Tag: social

I’m a founding member of the Media 2.0 work group

media 2.0 workgroup

I'm proud to announce I'm also a member of the Media 2.0 workgroup, along side people like Ben Metcalfe, Suw & Kevin, Steve Boyd, Chris Saad, etc.

The Media 2.0 Workgroup is a group of industry commentators, agitators and innovators who believe that the phenomena of democratic participation will change the face of Media Creation, Distribution and Consumption.

I think you will agree, this is certainly a noble cause. And when Chris outlines in detail the root of the group it just gets better and better. I like to think of this group being something like the mix of people who turned out the forever relevant Cluetrain manifesto

The term “Web 2.0” has become a little warn out lately, but it has had an important and dramatic effect on our industry. It has spurred innovation, driven investment and ignited the imagination of the entrepreneurial community.

The Web (2.0 or otherwise), however, is only part of the Media landscape. An important part of course, however Media includes the superset of people, places and things that can co-existing in and around the web to create participation experiences.

Radio, TV, Traditional Media Outlets, News, Entertainment, Movies, Music, Game Consoles etc all have an opportunity to innovate by 'getting social', and each will be impacted by and contribute to the transformative effects of Media 2.0.

There are underlying issues and opportunities however. Issues with fancy names like Aggregation, Attention, Convergence, DRM, Distribution, Engagement, Identity, Participation. These issues need discussion across the perceived Media boundaries and traditional disciplines so that we can all achieve real, integrated results.

To put it plainly, the visionaries, tool builders, emerging social media participants, 'old media' vanguard, investors and marketers all need to speak to each other to help create this opportunity together.

We call this broader ecosystem Media 2.0.

Like the Web, Media 2.0 is about shifting the power from the few to the many. We, the participants, are (or should be) the most important parts of the emerging Social Media. We each have a story to tell and connections just waiting to be made.

The challenge, however, is to help the unsocial media understand how to be social. To help advertisers understand the value of an engaged, trusting participant over a passive audience demographic. To help content creators understand that sharing and remixing is more profitable than DRM and to shine a light on the best innovations and ideas emerging from that very long tail.

Every community needs some help to grow. The long tail has a head, and every conversation needs a topic. So in this spirit, we have gathered a group of people who are passionate about the issues of Media 2.0 to help propel and focus the conversation.

These participants are from a cross-section of disciplines and agendas. Some merely comment, criticize and consult, some develop tools, some live the dream and have started their own Media 2.0 empires and some are fighting from the inside of established media to change the face of ‘business as usual’.

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Dabbler, at last someones adding distributed to the mix

Dabble beta

At long last dabble has added distributed back into the mix. Dabble can be thought of yet another video hosting service but actually you would be overlooking its main feature. Its more like del.icio.us than anything else. Simply put its a bookmarking service for online video. So no matter where your video sits, google video, archive.org, youtube or even on your own site, you can bookmark it and share it with anyone via dabbler.

In the usual style you can also add tags and create playlists for other people and friends. Its such a simple idea and although dabble is very rough around the edges, I can see myself using this a lot. I actually rememeber this type of service being applied to Podcasts but it was so simple and clever, it actually is a shame it doesn't do audio too.

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@media social is still happening today

@media 2006

@Media 06 Conference is supposedly happening
The @Media 06 Conference (second day) is supposedly happening today. But it’s funny, I’ve seen very little mention of it on the blogosphere. If you ignore the Flickr photos that have crept into Technorati, a search for the tag atmedia returns just 3 posts from the last few days.

I have to agree its been pretty quiet in the blogosphere but Flickr does have a good collection of pictures from the days including the social events. I've been collecting a good range of pictures so I can project them around tomorrow at the social. But it would have been nice to have seen some podcasts too, maybe a special boagworld?

