The Twitter green-out

Anyone stumbling across Twitter for the first time right now could be forgiven for wondering what exactly is wrong: Are people ill? Are they collectively envious of something? Perhaps there's been an outbreak of Incredible-Hulkism? Or maybe everyone's just getting a bit jaded with it all at last?

Actually, Incredible-Hulkism might be the best answer: people got angry and turned green, or at least their Twitter avatars did, in symbolic support of those protesting what is widely being seen as a rigged election in Iran. But, as a number of people have asked, what exactly does this achieve? Anything?

The cynical answers first (since it's always nicer to end on a high): it makes us in the West feel better; it makes us feel like we're doing something; it is (quite literally) the least we can do. Perhaps too it's something along the lines of the theories ventured at the time of the death of Princess Diana: people want to feel connected to something more dramatic, important, or meaningful than their own small, increasingly individual and isolated lives.

Frankly, I have no idea whether it's any of those things, but I can imagine them being suggested by the usual assortment of commentators. Myself, I've actually turned my avatar green, and to be honest I'm not entirely sure why.

At first it started to occur to me that maybe everyone else who'd turned green would (wrongly) assume I was in disagreement with them. Then I decided that just because I couldn't entirely see the point it didn't mean that there wasn't one, and anyway, it's just a couple of mouse clicks, so I might as well do something rather than absolutely nothing. If it achieves anything, great; if not, never mind.

Even so, none of this explains what it was hoped that making Twitter resemble some collective absinthe hallucination might actually achieve.

The first thing of this order that I remember is a day on which everyone was supposed to wear red in support of the Burmese monks and Aung San Suu Kyi. Again, I didn't entirely see the point, but I think the idea was that photos would appear on Flickr and the Burmese would know that the rest of the world was behind them and that we cared about what was happening.

More recently, there was the Twitter blackout, protesting against draconian internet regulation plans in New Zealand. Apparently, despite much skepticism, this proved successful (or played some part in the resultant climbdown), and maybe that's why the strategy has been revived in the wake of the Iran elections. However, it does seem that applying that same strategy to the present situation is somewhat of a category error; like assuming that because you've found that 2+2 = 4 and 2+3 is also a mathematical problem it must also have the same answer. Just because one government is likely to pay attention to what amounts to an international online petition, doesn't mean another one will.

But I doubt anyone really expects that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will give in to a small army of sickly looking Twitter avatars - unless, perhaps, he assumes them to bear him some kind of virtual swine fever. So I guess the aim here is closer in spirit to the wear-red-for-Burma day: to show any Twitter-engaged protesting Iranians, and their ex-patriate friends and relatives, that there is a wider international support for their cause. Or anyway at least enough that people will click a mouse a couple of times.

But again I veer towards cynicism.

The truth is, I still don't really know exactly what these kind of protests achieve, or exactly why my Twitter avatar is now tinted a misty green. All I can really say is that since the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, et al, it's almost as easy to register at least some small protest as not to, on pretty much any topic, whether it be about the disappearance of your favourite chocolate bar or about the disappearance of civil liberties. What, if any, the impact might be doubtless varies wildly according to the nature of the issue, but at least it allows you to do something, no matter how infinitessimally small - and perhaps it even allows you to take part in proving yourself wrong. I hope so.


A random bit of balance: At least one person isn't so sure Twitter's been a helpful voice in the Iranian situation: yes, it spreads information fast, but what happens when that's false information?

Digital Britain: The Debrief

The government's final Digital Britain White Paper was published on schedule yesterday, despite speculation that it would be delayed due to the mayhem caused by the recent expenses scandal and the surprise resignation last week of its author, Lord Carter.

The main points - and shortcomings - of the report have been well covered in the media, so there's no need to reiterate them here.

Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC, for example, has a nice, clear analysis of why the actions outlined in the report are very unlikely to put Britain at the top of the global broadband league - despite Gordon Brown's insistence that they will, while Bryan Glick at Computing takes a more positive view.

But I did just want to put on record the debrief that I gave to the Cornwall Social Media Café last night. Last month I co-ordinated the CSMC's response to the interim Digital Britain report and our recommendations for consideration in the final report, as part of the series of Digital Britain Unconferences that took place around the country.

