I’ve been doing quite a lot of presenting in recent weeks, and at the end of last week presented to two different sets of undergraduates at Manchester and Birmingham universities. It was part of a MediaGuardian Insight series into working in modern media, and my subject was digital media and the evolving landscape.
What struck me pretty forcefully at both places was how some of the things I take for granted - blogs, RSS, tagging, participatory media - are having little or no impact on these young people. When I was talking in Manchester, someone shouted “what’s plogging [sic]” from the back of the hall, so I asked people to put up their hands if they knew what a blog was. About a half-dozen hands went up. When I asked how many people had a blog, only one hand stayed up. When I asked about RSS, only a couple of hands waved. But when I aseked about podcasting, though, 30 or 40 hands went up.
What does this tell us? A few things:
- The UK is a very different place to the US when it comes to digital media consumption and usage. Social media platforms, such as blogs, are still very much the preserve of the digerati, and haven’t genuinely broken out yet.
- Digital media practitioners in Britain had better be careful they don’t get too far ahead of their audience. I spend a lot of my day talking about participatory media. Maybe I shouldn’t spend quite as much.
- Technology breaks out much, much faster when it’s linked to consumerism. I’m convinced that podcasting was recognised so widely because it’s linked to the iPod (which is in turn linked to iTunes, and Apple, and that great big sexy consumer machine that Apple has become). So where’s the RSS iPod? Will there ever be one? Maybe it’s just a mobile phone…
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You may well have read that the Guardian’s Baghdad correspondent, Rory Carroll, was kidnapped by gunmen in Baghdad yesterday. The editor, Alan Rusbridger, had this to say:
“We’re deeply concerned at Rory’s disappearance. He is in Iraq as a professional journalist - and he’s a very good, straight journalist whose only concern is to report fairly and truthfully about the country. We urge those holding him to release him swiftly - for the sake of his family and for the sake of anyone who believes the world needs to be kept fully informed about events in Iraq today.”
There’s nothing I can add to that, but here’s some links to Rory’s stories from Baghdad. I really hope he’s safe.
UPDATE: Rory was released safe and well after a couple of days. Great news. Even better news was how he came straight out and said he’d be back in Iraq after a rest. What an extraordinary person.
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There’s some fascinating stuff from Verisign on their acquisition of Weblogs 2.0: why it happened, and what it means:
Not only are we running the DNS Registry and the largest TLDs (.com/.net), we handle hundreds of millions of transactions every month in the areas of mobile telephony, ecommerce payments, and instant messaging among other things. As we look ahead a few years, we see a future in which pings are generated not just by the millions per day, but by the tens and hundreds of millions. The blogosphere will continue to grow – rapidly – but we already note signs that RSS and the mechanics of feed-based publishing will extend well beyond the blogging perimeter, and be adopted as an enabling technology in areas like mainstream media publishing and corporate data distribution. In short, we believe that it won’t be long before terms like ping, feed, and trackback become part of the conventional lexicon for Internet publishing as a whole, not just the realm of blogs.
That to me seems like almost another definition of Web 2.0 (yes, I know, not another one). But a world where pings are being thrown back and forth is by definition a world in which information is being shared mechanically and dynamically, where the act of publishing means something more profound than just putting up a web page, it means chucking something into the pingosphere where it adds to the value of the system. Content itself becomes a network.
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Thanks to the Association of Online Publishers for two big wins for Guardian Unlimited last Friday. Our amazing sports desk won online editorial team of the year (and if you’ve ever read one of their over-by-over cricket reports, you’ll know why), and we won the overall Best Online Publisher prize in the consumer category. We are, not to put too fine a point on it, well chuffed.
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David Hepworth, publisher of Word magazine and hero to all of us who cherish an intelligent view of the world of popular music, has written a characteristically witty and trenchant column in today’s MediaGuardian, arguing that design is too important to be left to designers. Hepworth’s point is that the things which magazine publishers care about most - revenue and attracting an audience - are often the kind of things that bore designers to death. He includes five basic rules of magazine design, the last two of which are:
4 Designers are apt to wriggle out of practical problems. Cheating yourself more space by sticking a headline on its side is like making more room in the front of a car by siting the steering wheel in the glove compartment. And if a headline on its side is a dereliction of duty, putting a whole magazine logo on its side is nothing less than surrender in the face of a basic professional challenge.
5 A cover must appeal to a moron in a hurry, which is why none of the following works: anything “intriguing”, green, anything illustrated, anything downbeat apart from an obit, anything with the words “part two”, I could go on . . .
Add in “usability” and a lot of what Hepworth says also applies to online publishing. Finding usable sites with attractive advertising positions that are also beautiful to look at is like finding England footballers with something good to say about themselves. Not all the designers’ fault, of course, but I certainly feel we haven’t found the right balance between design, commerce and usability on the Web. Yet.
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I’ve posted a fair few things on here about shared identity, most recently on the Yahoo-Flickr fallout and the apparent accidental creation of an open identity platform. For a far more considered and intelligent view of this space, check out the Identity2.0 OSCON Presentation from Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of Sxip Identity. Hardt makes a compelling case for the inevitable emergence of Identity 2.0, a scalable architecture of shared identity where identity providers offer digitally verified identities which users can then exploit on different online resources. Very nice, very compact, tremendously exciting.
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Matt Webb’s written a fascinating post on attenuation over at Interconnected which I need to read a couple of times to fully understand, but he did introduce me to a new concept which I think could be vital for online publishers seeking to build communities: the concept of implicature:
Conversational implicature is when you prune (and adapt) what you say, according to what you know your conversational partner already understands about you. They’ll assume you’re following certain maxims, and because of that platform of understanding, you can be much more meaningful. For example, if I say I have a dog, that’s essentially meaningless unless you assume I’m following the maxim of relevance–that is, I’m saying it for a reason. Only by presuming I’m being meaningful - that the statement passed a certain threshold before I uttered it - can you understand it as something important, or surprising, or silly. Only by presuming I’m being meaningful does me giving you an mp3 mean it’s a gift, not a so-called viral plant from a marketing drone. Mutual implicature allows ever greater flow of meaning, and it’s why apparently genuine comments left as marketing, not as gifts are so poisonous.
Brilliant stuff. It’s one thing online publishers with a strong brand need to think carefully about, particularly when moving from one environment (say, the printed page) to another (say, the Web). One of the issues we’ve faced frequently is with our policy of trying to print a wide range of comment on a particular issue, of the right and of the left. This makes sense on a printed page, where the implicature is invested in the brand of the newspaper (which you’ve probably bought, so you probably understand very well) and in the layout of the page (where left-wing comment sits next to right-wing comment in a way obviously designed to reflect a multiplicity of opinion).
But that implicature breaks down completely online. If someone runs a search on Google and comes across a piece of right-wing comment, they make assumptions about our motives for publishing that comment which are entirely at odds with the reaction of someone reading the newspaper. In this case, we usually get an email saying something along the lines of “why is the liberal Guardian publishing this right-wing crap? Are you shifting to the right now?”. It’s like the implicature is far more binary online - you’re either one thing or another. You see this a lot in our message boards, too, particularly around international geopolitical issues - it’s often a shouty environment in which things are quite black and white because the implicature is so clunky.
We have to get better at this: at displaying our motives for publication, recording context, reflecting the browsable complexity that you get from a newspaper within a web page. And we also have to figure out how to do that in a feedthink world, where things are even more lacking in context and, presumably, the implicature is even shallower.
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