To answer some questions ahead of the Social which will happen in less than 12 hours now. Ben is right, I'm not being paid. Like geekdinners, I don't earn any money from the social events I do. I mainly do it for the fun and enjoyment of seeing other people enjoying themselves. Although if you would like to buy me a drink tomorrow, mine would be either a Redbull, Cranberry Juice or Coke. Also not being paid has its advantages, like not taking any risk with my own money, aka @media are paying for the beautiful venue not myself.
Second question is the timing. Yes we have the venue for 10hours plus, that does not mean you need to be there 10 hours with us. You can come along in the afternoon, go shopping and come back if you like. Which leads nicely on to question three.
People keep asking me if its really a free event and do you need to have gone to the @media conference. The answer is yes its free and open to everyone. We have things setup for certain times during the 10hours but generally I will go with the flow and see whos around and what people would prefer to do during the afternoon. But during the night, I'm expecting to stick pretty closely to the geekdinner style of party. Just rememeber to get your food in early because the kitchen closes earlier that usual.

And on that note, I'll hopefully see you all there tomorrow, don't forget to invite your friends and tag your media atmedia, geekdinner or atmediasocial.

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Your network now available in Del.icio.us

Your network in delicious

Just spotted the your network option in del.icio.us. Nice idea, would like to do the same in Flickr. So heading over to the del.icio.us blog, I found a recent entry.

To make sharing easier, weve just released a new feature called your network. You can add other del.icio.us users to your network either by visiting their del.icio.us pages or from the your network page itself. Once someone is in your network, you can keep track of their latest saved public bookmarks. And when you save new bookmarks you can easily share them with people in your network just by clicking on their username.

In Flickr there is the ability to send pictures to a set of pictures but not to a group or person. Once you've uploaded it you can then send it to a group. But the nice thing about the delicious way, is that its using Tags instead of some other thing.

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Geek and Geekhag podcast number five – Tesco too big for its boots?

My and Sarah's five podcasts now available online. Enjoy and please leave a comment if you've enjoyed it or simply hate it.

This time we talk about joint/partner websites, Sarah says sorry to Blojsom creator and how Tesco is becoming Walmart in the UK and it would seem trying to beat Walmart at its only game in America with Tesco Metro's (starbucks style?).

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Social networking your filmz

My Films

The man behind Reader2, myprogs and tagfacts is in the final phase of testing Myfilmz.net. Go check it out, same login applies if your subscribed to any of his other tools and it looks to have all and maybe more features than listal.

Its based on Amazon again, which is great but means you will have problems adding brand new films just out in the cinema. But I blame IMDB (i mean Amazon) for this. When is IMDB going to open there doors to Webservices and expose a ton of Webapi's? Even RSS would be a start.

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Should you use social software at work?

Basecamp icon

Where’s the line start and end with social software?

Currently I'm using these and more social software services.

Flickr
Audioscrobbler
Eventful
Bloglines
Del.icio.us
Reader2
Myprogs
Ideabank
Listal

But just recently I've been testing out basecamp. Now basecamp is a product by 37signals camp and I was impressed by the talk which was given. But theres something different between the other social apps I'm using and basecamp. See the rest I use in my personal life and projects not at work. But Basecamp is a project management tool, fitting somewhere between a adhoc wiki and full on microsoft project ummm project? Where do I have to manage the most projects? Work of course.

So is it correct of me to use a online tool to project manage internal BBC projects which I maybe working on? Its a tricky question and I'm not certain of the answer. Some would actually suggest that I shouldn’t be discussing this in public on my own blog. But I'm not revelaling anything which is secret or private to the BBC, so I'm sure I'm on good grounds with this entry.

So back to the question. The only time I've come across this type of dielmma is when using del.icio.us. There are a lot of urls which I would like to store in my bookmarks and del.icio.us means I can access and store them anywhere but should I store internal urls in the public del.icio.us? Yes I know del.icio.us like flickr and a few other services have a private tag which means it will not appear in the public. But is that a good idea? Anyhow the question of bookmarking was solved for me when someone setup del.irio.us inside the BBC firewall. So all my internal urls are now stored there and external one's on del.icio.us.

But back to basecamp, this certainly quite a step up from storing bookmarks. Storing project metadata externally is a risk too far. The logical solution would be to download a opensource version of basecamp and run it inside the firewall but then you lose some of the flexibility of social software. I don’t believe basecamp is even available to download and the other project management tools in this area tend to be too structured (alas Microsoft Project) or too unstructured (alas a fancy wiki). If someone can suggest somthing they have seen which is dead in the middle please do add a comment.

