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24
Mar 08

The Wire and the web

With its complex yet penetrating arcs and careful unravelling of a fictionalised but well-rooted version of Baltimore, The Wire quickly became my favourite television show of recent years. So following its recent conclusion I’ve naturally been devouring every article I can find, not quite ready to let go.

The following paragraphs from a piece by executive producer David Simon struck me as an unintended example of why newspapers (his previous profession) have generally fared so poorly over the past few years, and a reminder of how easy it can be to miss the possibilities new technologies :

It would not have been easy for a veteran police reporter to pull all the police reports in the Southwestern District and find out just how robberies fell so dramatically, to track each individual report through staff review and find out how many were unfounded and for what reason, or to develop a stationhouse source who could tell you about how many reports went unwritten on the major’s orders, or even further — to talk to people in that district who tried to report armed robberies and instead found themselves threatened with warrant checks or accused of drug involvement or otherwise intimidated into dropping the matter.

These are areas that the technologies we use on the web should have helped papers become more effective. Improved scraping, syndication, and the tools that make sites like EveryBlock possible make it easier for people to track the data and offer new ways to identify potential grounds for investigation. The technology doesn’t remove the need for beat reporters, but it might let them find the leads more quickly, and help newspapers find the story. Instead, too many have simply looked to the short-term, aiming to raise ad revenue by becoming increasingly generic.

The story is the same outside the confines of the newspaper world. When approaching new web projects we need to make sure we’re not simply being reactive, but proactive. How can we take what we do well, and do it better?

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14
Feb 08

Filesharing legislation and why it's unworkable

Seal of HM UK GovernmentAccording to leaked documents obtained by The Times, the UK government is planning a green (discussion/consultation) paper proposing strong action against “illegal file-sharing.” According to the leaked documents they want ISPs to take the primary responsibility for monitoring usage and to ban any of their users who continually share copyrighted materials without permission. Whatever your position on copyright enforcement in a digital age, this is a ludicrous idea.

Logistically such proposals will be almost impossible to enforce effectively. Setting aside the issue that many of us encrypt as much as possible of the data going out from our computers, it will effectively require ISPs to monitor all traffic going through their networks in a far more intrusive way than they currently do.

Most ISPs watch traffic and do some work to “shape” it to make sure that, say, email takes priority over bittorrent, but they can do that at a high-level without looking closely at the content of that traffic. Under these proposals they would have to track all the data moving between your computer and the internet, and piece it all together to detect any material that could conceivably be copyrighted. The privacy issues around that are startling, but the technical issues are only starting.

Once the ISPs have that data, they then need to work out if it is indeed copyrighted and have a mechanism for working out if their users have the rights to distribute it. If I rip the new Ratatouille DVD and stick it on bittorrent it’s fairly easy for them to identify that, and there’s a good chance I’m infringing copyright. But what if I’m a Pixar employee uploading it to an online storage site so that I can pass it along to selected technical or media contacts? Or how’s about an event like Greenbelt were to ask a group of us to make a new promotional video available? That would probably contain multiple copyrighted items under an appropriate license, but torrents may be the most appropriate distribution mechanism and volunteers (rather than staff) may be the best people to get it out there.

In either case, there’s the hassle for me in having to provide a paper trail to my ISP each and every time I want to do something that might appear slightly suspicious, and of course there are the ISPs who will have to be able to process that paper trail, check its veracity, and potentially then provide an audit trail on up to whoever manages the regulations. They’re going to have to charge me more in order to cover those costs, and I’m going to have to put in a lot more effort to perform tasks that are currently simple and will remain entirely legitimate.

TechCrunch UK is among the commentators wading in to criticise the plans. Their technical argument is similar to mine, but the economic one is quite different. Whether or not music ends up mostly being available for “free” there are numerous issues we’ll need to address, particularly that while the cost of distribution may come down that is only part of the cost of production.

Regardless, this issue stretches well beyond music, and the point stands that this is an example of government’s response to new challenges being driven by the desires of companies about to go out of business, and not by a real desire to engage with the future of the creative industries.

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24
Jan 08

The fury that Microsoft have unleashed

Internet Explorer logoSuch has been the flood of information since Aaron Gustafson broke the news of Microsoft’s radical new plans for Internet Explorer that I’ve mostly sat back and tried to absorb it all, waiting before contributing anything.

For those who haven’t been following the developments, Microsoft have said that future versions of Internet Explorer will support a new HTTP header and/or meta-tag which will indicate to the browser which version of IE the page is designed for. Unless the page specifies otherwise, all future versions of Internet Explorer will render it just like IE7 would. If you want IE8 to actually use the new features it brings with it, such as (we hope) improved standards support, you will need to explicitly ask it to do so.

