging on at least once a day. In other words, for many people Facebook has become email.

This has forced changes in privacy, because it’s impossible not to be private and be an active Facebook user. Unlike email, most Facebook activity is visible to other people. So I can, if I want (and I don’t, but can’t really help it), find photos of my nephew caressing a female friend, something I would have been horrified to allow my uncle to see when I was his age.

In part it’s a generational thing. We adults have no idea what it must be like to surrounded by cameras, transmission devices, mass media—an all-embracing Net–from our early years.

But does that mean that younger people are just more relaxed about privacy, or that they just haven’t learned its value? Much of us older folks’ understanding of privacy comes from having lived under snooping governments, or knowing they exist on the other side of iron or bamboo curtains. Or we read and could imagine 1984.

Or, simply, that we’ve had something private exposed to the public. I once had some love poems I had written at school to two sisters read out in front of the school when I foolishly left them behind on a desk. Since then I lock up all my love poems to people related to each other under lock and key.

Younger people, it’s thought, don’t care so much about this. They grow up in a world of SMS, of camera phones recording every incident, of having one’s popularity, or lack of it, measured publicly via the number of friends one has on Facebook.

This is all true, of course. And while employers may still be Googling potential employees, and looking askance at images of them frolicking, this is going to get harder to do when all their potential employees are on Facebook, and all sport photos of them frolicking.

This is part of a new world where the notion of privacy is balanced by transparency: Online is no longer a mirror image of offline, in the way email was just a more efficient postal service. It’s now a place that one shares with lots of other people, and to play a role in it entails a certain visibility.

This is both the price and the reward of being online. There are bound to be things we’d rather keep to ourselves but we also recognize an advantage in such public access. Just as people can discover things about us, so can we discover things about them. A rising tide, as they say, lifts all boats. If you have an Internet connection.

In some ways this is deeply subversive, since it undermines the traditional structures of society. A teacher or speaker can be subverted by a back channel of comments among the class or audience to which he is not privy. Reality gets distorted, and traditional dominance undermined.

I was sitting in a hearing the other day where those being grilled by the legislators were maintaining a quite noisy twitter presence that stood in contrast to their respectful tone in the session. Two channels, both of them public, but both of them trains running on parallel tracks. Which of them is real?

Technology is moving ahead, and we’re catching up. But we’re catching up at different rates.

If an employer can’t make a distinction between an employee’s office persona and their, for want of a better expression, their personal persona, then they’re probably not very good employers.

Still, there are limits. The British man who joined a rampaging mob in Thailand and yelled at a passing citizen journalist hadn’t considered the consequences should that video clip end up on YouTube. Which it did and he now faces a lengthy time in jail.

Adolescents who share racy photos of themselves by cellphone are discovering the limits to transparency when those photos spread like wildfire. And one can’t help but suspect that not all school kids feel comfortable with the intensity of digital interactivity.

Which brings us back to Facebook.

Facebook is the thin end of a big wedge. We’ll probably look back and wonder what all the fuss was about, but that doesn’t mean we’re wrong in questioning Facebook’s actions or its motives.

But we’d be smarter if instead of putting Mark Zuckerburg in the stocks, we took stock of what we really want out of these services, and what we really want to share and what we don’t. I suspect that we simply haven’t done that yet, and so we lash out when such moves force us to confront the new reality: that definitions of privacy and openness have changed, are changing, very radically and very quickly.

Facebook’s Asian Growth: Not Everywhere is North

By jeremy | November 22, 2011

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I’ve seen some posts recently suggesting that Facebook is not doing well in Asia-Pacific. This, for example, from Forrester’s Reineke Reitsma:

For example, Facebook is struggling to gain ground in Asia Pacific:

With 58% of online adults accessing it, Orkut is the leading social platform in metropolitan India, while 27% of Japanese online adults use mixi; and in South Korea, Cyworld is most popular, attracting 63% of South Korean Internet users.

I won’t quarrel with her stats, but I’d suggest she’s missing a bigger picture: Facebook is growing at quite a clip in many Asian countries. My figures, based on Facebook data—which doesn’t include Japan and South Korea, admittedly–indicate that in 10 Asia-Pacific countries, Facebook membership has been growing at an average of nearly 9% per month for the past five months. That includes Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, China and India.

By far the biggest growth is in Southeast Asia, with Indonesia growing at 14% per month, Thailand 15%, Malaysia 12% and Philippines 13%.

India is growing at a similar rate, but with a far smaller proportion of population: still less than 1%. Thailand is less than 5%, but 10% of Indonesians now have a Facebook account, as do 23% of Malaysians, 14% of Filipinos and 42% of Singaporeans. Only Hong Kong beats that, with 44% of the population having a Facebook account.

Hong Kong and Singapore join other developed economies at reaching a critical mass—Australia 38%, New Zealand 36%—where growth has understandably tapered off to 5% per month or less.

So while it may well be true that Facebook ain’t big in North Asia, it’d be a mistake to assume that’s true of the rest of the Asia-Pacific region. Facebook is still the one to watch, and showing consistent growth this year in all 10 countries I’m monitoring.

(This updates my post back in January on Facebook stats.)