The Ed Techie

Structured, distributed blog article starts today

I am starting something of an experiment today for the rest of this week.

I am going to construct an article by structuring a debate across four blogs. The article is around the future of content and starts in my next post.

The plan is:

Monday - I post a piece on where I think digital content is going, arguing that it is moving towards being free and widely distributed.

Tuesday - Ray Corrigan is going to post a piece responding to mine which looks at how digital rights may make it a more, not less, controlled future for content.

Wednesday - Patrick McAndrew will focus it on education by bringing in the perspective from open educational resources.

Thursday - Will Woods will look at some of the relevant technologies and how these might impact.

Friday - we'll draw some conclusions.

I also hope that by Friday we can bring in comments that people have made. I've no idea if this will work, but in the spirit of opennes I'm willing to give it a try in public. Depending on the end result I may even try and re-edit it into a 'proper' publication.

Feel free to join in - I've structured it carefully so it doesn't just fizzle out, but blog responses would be great.

That Stephen Fry post

As you may have seen Stephen Fry has started a blog, and his first post was on smart phones and the iPhone in particular. It received so much traffic that it fell over and they're currently upgrading it. That aside, several things occurred to me after reading it:

i) It has to be the longest post I've ever read. I love this variety in blogs - they can be whatever size, tone or format you want. One of my favourite bloggers is Christopher Sessums who doesn't post very frequently, although he does post regularly, about once a week, but his posts are always thoughtful and more akin to essays or articles. But I'm also a big fan of John Naughton's blog, and John tends to have several short posts a day, that pull in interesting pieces from all over the place. You can't get that variety in many other media. It remains to be seen if Stephen Fry can maintain posts of this length though.

ii) It is incredibly well informed. For a while I wondered if it was some tech geek pretending to be Stephen Fry. In a society that seems to treasure stupidity (the recent Big Brother winner asked 'who's Shakespeare?') it is refreshing to have one who is so well informed. What other celebrity would talk so knowledgeably about 'server side apps'?

iii) It's interesting that even Stephen Fry can't have an outlet for his technophilia in traditional broadcast media, and felt a blog was the best outlet. This shows that technology and engineering are very under-served in traditional media, particularly TV. They just don't know what to do with it, maybe because it doesn't lend itself to TV very well, or because it's too complex for TV producers to get. But considering so many of us spend a lot of our time thinking about, arguing over, developing for technology, it is remarkably absent in many of the traditional media.  Which is why it is covered so extensively online I guess.

Prof in ICT post at the OU

I've been asked to flush out any candidates for a Professor of ICT here at the OU, in the newly formed department. Details here: http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=3263&ref=ext If you're of Professorial quality (I know you're thinking - if you're one, how hard can it be?) come and join us, there's lots of interesting people here (and me). Don't contact me for any further info though - I don't know any more than is here.

Dylan viral marketing

(Hat tip: Stuart Brown) As you may know, I'm a sucker for viral marketing - it's like normal marketing but fun. To promote the new Dylan Greatest Hits, they created a make your own Bob video site. You can add the text in. Here is my one:

Listphile - a man thing?

(via Dan Taylor) I have had a play with Listphile a site that lets you (yes you've guessed it) create and share lists. Yes, that's it - it never ceases to amaze me how small some of the ideas behind these web 2.0 startups are. You create a list which you can pull different media in to and others can edit it.

Although it's a small idea, you can see how this might grow. Rather like the real world, in the online world there is an almost infinite variety of very small ecological niches that some company (organism) will exploit. Making and sharing lists won't change your life, but it is something we do a lot. I used to carry a  personal top ten films, novels, Spurs players lists in my head, which were often readjusted, as if I was going to be asked by a journalist for these at any moment. I think this is a man thing, men like making lists (readers of this blog will know I'm not averse to a list).

So, just to test it out, and not because I like making lists or anything, here's my Asian horror film list. Feel free to add to, or edit, it.

I was going to add in some potential educational uses here to justify my playing with it, but instead (in a smug, postmodern, self referential way) I've created a Listphile list - Educational uses of Listphile. Actually when you start doing this it does seem like a really useful tool - I've done this list with a formal education cohort of students in mind, but you could apply the same to a broader subject community. Some of these would be really useful I think - best research question and best resource in particular. So much so, I think I'll add them in to my course next year. I would really like you to add this list (the Asian horror one, less so).

Teach the people - would you sign up?

Teach the People is a social networking site with an emphasis on learning. It's not up and running yet, so I've registered for a beta invite. It has more of a content focus than a lot of the other sites, claiming that

"Instead of just messaging with other users like on traditional social networking services, users on Teach The People^SM are creating their own communities for fun, education, innovation; whatever! User can then fill those communities with as much content & media as they desire"

I hope it works, but I'm not sure myself, and this was based on my initial reaction - I didn't instantly get the point as one does with social networking sites where the emphasis is on casual interaction. This goes back to a point I made earlier about whether learning is intrinsically a bit dull? Maybe if you want a learning focus you have to do one of two things:

i) Start with an existing social networking community and introduce learning tools and services in to it. For example, help people use Facebook to aid their vocational tasks, informal learning or formal studies.

ii) Start with an existing learning community and provide it with social networking tools. Take the OU students and alumni for example and provide them with an environment that helps facilitate social interaction, and learning.

