Social Media
Ian Tomlinson, interactive maps and digital journalism
How interactive maps are being used in today’s journalism
Last week, Paul Lewis, a Guardian reporter, linked to a piece of collaborative journalism that he had been working on and had just been published. ‘There can be no better example of how digital technology can hold the state to account than this,’ he wrote on Twitter.
The link in question directed readers towards an interactive map, depicting the movements of the newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, who was unlawfully killed during the G-20 Summit protests in the City of London in 2009.
The interactive map is a clever, clear, accessible piece of journalism. The protestors and police are plotted, mostly huddled about Bank tube station; Ian Tomlinson’s path is shown, zigzagging along St Swithans Lane and on his ill-fated route to Cornhill. PC Harwood’s numerous scuffles with protestors are also documented, starting in Cornhill and extending out to Threadneedle Street and into a side road, where he met with Ian Tomlinson at 7.20 p.m.
Twenty different interactive boxes, beginning before and concluding after the incident between Tomlinson and Harwood, annotate the two men’s paths – all numbered in chronological order. The boxes contain captions, snippets of mobile video clips, CCTV outtakes and snatched photographs taken by protestors.
This is one of the most effective map mashups that I have seen. It portrays a clear yet raw account of what happened on 1 April 2009, using material from a range of non-traditional sources and stitching them all together with code and graphic design. The videos convey the brittle, hostile atmosphere of the day with an immediacy that is difficult to replicate with words. They also carry the additional benefit of being more faithful and incorruptible than human memory. When Paul Lewis claims that there is no better example of how digital technology can hold the state to account, I know what he means.
Interactive maps are a useful tool for journalists, for digital storytellers or for simply setting data out in a digestible way. It’s now more than six years since Google Maps launched and in that time they have been used for all manner of purposes with a steady stream of the latest creations featured on a site called Google Maps Mania.
Still, I wonder if journalists could make more use of these maps. Last week I saw Joseph Stashko give a great example of how a Google Map could be used to visualise the results of local elections in Preston. And there are other tools too, such as UMapper, which allows users to create maps with more flexibility – from basic embeddable maps, to maps of tweets, to specially-tailored weather forecasts and so on.
I’ll finish this post off with a nod to the British Library. Though not a journalistic outlet, they seem to have taken to digital with surprising comfort over the last few years. At the last count they had something like 16 blogs from experts that covered a range of topics. They have released a beautiful iPhone App, which includes material from their ‘treasures collection’, and, during the last of their exhibitions, they produced an interactive map of their own.
The Evolving English Voice Map is a patchwork of different Audioboo recordings, all geo-plotted, that demonstrate different accents from around the world. Is a clever mix of new technology and ancient habits (the pleasure of looking over a map), and it works well. All those who participated were asked to read an extract of a Mr. Tickle story – recording it on their iPhone or computer. The result was a mass of submissions from all around the world, including one listed as Abbots Bromley England 1983 Male – I’ll let you guess who that is.
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Image credit: Chris JL on Flickr – Note, the photograph of the policemen above is not from footage of the G-20 riots in 2009.
The Decisive Moment – Flickr, the Royal Wedding and the Death of Osama Bin Laden
Night and Day
The royal wedding and the execution of Osama Bin Laden are a good reminder of how far the news agenda can lurch in the space of a couple of days. On Friday and during the weekend, the run was all for images of expensive dresses, dashing Rolls Royces, cheering crowds and flapping plastic flags. By Monday morning these pictures had been replaced by other more grisly ones, of Bin Laden’s very odd, stark hideaway in rural Abbottabad – his old rooms upturned in the chaos of the gunfight, his carpet smeared in blood, a smashed clock and half-full medicinal bottles on an empty shelf.
Among all the interesting coverage of both these stories are a number of images on Flickr. For some years governments, organisations, political parties and so on have been using Flickr as a medium to publish official photographs and images. A British Monarchy Photostream documents the doings of the royal family and, over the weekend, they uploaded a wide-range of wedding shots that include sets devoted to the balcony scenes, the RAF flyover and a specially-commissioned McVities Cake, which had been requested by Prince William.
More interesting than this, for several reasons, is the Official Whitehouse Photostream. The photos published here are the work of Pete Souza, a photographer who travelled across the Hindu Kush in 2001 to cover the fall of the Taliban and, in 2009, was appointed Official White House Photographer.
Pete Souza’s photographs are remarkably revealing and candid. They give a glimpse into the day-to-day life of the President and his aides, and also the decision-making processes behind important acts of government. The photo at the top of this piece is taken by Souza. It shows Obama, Vice President Biden and other senior members the administration receiving a briefing on Sunday night, a time that was described afterwards by counterterrorism adviser John Brennan as ‘one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time in the lives of the people who were assembled here.’
