Category Archives: What I’ve Been Doing
Talking about the social web
I’m talking to some lovely folk at a top-secret location somewhere in the North-West of England.
We’re talking about the social web and how they might use it. This blogpost is an example. While I’m writing this they are all sitting quietly and I’m also uploading some pictures to flickr.
I’m showing them how I write a post – and forgetting half the time that I’m doing that and that I should explain more what I’m doing at the time.
To Bicester Village
I spent this afternoon at Bicester Village, the Disneyland High Street of outlet stores in Oxfordshire. Equal parts weird and fascinating. Most frequently overheard was “darling, can I get you this sweater/bag/pair of shoes for Christmas?” You know, the sorts of people for whom all shopping from mid-October on is a part of Christmas shopping. There are a hundred or so (yes we were given lots of figures, but I wasn’t paying full attention) stores there, mostly clothing, but also homey places like Le Creuset, Bose and Wedgwood, a Books etc plus a Starbucks & a Pret. Lines are all last year’s with between 30% and 60% discounts.
The day was facilitated by Helen Keegan (brilliantly, I have to say, even though she’s one of my longest-standing friends, everything just worked without any fuss), who’s working with BV on their online marketing strategies and there were a range of other tuttlers there. We were given a nice goodie bag including a 10% off card (though that was refused me at L’Occitane on purchases less than £25) and a generously endowed gift card. I found it quite strange, going shopping, going shopping in luxury brand stores, going shopping in luxury brand stores having been given money specifically for spending there. But somehow I managed to make some purchases. I had to have a good walk round first, and probably popped into every store except that very posh one at one end of the village that’s so posh that they don’t want us to talk about the fact that they’ve got a store at BV. I then had to go and sit down with a cup of coffee before I ventured out to actually buy something – it showed me how conservative I’ve become in my wardrobe choices (or rather, just stuck, there was plenty of conservative clothing but not what I’d want to wear). I tried to get some chino’s in Ralph Lauren but they didn’t have anything in my size. I had to ask one of the foppish young men assistants to explain the labelling because I couldn’t believe that some of the trousers had 38″ legs, but it was true, I unfolded one pair and if they’d hung right at my ankles the waistband would have been tucked under my armpits. There was only one pair in anything resembling my size according to the label, but either I’ve got tubbier or they’d been cut on the small side – I fear the former is far more likely.
In the end, I settled for some smelly stuff from L’Occitane, some notelets from Smythson and a scarf from Jack Wills. The last purchase took me very slightly over the limit on the gift card, which proved quite a trying experience for the poor girl who was serving – she had to work out 10% off, then get two of her colleagues to check how to make the till understand the combination of gift card and my debit card. All part of the entertainment.
All of the assistants in the stores I visited seemed to be county boys and gels either working through college or in a gap year, I got the feeling they were all quite excited to be there, presumably they get even more of a staff discount on the discount on the discount.
Unlocking the see-saw
That was the title of the VRM shindig today. It was fun and interesting and stimulating.
I left ready to do something. I don’t think my coding teeth are strong enough to join in with that bit, but some more co-ordinated and detailed requirements analysis or user testing would suit me fine.
I did a bit where I pulled out my wallet and went through some of its contents. The loyalty cards and what not. Needs a bit more time to go through that in detail. I’d like to, because I think it’s got some legs. For example, the difference between the relationship implied by Caffe Nero’s bit of cardboard as opposed to Starbucks’s pre-payment card. But not tonight.
My main point there was not well developed either, because it only really came to me as I was doing it – it was the empirical evidence of how engaged I am in managing my own personal data – I may say that I’m up for it, but my wallet actually tells a slightly different story.
Thanks to Adriana and Alec for their sterling organisational efforts and to my collaborators for lots of good thinking.
The Importance of People and Real Things
I’ve spent the morning realising that thinking about people is quite unusual, I mean real people, not people as consumers, community members, entrepreneurs or employees. I’m not saying that the guys I listened to this morning aren’t thinking about them, just that the stories we’re telling are still more about technology than about what people are doing with other people.
I saw Stowe Boyd and Stef Magdalinski address large audiences and then Tim O’Reilly spoke to a bunch of us bloggers in a more intimate roundtable. And the interest is mostly about doing stuff “on” or “through” the web. I’m not surprised this conference is about the web but it helps me realise that I spend more time thinking about the other people on the web than I think about the applications or the infrastructure.
Stowe talked about plumbing and the shifting power relationships between writers and readers – or more properly, between different classes of writers and how the relative disempowerment of commenters who are unable to aggregate their content and therefore build their reputation means that it’s more likely that they’ll go elsewhere – away from the blog – to talk about what they are interested in. RSS has helped to give them some power – pulling blog posts out of their social context and with the river of news model now dominant, we think of the web more from a time perspective than space – we used to think of content being in places on the web, now it flows past us and time is more important.