At the time I wasn't confident that our response would have any effect. But as it turns out, it does seem to have helped to make a concrete difference to the government's proposals, and is even explicitly acknowledged on page 10 of the final report itself.

Here's the debrief more or less as I delivered it last night:

The final Digital Britain report – all 245 pages of it – was published today and announced in Parliament by the new culture secretary Ben Bradshaw.

The report takes into account the recommendations made by the twelve Digital Britain Unconferences that took place last month, one of which we had here in Vertigo Bar at our last CSMC meet on the 12th May.

The aim of those conferences was to provide last-minute feedback and recommendations to the government ahead of the final report. Our feedback was based on the recommendations outlined in the Digital Britain interim report published in January.

Our feedback focused mainly on the government’s proposal to deliver 2MB/s broadband to everyone in the country by 2012. We felt that this would put rural areas at a disadvantage as some urban areas already benefit from ‘next-generation’ broadband speeds of 20MB/s or more provided by the likes of BT and Virgin Media.

We said that if the government left it up to the market to provide next generation broadband, rural areas would fall behind as it is unprofitable for BT and Virgin to lay fibre to remoter communities. We urged the government to take a more active role in ensuring that everyone could have access to next-generation speeds.

The good news is that the government has taken this feedback on board, and they no longer plan to leave the rollout of next-gen broadband up to the market.

The bad news (depending on how you look at it) is that it seems we’ve been instrumental in creating a new tax. Everyone with a fixed phone line will pay 50p a month to create a new public fund for the rollout of next-generation broadband across the country. (Vulnerable people will be exempt.)

Personally I think 50p a month is a small price to pay to ensure that rural communities and other ‘notspots’ can keep pace with urban centres. Others may not agree! And some people think that the funds will take a long time to raise, and rural areas may not see their super-fast broadband till 2017 by some estimates.

But the bottom line is that we provided feedback and the government listened. Because of that, the rollout of next-gen broadband across the whole country should be faster and more extensive than it would have been had we not provided our input as part of the Digital Britain Unconferences. So I think we can all be quite proud of ourselves.

Further Resources

Full text of the Cornwall Social Media Café's response to the Digital Britain Interim Report

Summary of the amalgamated reports from all 12 Digital Britain Unconferences

Full collated reports from all 12 Digital Britain Unconferences

The full, final Digital Britain White Paper

Thanks

Thanks go to Kathryn Corrick, Tom de Grunwald, Bill Thompson and Alastair Duncan for instigating and co-ordinating the Unconferences and editing and submitting the collated report, and to Aren Grimshaw and Laura McKay for agreeing to hold a Digital Britain Unconference during the May CSMC meet and for allowing me the time to deliver the debrief last night.

Twitter: inspiring underinformed journalism throughout the land

Twitter, much like Jonathan Ross, seems to have quite a knack for annoying certain people. Cue inevitable snooty article in The Independent's Friday Review section, then, upon the news of @wossy's Twitter based Book Club. "The very idea!" you can almost hear Boyd Tonkin snorting, while failing to properly research his article. In fact, what he actually said was

It sounds like some belated April Fool's gag designed to tickle every exposed nerve of anxiety, greed and fashion-victimhood in the palsied frame of the book business.

But that phrasing probably came a bit later.

It's not the choice of the first book to be read that seems to have got his goat (sorry); or even entirely that Jonathan Ross was behind it; rather, his main issue seems to be that Pan MacMillan were craven and obsequious enough to make it "alarmingly for authors, briefly available as a free download".

The thing is, they actually didn't. And nor did Jon Ronson appear at all alarmed (or no more than usual).

What actually happened was: on the back of Ross's recommendation a paper copy of The Men Who Stare At Goats became almost impossible to get hold of; to meet the demand an e-book was swiftly made available as a paid for download, on Exact Editions; and only for the hour during which the @atwossybookclub Twittering was to take place was a copy available for free, though even then only to read and refer to online, not to download. Which all strikes me as, in fact, a commendably quick reaction; one that for the participants of the book club at least might have actually put the book industry into quite a decent light.

As for the suitability of Twitter as a venue for book club discussion, even Jonathan Ross isn't claiming it's ideal - at least not unextended.