Souza’s photograph has appeared in the world’s press over the last few days. On a macro level, it is a perfect example of what the French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson referred to as the decisive moment. Obama is hunched forward on his chair, cold eyes on the screen. Hilary Clinton covers her mouth with a hand, concealing an expression which might either suggest shock or concentration. It feels like a decisive moment because the fate of the mission is not yet determined and, on a grander level, Obama’s hopes of re-election next year might even rest on its success.
Social media is helping to expose these moments, even at the top of society, and more transparency can only be a good thing. It connects people to the political process; shows the care and concern of those in power and encourages interaction. I’m writing this at a quarter to twelve in the morning of 4 May and, over the past few days, 1,621,516 people have viewed the image on Flickr – a staggering number.
Just about all of the White House’s images are available to be re-published by others, being licensed under a special category United States Governmental Work. In the UK all of the royal family’s photos and most of those from the Prime Minister’s Official Photostream are produced by the PA, and are therefore protected by copyright.
While I’m going with Flickr, I thought that I’d list some of the other interesting photostreams that are currently being updated. There are four here which are particularly useful for journalists, as they are licensed to be reused:
Metropolitan Police – Great images of events, vehicles and so on.
Cabinet Office – Good quality photos. They include useful profile shots of various politicians like Nick Clegg and Francis Maude
UK Home Office – Day to day work of the department.
HM Treasury – Really useful. Not just day to day work of the department, but also official graphs and stats.
And some others: (mostly unlicensed)
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Image credit – Official WhiteHouse on Flickr
Twitter art, Irkafirka and tweet #3125
Art, an octopus and social media
Strange things happen in social media. Last night was stranger than normal.
Yesterday morning I was using Twitter to complain about doing Excel spreadsheets at work. I felt, I said, like #afishoutofwater – or, I then wrote, exercising a Spanish idiom, ‘Como un pulpo en un garaje.’ – which translates into English as ‘Like an octopus in the garage.’
Less than 12 hours later a website called Irkafirka published this:
Oddly, I first saw the illustration moments after getting home from El Camino Spanish bar in King’s Cross. And waking up this morning I imagined that I’d probably had a little too much sangria – but, after checking, it’s quite real.
It all stems from an idea that Irkafirka’s founders have had to illustrate a random selection of tweets then publish them as quickly as possible. On their website, they write:
The Rules:
1. Irkafirka is as fresh as possible. We aim to post illustrations within 24 hours of the tweet that inspired them.
2. We are not aquainted with our chosen tweeters. Tweets are chosen by a random process of dipping in and out of the massive data deluge that Twitter has become.
3. Suggestions are warmly welcomed but almost certainly ignored. Which isn’t to say that we don’t have a price. You want a commission, you’ve got to pony up. Call it becoming a patron of the arts.
4. We aim to post illustrations daily, but we have jobs, family and cinema tickets, all of which have to take priority from time to time.
5. If we stop enjoying it, we’ll stop.
6. We can break any of the rules except 5.
There are more illustrations on their website. I think it’s a wonderful idea that will work brilliantly over time – just so long as they can keep it going.
I’m after a copy of my tweet #3125 to hang on the wall, and when I asked if I could buy the artwork they responded with:
Nothing more for me to say to irkafirka then, but THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND I BLOODY LOVE IT.
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Image from Flickr
The Internet: five years ago
2005: social media?
About five years after its launch, last Sunday evening, You Tube announced that they are now receiving two billion hits per day. On their official blog they wrote:
Five years ago, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com in May, with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself. [Link to full post]
Not only is the two billion milestone noteworthy, but the fact that the site is five years old is also well worth noting.
There’s a good argument that 2005 was the pivotal year in the shaping of the Internet as we know it. You Tube was founded, Mark Zuckerberg opened Facebook up to schools across America, and Yahoo acquired two year-old Del.icio.us and one year-old Flickr.
For the sake of nostalgia, here is what some of these websites looked like back then, five years ago.
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You Tube
Billed rather simply as a digital photo repository back in 2005 – their logo has hardly changed a bit in the last five years. The homepage design obviously owes quite a bit to Google’s, who, in any case, bought the site in November 2006 for $1.65 billion.
(Click on the picture above to expand to full size)
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Google
In 2005 Google was already looking fairly grown up and confident. Very few changes were made to this minimalist homepage design until just a few weeks ago.
You’ll spot here that back then Google were busy promoting Froogle, their price comparison service which was later rebranded as Google Product Search.
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Blogger
In May 2005, blogger was already six years old. Therefore it predates Web 2.0 and is one of a few notable survivors of the Dot Com Crash in 2000. It had been acquired by Google in 2003 and by the time of this screenshot it was by far the most popular blogging software available.
In May 2005 they launched Blogger Mobile, which allowed people to blog by text message –making them, by my reckoning, just about two years too early.