I like the idea of one stream with different types of content making the stream more or less chunky – blog streams are thick and slow moving, twitter is very fluid, especially with some of the newer clients. Stowe showed off his flow desktop consisting of snackr (for RSS feeds) twhirl, the new friendfeed and the new flickr homepage.
Fundamentally, the most natural conversation is where the flow feels fastest, is what I think he said. What’s this got to do with real-life people? Well it’s about scale – the physical instances of Stowe, me, Nancy who was sitting next to me, Christian Heller sitting a few rows back, cannot meet in the same place regularly *and* get everything else we want to do done. Nancy & I get to tuttle regularly but the others are elsewhere. But on twitter, we can see each other everyday if we want to (at least hear each other, even if we have no time to talk) – of course online relationships enhance offline relationships and vice versa, but we just can’t. Perhaps I’m only just catching up with something everyone else takes for granted, but I think it’s worth making explicit.
Then I went to listen to Stef and got to hear the other side of the story from the one I’m used to – I’m a longstanding customer from when they had only 1 product and I also talk (not regularly enough) to Mex and others at Moo so I hear lots about the community but less about the back end. It was good to see some of the measures they monitor and use to manage the business. The aim to keep the feedback:order ratio below 5% and are pushing to keep it as low as possible, although I assume they want *some* feedback! The other measure mentioned was their <1% reprint rate due to code errors. I wonder how many arguments they will have as they get bigger about whether a reprint was due to code error or not. Nice to be open about your performance measures though and that they’re based on the experience being good for customers. And they’ll be sharing 15% revenue with API affiliates “very soon”
The other thing I noted was that they started small and grew quickly when it comes to complexity. This was a very smart move in hindsight – Stef intimated that all these products were always in the plan, but when they started, my perception was very much that they were trying to do one thing very well, and that helped enormously in my willingness to recommend them to others. Nice to know too that they’re early warning system is alerts if orders drop below a certain level for a period. It’s also interesting to see how they started being almost entirely outsourced, but that having brought some (non-specialist) stuff in-house, they’re considering whether to buy some presses for themselves too. Stef paints a lovely picture of an organic enterprise.
Oh yes, and the reason I get a Union Flag sticker and a blue non-fail whale sticker in my pack is because this is part of the instructions for the packer – it means it needs to go in the UK bag and have a blue cover.
I didn’t take notes at the Tim O’Reilly session – I asked a question about how his offline relationships had been affected by his online activity (a lot, he says, just like the rest of us, though he’s a pathological case with 11,500 followers) which I followed up with a question about fame – I got the feeling that I was perhaps being a bit too personal – it wasn’t (shock, horror) as intimate a chat as it was billed as. On behalf of Nik Butler – @loudmouthman I asked the question that he’d asked about the extent of the influence that O’Reilly books have had on Web2.0. Tim felt they’d done a lot more to build the web in the 90’s than what’s happened since. They’ve done much more through events like this than with books of late.
Thanks to Suw, Nicole, Steph & Janetti for inviting me along.
Fatherhood
Another typical Sunday night with the Davises.
My daughter, Rose, 15, sourced the music, devised, directed, shot, edited, uploaded and annotated this in less than an hour – all I did was dance around like a dickhead.
Glimpsing Obama
On Saturday, I was at Victoria station on my way to somewhere else and I saw on Twitter that Barack Obama was just about to arrive at Downing Street to meet Gordon Brown. I decided to take a detour on the no. 24 to check it out – having seen the pictures in Berlin, I assumed that Whitehall would be closed off and we’d be diverted around throngs of the placard-waving Obarmy-army – but actually it was all very quiet.
The pavement is being dug up all along in front of the Treasury and FCO buildings as well as in front of the entrance to Downing Street itself. So although there were the usual tourists milling around there was certainly nothing like a crowd but the prospect of catching a glimpse through the gates was very slim indeed. I walked back towards Westminster and saw that a bunch of people were gathering in King Charles Street, so I wandered down to have a look. It turned out that this included some hardcore supporters including the organisers of the local meetup group formed to focus Londoners (and US expats) on supporting the senator from Illinois. The thinking was that the Obama party would come from Downing Street through the FCO courtyard and along King Charles Street to go to the Palace of Westminster to meet the Tory high command. The hope was that BO himself would go walkabout and stroll down Whitehall.
I settled in to wait and wait. I passed the time on Twitter and Qik – getting the first updates and pictures from @DowningStreet and getting help from @jkerrstevens while spotting the security services talking to their cufflinks. George Osbourne seemed to come out of the Treasury (?) in a Google t-shirt and on his bicycle.
A BBC TV crew said they didn’t know if the party was coming this way either but took their position in front of the crash barrier – when asked, they explained that otherwise they’d only be able to see as much as we could see. We knew that the press conference was due for 11am and so were ready for action when we saw the journo’s come strolling out. The crowd, including some delightful little children, started chanting “Yes! We Can!” and got ready with their cameras and phones for the moment when the man himself would surely follow them and walk towards us. But then suddenly a motorcycle escort and convoy of 4 people carriers zoomed out of the gateway, past us and through the gates onto Whitehall.