Tonkin's real beef, though, it seems, is with the British publishing industry; which he seems to think is focusing too much on the gadgets on which we will be reading our books, rather than on creating the readers who will read them - the way Pan MacMillan pandered to the Ross book club (or at least that was the story as Tonkin understood it) is just another example of their short-termism; a quick fix. But even here his argument seems to have got a bit confused: doubtless British publishers do need to think about how to "nurture fresh readerships", especially in certain genres, but surely the proliferation of different reading devices, from the Kindle to mobile phones, is a big part of the answer, rather than a distraction?

Imagine, for instance, this article on the humourous bits of Haydn - but read on a device that could supply in-context MP3s. At present, it alienates anyone lacking a certain level of understanding of musical theory, but being able to instantly hear what's being described would bring a whole new reading experience; perhaps a whole new readership - the until now only Classically-curious.

Moreover, the Exact Editions e-book platform mentioned above, which makes it possible to link to and cite individual pages of the text, is if anything evidence of the publishing industry trying to nurture new readerships - for people who might be unable to attend an offline book group, Exact Editions could be used as a common edition, then a forum set up, and problem solved. Indeed other e-book platforms, as demonstrated by the Golden Notebook Project, go even further towards enabling communal reading online.

Whether there are enough of such initiatives, however, Tonkin I'm sure knows better than me, and there's doubtless a valuable article to be written on the matter. But harumphing about a book club on Twitter, that boosts sales and brings fresh readers to a work like Leaves of Grass, or indeed to graphic novels, really isn't the way to start it.

Back to the future...

More specifically, the future of news; a topic we've featured on this blog a couple of times this month. Following up on those posts, then, here are a couple of podcasts to download.

The BBC's ever wonderful Pods & Blogs has twice this month devoted a chunk of its weekly podcast to discussions and developments around the future of news. Most recently, this week's edition spent some time at the recent Media140 conference (on the future of real-time news) talking to folks from The Daily Telegraph and Reuters, as well as interviewing Guy Degen, who uses mobile technology and social media to enable his numerous freelance reporting endeavours.

For more on Media140 and some of the speeches and interviews just follow the link.

Going back a couple of weeks, Pods & Blogs was also at the JEEcamp unconference (JEE = Journalism Enterprise and Entrepreneurship), an event which describes itself as

an opportunity for a range of people to get together to talk about how on earth journalists and publishers can make a living from journalism in the era of free information, what the challenges are, and what we've learned so far.

An interview with JEEcamp's founder Paul Bradshaw kicked off the week's podcast, before attention was turned to the potential fate of newspaper cartoonists, Matthew Buck and Alex Hughes of The Bloghorn, the digital cartoon blog of The Professional Cartoonists' Organisation, being asked how media developments are starting to affect them and in what ways they and their colleagues are responding.

The show may still be available for download at iTunes; but if not, you can download it from this temporary drop.io link.

For more information about the JEEcamp, this article at Guardian Tech looks helpfully peppered with links.

Anyway, enjoy! (And maybe follow the show on Twitter).

Could advertising be the new publishing?

To follow, after the video: Unwitting semi-prescience. Oversimplified economics. Early printing presses. AdBlock Plus. The April edition of Bearded magazine. Repeated use of the word 'content' as a noun. The Credit Crunch (but only in passing). Bill Hicks (ditto).

I was going through my phone the other week; apparently last May I thumbed a short note on it to the effect: "If this is an information/knowledge economy, and information is so available as to be almost worthless (assuming the traditional economic model, supply and demand, the value of scarcity, etc.), then is everything just a worthless bubble kept aloft by advertising?" I wish I could say that that was me anticipating the Credit Crunch; instead, what I then went on to note was an intention to post my ramblings here, add a link to a video of Flogos, and make some silly quip about advertising itself now being nothing more than bubbles.

Yep, looking for the cheap joke, as ever.

Nonetheless, while that post didn't make it onto here (until now), there was at least the beginnings of a point in it: the extent to which the online economy is supported by advertising (cue link to Chris Anderson) - basically, it relies on it. HEAVILY. And most of us acknowledge that.

Yet, at the same time, ask most internet users what they think about online advertising and if you don't get the full Bill Hicks rant, complete with YouTube link (NSFW), you'll be lucky to hear anything more positive than "Well, you just put up with it, don't you?" To which the answer is, of course, "No, you don't," not if you know about Firefox extensions like NoScript, Adblock Plus, or Mozilla's new experimental add-on, Jetpack, all of which are about as friendly to ads as your average Rentokil operative to an infestation of rats - and unlike rat extermination, entirely free.

