[overhead shot of a table in an expensive modern-european restaurant. It's not a capital, but it's one of those cities on the thinktank/summit-circuit that treaties get named after. Two people are talking. A man in his fifties and a woman in her mid thirties. Both are understated in appearance, but obviously expensively dressed. Both of their smartphones are turned screen-down on the table. It's unclear to us who is the most important. And it's unclear which one is saying the following]
Governments and corporates know me as 'Switchboard', which is how I like to keep it.
I have an aptitude.
Well, a few aptitudes.
But, mainly - I'm very good at people.
Especially those who can't really be described as people anymore. I know what they're good for, what they want and - how to get hold of them.
I've never saved the world, but I've probably had lunch with someone who has.
I'm who you call if you have, y'know - a *really* big problem.
[ringtone]
It's only a week away and, at rather short notice, I was asked to take part in the 'The Future of Policy Making' session. http://rebootbritain.sched.org/
I've thought of some hooks for this - and I may as well share them in case anyone has ideas to add.
1. Market Research faces certain issues when it gets involved with studying or using Social Media. I'm going to look at some of these, and our responses to them, and then I'm going to examine what the parallels are with something like 'deliberative e-Democracy' or whatever the newer names for this are.
2. One of these issues is the inequality of participation online. A little of this is about access to the channels, but much much more is about personality types and motivation. So let's look at the 1-9-90 of research and the 1-9-90 of policy making on-and-off line.
3. A key element in understanding inequality of participation, and wider issues of 'representativeness', is the crudely worded meta-question... 'who are these people?'. To what extent can we treat every 'input' as having come from a uniform and rational agent, or to what extent must it be contextualised by knowing who it comes from? To be clear, I don't think this is about good old demographics, or even values/lifestyles, any more. I argue it's about personality types, and therefore about what such people will also do in the world, in their lives. I will illustrate this by talking about 'who am I?' and showing how my background contextualises the reception to my presentation.
4. Is about emotion. Market Researchers are becoming more and more at home with, and attuned to exploring, the role of emotion, the subconscious, the group effect, etc in making what might otherwise be isolated as rational judgements and decisions. This goes hand in hand with what Social Media can give us access to - such as images as well as text - or to moments of personal experience. Yet the temptation for 'Social Media Policy Making' will be to make the process more rational, more structured, more prone to cleaning up the evidence. How does this stack up?
5. Is about three modes of 'getting communal' that Market Research has to contemplate... a) creating, and recruiting, artificial social spaces (and 'just for Christmas?') or b) striking up relationships with (and or recruting from) existing online communities, or c) eavesdropping on publicly conducted conversations on the web, often at scale and using automated crawling, harvesting and analysis.
6. Is maybe about the 'short circuit'. I've been thinking about the parallels here, between online adjuncts to policy making, and Market Research. But of course one way that the former can happen is when the policy makers employ Market Researchers to do 'online and social' with citizens in order to inform policy making. The main point I want to make here is that the 'client' in these scenarios is most often an official. Does this create competition with elected representatives and with political activists or pressure groups etc? This is probably a good place to briefly consider whether all this Policy Making stuff is about service design and civic consumerism, or whether it's about governance per se. In short - who sets the original agenda - another question, perhaps surprisingly, that some of our clients are waking up to.
Throughout, just to make it easy, I want to keep glancing across to the practical questions posed for Social Media usability, features, functions, architecture and 'marketing' by all of the above.
And the final afterthought. Crowdsourcing is often part of a recognition that a few people can't get their heads around the definition, status of and solution for some kind of problem. However, most models still (paradoxically?) work on the premise that the crowdsourced wisdom can then be condensed down to 'insights', followed by plans, that a small number of people can get their heads around. Can this be correct/right? What does the alternative look like - i.e. where the application of the 'distributed crowd insight' is also devolved to the crowd, where the elite representatives and officials 'let go'? Is it possible? Does Social Media make it more possible, conceivable or acceptable....? That, to me, seems like a good question to leave with Reboot Britain.