The next step for me is look at the public and private aspects of Basecamp and of course the End user licence. I already noticed you can export all the data as one large xml file but it didn’t quite work for me. I got a lot of structure and no data except the actual project title. I'm sure its a bug or something. Theres also RSS and iCal data which can be subscribed and used as a restful api if the export is not up to the task.

I'm sure many other businesses use basecamp small and maybe large. But they may use the paid version which has more features and maybe a slightly different end user agreement? no its the same one. I'll check this out later but I'm actually writing this from my hospital bed and believe it or not there is no wireless and i'm not allowed to use my mobile to dial up on 3g (hint of cheekyness of course).

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update – Socially sharing everything?

Ok I keep adding more to the previous blog entry, so heres an update.

I've been playing with Listal and BlinkList after the recent comments. There both pretty good, BlinkList is certainly a whole lot futher down the line than Listal or even Reader2 and Myprogs. But seems to be a straight replacement to del.icio.us, de.liri.ous, furl, etc. It lets you easily import thses too. I'm currently quite happy with del.icio.us and am thinking waiting till Yahoo's My Web 2 and other bookmarking services show something different they can do.

Listal is a little scatty because it can do so (maybe too) much? Flickr works because its all about photos, del.icio.us works because its about bookmarking resources online. Listal does Bookmarking, movies, books, music, etc. Its useful to have the ability to create a list about anything but you loose the fundmental social aspect of a social tool. Reader2 works because every resource must have a ISBN and del.icio.us because every resource has a URL. Listal has so many different types of resources to work around I cant see how it would be possible to keep track of them all. Its easier to match people together based on one common resource. I also dont get the artificial barriers it throws in. Talk about driving the complexity up! Why is there a difference between Region 1 and Region 2 DVDs? I assume because the database pull is different, but why display that to the user? Anyhow, I dont want to seem too harsh in my comments, as I've only played with it for a few hours.

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Social software silos

Tim Idenifies the major problem with social software silos.

One thing that interests me in terms of is the fact that there are many sites offering social applications (different services rather than duplication) and it struck me that it would be really cool to have a sort of 'meta-social'software' service, that would aggregate all your social presence on the web into one place. That way you could take your blog, del.icio.us bookmarks, IM accounts, flickr photos, friendster profile, url and email (along with any other personal data) and make it accessible all in one place, meaning you only have to give out one userID to people, which would allow access to all these things.
Microsoft's solution is a great effort in that it tries to integrate all these services, but the fact that you have to buy in to using the same product for everything concerns me slightly; – it would be nice if integration was possible over multiple services. This should be possible with something like RSS, but to my knowledge has not yet been done. (Presulably a level of cooperation between teh providers of social web services would be needed, and since not all of these services are open source, this is probably fairly unlikely.)

Some thoughts on the issue myself, first I saw some information about LID – lightweight identity and I've been thinking about the whole issue myself. Recently I adopted the use of Keepass which is a open source light weight password manager. To have pretty much all my internet and computer passwords in an advanced 256bit encrypted, twofish algorithm database, makes you think twice about personal information. I mean for example I'm playing with Microsoft Wallop, using flickr for my public domain photos, relaying music taste to audioscobbler and busy weaving bookmarks and metadata for del.icio.us. But each one bar audioscrobbler I would say are pretty much deadend when it comes to getting personal information out. Not only that but what about all the other information which is generated from mass aggregation? Would be good to share that information with the people actually creating it wouldnt it? By the way I have not heard Doug Kay talk about Attention XML for ages now and digital identity was discussed by the gillmor gang a while ago. The reality of digital identity raises its head when thinking about social software, shame none of them will even take my foaf profile? Not to say that is the ultimate aim of digital identity and interopable social software.

Miles dropped me and Tim a email pointing towards the new Technorati Tags. And honestly I'm pretty impressed with the tag feature, I just wish there was a meta standard for blogging which would beat using the rel attribute in a link. The better default option of using the categories of blog entries is actually quite a good idea because it requires no extra effort from the blogger and its retro active, which gives technorati lots of data to analyse, if they have not done so already. Anyway to celebrate the technorati's step up in the aggregation market here's a couple of good examples.
Technorati bubble
Technorati ipaq tag | Bill Gates | Socialsoftware | Hacking | Xbox | Silicon | Flickr | xbmc. Now if only we could get this in xml?

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