There’s been a lot of response and people have fairly quickly become quite polarised. David Emery has a good list but a few I particularly noted were:

Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman explaining their support, Jeremy Keith suggesting that at the very least this is the wrong way round (the default should be the latest and greatest rendering engine), Drew McLellan (Web Standards Group Lead) pointing out that while members of the WaSP Microsoft Task Force had been involved in the initiative, this is not (currently) a WaSP-endorsed idea, comments from Ian Hickson,
and Sam Ruby and his commenting crowd considering the technical implications.

Reading all the debate it can be hard to separate feelings about this specific idea from a basic resentment against Microsoft that is harboured by most web developers I know. The failure of Internet Explorer to keep up with web standards has cost many of us, in aggregate, months of work, and our clients lots of money. The time we’ve spent supporting broken browsers could have been time spent improving the user experience or developing exciting new uses for the web. It feels very much as if the only way Microsoft can see to fix the mess they’ve created with their lacklustre browsers (and some very poor authoring tools) is to throw us a new type of confusion.

Regardless of it being Microsoft, though, even after reading all the debate I can’t help but feel that this is a very bad idea. Even if we get to the day that Internet Explorer 11 dominates and IE10 is the only other version used by a significant number of users, this would mean there would still be sites out there that are coded not to older standards than we may be used to, but to one of three or four older rendering engine and their unique set of bugs. That’s too much information for anyone to handle.

And then, of course, there’s the question of other web browsers. Sure, we can add a note that a site is designed for “safari 3, firefox 2.0, IE7 and Opera 9″, but that’s not a complete list even now. And we’re already seeing an explosion in the number of mobile devices, app-specific browsers, screen scrapers and other means of accessing the web. I find it hard to see this as anything other than a short-sighted form of browser lock-in.

So what should we do? Clearly the standards process is moving slowly and it’s taking browser developers several generations of their software to fully support the standards we do have. There’s already a lot of discussion of what should happen to the standards process to change that, but in the meantime I quite like the line of thought in David’s blog entry mentioned above suggesting we should have a way to test for support of various CSS properties. I’m not sure about the precise implementation details, but object detection got us a long way when we wanted to escape browser sniffing before, and maybe that’s still a fruitful line of enquiry?

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12
Dec 07

Why social media is like local newspapers

Flickr Hot TagsWhen running a campaign a good strategy always used to be to ask your supporters to write letters to their local newspaper. Local newspapers are far more widely read than their national equivalents, you’re much more likely to get your photo published in them, and because of their more tightly defined audience they present a much greater chance to contextualise your message and suggest options for local action.

In many ways, that is the campaign tactic that a strategy for web 2.0/social media should build from. It’s not about having a presence on flickr, delicious, facebook, upcoming, myspace, or any of the dozens of other “web 2.0″ sites, though an official presence may be useful in some cases and personal experiences with all of them is a good idea. Instead it’s about resourcing your key supporters to be there for you, just as they would in their local papers.

Your supporters already have networks of friends/contacts in these settings that it would take you a lot of time to build. Those friends are going to pay attention to what is being said because of who said it, when if it came from an unknown campaign officer they’d be far less likely to read it. You’re likely to be busy at your events, but your supporters are free to take photos they can post on flickr and which their friends will look at whether or not they currently follow your campaign. You can put as much time as you like into creating a facebook group, but unless your friends and your supporters’ friends join it, it’ll never take off in the “viral” style you’re probably hoping for.

The task then is to educate your supporters. Encourage them to create and disseminate their own content, and back that up with good quality briefings, access to take photos, and any other options that make sense in your context. And to keep an eye on that content so you can pick from the best of it. We’ve found asking greenbelters to tag their photos with a given tag for each year hugely effective not only in making sure we get included in “top tags” lists, but also in giving us an easy way to access the resulting content and get a broader view of the feel of the festival than we otherwise would.

It’s never been and never will be possible to truly get your message everywhere. New tools may help push your content into new spaces, but the only way to effectively disseminate your message is to open it up and let others carry it for you, interpreting it through their lenses. It’s not a new idea, but it’s one that’s far more important now than it ever has been.