In short you need a critical mass starting either from the social or the learning camps. Teach the people may be trying to do both at once, which is too steep a curve to climb. Anyway, when I get my beta invite I'll be able to have a more thorough investigation.

Shaming yourself in to action

I like this: in an attempt to shame himself into losing weight, Kerry Buckley has a Big Visible Belly graph showing on his blog, which shows his fluctuation around his ideal weight - over and it records in red and under it shows in green.

This use of the blog to expose some aspect of yourself to the audience and thus force action got me thinking. What else could you use it for? I would probably like to record my running, with a weekly target. But anything you procrastinate over would be a contender - you could go for study hours, progress through Remembrance of Things Past, number of alcohol units consumed (depending on whether you wanted to drink more or less), blog posts even.

I think the visual element is important - you get an instant nudge if it's largely red. So is the pressure from the audience - this only needs to be perceived, none of your audience actually needs to care or comment, but the fact that it is public is sufficient. Another Facebook app maybe?

Facebook and Twitter - the status wars

I've decided to give Twitter another go (you can see it on the sidebar there if you're reading this in the blog). What inspired me was a couple of posts - from David Warlick who relates how Twitter was used at a conference and Ewan McIntosh who asks for the Twitter details of people attending the Scottish Learning Festival, so they can create a page of reflections on the conference.

It seemed to me that maybe having a Twitter identity was a professional requirement, a component of the essential modern identity an educational technologist should construct. But my problem is I've tried before and not established it as a habit sufficiently. One of the reasons was that I didn't know anyone else using it, so I've added a few friends this time round. But in the meantime I've become a Facebook user, and established a friends network in there.

Facebook status updates performs much the same function of course, and now that it can be tracked as an RSS feed, you might think why bother with Twitter? There is a subtle difference about Twitter, personified by its openness. You can restrict your notifications, but the default is open, and thus you can post your updates onto your blog or onto a conference web site. Because your status in Facebook is shared only with your friends this makes it more private.

There is thus a subtle difference between the type of update you post to Twitter and to Facebook, and the relationship you have with other Twitter followers and Facebook friends. I'm probably more protective about my Facebook friend access than my Twitter one. And this is what Facebook has built itself on, establishing a trusted and private network.

So, why is this important? It's because I am unlikely to bother to update both my Facebook and my Twitter status. And if we take my point about the difference between the two types of status then there is an asymmetrical relationship between them. The flow is from Twitter to Facebook, not vice versa, because I wouldn't want my Facebook status to be publicly displayed, but I would be happy for my Facebook status to be updated from Twitter.

But the flow doesn't go this way, because of Facebook's walled garden approach. So you can, using a nifty app called fbtwit, get your Facebook status to be displayed in Twitter. And you can import Twitter into Facebook, but it is another app, it doesn't update your status.

This was a challenge of course, so a couple of different programmers cracked it using PHP, including Blake Brannon and Kerry Buckley. It turns out Facebook weren't very happy with this and demanded that they remove the code or face legal action, and even worse, have their Facebook accounts closed! The Facebook engineer claims that

"we just can't let people automate against our site outside of the platform; it's a slippery slope."

This is not the real reason - Facebook could create a Twitter update if they wanted. And when you analyse it, this is quite revealing about the Facebook business model. The key issue for Facebook is that status updating is the jewel in their crown. It is the key to stickability for their site. If they allow people to update it via Twitter then the motivation to visit Facebook is lessened. Why is this significant? Because even if Facebook aren't sure what their business model is, they know it relies on stickability - on having lots of people in their site. 

But isn't stickability dead, you may ask. Isn't it all very web 1.0 and Jakob Nielsen? This is true, and in general syndication is the key now, as Twitter embodies. But, ironically, in a world of mass syndication, this makes the riches for winning in stickability much higher. There will be fewer stickability sites, so when you achieve one you get a lot of users. In the same way the long tail flattens the retail topography, but leaves a few very high peaks - the mega blockbusters. So while sales flatten out across many titles the big titles get bigger, such as (God help us) The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, etc.

Facebook are playing for big stakes then. And they know Twitter could damage their business model so it's in their interest to make Twitter available inside FB, but not, never, ever to encroach upon their main pull factor - status updates.

Which is another reason why I'm giving Twitter a second chance. The winner of these status wars will go a long way to shaping the future direction of technology, and as much as I love Facebook, one should give the open approach a fighting chance. Having said that - what am I going to do about my dual update dilemma?