Hi,
Now you can visit my new blog at Finlaychristie.typepad.com
I was walking up the hill towards home the other day. There was a man walking towards me - slightly older than me I guess. To my unconscious social auto-pilot I now reckon he was a 'probable' - that is, somebody it was worth turning my open face to in the expectation of making eye contact and saying "hello". I don't know him, hadn't seen him before, but he was just of a certain generation...
I was wrong - there was no mutual connection. If anything his social radar tipped him off that I was looking towards him and, it seems, there was an intentional avoidance as we passed - to ensure we didn't connect by accident.
It made me think - as it does when this happens... on the assumption that I wasn't wearing a particularly scary face at the time, or that I am generally intimidating in dress, posture and demeanour.
This isn't what it was like where and when I grew up - and where I live now isn't much different as a place. I'm pretty sure that if I went back to my childhood neighbourhood, similar to this one, I would now get just as high a 'no-contact' score. Don't get me wrong - plenty of strangers say "hello" - but the count is down and seems to be dropping, not least amongst those I consider my generation.., people like me.
If I'm right - and it has something to do with inhibition, less social living, more concentration on small groups of trusted friends and family, fear of confrontation or just lack of experience and confidence in connecting with those we don't know... how does this sit with the supposed explosion in social media, in social networks and sharing, and in all that voting and joining in with Britain's Got Talent and Strictly Come Dancing?
Is it that we now connect by proxy? That somehow we can connect at the mind level because our faces and physical presences and social incompetence can't get in the way? Or is it that this is a facile poor substitute for the direct social contact that we are getting less good at, because we do it less - drive to the shopping mall, sit in a personal iPod bubble on the train, work with a small group of people - and deal with the rest by phone and e-mail?
There's plenty of society going on still - of course there is. But I'm interested in the trends and the majorities and how these relate to my personal count of those turned-away faces.
A grand scale argument would be that we are evolving again - into beings who can derive part of our social and mental satisfaction by connecting at a distance, via partial or virtual personae, and that in some ways this may lead to a larger number of deeper relationships - to supplement our 'normal' socialising and family life.
One's first reaction is to think of this as artificial - in particular to wonder whether our physiological and deep cognitive make-up can keep pace with such a change - if change there is - whether this will cause more disfunction and illness through a separation of physical and intellectual presence... a widening of Descartes' dualism.
But then - where do we draw the baseline for 'normal' levels of socialisation for the human species? If our natural programming is still that which works for a large family/small tribe living a semi-nomadic life on the African savannah... were the medieval agricultural fixed settlements of the Middle Ages (let alone the English suburbs and small towns of 'my' 1960s) any more natural to us than a world where we directly encounter few people - treat the rest as economic transactors (shop assistants, restaurant staff...) - and have quite other meaningful relationships with people we rarely or never see in the flesh?
This puts me in mind to do three things:
1. Go looking for whatever constitutes the hard data as regards real world 'connection' between strangers and its relationship to online connections and relationships.
2. Find out more about why campaigns like 'Love where you Live' and 'The Big Lunch' are suddenly cropping up. They bear a striking resemblance to ideas we discussed at UpMyStreet about local connection and the UpMyStreet Party... or UpMyStreet Street Party...
3. Resolve to keep turning my open face to everybody, put up with the disappointment when it's not returned, and refuse to be part of a process of disengagement. (One, that is, I've checked my teeth for spinach...)
Oh - by the way - "Good Morning" ;0)
When I'm digging in my garden, and the activity clears out all the trivia, I often find myself thinking about work. It's OK... I really like my work, or at least the part that I think about when I'm digging, which is perhaps the ideal work that I would be doing all the time, if I could just clear out all the other stuff.
Typically it will be a movie playing in my head - of me addressing an audience of my colleagues - maybe small, maybe a full hall. It's not that when the movie starts I already know what I think about a particular subject, or that I know how I want to communicate it, the movie is to some degree the real time process through which I both clarify and share those thoughts.