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10
Dec 07

Why we're not quite ready for everyone to build their own social networking site

Whether or not you should build your own social networking site and/or make use of sites like facebook is currently a hot topic within the not-for-profit web developer/consultant world. The launch of sites like Amnesty International’s “unsubscribed”, which bears many hallmarks of a social networking site, combined with growing attention for facebook campaigns and tools like SuperBadger bring the options and potential into clear focus. Elizabeth Dunn’s post last month “social networks, walled gardens, and decision trees” makes a compelling argument that non-profits should be focussing on these questions now even if they’re not key for their current audience: sooner or later they will be and you don’t want to be playing catchup.

There are certainly many advantages to having your own social networking site. A facebook or myspace presence may attract attention, but the data you’ll be able to gather about your supporters and the potential for inserting your own branding are limited. Set up your own social network and you have full flexibility to integrate that data with your supporter databases, and to tune the site to your very specific requirements. But not only are they a significant investment of resources, there’s also a significant cost of time for supporters who will need to sign up for yet another site, identify their friends once again and give their attention to even more online data. Online campaigning’s great strength so far has been its low barrier to entry; for cause-specific social networks to really make sense their barriers need to fall.

That desire is definitely not unique to non-profits. As Brian Suda’s “Portable Social Networks: Take Your Friends With You” highlights, finding ways to let users move their data from site to site is a hot topic across the web development world. Sites like traveller network dopplr have succeeded in part by letting their (so far highly tech savvy) users import data from other social networks such as twitter. The real breakthrough will be when the mass-networks of the moment (as facebook is today) become similarly open. That won’t make it easy, but it will mean that there is suddenly a huge audience who can become fully signed up for your site with just a couple of clicks.

Right now most efforts hinge on a set of emerging standards, two of which will be familiar to anyone who’s been reading this blog for some time but which bear some more attention. There’s plenty of information around the web on these so I’ll just touch on them briefly:

Microformats are a way of taking plain old HTML and, by following some conventions, adding meaning to the content that could be understood by machines. While a human might be able to look at some information and infer that it is describing an event, machines aren’t so good at that, so we need standardised ways to say “this is describing an event, that bit is the date,” or “this link is to the homepage of my brother.” There were already ways to do that, but it involved adding extra things to your website. With microformats, so long as you (or your content management system) follow some simple conventions when creating a page, a machine can get the content out of the page as easily as a human reader can. That lets us identify friends/contact lists in a portable way, among other useful functions.

OpenID is a way to get rid of the frustration of having to create a username and password for every new site you visit. Instead when you visit a new site that you want to sign up for, you enter a URL that is your OpenID and that site will check with a central system (which may require you to log in) whether you do in fact own that OpenID. Rather than having to remember dozens of usernames and passwords, you’ll probably just have to remember one URL, one username, and one password. And because you’re using that same OpenID for lots of sites, when you sign up for a new site you can be identified on others. So if you sign up for a new site I’ve created using the same OpenID you use on livejournal my software can identify you on livejournal and import your posts from there. So there’s less work for you to tell that new site you’re creating a profile on how to find your blog and to import the posts, and an easy way to make your profile active and informative.

OAuth is the newest of the standards and goes hand-in-hand with OpenID. It allows you to grant one web application permission to access certain parts of your data in another application without giving your usernames and passwords all over the places. If you’ve ever used a site that redirected you to flickr to get your permission to do something with your photos, you’ve seen something like it. If OAuth is widely adopted, no longer will you have to give every social networking site your webmail username and password in order to have your address book checked for other users of the site, simply trusting that they won’t abuse it. Instead, it becomes easy to give a one-off permission while keeping your details as secret as they should be.

What these pieces add up to is a significant reduction in the psychological hurdles that might prevent your supporters from joining your new social network. Instead of pouring hours into their friendster profile only to find everyone has moved to myspace, and so not signing up for your site because they’d have to go through the whole process all over again, they can sign up with their OpenID, perhaps grant you a few permissions with OAuth (knowing that they’re not handing over the keys to their email, online photos, or whatever) and be signed up with an already complete profile.

In other words, persuading people to sign up and build their profiles is no longer the issue and you can focus on providing them with compelling reasons to keep coming back.

So if you’re wondering whether now is the time to start building out your campaign’s fancy new social networking site, it just may be, but chances are a few months from now will be a better time. As OpenID and OAuth become better established—and maybe even get adopted by some of the big players—your life is going to be easier and provided you pick web developers who’ve been keeping up you’ll be able to focus on your campaign strategy rather than coaxing visitors to spend another few hours re-entering the same old details.