The nature, and limit, of friends

My (real) friend from university, Will Reader, has done some research on Facebook friends recently, which the Guardian and others have picked up on. They are all running it as an 'online friends aren't real' type story. But I think this isn't what Will was saying. What he actually says is

"Although the numbers of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the actual number of close friends is approximately the same in the face to face real world,"

Previous research suggests that the maximum number of friends you could manage socially or cognitively was around 150, known as Dunbar's number. What Will's research was doing was looking at social networking sites to see if this was still valid when you moved online. The answer seems to be yes, well sort of, as it is stretched upwards a bit to nearer 200. But people will hundreds or thousands of friends (step forward Robert Scoble), don't really know these people, and can't really process them in the same way you do with what we conventionally call a friend. Also, you tend to have the same number of close friends (around 5), and often these are from face to face encounters.

A few things occur to me:

i) I think it would be interesting to see if the number of friends you have increases when you go online. I haven't read the paper (not sure if there is a publication yet), but what would be useful would be to do a pre and post test. Because although the number of online friends might compare with Dunbar's theoretical maximum, that doesn't mean we all have 150 face to face friends to start with (I don't, but maybe that's me). So being in Facebook has, for me anyway, shifted some people in to the friend category, and my guess is this would be the case for a lot of people. For instance there are some fellow bloggers who I have never met, but who are my Facebook friends, and this makes me more likely to think of them as friends than previously.

ii) Does the type of friend and friendship you have differ online? My Facebook friends are more peers, work-related. My face to face friends are more social, beer-oriented.

iii) I think the reports missed the interesting point of the research. It's not that people in Facebook aren't your real friends, or you can't make friends online, as both of these are untrue, but rather there are still limits about the number of people we can keep track of, and being online doesn't alter this significantly. There is much talk of the net generation having their brains wired differently, but you don't overthrow millenia of evolution that quickly.

iv) Being online undoubtedly increases the number of acquaintances, it's just that the term friend has been rather hijacked by so many sites that it almost has a new meaning now.

So maybe all Facebook et al allow us to do is to get nearer that Dunbar limit, as opposed to being about 125 people short of it...

Why headlines don't matter

A few people have blogged about this report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism. They compared what constituted the headlines for online stories, and traditional media. They put it like this:

If someday we have a world without journalists, or at least without editors, what would the news agenda look like? How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people?

Which they did by looking at the top stories on sites such as Digg compared with those from traditional providers. The takeaway (amongst some interesting stuff) is

"In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three leading user-news sites--Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us--were more focused on stories like the release of Apple’s new iphone and that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth, according to the study."

The implication is that far from being the place where the informed debate is taking place, the net is more trivial compared with proper media. This is too good for internet detractors to pass up, and Nick Carr duly obliges:

"The techno-utopians would have use believe that citizen journalism will provide an antidote to the mainstream media's long-run shift away from hard news and toward soft news, that it will counter the trend toward news-as-entertainment and entertainment-as-news. But the indication so far is that the precise opposite is true. When you replace professional editors with a crowd or a social network, you actually end up accelerating the dumbing-down of news. News becomes a stream of junk-food-like morsels. "

I agree with George Siemens who says that this is not a valid comparison, as Digg tends to be about technology:

"The real point isn't the content itself. Rather, it's that any community can filter information that it finds to be of greatest importance. What is valuable is process, not the specific content. Many of the news sites - like digg.com - are focused on the tech community. Why not ask what the gossip magazines were discussing while mainstream media was doing "serious work". I'm guessing the journalistic emphasis of these magazines were heavily focused on Britney, Paris, and Lindsay. This is just silly."

But I'd go further as well - Nick Carr is simply not getting it here, or rather not getting several things. The first is that being online isn't about the most popular stories, but about your stories. So what I read will rarely match the top stories, I will have devised my own news agenda. Whereas in traditional media I don't have that choice.

Secondly, the report and Carr make the error of thinking what people share is the same as what they read. This isn't so. The stuff that is shared is often viral, short, and entertaining. Take the Miss Teen South Carolina vid that did the rounds recently. Not big news but the sort of thing people from all different backgrounds share (funny, but I agree with John Connell there was a bit of intellectual cruelty about some of it). This doesn't mean that people are not also discussing other topics in detail, they just may not share these with as many people, since they don't have the broad appeal. For instance, anyone who thinks the blogosphere hasn't got much to say on Iraq, simply isn't paying attention.

Thirdly, we're in long tail territory here. The headline for this report should be 'headlines don't matter.' I spend a lot of time reading online stuff, and very little of it is the junk food morsels Carr describes. Why? Because there is so much stuff to choose from. News items that might not be popular to the general audience are significant to me. Headlines or 'front pages' only matter when you are talking about mass broadcast. We're not, that's the point.

Lastly, less the news people should be patting themselves on the back excessively, it would be good to compare the depth of analysis available in the two mediums. The US media in particular has not covered itself in journalistic glory in the debate around the Iraq war for instance. And had the focus of this research been on UK news they would have found the media obsession with the McCann case dominating the headlines, which has been mainly based on rumour and gossip. And had the report taken in to account tabloid newspapers then it would less worthy again.