Hang on - that's thinking out loud but in my head !!!
Anyway, I wish it was possible to record these movies, with their passion and humour and, yes, self confidence because if I think, "Hang on that's a blog entry", by the time I sit down to write they have faded to something much more laborious. Also, as I write the first bits, reflect on them and ensure they are in tidy 'propositional' sentences - the later bits get overwritten in my memory, or fall off the end of the different kind of memory I'm accessing by then.
One - narcissistic - idea I had was to run in and sit down infront of our HDD video camera, or our web cam, and speak it rather than write it. Hmmm. [Is this a variant of that 'learning styles' thing?]
Anyway - here are the remains of todays (literally 'dug') thought.
When I'm explaining promoting some things to my colleagues about the web, about web2.0 and social media, one of the problems is that it is too wide a range of 'importances' and, since we all tend to start with background and the web2.0/social media background is MASSIVE!, I'm not left with time, stamina or audience forbearance, to move on to the other aspects. You'll see what I mean in a minute.
Solution. Deal with each of the three on different occasions. Supporting solutions: Ask some questions at the start to show, and to let the audience show each other, that we all have different degrees of understanding of, levels of enthusiasm for, and degree of personal immersion in, any of the 3 (yes three) dimensions of web2.0/social media for market researchers.
So I need three different (or three different families of) expositions on this subject.
1. World. How these things are being played out in the world - spread, types of activity, historical perspective - what it influences, but also what it is influenced by and confused with. THEORY. ACADEMIA.
2. Object of Study. What out clients ar interested in - so what they might ask us to investigate. How marketers are trying to interract with 'consumers' through these media. New behaviours and segmentations. New theories of marketing or the death of marketing. This is where considerations, and versions, of the 1-9-90 question belong.
3. Medium of study. i.e. how we (i.e. our company) have, could, and how others have, used, and sought to use, the machinery of web2.0 to conduct research studies. In particular encourage exploration of whether each case is 'old work with new tools' or 'new work' - also how it relates to considerations, at 2, about types of participant... not just familiar segmentations - but segmentations by online behaviour, connectedness, openness.
Interestingly - social web mining - something I'm looking at at the moment, is one thiong that really straddles 2 and 3 in a stubborn way. Though I think it leans towards 3 at the moment.
So I need to deal with each of these, briefly and penetratingly, on it's own.
My notes to self are...
In each case be prepared to talk (not to 'present') and hence tap into my emotion/belief/hopes. Let the outcome be a group discussion and then the firing up of a number of bilateral conversations thereafter (more of those movies maybe, but no longer in my head) - this is in contrast to the outcome being a deck or a set of notes that people take away.
I think the next thing I need to do is collect favourite quotes, examples and things that make me rant.
(With apologies to Samuel.)
Hi, I must be going. I'm running into more and more issues that stop me being happy posting here.
• Data ownership
My other hosted blog is on Tumblr. Unlike Vox, they let you use a custom domain so that you control the URLs. I realise Six Apart make a nice living off doing this with TypePad, and Vox isn't really aimed at the sort of people who care, but I do, so maybe this isn't the right place for me. Related to that:
• Badly documented, badly supported API
To get my content out of Tumblr, I need use only one API call: /api/read/json, with well-documented paging parameters. In contrast, I've spent several hours grappling with the Atom API that Vox supports, finding it inconsistent, barely-documented, broken, and otherwise infuriating. I dare say eventually I'll manage to liberate all my data, but damnit, it should be easier than this. (If you're lucky, there'll be a follow-up on how I managed to get on, with more technical details, later.)
• Lack of one-click export support
... in fact, it should be that easy. I believe Blogger may recently have added this; certainly Pownce had to when they were acquired and shut down. I don't want to wait until a crisis point, though; I want backups of my content as and when. The recent loss of JournalSpace and AOL Homepages show you can never be too paranoid.