But, of course, that's not the full story - online advertising certainly isn't seen by everyone as entirely akin to an unwanted infestation.

Many of us, without really even thinking about it, judge a site's legitimacy on the quality of its advertising - at the very least, if we're being told by a flashing banner that we're its lucky millionth visitor (for the third time today), we're going to be less likely to trust what it has to say than we would be if the advert came from a company rich enough to place its logo on only the best sites. And then there's viral advertising - if something entertains us, makes us laugh, or otherwise engages us in some likeable way, not only will we be happy to watch or interact with it, but we'll pass it on, post the video to our blog, sign up to its Facebook page, or even post our own imitations on YouTube.

Why?

Essentially, because that brand has done a little more than simply try to persuade us to buy something we don't really need; it's actually had the courtesy to give us something in exchange for our time and attention, even if that's only a quick chuckle, or a moment of wonder before we realise that, "Wait? No! Those sheep couldn't possibly have been trained to do that! (Although it's still kind of cool anyway)." Yes, we know that by passing on a links to a viral we're helping an ad campaign, but if the ad's done something for us it feels like a fair exchange.

To frame it another way: we don't mind adverts that are more or less equivalent to content.

That's hardly a new observation. But is there something new that can be done with it?

Here's where Bearded magazine* comes into things: specifically, an advertising space raffle on the April edition's back cover. For £10, if you won the raffle, you could place whatever you liked in that space (and somewhere online) for a whole year. What came to my mind was to use it as a cheap way to publish and publicise some of my short stories, while perhaps collaborating with an illustrator friend so that my presumptions might at the very least be enjoyable to look at.

I never got around to it, alas, but again there was the beginning of an idea there (and this is the one I've been rambling towards here): could advertisers be about to further rehabilitate the short story?

(It seems to be always either about to die or about to be saved, so I'm assuming it's basically fine and just needs a new reason to get out of bed).

In many ways, advertisers already find themselves in much the same position as the owners of the early printing presses. Not by owning the means of production, but by having become so essential to the survival of those that do own it that at least a chunk of pretty much everything that gets published - both on and offline - is determined by them. So why not use some of this chunk to actually publish something? And why not short fiction?

Imagine a one-page short story in a newspaper's weekend magazine, perhaps by a well known author, attractively illustrated, with links to more similar stories online.  It's unexpected, it's worth reading, it's not in itself an ad, and it's not so long that you'd skip over it - any fiction lover would be delighted. And moreover, what potential customer wouldn't form a positive opinion of a brand that's not only giving this away, but in the process also supporting the arts?

Or online; imagine, as a small web ad, an intriguing first couple of lines next to an arresting image, the full story (and others) free and only a click away, on Brand X's website. It's intriguing enough to check out and, once there, short enough to be read online, yet still long enough to keep a potential customer on the site; it'll be linked to, it'll be discussed, and in the process the relevant brand will be seen and engaged with.

But what can be done with the short story is mostly just the scenario that interests me - and essentially what we're talking about here is just branded content anyway. Nonetheless, if advertisers were to explore publishing genuinely creative, web-friendly, short stories in ad spaces, and generally making more use of the form, I can't help feeling that they might find that they've hit on at least one more persuasive reason for today's web users not to just zap web ads into oblivion - and with them, perhaps, inadvertently, the Web as well.


*it's about music, not beards; quite often the two happen to intertwine, though.

Truro Digital Britain Unconference: Report

I hosted what turned out to be a great discussion about the government's Digital Britain Interim Report at the Cornwall Social Media Café meeting in Truro last night.

Many thanks once again to Aren Grimshaw and Laura McKay for organising an excellent event, to Jay Cochran for sourcing an excellent venue (Vertigo bar) and to Toby Parkins and UKNetWeb for paying for the food.

As promised, I wrote up the report from the event this morning and submitted it to Kathryn Corrick, the instigator and co-ordinator of the Digital Britain Unconference series that has been taking place across the country over the past couple of weeks. Kathryn will collate it with the reports from the other events and submit them all to the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR).