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WordPress
WordPress would supplant Blogger in popularity over the next few years. It’s interesting to note, however, their reasons for encouraging people to use their software. ‘You can stop sending mass emails to everyone’, ‘You can archive your thoughts’ and ‘Why the heck not?’
Indeed.
(Click on the picture above to expand to full size)
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Facebook
Facebook has retained this familiar feel from the start, but its evolution has been a little more complex than most.
Back in 2005 there were two Facebooks, one for people in college and one for people in high school. All the dots would be joined up over the next year as it began the march that would see it become the most popular site in America.
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The BBC
Back in 2005 I had never written a blog, had never used Facebook and only seen a handful of You Tube videos, but I was already mildly addicted to the Internet. And from a sunny Madrid and a fitful Internet connection, the BBC’s official site was where I spent most of my time.
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The Guardian
And 2005 was a time before guardian.co.uk existed. Back then it was known as the Guardian Unlimited – a website that promised such things as ‘All the headlines from today’s first edition.’
From that I suppose you can summise that the website was still being considered as some kind of digital reflection of the newspaper – and not really a strong publication in its own right.
(Click on the picture above to expand to full size)
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Flickr
Flickr now hosts more than four billion images and is the most popular image sharing site on the web. Back in 2005 PC World were offering them some kind words:
‘Cutting edge real-time photo sharing’, they said. They were right.
(Click on the picture above to expand to full size)
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And in 2006 … Twitter
Twitter didn’t exist in 2005 and it wouldn’t appear properly until more than a year or so later. Therefore it’s just tagged on to the end of this post. It’s a good demonstation of just what can be done in four years with a scruffily designed website, a clever idea and a willingness to stick with your logo through thick and thin.
(Click on the picture above to expand to full size)
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Top image credit: TonVC on Flickr
Screen shots pulled out of the Way Back Machine
Andrew Sparrow on Live Blogging the General Election
14,000 words per day
It’s worth taking a moment to thank Andrew Sparrow for locking himself up in the Guardian’s offices for the last month and producing a great live blog of the General Election campaign and the eventual change of government.
He’s written an interesting piece on the practicalities of live blogging and how writing up to 14,000 words a day gave him a unique insight into the campaign. Sparrow’s a fan of the art and so am I. Live blogging is another skill that should be incorporated into practical journalism qualifications.
Interestingly, he writes:
“If journalism is the first draft of history, live blogging is the first draft of journalism.”
It’s a great line, and it certainly has merit. But Sparrow’s blog was also a collection of information from elsewhere: quotes from MPs on Twitter, the recording of Gordon Brown and bigotgate on Audioboo, the photos of Cameron and the Queen on Twitpic and so on.
Therefore, perhaps I could amend Sparrow’s statement slightly and suggest that social media is the first draft of journalism?
Anyway. Here’s a very quick sketch of how news was reported throughout the General Election campaign.
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Image credit: C4Chaos
The General Election 2010. Ha ha ha.
Image credit: My David Cameron
How to laugh at a politician
On election morning I thought it’d be a good idea to look back at the last few months’ online political satire. I’m not sure that it has been quite the digital election that I was anticipating, with TV being, if anything, the defining medium, but the Internet has certainly added something.
And here is a quick round up of the best digital satire.
1. My David Cameron
A website set up in January this year by by Clifford Singer, creative director at Sparkloop graphic design agency, shortly after David Cameron’s heavily airbrushed face appeared on 759 billboards about the country.
The site received 90,000 unique visitors in two weeks, with anyone able to share their version of the Cameron poster.
2. #itsnicksfault
After a furious press turned on Nick Clegg for daring to become popular without their support, their negative headlines were ridiculed on Twitter as Rory Cellan Jones explains in this blog post. Some of his highlights being:
“Just had a giant chocolate eclair with cream. All #nickcleggsfault”
“We’ve run out of houmous #NickCleggsfault”
“Pompey not being allowed to play in Europe. #nickcleggsfault”
“Got rid of the wasp and a new wasp has arrived. #nickcleggsfault”
“I got my debit card stolen #nickcleggsfault”
3. Charlie Brooker in the Guardian
Charlie Brooker has been on enormously good form in the last few weeks. I think my favourite paragraph of his was this, just after the final leaders’ debate:
According to some polls, Cameron won, or at the very least tied with Clegg. Which is odd, because to my biased eyes, he looked hilariously worried whenever the others were talking. He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to wee through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact. Perhaps that’s just the expression he pulls when he’s concentrating, in which case it’s fair to say he’d be the first prime minister in history who could look inadvertently funny while pushing the nuclear button.
[Charlie Brooker - BBC debate was a cross between Songs of Praise and Over the Rainbow]
4. The Daily Mash
Odd and shocking as ever, the writers at the Daily Mash have obviously enjoyed the fact that there is an election on:
Clegg to clean up politics using his personal bank account – [link]
BNP launches aryan spread – [link]
Brown to be turned into glue – [link]
5. The election debates and social media
As Shane Richmond explains here, watching the leaders’ debates with Twitter added an extra dimension to the whole thing. Facebook was pretty good too.