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9
Dec 07

Jeremiah Owyang on Facebook Strategies and Beyond

A number of people have been linking to Jeremiah Owyang’s presentation at the Web Community Forum (I think I found it via Beth Kanter). It’s a good overview of the pros, cons and options for using facebook to promote a cause, campaign or brand, and well worth some time if that’s your focus.

There are two pieces from his presentation that I wanted to pull out. The first appears to be a recurring theme in his work on web strategy, centered on the acronym POST. That breaks down into:

People
assess you customers’ Social Technographics profile
Objectives
Decide what you want to accomplish
Strategy
Plan for how relationships with customers will change
Technology
Decide which social technologies to use

The third and fourth of those are particularly good to see. Not only do you need a strategy, but you need to recognise that your relationship with your customers will change when you engage them in a new medium. Too much of the focus on using Web 2.0 to promote a cause has focussed on other ways of putting across a message. It’s simply a translation of “if you’re not everywhere, you’re nowhere” from offline to online media. But part of the promise of the web lies in the fact that it’s no longer your job to get yourself everywhere. Instead you need to build stronger relationships with key stakeholders and they’ll then spread the word if they want to. You just need to look at facebook for evidence — you can put all the time in the world into building a profile, group, application or Page, but unless people want to friend you, use your app or call themselves a fan, your message won’t be seen.

Looking to the future it was also good to see the reminder “Don’t limit to Facebook,” summarised with the bullets:

  • Brands should not limit strategy to Facebook Alone
  • Prepare for The Distributed Web
  • Understand OpenSocial
  • Understand the Aggregation of Social Graph
  • Tools come and go, what sustains is a strategy

Beth has some good points about building on that last one, but I was just glad to see a perspective looking beyond the current dominance of facebook. If the announcements in the web world over the past couple of months about technologies like OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial are anything to go by, 2008 is going to bring some significant changes in the world of ‘social networking sites.’ (I’ve had a draft on that topic sitting around for far too long, hopefully I’ll get it finished and posted this week!)

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7
Dec 07

MyCharityPage : A Facebook for the Third Sector?

Third Sector have a report today about MyCharityPage, “a new website billed as the sector’s answer to Facebook”. The site is currently just showing a page to sign up for notifications, so any reporting or commentary is likely to be speculation, but I have to say I find the whole thing rather puzzling.

Special interest social networking sites are far from new. Whether it’s last.fm for music, flickr for photography or dopplr for travellers there are plenty of examples around the web. One of the strengths of those sites, however, is that they don’t describe themselves as or set out to be a “facebook.” They each focus on serving their niches and doing what they do very well. In the case of dopplr, it’s very clear that they see themselves living alongside other social networking sites by providing excellent tools for importing your contacts from other places, and displaying your dopplr data outside their site.

It may well be that MyCharityPage sees itself in a similar way and that the copywriters or reporters got a little carried away. It wouldn’t be the first time that reports were written about the web that tried to compress it down to variations of the site-du-jour. But the emphasis of the reporting on MyCharityPage also makes it seem like a strange proposition as there are already so many options for charities to reach out to supporters on existing sites (where they already are) that it hardly seems worth the effort of already overstretched web communications officers to set up profiles on a site that is solely focussed on the sector and so unlikely to bring in new supporters.

Just as for musicians, what would seem helpful would be a site that set out to help charities manage their profiles and activities across the burgeoning world of social networking sites. That may well have the spin-off of also hosting profiles for those charities, but it would do it by simplifying their operations rather than adding yet another point of focus to an already crowded landscape. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised by MyCharityPage, but I’m already hearing enough commentary from people who are confused about where to focus their limited resources that it will take a lot for MyCharityPage to impress.

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5
Dec 07

Collecting Bali coverage, and how aggregating data is good campaign strategy

Back before the Afghan and Iraqi wars, when it seemed like every month there was a different global summit in the news (primarily because of overblown and misleading reports on the protests surrounding them) I had an idea for a site that would aggregate the reports from a variety of NGO and citizen journalism sites covering the summits. It would have been a complement to indymedia and protest.net and would have provided aggregated RSS feeds which other sites could embed.

Sadly, it was yet another idea that never got off the ground. Back then very few people were publishing RSS feeds, so gathering the data would have meant a lot of “screen scraping”, writing a different script for each and every news provider, and the tools weren’t around to easily embed the feeds I would have offered into other peoples’ sites so only highly technical users would have found them useful. Atom and RSS took off, but the political climate changed so the site never did.