The full text of the report I submitted is below. As time was very tight (event finished at 9.15pm last night, and deadline for submission was midday today!) and as the report had to be two sides of A4 max, plus there was some mild dispute as to the actual nature and extent of the broadband infrastructure currently available to Cornwall, plus my knowledge of networking technologies is sadly not that profound, there may be some things from last night that I have missed or slightly misinterpreted.

But I believe it accurately encapsulates the overall direction and spirit of our collective response to the Government's proposals. Please feel free to correct anything that seems to be wrong, or to add any comments. And finally, many thanks to all who participated in what was a very interesting and lively debate.


Digital Britain Unconference Truro
Report Submitted by Fiona Campbell-Howes, Radix Communications Ltd, Penryn, Cornwall

The Truro Digital Britain Unconference took place on Tuesday 12th May 2009 within the second monthly meeting of the Cornwall Social Media Café (CSMC), a group of people from Cornwall’s business, local government, not-for-profit and academic communities who have an interest in using social media to network, form interest groups, conduct business, and share ideas, expertise and information.

Fifteen people attended the meeting, including representatives from Cornwall Council, Cornwall Development Company and Cornwall’s digital industry. It consisted of a brief introduction to the report delivered by Fiona Campbell-Howes, followed by an hour-long discussion of the main points affecting Cornwall and the country as a whole.

As time was tight, the group chose to focus on the most pressing aspect of the report, which is the enormous discrepancy between the first of Digital Britain’s five objectives:

"Upgrading and modernising our digital networks – wired, wireless and broadcast – so that Britain has an infrastructure that enables it to remain globally competitive in the digital world."

and its statement of action no. 17:

"We will develop plans for a Universal Service Commitment to be effective by 2012, delivered by a mixture of fixed, mobile and wireless means. Subject to further study of the costs and benefits, we will set out our plans for the level of service which we believe should be universal. We anticipate this consideration will include options up to 2Mb/s."

The group welcomes the Government's recognition that next-generation access (NGA) broadband will be essential to maintaining the country’s competitive position in a global digital economy.

However, the group is deeply concerned at the Government's intention to leave the rollout of NGA up to commercial providers such as Virgin and BT. It finds the USO of 2Mb/s by 2012 deeply inadequate for those who will not have access to NGA – not to mention embarrassing for the country as a whole. With countries like Korea already investing in a 1Gb/s broadband network by 2015, failing to keep up with developments in broadband technology will be economically suicidal for Britain, which, as the report notes, has already fallen to 12th place in the European Commission’s league table of digital adoption.

Particularly worrying is the following statement on p.19 of the Interim Report:

"If these [Virgin Media’s fibre-to-the-home network and BT’s 21CN fibre network] are carried to completion, we can reasonably expect at least half of the UK population to have access to NGA services and possibly a periphery around that – perhaps as much as 60% or more."

As a county with a high proportion of businesses and individuals based in rural areas, much of Cornwall will fall into the 40% or 50% (perhaps more, if BT and Virgin’s investments are not carried to completion) of the population that lies outside of the NGA services being rolled out by Virgin and BT.

The group anticipated that the resulting 'two-speed Britain' would have a detrimental effect on rural businesses not just in Cornwall but also across the country, as next-generation broadband fast becomes a prerequisite for conducting business and participating in 21st-century society.

In particular, the following points were raised:

Cornwall has been immensely fortunate to benefit from EU convergence funds for the county-wide rollout of first-generation broadband. The ActNow project has ensured that 10,000 businesses and 99% of people in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly now enjoy broadband download speeds of up to 8Mb/s (although actual speeds vary depending on distance from the nearest exchange, plus upload speeds are a fraction of download and are already not sufficient for some more rurally-based businesses who rely on transfer of large files, video streaming etc. – a warning of things to come).

This has allowed innovative businesses to be set up all over the county, giving a much-needed boost to the rural economy, reducing carbon footprint, employing people locally and enabling traditional and new industries alike to find customers across the country and across the world via the internet. ActNow says that "over 80% of businesses in Cornwall say that the Internet is now critical to their business."

Cornwall is therefore an excellent case study in how near-universal access to the latest broadband technology can regenerate and revitalise not just urban areas but an entire county. From farmers to web designers, florists to PR agencies, Cornish businesses have been transformed by universal broadband access, and the county as a whole has benefited.

