Cornwall Social Media Café: Cornwall's Digital Future

Tomorrow night (Tuesday 12th May) will see the second meeting of the Cornwall Social Media Café (CSMC), organised by Aren Grimshaw from UKnetweb and Laura McKay from Deborah Clark Associates. It'll be held at the Vertigo Bar in Truro from 7pm.

A couple of weeks ago Aren was looking for ideas about possible formats for these events: should they just be informal drinks sessions, or should there be a guest speaker and discussion topic each time?

At the same time as Aren sent out his request, I was seeing a lot of chat on Twitter about the Digital Britain Interim Report, which sets out the government's vision for the UK's digital economy over the next four or five years.

It's still in draft at the moment, but when the final report is published next month, it will form the basis of future legislation, policymaking and public spending in the areas of broadband, mobile, TV and radio infrastructure, digital content and services, e-inclusion and digital skills.

A lot of the people I follow on Twitter weren't impressed with the unambitiousness of the report, or that the government seemed only to be seeking input on it from big media and telecoms companies.

Kathryn Corrick suggested that there should be a series of informal 'unconferences' across the country, at which anyone who has an interest in Britain’s digital future could get together to discuss what the government is proposing, and submit any feedback and suggestions for possible inclusion in the final report.

The deadline for feedback is mid-May, which means there's just time for CSMC members to comment. I suggested having an informal discussion about it at Tuesday's CSMC meetup, and Aren and Laura liked the idea – as long as I was happy to write up and submit any thoughts we might come up with, which I am.

The main aspect of the report that we could discuss and feed back on – especially in terms of how it affects Cornwall and the Cornish economy – is the part relating to broadband. Basically it makes two main points:

1. Next-Generation Broadband is essential: The government would like to see a nationwide next-generation (fibre-optic) broadband network infrastructure with download speeds of at least 20Mbps by 2015. The future success of our economy depends on it, and if we don't have it, Britain will lose out to other more advanced countries. (South Korea, for example, is aiming for a 1 gigabit broadband network by 2015.)

However, the government does not propose to invest any public money in this next-generation broadband network. Instead, it wants to rely on commercial enterprises like BT and Virgin rolling out 50Mbps fibre networks across the country.

What does this mean for Cornwall? Virgin and BT are unlikely to dig fibre-optic cables up to every village and farmhouse; it's not profitable, especially not in a recession. We'll be back to a two-speed economy: urban areas are already benefiting from next-generation broadband, but rural communities will have to stick with first-generation speeds of 1-2 Mbps. Cornwall's rural businesses, which rely increasingly on the internet for sales, marketing, research, etc., will be at a disadvantage, and the county's economy will very likely suffer.

2. Every home and office must have 2Mbps broadband access by 2012: The government wants to impose an obligation on BT and other providers to make sure every home in the country benefits from broadband access and download speeds of 2Mbps by 2012.

What does this mean for Cornwall? Without access to fibre-optic broadband networks, rural homes and businesses in Cornwall will be stuck with this 'low-speed' broadband option. 2Mbps is already not sufficient for some new internet services (e.g. reliable video streaming), and by 2012 it will seem as slow as dial-up does to us now. It's well known that actual download speeds vary significantly from the promised 'top speed' – and upload speeds are usually only a fraction of the download speed.

The ActNow project used EU development funds to make sure that (just about) everyone in Cornwall got access to first generation broadband. But there are no funds at present to help Cornwall move to next-generation fibre broadband. (Cornwall Council is actively looking for a private investor to fund it, but this will be difficult in a recession).

Hopefully this will give us a starting point for discussion tomorrow night!

For those interested in this and other aspects of the Digital Britain report, I recommend the following resources:

Digital Britain Interim Report (PDF) – the 86-page report itself

Digital Britain At A Glance – the BBC’s overview of the main points of the report

Charles Leadbeater’s response to Digital Britain (PDF) – excellent deconstruction of what’s wrong with the report.

Digital Britain Unconference blog – with details of all the other Digital Britain unconferences.