6. Matt on the General Election
A cross over from the mainstream media here, but it’s well worth checking out Matt’s bank of General Election cartoons at the Telegraph. There’s a particularly good one of David Cameron pestering a sleeping couple.
7. Nope
Currently doing the rounds on Twitter. Published in response to the Sun’s front page.
Image taken from Mattlays’ Twitpic.
UPDATE 8am: It’s only an hour since I posted this, but already Liberal Conspiracy are publishing lots of different variations of the Cameron frontpage. It’s an echo of the airbrush moment, and it’s interesting to wonder what effect it will have – if any – on polling day.
8. The Peter Mandleson Experience
And, lastly of all, this video of Peter Mandleson and Gordon Brown having a jam is quite brilliant.
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Right. Enough silliness – I’ve got to decide who to vote for.
On why Gordon Brown calling Gillian Duffy ‘a bigot’ sparked a perfect social media story
The perils of going out for a loaf of bread in Rochdale
Yesterday was an unusual day and one that Gordon Brown will never forget. Personally, I feel quite sorry for him. You can accuse him of being short-tempered, autocratic and blinkered if you will, but one thing that I don’t think Gordon Brown is, is disingenuous. Today that’s exactly how it looks and I hope it doesn’t become the slip that characterises the end of his career. That would be unfair.
As some people have already pointed out, Brown was dreadfully unlucky yesterday. The audio fell straight into the Rupert Murdoch’s hands rather than anyone else’s; the sound was sweet and crisp and Gillian Duffy turned out to be a respectable lady with the perfect background for the Tory press to exploit.
But there was also some other factors that combined to make the incident into a perfect social media story. Here they are:
1. Time
Brown closed his car door a little after midday and Andrew Sparrow reported that ‘Gordon Brown has been caught on a microphone…’ at 12.18pm.
Britons were sat before their computers with their lunch hours approaching – time to discuss, blog, tweet or whatever. For Gordon Brown there was another seven hours of campaigning to go before the evening, and the story had the whole day to play out.
2. Quality content
Shortly after Sky News producer Tami Hoffman had noticed, analysed then broadcast the audio it was being uploaded to streaming sites across the Internet. What’s more, it was high quality.
Within half an hour the video was featured on Brightcove and shortly after that it was uploaded to Audioboo and any newspaper or blogger could feature. With content to link to, people linked – circulating the story far quicker that the television could do alone.
3. Exposure
Social media excels when exposing perceived wrongs. Look at the Trafigura case last September or Jan Moir’s article about Stephen Gately’s death. Now here was the Prime Minister using scandalous language to describe a potential voter.
Just the type of thing to tweet about.
4. Narrative
The story lingered. First Gordon Brown was in Jeremy Vine’s radio studio, then he was back on his way to Rochdale, then he was in Gillian Duffy’s house and then he was on her doorstep, smiling like a Cheshire cat. Many newspapers live-blogged the whole thing and evening into the evening people were still tweeting about whether or not the Sun had paid £50,000 for a story.
It was very much like watching a long episode of Neighbours, albeit with deeper, Scottish accents. At 3.42pm, when Gilliam Duffy’s door swung open, Andrew Sparrow wrote something on the Guardian blog that summed it all up:
“Everyone: the door has opened. This is live blogging at its best. More follows.”
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Image credit: Downing Street
Digital directions and social media life expectancy
Making sense of it all
I’ve begun 2010 thinking a little about social media shelf life and the longevity of digital publications. Just how long will someone last on a particular social media site before they abandon it? How long could/should/might a blog trundle on?
These, I think, are interesting questions. We’re always told how to set things up on the Internet, but we’re very rarely told when to finish something. When is it time to stop?
When it comes to blogs, it seems, far too many are launched with the assured expectation that they are going to roll gloriously onwards into infinity. Therefore they usually evolve to the same familiar rhythm – which often means beginning in an explosion of energy before generally trailing off into obscurity.
I’ve already blogged here about the enjoyable experience of completing the Camervroom blog. It was a happy experience for a number of reasons: that I was experimenting with new technologies, that I was working from unfamiliar surroundings, and (importantly) that I knew that it was a temporary thing.
Camervroom had a very simple narrative arc. It started with the preparations of the car, continued with launch and the journey and concluded at the finish. There was one wrapping up post from my home in Islington and then that was it. Finished.
To end a blog off in that manner was satisfying. A little like finishing a book and slipping it back into the bookshelf, or sending a completed publication away the printers.
