What I've Seen

A little bit of politics for you

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Lovely to see the JFDI crew heading for Thomson Reuters again yesterday for #askDC a little talk by David Cameron and then a Q&A that promised to include some questions from Tweeters. It was a re-run with extra manpower and sparkly bits of the Gordon Brown do in the same room at Canary Wharf a little while ago, when Christian qikked the PM thus getting a 2 or 3 second scoop on the “live” internet feed and the BBC.

I love it – I’m a news junkie – I can’t get enough of this stuff and these guys supply it very well. It also fits very well with some work that I’ve been doing within Government that I *still* can’t talk about properly, but hopefully will very soon.

So what next?

In following the pattern of traditional news media with live coverage they show two things: firstly that there’s so much more that mainstream media could do, if they could be bothered to learn and let go of their ideas of how things have to work. I think this is the main reason Reuters are doing it, but (yes there’s a but) what it also reminds me is that there’s a whole lot more to news than instant live coverage and, even more importantly that there’s a whole lot more to social media than getting a few seconds scoop on the big boys.

There’s a limit on how live you can get. So in certain circumstances we can get a scoop pretty easily just by happening to be in the right place at the right time or to be witness to something that otherwise would not get any coverage because the benefit from the story doesn’t outweigh the cost of sending a 5-person camera crew. However, when it comes to set pieces like yesterday, the marginal speed gain from live-streaming from qik is wiped out by the drop in quality – the added value is in the contextual stuff that together the guys were creating while running around and pulling together stuff from twitter, flickr and qik.

What the social stuff is best for is the slower, longer-term story-telling, the relating. The repeated application of this kind of reporting is what really wows people, one-offs are fun, but ultimately unsatisfying, because we don’t, we can’t get under the skin of a story in one morning. Yesterday we got a very very broad look at a very shallow event – I’m interested now in how we get depth as well as breadth.

Once Cameron had finished speaking, BBC News fell back to the studio and analysis from a specialist political correspondent. I think we need now to be looking at how we provide that sort of added value, of contextualising stories, breaking them down and looking at them from a range of perspectives. And we get our context by writing and creating other content tangentially to the story that the subjects want to tell. The social reporter interviews the bit-players, junior officials and also-rans because what they think and say tells us as much about the main story as what the official speech-writer managed to squeeze into a time and space designed specifically for conveying a precise message to a relatively small group of hacks. Then by making all the content available, not just the annointed bits that push “the message”, we, the reader/viewers get to filter and re-mix to help make sense of it all.

Things are getting really cool.

Photo: Sizemore

events

Le Web now with more social richness

09122008681The smallest conversations bring great insight.

I was just talking to Alex (ledretch) about the conference, the sessions, the people etc and he made a remark about all the tools we use to connect.

And it hit me that 3 years ago when I was here at Les Blogs the *only* thing we had that we could connect through was our blogs, and flickr I suppose, but mostly the blogs, and there was this feeling of tension of social unease that we didn’t know each other very well and that that mattered (apart from among the old-timers of course who regularly met at conferences) – and now we have so many other ways of getting together and in fact the communities that have formed around twitter and seesmic and facebook et al *as well as* our blogs are now just way, way richer and when we come together offline, it’s just that we’re operating in a different mode, it’s not so awkward or anything.

And anyway lots of people just come and sit down here and chat and crack open their laptops.

Of course I could just be an old social media tart or something.

events

LeWeb commences

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The Seesmic Clique

This morning at LeWeb:
We are on the western side of this time zone, so it was still dark at 8am.
Early birds include Dean Whitbread who marched past me as I exited the metro & @whitscott & @ledretch etc.
W00t! blogger tables at the front with wired internet and power (but no power)
Heartwarming smoochycoochy welcome from the Le Meurs
Spotted @fred2baro in the crowd.
Steve Gillmor straight into Silly Valley insider gossip fest with some MS dude
More of the same from Google fella
DAVID WEINBERGER!! FUCK YEAH!
MySpace drone drove me downstairs to the comfy sofas, the better wifi
On the way caught JP to muse on internet fame and self-organisation viz Stansted invaders, but more scarily for us all with teenage children, organized crime around facebook parties.
Sophie Cox dropped by, no doubt hoping to try and straighten my badges, but ended up modelling the giveaway beanie from the goodiebag.
Hugh McLeod sauntered in, shared some off the record bits of his evil plan, which had be giggling and ready for anything at which point he pulled out some hot wet pussy.
Out into the hall for lunch – not quite attack of the microlunches, but close run, given that as Stephanie noted there seemed to be lunch for 150 whereas we have about 1500 people.
Realised that Hermione Way really hadn’t thought through the name of her new startup techfluff.tv when I called her techfluffer in chief – seems she didn’t know till recently what a fluffer was. I nearly ended up drenched in red wine.
Nipped out and got some turkey kabanos from the jewish mom & pop store down the road and met Hugh again in the snow, so we had a bitch about London, Paris and the like.
Came in and chatted with David Langer about social media consulting, me, tuttle, self-organising and other interesting stuff about err… me

It’s the people, people. We come for the people. Think I’ll go sample Paulo Coelho in the main hall.

What I've Seen

Power FAIL

01122008638

I can’t believe that no-one at First Great Western thought about whether these power outlets were usable with the charger from one of the most popular mobile phone handsets, or any other one that isn’t a simple 3 point plug.

I hope they do the simple thing which is to turn them upside-down. BTW, this was in first class, I didn’t check, but the last time I was in standard class on a FGW train, they had the same problem on table seats, but the other seats had an outlet between non-table seats.

london, What I think

Silly Lists, Silly Games

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This evening, my attention was drawn to the fact that I wasn’t on the twitter grader “Twitter Elite in London” list.

Oh Noes! Wot a calamitee!

So I checked out my location setting and found it to be “London, UK” – it’s a free-form text box so you can, and I did, temporarily, change it to “Up My Own Arse” if you like, but there isn’t a list for “Twitter Elite Up My Own Arse”… yet.

Changing it to London, slipped me quickly into the list at #12 although since others have noticed the same thing and changed their locations, who knows where I’d be? Hey it gave me another opportunity for cheap sexual innuendo. I’ve now put it back to what it was, simply because I think it’s more accurate and useful. Take a look at the disambiguation page for just London.

These lists *are* silly, the games we play with them, once we’ve noticed them, are just games. Is there anything here other than vanity and the fleeting fun of gaming a system by tweaking it’s parameters? Well scroll down a bit and you’ll see that this list is just a way of grabbing attention in order to point people at the services of Hubspot and “inbound marketing”, ie SEO specialist. It’s us, our vanity, our envy, our play, being used for someone else’s marketing campaign. No thanks. Unfollowing @grader (though I understand that doesn’t stop me being included in the lists)

I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.