"The current days of the internet will soon be over"

Following on from Fiona's excellent summary of Emily Bell's recent lecture on the future of journalism, at University College Falmouth, a couple of links to supplement the debate.

Today's post title is taken from Rupert Murdoch, as quoted in today's Guardian. Murdoch it seems doesn't at all hold with Chris Anderson's conception of the "free economy", and, encouraged by the Wall Street Journal's online subscriptions success, now anticipates that News Corp newspapers will begin charging for online content "within the next 12 months."

Quite a U-turn on his part, it seems: in November 2007, he was instead talking enthusiastically about dismantling the WSJ's subscription wall:

We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million (subscribers), having at least 10 million-15 million in every corner of the earth.

A much longer, and very interesting debate piece can be found in this month's Prospect magazine, which happily isn't charging online readers to view Steven Johnson and Paul Starr's exchange of correspondence on the question "Are we on track for a golden age of serious journalism?"

Readers of this blog will probably be able to guess the position Johnson takes up (broadly optimistic); while Paul Starr, who I confess wasn't familiar to me, provides the notes of caution, his main concern being to avoid the erosion of the press's ability to provide effective political accountability, as well as how to maintain funding for journalism without compromising it's independence. As for an overall conclusion; that was left for the reader to decide, perhaps in more ways than one.

UPDATE: Just spotted that Wired.co.uk has a blog devoted to these matters: The Great Transition.

Emily Bell on The Future of Journalism

[UPDATE You can now read Emily's own account of her lecture here.]

Last night I was lucky enough to attend a free lecture given by Emily Bell, head of digital content at Guardian News and Media, at University College Falmouth, where Emily has just been appointed visiting lecturer professor to the college's increasingly highly-regarded media degree courses.

Emily's topic was Journalism Ten Years From Now - a massively contentious topic as advertising revenues and print circulations plummet, editorial staffs shrink, new digital and social media platforms spring up everywhere and knowledgeable amateurs with blogs provide an increasing number of alternative, authoritative information sources.

Unlike net-culture visionary Clay Shirky, though, Emily doesn't think that print journalism has no future. Print will remain an important part of reaching the audience - but it will not be the primary conduit for journalism in ten years' time. Instead, going by the 'clues' we can pick up from the way journalism is changing today, journalism in ten years will have some or all of the following characteristics:

1. It will go where the audience is. Instead of hoping that people will go to their website to read or watch the news, journalists will need to take their stories out to where the readers and viewers are. Today, that means publishing stories on Twitter, on YouTube, on Facebook, as podcasts on iTunes, and so on. In ten years' time, those platforms might be different, but the principle will remain - journalists will have to take their stories to where the audience is.

2. Journalism will be networked, not siloed. Journalists will need to act as hubs, rather than destinations. They will need to create communities around themselves, linking and pointing to other stories, and connecting readers and viewers with other interesting people and information, not necessarily from their own organisation. This means getting involved in conversations with readers and viewers, rather than just publishing once and be done with it.

3. Journalists will need to be very reliable and trustworthy. Enabling readers to comment publicly on stories means that journalists can no longer get away with shoddy work - readers can and will set facts straight, add new information and deconstruct 'spin'. Part of the reason why the BBC's Robert Peston has become such a phenomenon is that his obvious deep knowledge of the finance industry means his stories and opinions are trusted.

4. Journalists will need to be ready to share information whenever they have it and in whatever way will communicate it best to the audience. This means they will need to be skilled not just in writing or broadcasting, but also in blogging, podcasting, video-recording, photography and so on, and have the technical skills to get that content out to the audience (in all the places that the audience resides) quickly.

5. Journalism will no longer be possible without the audience. Thanks to advances in mobile phone technology, nearly everyone carries digital recording equipment now, so there are 'digital witnesses' everywhere. This does not mean there is no role any more for professional journalism, though - Emily gave the example of Ian Tomlinson's death during the G20 protests: if it had not been for the fact that the Guardian had paid a reporter (Paul Lewis) to stay on top of the story and keep it high-profile, the hedge fund manager who had the crucial video evidence would not have bothered looking through all of his footage to find it and hand it to the Guardian, and the police would not have been held to account. Collaborations like these help journalism to expose cover-ups, untruths and miscarriages of justice - one of its most important roles.