You’re left with a sense of achievement and the knowledge that you can take whatever it is that you’ve learnt on to the next project. The nagging blogger’s noose – the one that tends to appear after you’ve exhausted your first creative spurt – is gone, and because your blog is based over a shorter period of time you can ensure that it conforms to that most important of blogging essentials: that it stays niche.
Ok, jumping from one project to another means that you’ll forgo the benefits of pouring all your efforts (and Googlejuice) into a single domain, but as long as you keep your Twitter feed reasonably well updated then it will be easy to signpost new work and take your readership around the web with you.
This, I suppose, is why I think that Twitter will endure. It is the nerve that runs through all of our online projects, knitting them together and giving them context.
It’s understandable that many established (and very good) bloggers are, through page rank, brand recognition and emotional loyalty, wedded to their domains – but it doesn’t mean for those that are just starting out that it is the only way.
Moving from one carefully crafted web project to another is an underused alternative approach to digital publishing that might well suit those who are looking for a dalliance, and wanting to avoid a millstone.
Something to think about, at least.
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Image Credit: PhotoGraham
Politics and Social Media
I’ve already written about paid search and politics, but a far more obvious digital tool for politicians over the next few months is social media.
It’s an obvious and efficient way of politicians (and budding politicians) engaging with their constituents or target audiences to get their message across. Some good examples being:
Ed Fordham’s website
Alastair Campbell’s Blog
Iain Dale’s Diary
Tom Watson’s Twitter Feed
Watching each of these grind into motion over the last year has been interesting and this week it has been satisfying to get a bit of social-media-political-attention for myself.
Clowns and Parks
I live in Islington, just off Pentonville Road. Opposite my flat is Joseph Grimaldi Park, named after the man who invented the identity for the modern clown and who, Joe Frankenstein contends in a recent book, was the very first celebrity.
For interest, here is a snippet about Grimaldi:
Grim-all-day
A man goes into the doctor’s. ‘Doctor,’ he says, ‘can you help me? Life doesn’t seem worth living, and I am shrouded in constant gloom.’ ‘My good man,’ says the doctor, taking a look at the melancholy face before him, ‘there is only one cure for you. You must go to see Grimaldi the clown.’ ‘Sir,’ replies the patient, ‘I am Grimaldi the clown.’
Depressed or not, Grimaldi was a sensation and two centuries on his bones lie in the park opposite my flat.
All good and interesting until workmen arrived a month ago and dug it upside down.
After weeks of muddied shoes and sharp clatters from beyond the window, I wrote on Twitter:
“Oh. And congratulations to Islington Council for transforming the lovely Joseph Grimaldi Park into something that resembles a bowl of porridge”
It was about as much as I had time to say on the subject. It wasn’t a concern but it was an irritant. The kind of latent issue that a councillor/politician would never get to hear about in a letter or at a public forum, but which they might just find out about if they took the time to study the Internet.
And well done to Bridget Fox for doing just that. Within the hour I received an @tweet informing me about plans for the park and estimated deadlines and this morning it was followed up by a blog post.
If you glue those two things together it adds up to about as much direct engagement I’ve had with a politician for years. Mostly my fault, I know – but a lesson for politicians nonetheless. If you want to dig beneath the surface (pun intended) and engage with the apathetic masses – then social media is a pretty good way to go.
I suppose it would be glib and rather self-absorbed of me to suggest that I was going to vote for a politician because I’ve appeared in one of their blog posts. But in a world of beeping computers, identity numbers and automated messages it is comforting to communicate with another directly. And when it comes down to it, that might just make the difference.
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Image Credit: Rich Lewis
The Battle of Trafigura
A memorable day for the British media
A good day for the British media. A good day for press freedom. A good day for the Guardian and, especially, its editor, Alan Rusbridger.
Briefly written, here’s what happened.
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I’ve little to add that hasn’t already been mentioned elsewhere, but here’s a thought.
Today we saw old and new media working together. Newspaper editors and journalists were interacting with bloggers and twitterers. There were articles, blogs and tweets – all repeating the same message over and over and over again.
There was an unfamiliar sense of unity. The idea that if the media worked as one it could defend a principle that it felt strongly enough about.
And after years of new and old media growling at each other from different corners of the same room, this was something new.
An important principle has been defended – and that is the most important point of all. But perhaps it is worth noting that some bridges might just have been built in doing so.
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image credit: Ricky David
Social Media Profiles
Digital You
A short post, but a useful one (I hope).
Any digital identity needs consistency and coherence. So whenever we have a new starter at work I always ask them to secure their online profiles across the most important social media sites.
But which ones? Um. These, I reckon:
1. WordPress (importantly)
2. Tumblr (for blogging)
3. Vimeo (for video)
4. Flickr (for images)
5. Delicious (for bookmarking)
6. Twitter (pointless little messages)
7. Audio Boo (for audio recording)
8. Posterous (for blogging)
9. Friend Feed (an aggregator)
10. You Tube (for video)
So there you go. You’ll notice that facebook isn’t on the list, as to my mind it isn’t really too useful for work. I just hope your name isn’t Peter Moore, or I might just have annoyed you.