Far from being the brave step into the future envisaged by the Government, the 'vision' outlined in the Digital Britain Interim Report will actually set Cornwall *back* to where it was in 2002. Businesses currently based in rural areas would be forced to relocate to urban areas served by NGA networks. This would put pressure on roads and transport networks, cause currently-vibrant small towns and villages to stagnate, and have a detrimental impact on the environment by increasing commuting.

In Cornwall, NGA is currently envisaged for just Truro and Falmouth – and that will be thanks to EU convergence funds, not commercial market drivers. (NB Virgin Media is not present in Cornwall at all.) The group felt that Cornwall was fortunate compared with counties that do not benefit from EU funding, and that the myopic ‘vision’ of a 2Mb/s ‘Digital Britain’ could set their economies back even more.

Conclusion

Members of the Cornwall Social Media Café believe that a USO of 2Mb/s (especially where upload speeds will be a fraction of that) is insufficient for Britain’s economy today, let alone in 2012. Handing over the rollout of NGA entirely to the market means that half the country will soon find itself unable to compete effectively in the national/global economy, losing out to urban areas and other countries that enjoy next-generation broadband access. Thousands of businesses will find themselves set back years.

In conclusion, the rollout of NGA cannot be left up to the market. CSMC urges the Government to reconsider this decision and to actively explore ways to invest now in an NGA infrastructure on which the prosperity and economic future of the whole country – not just its towns and cities – can be built.

Digital Britain Cornwall Unconference Tonight - More Thoughts

Some more thoughts ahead of the Digital Britain discussion at tonight's Cornwall Social Media Café meetup:

Our aims will be the same as the Birmingham Digital Britain Unconference taking place today - you can read them and listen to the live stream of the event here. That is, to prepare a response from Cornwall to the Digital Britain report before tomorrow's deadline for feedback

The main thing that strikes me is that the government's 'vision' for Digital Britain is so limited that it doesn't even reflect where things are at in Britain *today*, let alone in 2012.

Some of its principal points seem to be as follows:

2. By 2012 the everyone in the country must have access to broadband download speeds of <2Mb (there's no word on upload speeds).

3. Digital content (television, radio) will still be produced by the existing big media companies, but more of us will be watching television via things like the BBC iPlayer and listening to radio via DAB radios.

4. Most digital content will continue to be produced in London, except where public service broadcasting remits mandate that a proportion of content is produced in 'the regions'.

5. There will be a high-speed (20-50Mb) broadband infrastructure, but it will only be available in areas where it makes commercial sense for operators like BT and Virgin to offer it. Everyone else - small towns, villages, rural areas - will have to make do with the standard 2Mb connection.

5. Ordinary people will not produce their own digital content; they will only consume the content produced by big media companies. They won't need fast broadband upload speeds, because they won't produce anything to upload. People will really only use the internet to receive information and content from big media companies and the government itself.

6. If people do want to upload content, it will probably just be pirated stuff, so there needs to be a framework that protects big media companies from illegal uses of copyrighted material and does a better job of identifying and punishing offenders.

7. Despite all this, the internet and digital broadcasting networks will somehow be the saviours of the British economy and a framework for commercial and social innovation that will make Britain the envy of the world.

How Should Cornwall Respond?

As we have an opportunity to influence government thinking, I think we ought to show to the government that digital innovation can and does exist outside London and the big media companies.

On the back of that, I think we should argue that a two-speed digital economy (some areas on next-generation networks, some areas not) is not only a bad thing for those people and businesses who are based outside urban centres, it's also a bad thing for the country's economic prospects as whole.

To do this I think we should highlight some good case studies of recent digital innovation in Cornwall: whether by individuals, groups (even CSMC itself), commercial businesses, social enterprises or educational institutions.

From this we could and make a case for how much *more* innovative and prosperous Cornwall could be if the county had access to the same kind of high-speed broadband infrastructure (for both upload and download) as major urban areas. How many more jobs could be created, how many beneficial social enterprises could be set up, how many more vulnerable people could be helped, how much easier it could be to share knowledge, teach new skills etc.

Again, these are just starting thoughts for tonight's discussion - I look forward to hearing your thoughts (and to writing up and sending off Cornwall's submission tomorrow!)