• The HTML editor still doesn't work in Safari
Well, it's better than it was; instead of locking up your browser, it does now allow you to post. Unfortunately, it also inserts loads of random tags that mess up formatting when I come to copy the entry to anywhere else
• Even in Camino, the WYSIWYG editor can mangle things
• There's no raw view, which makes fixing the editor's bad HTML even harder
• The best bits are now in Movable Type's UI
When I started using Vox, I still had Movable Type 2.6 on my personal site. I still do, but I have a version of 4.1 or something on my laptop, and at some point (probably sooner rather than later, now) I'll deploy it to husk.org proper. A lot of the niceties of the interface in Vox are replicated over there.
(Meanwhile, Six Apart still shuffle backwards and forwards on whether MT is free or not. I think for my uses, it's definitely free as in beer, but I can choose between whether I have a copy that's free as in speech or not. Sigh.)
• Lack of control over page design
Editing a header image and choosing from some (admittedly pretty) backgrounds is a bit poor when you compare it to Tumblr. Sorry.
• No stats/analytics
Even Flickr has stats now, and Tumblr lets you add in Google Analytics to your HTML.
• The UI feels too "heavy"
When I started using Vox, it felt nice and simple compared to that MT 2.6 editing screen. Since then, however, we've seen Tumblr, Twitter and ffffound, where the posting interface is a simple text box, bookmarklet, or similarly stripped-down. Editing on Vox feels like it's a battle far too often.
• There's no feeling of community / not a one-stop shop
Vox feels like it was intended to fix some of the issues with LiveJournal and the isolated blogging of MT and TypePad, but sadly it never hit critical mass. Similarly, the idea of allowing users to upload all their stuff was a nice idea, but it doesn't seem to have worked out, for me anyway. (Once again, Tumblr does both of these right, for me anyway.)
• It's not going anywhere
I don't know what Six Apart's focus is, but Vox definitely doesn't feel like it's part of it. While I'll continue to watch them with interest, it feels like a lot of the work that's been going on hasn't really had any useful impact over the last couple of years.
I'm not going to give up posting; as I said above, I do have a Movable Type installation I'll be reverting to, and I'll continue reading what my friends and neighbours have to post. However, I don't feel comfortable posting here any more. Sorry.
When I posted about lib-flickr-minimal, I noted that the newly-launched flickr.places.placesForUser method made a more interesting demo of data you could fetch when authenticated than, say, showing a user's most recent private photos. Evidently the developers at Flickr agreed it was an interesting concept, because over the last couple of months that area of the API has been extended considerably, As a result, I've expanded the demo into an AppJet application of its own.
Where? What? When? is the result. It shows you, on a map, the locations with the most photos according to a given criterion: by default, that's a tag, but it can also show your photos, or those from your friends and family, or your contacts. You can then inspect a place and see the most recent relevant photos, or the most popular tags, for that location.
How did that evolve from the initial demo app? Instead of simply printing a table based on Flickr's response into the document, I directly plotted the results on the map. I added a small form to enable the choice of criteria, and when Flickr added the placesForTags method, I added that as a choice. Belatedly, I realised that would also work for users without authentication, so I removed the requirement to authenticate, and made tags the logged-out default. (The image above shows a slight change to the initial results: it's the same tag, London, but at the neighbourhood, not locality, level. All of the locations are within the greater city's area, which probably won't be a surprise, but that's not true for Paris. Evidently, what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay there.)
The design of the application isn't quite settled, but I knew I wanted to replace the standard Google Maps pushpins with partially-transparent circles. Initially, I went with red, but when I showed it to colleagues, they said it reminded them of maps of bomb blast radii, so I spent a while looking around for the right colour, before settling on a yellow. The circles themselves are scaled according to the natural log of the number of photos for that location; I played with square roots as well, but I feel that logarithms give the right sense of scale.
The last piece of work I did was adding tag display for locations, using the tagsForPlace method. These tags can be surfed: clicking on one will load a new search for the given tag. It's noticable that the first few tags for most places are almost always place names, while common tags seem to share a familiar pattern of scattered, similarly-sized circles across the US, Europe, south-east Asia and coastal Australia.