But have I missed anything obvious?
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image credit: JMC Photos
Jonathan Agnew, the Observer and a Social Media Scrap
A view from the boundary
This is an interesting tale. I’ll just report the facts of the recent public fall out between Will Buckley of the Observer newspaper, and Jonathan Agnew, the BBC’s cricket correspondent.
Here we go.
Saturday 22 August:
Jonathan Agnew (affectionately known as Aggers) interviews Lilly Allen (the pop star) live on Test Match Special during the lunch break of the final Ashes test at the Oval. (Listen to the audio here)
Sunday 23 August:
An article is published in the Observer by Will Buckley (the Observer’s senior sports writer), describing the interview. The article is called When Aggers met Lily: an unrequited love affair for the middle-aged, and it included the following paragraphs:
“And, finally, it arrived but when it did so, and as is so often the case, Agnew/Allen turned out to be more about the interviewer than the interviewee as Aggers attempted to walk the dangerously thin line between benevolent uncle and desperate middle-aged man panting on the edge of the dance floor. He failed. “You weren’t even born then, oh dear” and “I’d have thought you’d be more of a one-day girl” and “I’m quite getting into your music” and “I’ve been out there and played a bit” and “it’s just destined to be” and “is this what you expected to find up here” and “we might go and see Warney later” – all suggesting that Aggers had positioned himself firmly on the pervy side of things.
“It had all, as with so many putative celebrity couplings, started with a tweet. Aggers was alone in a stand in Edgbaston. He was lost, but he was found. “We keep plugging the Twitter because it’s good fun,” said Aggers, who went on, not to put too fine a point on it, to admit that he has been stalking the young singer ever since the third Test. So it was that he knew Lily had bought a watch which … wait for it … “didn’t fit”. “It looked big,” was the Aggers verdict.”
Monday 24 August:
Jonathan Agnew writers on Twitter:
- I gave Will Buckley 24 hrs to aplogise for calling me a pervert, and he has declined.
- If you feel moved by this his boss is brian.oliver@observer.co.uk well, as you can imagine, I have taken being called a pervert quite badly.
- and you should hear how he described readers of theObserver to me……
- I will tell you how he described his readers (you) if he fails to print a total apology to me and my family on Sunday
- Don’t want him sacked…just an apology
[Five tweets over a 15 minute period, the last at 11:16 PM ]
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Meanwhile, more and more comments are left by readers of the Observer at the bottom of Buckley’s piece. Most of them attacked the writer for a ‘jealous’ and ‘nasty’ attack. You can read a long list of them here.
Tuesday 25 August:
The Observer receive more comments about the article throughout the morning and at around ten o’clock Lilly Allen publishes the following on her Twitter page:
- I rerally [sic] think this Will Buckley guy should apologise to @aggerscricket, he was nothing but kind and gentlemanly to me during our interview
- i dont know 1 person that agrees with The Observer on this one. Maybe this is Buckleys attempt at creating a name for himself as the demise
- of the Observer Monthlys(including Sport) are imminent. Sorry @aggerscricket , i should have left you all alone
[Three tweets over a 10 minute period]
At 2:48 p.m., the Telegraph publish the following article: Lily Allen defends Jonathan Agnew over ‘pervert’ slur
Meanwhile Jonathan Agnew writes on Twitter at around midday:
- “Apparently a statement from Buckley will be appearing soon in the comments under his “article””
At 3:15 pm Will Buckley publishes the following response in the comments’ section:
My, what a commotion. Before the tone becomes even more shrill I would like to apologise to Jonathan and his family for any offence caused by this article. It was intended to be a skit on Aggers and Tuffers and the cult of celebrity but has obviously not been received in this way. The joke missed. As they so often do in the blogosphere.
That said, it should perhaps be pointed out that at no stage did I describe Jonathan as a pervert. I am unlikely ever to be in a position to comment on Aggers’ sexual proclivities and even if I did find myself so placed I wouldn’t dream of doing so. The word I used was ‘pervy’ which to me is a Benny Hill style word rather than one to be taken too seriously.
There is also, it goes without saying, no foundation in my claim that Aggers is jealous of Tuffers. Who could be jealous of Tuffers? This was merely a piece of whimsy based on Jonathan being slightly pompous and huffy when Phil refused to become caught up in the excitement about Lily Allen coming to the TMS box and delivered his wonderful Denis Bergkamp line.
As I have written many times before, TMS is my favourite sports programme and I can’t wait for the team, tweets and all, to be broadcasting from South Africa.