Momentarily I looked up from my phone which was *not* taking pictures on burst mode as it was supposed to be and saw the familiar, smiling senatorial face as he gave a little wave to the excited but slightly disappointed crowd. I went over to Parliament but again everything was happening too far away and through grills and railings so left him to meet with a man who can’t look after his own bicycle but may be running the country before too long.
Despite the small turnout I can’t imagine that any presidential candidates in previous election years can have generated such excitement on the streets of London. The papers said that they were keeping the visit low key to avoid Obamamania – I’m sure that if he returns here victorious next year, we’ll settle for nothing less than a decent walkabout. My worry continues to be though that the task of getting him elected and keeping him alive for four years in the face of America’s underlying racism seems to be quite a toughie.
Clay Shirky at Demos
Thanks to France being all quatorze juillet yesterday, we got the benefit of Clay Shirky’s wit and wisdom over lunchtime at Demos. Although the first few minutes were “Previously on ‘Here Comes Every Body'”, as you’d expect in a session chaired by Paul Miller at the lefty think-tank there was much focus on the use of social software in public policy and political organisation. Yay! I hope you don’t expect me to weave what was said into a structured narrative. Here are the brain globs that formed for me.
The Obama campaign has focused on strategic use of the tools learning the lessons from the Dean campaign’s tactical experimentation.
Of course he wants Obama to win, but Clay has laid a $50 bet on President McCain – simply because people lie to pollsters – they *say* they’ll vote for a black president but…
The use of social software in the Obama campaign has been focused on marketing efforts and not policy development. The hope is that the people can be let back in more once the presidency is won.
If making a TV documentary about the future of the web (As Charlie Leadbeater seems to be doing – hatchet buried btw, he’s coming to Tuttle in September) it would be cool to allow remixing to create versions focused on narrower industries or themes.
You can’t extrapolate from Linux and Wikipedia in order to tell you what to do now – Wikipedia is under constant “attack” – the page for Galileo is protected because it’s a focus for the “500-year flame war” over his persecution by the Catholic Church but that doesn’t mean that your 5-person wiki needs the same level of defences.
Something clicked with me about the Open Source thing – where most Sourceforge projects go nowhere and the potential coming out of 2gether08 – most of the conversations we had will go nowhere, but one or two will be amazing – we just don’t know which one or two.
And as my blood sugar levels plummeted, I heard that Etienne Wenger is doing something interesting where CoPs meet tech but I was already seduced by the fruit basket and didn’t really hear what.
Glad to see that the podcast is already up – well done Demos!
Videoblog Masterclass – Using video as a social technology
I thought I’d write about the stuff I took to my videoblogging masterclass last week. I’d like to repeat the process with other clients – and maybe a public one – it worked well in a small group of communications specialists and people from lines of business. I’d have liked to have done it all more openly too, but one of the requirements from the client was that everything was kept private (it was part of an internal conference on risk management)
I started with my background in social media as a whole and how I’ve been thinking about it helping internal communications and knowledge management for as long as I’ve been blogging.
Then I took a look at the technology. I started with the obvious – get a DV camera, point it at someone and record what they’re saying. I then showed how to simply take that footage, edit it quickly using Windows Movie Maker, add a title and some credits and create a movie file. I think this is simple now and there are tutorials all over the web, but I forgot how complicated it can seem if you’ve never seen it before.
Then I looked at video clips as conversations, using seesmic as an example. We looked at some conversations and saw how being informal helps to convey more information. I talked about how the community had grown up and about my experience of meeting and building relationships with people I’d known about before, but never got to know properly until we “met” on seesmic.
And finally we looked at mobile video – briefly touching on using your phone to record files, edit and transfer to the web like this master, but focusing mainly on live streaming, using qik as an example. I’m very grateful to Jackie at qik for shipping me an N82 so that I could demo this properly (and I seem to have really gotten the bug since then!) I’m not sure that the whole group in the class fully understood what was going on but one or two were gobsmacked and very excited by the potential of this.
We spent the second half of the morning talking about the cultural impact of doing this sort of thing, the risks involved and the kinds of practical applications that they could envisage. And then (oh noes!) we got onto why any use of video would be difficult (read “nigh on impossible”) in their current IT environment. This also led onto an interesting discussion about broadcast versus narrowcast and an understanding that not everything that gets published needs to be accessed by everybody else.
So yeah, give me more of these please.
Tim Berners-Lee on web science.
Just a snippet. Cross not to have power supply.
Sir Tim says something to the effect of:
People doing interesting things fall between stools. The web has to be thought of as humanity connected, rather than an interconnection of computer systems. And you have to remember it’s big, very big and it’s complex. It’s not apparent yet what all of its characteristics are. We don’t know yet for example what the blogosphere is and how it will behave. We just don’t know – we can’t show that it’s stable. So we have to study it, we have to understand it better so that we can take care of it.
Perfect Path 