I was reminded of that idea by a post on an email list from Jamie Woolley, Web Editor for Greenpeace UK. A group of NGO “webbies” have used a Google Reader account to aggregate feeds from various blogs covering the current Bali summit on climate change. And they’ve pushed the aggregated feed from that to feedburner so anyone can use it. You can find the result here, see an embedded example on the Greenpeace Climate blog and embed the google reader feed with:



The fact that this is now such an easy thing to put together is one of the real strengths of that thing known as “Web 2.0″. With widely available feeds meaning data is available in consistent formats, and tools that help you repurpose that data, what a few years ago seemed like a lengthy project is now an hour’s work. The focus can be on finding good information, rather than on the technical requirements.


Including aggregated data is a good way not just to make sure your site looks fresh with lots of up to date content, but also to establish your site as a key source of useful information and to engage with the wider community working on and thinking about your issues. No campaign is (should be) a closed garden and if you’re confident of your campaign then there’s lots to be gained by using every resource available to educate your supporter base, and building stronger relationships with other campaigners.

				

				
				

			


				
		

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			    3
Dec 07 
				
Following up on Facebook's social ads debacle


				

					
Facebook appear to have given in to pressure over the debacle I wrote about a few days ago. According to their announcement:


Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.


That’s definitely progress and will assuage the fears of many users. Unfortunately, as the unofficial facebook blog points out they are still storing data on your shopping preferences, even if they’re not displaying them. You can get around that by changing various settings in your web browser, but there’s no easy way to opt out.


Reactions around the web have been mixed: Some are advocating quitting facebook entirely (or as close to entirely as is possible, you cannot completely delete your account), while others continue to question whether most facebook users are concerned.


I quite like the idea that if facebook are going to use advertising they should target it based on what I’ve told them are my interests and who I’ve identified as my friends. So far, they’re doing a pretty poor job of that as I’ve yet to see an advert on there that interests me, but that’s data I’ve consciously given to them, and it’s my responsibility to moderate that if necessary. The problem is when I may be giving them more data than I realise because of who their partners are. That’s not an entirely new situation for the web —think of all the sites operated by yahoo or google — but so far it’s at least been limited to sites within specific networks.


For those who use facebook socially, it’s well worth considering how much you want facebook (and their investors) to know about you and what measures you can take to limit that if necessary. For those using facebook for promotion it’s well worth considering what your audience’s reaction is likely to be to this situation, to be clear about how you’re using data gathered from facebook, and to think very carefully about these issues before touching the social ads system.

				

				
				

			


				
		

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			    27
Nov 07 
				
The "Facebook Stole Christmas" debacle


				

					
Having blogged in a way that might have been interpreted as enthusiastic (it came out less cautious than I had intended) about facebook’s social ads system when it was first announced it seems only appropriate to wade into the furore surrounding the actual implementation.


It seems facebook have caused a considerable amount of upset with the way they implemented their system. Technically it’s very interesting, using some clever javascript tricks (as I link blogged last night) to report your activity on various sites back to facebook. But practically it’s far less impressive as you’ll have to really keep on your toes to even notice what is being reported, and there’s no easy way to opt out of having your activity on participating websites reported to your facebook network.


As covered over at Read/Write Web, that’s upset some people so much that headlines like “Facebook Ruined Christmas” have been doing the rounds and MoveOn.org have launched a petition calling for facebook to change the behaviour. I very much support MoveOn’s action; it’s remarkable that facebook and participating sites aren’t offering users a simple and impossible to miss opt-out, and really each and every notification should require your explicit consent. Facebook’s own privacy page (only accessible with a facebook login) states:




Show your friends what you like and what you’re up to outside of Facebook. When you take actions on the sites listed below, you can choose to have those actions sent to your profile.


Please note that these settings only affect notifications on Facebook. You will still be notified on affiliate websites when they send stories to Facebook. You will be able to decline individual stories at that time.




That sounds good, if poorly worded, but not much like the user experience so many are reporting.


I don’t want to go so far as many have and utterly rule out the possibility that this system could be a good thing. I don’t want my wife to see what I’ve bought her for Christmas, but at some future time it might be useful to see that a friend has bought a tool we could occasionally do with use of, or for them to see that I’ve bought a DVD they wanted to see. Or on a more commercial level, I may want my friends to see that I’ve bought a certain CD (or package of MP3s) as I think they should go and buy it too.


The thing that facebook—like any company—must remember is that privacy should always be the default. It’s never an added extra, and certainly shouldn’t be a workaround only available to the technically inclined. As it is, facebook are lucky that this one started up as slowly as it did, and had better fix it before they start alienating that vast audience of theirs.

				

				
				

			


		
		

			
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