Wednesday 26 August:
More comments followed Buckley’s apology overnight and the following morning Jonathan Agnew writes, once again on Twitter:
- “Just for record, am leaving it to the Obs Sports Ed to decide if that apology is sufficient. But what an eye-opener this has been for all to the power of new media. It is here and will change the way news is responded to, in particular. This showed what twitter can do. Thanks
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It’s an interesting story, with a few unlikely participants.
Firstly, it is interesting that a cricket commentator (see previous post) turned to social media to express his anger rather than a more traditional media channel, and, secondly, it is worth pointing out that Buckley blames all of the ‘commotion’on the blogosphere (curiously he does not think his article has much to do with it) in his apology. He writes:
“The joke missed. As they so often do in the blogosphere.”
This naive – and rather dismissive – sentence betrays Buckley as someone who still hasn’t quite got it. And it also reminds me of a blog post written by Graham Holliday on his Noodlepie blog which is simply titled ‘Wankers’.
Nearly three years ago, he wrote:
“I came across this quote which perfectly sums up the clash of old and new mindsets – I’ve added links to make it a wee bit more understandable.I do get the sense that the Guardian’s columnists are simply not used to this kind of medium, they are not used to getting feedback in public where they can’t just hit ‘delete’ to get rid of a pesky critic.
Suw …. likened such old school thinking to this:
It’s like them walking into a pub, making their pronouncements and then walking out. Later, they are shocked to find out that everyone is calling them a wanker.
Nowt new. I just love the last two sentences. Perfect.”
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image credit: speckled jim
The Ashes – a few digital observations
The Ashes and digital media
So, England have won the Ashes and we have all turned up at work this Monday feeling unduly cheerful. I’ve even had a sensible conversation about cricket with a Spaniard – which underlines the gravity of the situation.
But let’s leave the cricket to one side and have a look at the effect of the series on digital media.
Firstly, as it was not available on terrestrial television people who did not have access to Sky were forced to find alternative ways of following the progress of the team. This meant listening to TMS online, watching the highlights later in the evening on Demand Five or following the live text updates on the BBC.
None of this is new, but the lack of straight TV coverage made people look around for alternatives. And when they found good places to watch/rewatch or listen to the action online, they would have also found more photos of the action, additional interviews, podcasts, blogs, videos, chat rooms and viewers’ polls. [See here or here]
Secondly, the series – which was played in stints of various days over the course of a month and a bit – encouraged social interaction online. People sent in their observations, their anxieties and their jokes, and they shared their photos and blogs while following the players and commentators on Twitter.
And one of the more surprising adoptions of Twitter came from members of the TMS team – a group of quite wonderful eccentrics that few would expect to understand any technology that had been introduced since around 1933. Here are some of their accounts:
And from Sky:
Not doing badly are they? – And it refutes one of the eight commonly used excuses for not using the web (“I leave social media to a younger generation. I’m too old.”)
The series also seems to have had a good effect on the BBC, and if you have a look at this round up of the Ashes series, you will see how they are beginning to share their Googlejuice by linking out to a range of external sites (mostly they are newspaper run websties).
This has not always happened, and if you believe in Jeff Jarvis’ link economy then this is a significant step forward. I wonder if they will soon start linking to blogs in the same way?
The Ashes is the kind of series that can change people’s habits. The nature of the sport is that you have to return to it, again and again, week after week – making it the perfect catalyst for altering behavioural patterns, and much more effective that a one-off football or boxing match.
I’ll finish this off with an excerpt from an email that I have just received from my Australian boss.
“Due to Australia’s unfortunate loss in The Ashes, I will be leaving the country on Wednesday evening and returning back to work on the 16th of September when hopefully everything has calmed down.”
I don’t feel sorry for him a bit.
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Update. Robin Goad, the Research Director for Hitwise UK has shown how much the Ashes have boosted the BBC and Sky Sports cricket websites.
image credit: fat mandy
Good Twittering/Bad Twittering
image credit: Julie Berlin
For the sake of brevity
Twittering in just 140 characters is an art. The challenge is to be succinct, interesting and informative or funny in one go. The goal is to spark a thought or prompt a reaction.
Good Twittering is like good subbing: drawing out interesting quotes, writing provocative headlines and framing a thought or a perspective.
All told, I’d estimate that with each Tweet you have around a second to catch a person’s attention. And if you fail repeatedly, you’ll just end up being ignored.
And as Twitter has grown, a new language has sprung up alongside it: clever ways of passing a message on quickly and effectively.
Some of the best have even forged their own individual style; one example of which would be @jemimakiss who regularly mimics the odd phrasing of the “I Can Has Cheezburger” website.
The FAIL game
More irritatingly, however, have been the appearance of Twitter clichés. Any regular user will quickly notice them and they are becoming more frequent. I’ll sketch three which annoy me here:
Firstly, people have started to carve each news story up into one of two categories: fails or wins (who knew that analysis could be so simple?).