Emily pointed out that all this is well and good, but what most people want to know is: where will the money come from to pay for all this professional, multi-platform, 'always-on' journalism? The truth is that no one knows, but there are some points that are worth making, viz:

1. News has never been profitable. Sky News isn't profitable; it's subsidised by other Murdoch enterprises. The Guardian isn't profitable; it's funded by a trust. BBC News isn't profitable; it's funded by the licence fee. It's very difficult to make a profit from journalism, although some new models are showing small profits, such as VillageSoup, a hyperlocal news community organisation in the US.

2. There is no point asking people to pay for online content; they won't. Emily said that people who are suggesting this as a solution now weren't online in 2001 when it was first tried and proven not to work.

3. Advertising won't go away - businesses will always want to communicate to customers - but revenues from advertising will never (again) be able to pay for modern news organisations.

Despite all this, Emily is optimistic that journalism as a profession will find ways to survive - as long as there are people who are passionate about uncovering and communicating the truth about important issues affecting our lives.

There followed a Q&A, which covered questions including:

1. Will we see an increasing in 'entrepreneurial journalism'? Emily said that examples like Rick Waghorn in the UK and Jeff Jarvis in the US show that there is a market for independent, authoritative journalists who can attract large audiences to a blog and make enough money from it to maintain it full-time.

2. What is Emily's view of user-generated journalism? Emily said there has been too much focus on the downside of allowing comments on news stories ('the noise of the rabble') and not enough focus on the fact that those comments throw up interesting new information, correction of inaccuracies etc. It is contributing to better, more accurate journalism. Media and politics have been too disconnected from the people they represent for too long - they need to be collaborative, not one-way communications.

3. Here in Cornwall there is a big digital divide - a lot of people do not have broadband/internet access. How will journalism serve their needs in the digital age? Emily said that mobile phone technology will soon make decent-speed internet access almost ubiquitous, even for the country's poorest people and remotest communities. The more pertinent problem is that many people do not and will not read the news - and that will not change, no matter what technology they have access to. 'You can watch TV all day and not see a single minute of news'. The real challenge - for journalists and politicians - will be how to get information to those who currently choose not to receive it.

4. How does Emily deal with information overload? Emily said she looks to filters like following trusted people on Twitter and using RSS to filter news and other information.

And that's it - if you were at the event, please feel free to add anything I've missed or correct anything I've got wrong.

No good can come of it...

Many trivial things have caused my faith in the human race to momentarily lapse into a billion teeny-tiny, Piers Morgan-shaped particles of despair, futility and hopelessness over the years - just lately, most of them new UK Radio and TV sitcoms, alas - but tonight's catalyst: Generatus.com, a website dispensing witty status updates to the witless.

No good can come of it, I tell you.

Or as Generatus might have it: "Tim is in his growlery" (from its mood options I selected 'anger' (it didn't have 'existential dismay'); Generatus apparently selected 'twee'). But it's not actually Generatus's status updates themselves that I'm particularly dismayed by, it's the people I'm imagining using the service... I mean, who would do that? Or rather, why do that?

Fair enough, plenty of people have difficulty expressing themselves - I can understand someone feeling a bit down, but wanting to say so in a way that sounds self-deprecating rather than self-pitying; for instance. And I dare say some people will find updates on there that sum up precisely what they wanted to say but didn't know how to say until they saw it. Of those kinds of uses none really bothers me, they're still somewhat expressive of the person behind his or her update. But, on the whole, doesn't artificially generating status updates sort of defeat the whole purpose of a status update?

A status update is about who you are; Generatus seems to be more about who you aren't: you aren't imaginative, you're not good at wordplay, you rarely come up with something funny, you'd like to appear more 'mad' (all those options are in the Tag Cloud), so you go to Generatus for updates that will cultivate your chosen (false) image. Now, is it me, or isn't there something faintly dispiriting and lonely about that image? about the self-delusion behind it? the calculation? the desire to be someone else? the effort that would have to go into maintaining the facade?