There's still a few things I could add; tag persistence in URLs (to make it easier to share pages), better loading indicators (especially initially), options on which photos are shown, and links to view the search on Flickr itself, for example. There's also a missing question: while the API methods support maximum and minimum times, I haven't yet added options to allow you to show When? However, for now I think I've done enough (and I'll note that the site has a link to view the source of the application, if you fancy hacking on it yourself.) Enjoy.
A few weeks ago, when I was finally prompted to write up my EXIF to machine tags script, I parenthetically remarked that
ways of getting all predicates for a namespace, and values for a namespace (at least within a given user's photos), would have made my list for 'things you'd like to see in Flickr' if I'd felt able to get away with being so demanding
Funnily enough, a mere week after posting that, Aaron Straup Cope posted to the yws-flickr group, announcing exactly what I'd obliquely asked for: methods to work with the parts of all machine tags on Flickr. I set to work, and by that weekend had produced a machine tag browser.
Thanks to some coding help from Tom Insam and suggestions by Ryan Gallagher, the currently live version is a fair bit nicer than the initial version. The code is still a bit of a mess internally (there's far too much repetition), there are some bugs (values with full stops (or decimal points) in particular), and I still have three items on the TODO list.
Despite this, it's still sufficient for users to see that the astrometry.net system has been able to solve about 85% of the images it's processed; that three images have had an ImageMagick Lomo effect applied before upload; the names of Len Peralta's monsters by mail; and where people take screenshots in Second Life. In fact, I've been pleasantly surprised to note that the code.flickr blog mentioned it when Aaron launched machine tag heirarchies to the wider world.
As it says on the browser itself, the source code (all the clever stuff is in JavaScript) is available on github, and I'd love to recieve fixes, changes, or requests. In the meantime, have fun looking around.
A decade ago, when the Jubilee Line was extended from Green Park to Stratford, there were plenty of glossy books published, examining the design and architecture of the twelve stations that made up the extension. Deservedly so, too; one, Foster's Canary Wharf, has become iconic in that time. There's still plenty you can find about the philosophy of the designers, and the way they wanted a commonality but individuality for each of the stations.
By contrast, it's almost impossible to find out about the thinking behind the Victoria Line. This was only all-new Underground line in the last century¹, and it's forty years old this year. Most people, if they think of its design at all, consider it dull at best.
However, I've been using it for my commute for a year now, and as a primary line for half a decade, and I think that does it a disservice. First, consider the station layouts. This is, I'll admit, more commonly thought of as engineering, but even so, someone had to think about it. There are sixteen stations on the line; five have cross-platform interchanges with either Tube or British Rail lines, far more than any other line², while all but one station offer interchanges with either Underground or British Rail lines.
Admittedly, partly this is due to politics: during the "tube boom" from 1898 to 1908, the organisations building lines were in competition with one another, whereas the Victoria was the first line designed by London Underground, a single company responsible for all lines. Even so, it's a boon to people who use the line - ask anyone who changes to the Piccadilly at Finsbury Park, or the Bakerloo at Oxford Street.
Beyond the engineering, though, I think the stations are also designed well. Unlike the aforementioned Jubilee Line, most stations follow the same basic look, with three escalators³ down to a main hallway between the two platforms. Unlike some earlier lines (the Central Line springs to mind), these are almost always straight, and I can't think of a station with steps from the central section to either platform. As I've said before, there are also cross-platform interchanges, which complicate things, but even there, consistency leaps out in other ways.
All of the Victoria Line platforms are tiled in a light, almost blue-tinted, grey, with simple wooden benches. Each also has a mural; there's a lovely set on Flickr by Chutney Bannister collecting them all. Recently, the southbound Oxford Street tiling was refurbished as part of the station's PPP makeover, and I was impressed by the lovely, modern design that replaced the snakes-and-ladders mural you can still see on the northbound platform. It turns out that this was the original design, removed in the 1980s after the Oxford Circus fire, but now re-instated, and it doesn't look at all dated - in fact, it's positively modern.
For now, the original 1967 tube stock is still used on the line. However, next year should see the introduction of the new 2009 stock, which, to be honest, I'm somewhat dreading. As with the stations, these are nicely consistent and minimal, with a quirky use of circular glass panels dividing vestibules from seating areas, and standard seating. The new stock will introduce more fold-up seats, and more room to stand, at the cost of fixed seats. I suppose I should wait and see how it turns out, but my gut feeling is that I'll dislike them.
That's not to say the line is without problems. As part of the engineering work to get the line ready for the new trains, its previously solid reliability seems to have taken a knock. More seriously, the above-ground buildings are generally appalling, with far too many of the stations lumbered with unpleasant subway complexes or buildings that look like glorified portakabins. This is particularly shameful at Highbury and Islington, where a damaged but glorious old station was demolished in favour of the current single-storey shed.
Despite this, I think the effort going into the line has been unfairly neglected. The design work for the Victoria line seems to be largely lost, on the Internet at least. Mischa Black was in charge of the overall design effort, leading the Design Research Unit, but I can easily imagine how the utilitarian style leant itself to concealing the identities of the others who contributed. I think it's a shame; the line, while perhaps understated, deserves more attention than it gets. I can't imagine my London without it.
¹ Parts of the Jubilee line were inherited from the Metropolitan line in 1977, and of course the extension in 1999, while needing new tracks, was not a new line end-to-end. Amazingly, the Central London tube network we know today - with the exception of the Victoria and Jubilee lines - was completed by 1907.
² I believe the Central, District and Piccadilly each have two, excluding Victoria Line interchanges, but none are within zone 1 (I'm thinking of Stratford, Mile End, and Hammersmith).
³ Annoyingly, cost-cutting sometimes (as at my home station, Blackhorse Road) led to the central escalator being replaced by a fixed staircase, which means that any failure results in people having to walk or, in extreme cases, station closures.
Last week Safari 3.2 was released, with the usual minimal release notes: "This update includes stability improvements and is recommended for all Safari users." The security notes were somewhat more forthcoming, but even there, not everything is covered, for as well as bug fixes, 3.2 quietly added support for two big security features: EV SSL, and Google Safe Browsing.
Neither of these changes, obviously, is covered in the release information, but since the (very good) MacJournals writeup of details of the anti-phishing features was reposted at Macworld, there's been a small whirl of further commentary, especially as the latter includes data collection for Google. Most of the (sensible*) concern has been raised because Apple's terms and conditions, unlike those of Firefox (who also use the Google Safe Browsing API), allow Google to make use of the data sent as a result of surfing using this plugin for any purpose, not merely enhancing that particular service. This might not be so bad if it wasn't also for the fact that the Safe Browsing checks fetch and send data by default.
Personally, though, I can't say I'm bothered by either of these. I'm sure Google get far more useful information from searches and opt-in service usage than they get from partial hashes returned when browsing to potentially hacked sites. As for defaulting to using the service, well, both Chrome and Mozilla also do that, and as with Firefox, Safari offers a preference to disable phishing detection.
What is more surprising to me is that so few people have connected the release of 3.2, and its emphasis on security over features, to the removal of Safari as a "safe" browser from Paypal's list in February:
"Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do, to protect their customers," [PayPal security chief] Barrett said in an interview.
I have little doubt that there's been behind-the-scenes back and forth between PayPal, and similar organisations pushing these changes, led Apple to release this sooner rather than later, in the 3.0 branch (rather than waiting for Mac OS X 10.6 and Safari 4.) Perhaps a more sensible place for people to raise questions is whether EV-SSL and Safe Browsing are actually useful, or if they're merely security theatre? Now there's a well-researched comment piece I'd like to see.
* There's also a lot of kneejerk "OMG Google haz my datorz!" nonsense, but reading the article makes it clear that only hashes of URLs are checked, and even that's only when a partial hash is matched against a hash of your current URL.