But I'm probably taking it a bit too seriously. After all, I think what really makes me recoil about Generatus is this: thousands of Colin Hunts out there, every one of them clicking on that 'madness' option...

Truly, it doesn't bear thinking about.

Twitter Watch: 3

Enough - for this week at least - about Twitter's rate of growth, Twitter vs. Facebook, Ashton Kutcher's quest for 1,000,000 followers (or for English viewers, Mitch Benn's), and all those other identikit stories that seem to surface in one form or another on Twitter every other day. Time, instead, for some (mostly) pointless 140-character fun and nonsense:

Twanalyst.com analyses your tweets, to determine your style of tweeting and your personality - then accuses you of being a POET (if you're me, at least).

The plot to each of Shakespeare's plays rendered in 140 characters, by JS van Buskirk.

Anonymous secret-sharing website PostSecret, but in Twitter form: SecretTweet.

And to make your secret, erm, doubly secret, you could always post it to Textgasm as well, I suppose.

'I tawt I taw a LOLcatz!': cat pictures captioned by random tweets from the Twitter public timeline. More such mashups here, including illustrated headline feeds from CNN and the BBC.

Avast! The good ship Twitter has been boarded by pirates (is nothing safe?): Post Like a Pirate (if you must).

Apparently you can win $5 on Twitter, just for knowing stuff. Who says Twitter's a waste of time?*

Because poking's not nearly annoying enough for just the one social network: Twaction.

An (almost) daily Twitter themed comic strip.

Why use Twitter to roll dice? I don't know... because you can?

And if all that was too exciting for you; well, you should probably get out more. If it's raining again, though, you could always calm down with a quick meditate: at selected time intervals InnerTwitter will send you reminders to 'Stop. Listen. Pay attention to what is before you.' (Also handy if you are out, and crossing a road, probably).

Next post: almost certainly something other than a collection of links; I should have a bit more time next week, hopefully.


*not one of the questions.

Serves them right for Ikea, frankly

When search engine-friendly news copy and Twitter collide:



More word-based fun

If copious Twitter retweeting hasn't collapsed their server again, the Scrabble prone amongst you might have some fun over at DeepLeap. The aim of the game is to make words out of a stream of randomly appearing letters, with points deducted for non-existent words and not using up letters, and extra points awarded for consecutively correct words, longer words and clearing the board. Apparently it's still "just a demo" at this stage, but it's playable enough already - and presumably will only get even better.

(Link via Very Short List).

More Twitter watching

More news from the world of 140 characters...

Twitter clients

"The new Seesmic Desktop is a dream application for the frequent status updater" - Mashable

"TwitterGadget embeds a powerful Twitter client right into your Gmail account" - Micro Persuasion

"With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, add multiple editors, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success" - indirectly via @BenOkri

Twitterary news

"We need to get more across in fewer words. The Twitter poem tries to respond to this and the feeling of freedom" - Ben Okri in the Guardian

"Resonance FM are inviting writers to participate in the development of a new play for radio, with dialogue entirely sourced through Twitter" - BBC writersroom

The t(w)ipping point?

"Is the G20 summit a turning point for Twitter?" - Daily Telegraph blogs

"Twitter traffic explodes... And not being driven by the usual suspects!" - comScore

"Twitter growing twice as fast as Facebook" - AllFacebook blog

Twittercide?

"Did Demi Moore's Twitter feed stop a suicide?" - abcNews

Twitter + Courtney Love = lawsuit

"Clearly, it's possible to defame someone in very few words" - MediaPost

1/4/09

"Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink" - Guardian

"We've created an unprecedented partnership with Twitter to build a
platform for publishing Guardian content on Twitter: We call it Gutter" - Guardian (love the WordPress bit)

"Keeping the most complete list of April Fools' Day Jokes that Web Sites have run since 2004" - @AprFoolsDay

More light relief

Because tweets are just too long:

(via Mashable)


Twitter founder Biz Stone on The Colbert Report:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Biz Stone
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

(via Mashable)