It’s a simple formula: find a news story that you like and plant the word WIN (and possibly an explanation mark) next to it; if you don’t like the story, all you have to do is replace WIN with FAIL. It’s a terrible habit, and one which is getting increasingly popular.
Another favourite is to prefix a link to an opinion article with the phrase “what s/he said” – a very effective construction that only becomes annoying when you see it fifteen times a day.
Finally, and this is the one which will one day prompt me to great violence – is people going “nom, nom, nom” at lunchtime.
These are ways of sidestepping the linguistic challenge of writing something intelligible and fresh in just 140 characters. They are signs of bad Twittering in just the same way that “economic climate” and the “green shoots of recovery” would be symptomatic of stale financial journalism.
With all the fuss about Twitter as a platform or a medium (or whatever the hell it is), we might as well start thinking about what makes a bad tweet. And what doesn’t.
In defence of Twitter
image credit: It’s just a robin, me’nthedog
From all of the available evidence, you’d have to conclude that Twitter is a frightening little tool. Here’s an extract from an article written by Barbara Ellen in the Guardian at the end of March:
‘You can’t blame “yoof” for this one. People into Twitter are the same people who fell for MySpace, in turn the people who used to project their holiday snaps on to walls at dinner parties. Every generation throws them up – painful, self-promoting bores, uber-narcissists to the nth degree, so fascinated by their every dreary, pointless move they can’t believe we’re not.’
We should all commend Ms Ellen for having squeezed every drop of vitriol that she possesses into a single paragraph, but why, you might ask, did she bother? It’s not as if people have been sandpapering under her armpits or clattering saucepans on her head. No. There’s obviously something about Twitter which is much worse than that.
Twitter, for the benefit of those readers that have been living in a cave for the past year, is an online social networking tool – the latest achievement of web 2.0 that has already given us Flickr, My Space, Facebook and Spotify. It allows you to publish short updates of 140 characters or less, and enables you to reply to questions and link to stories. It’s a deceptively simple tool that was used to great effect by Barack Obama as part of his election strategy last year, and ever since hundreds of thousands of others have joined in his slipstream, causing its number of overall users to leap swiftly upwards week after week ever since.
The golden-age of the uber-narcissist
I’ve long been of the opinion that there are three attitudes that one can take to new technology. Firstly you can ignore it and hope that it goes away. The second, and by far the most British way, is to laugh at it, claim that it is inadequate, infantile and nothing better than an idle waste of your precious time. And thirdly, you can try to understand it, and – if you can – use it.
I’m not advocating Twitter for everyone, but I’ve seen enough of it to state that it is useful. You can use it as a news feed, as a forum for discussion, a medium for connecting with interesting people and a way of promoting your own material. Twitter is the outgoing, liberal sibling of Facebook. Your network is not merely confined to old school and university friends, but can be handpicked to suit whatever you want. In my case I’ve journalists, photographers, charity workers, politicians and comedians that I can listen to and learn from whenever I switch it on.
But for Ellen these are no redeeming qualities. For her Twitter is just another symptom of ‘the golden age of the uber-narcissist’. It’s another nail in the coffin of the private self; a further silly Internet tool with a ludicrous name that shamefully encourages us all to broadcast the minutiae of our lives. It’s the most annoying thing since Facebook, and if we don’t rise above it we’re all going to be rightfully damned forever to weekends spent worrying about our friend list, our follower count, and smiling wildly into the lenses of digital cameras, in desperate attempts to make it appear as if we are having a better time of life than we actually are.
Of course, there is more than a grain of truth in this. I fondly remember growing up in the 1990s, an age when holiday photos were entombed forevermore in leather albums on a bookshelf in the hall and not open for the world to see; when it was possible to lose touch with people you didn’t much like; and when you had to plead with your parents to get your girlfriend added to the ‘Friends and Family’ list, so that you could call her excitably at seven o’clock – on the dot.
It was a less excitable era, before the arrival of mobile communication, and when you arranged to meet a friend in the park with a football at half past one, you wouldn’t think for a moment that they wouldn’t be there. And if they weren’t you’d know to ring the police because they’d either been abducted on the High Street or their house had just burnt down.
These digital times
But society has changed. We’re now more open, more capricious; we’ve grown adept at broadcasting ourselves and cultivating our very own images. With nowhere left to go, capitalism has turned the self, the very last private frontier, into a commodity. Some people might not like this and others might not understand it, but it has happened none the less. The 1990s, with its squat, bottle-green telephones and finger dial faces seems a very distant place indeed.
The fate of humankind is such that every generation, in turn, is saddled with its very own revolution; and just as the ‘60s saw a cultural revolution, the noughties have experienced a digital equivalent. Little more than five years ago there was no such thing as Facebook, Skype, My Space, You Tube, Blip, Spotify or Twitter. Now their places in our world are so assured that they have entered our language as verbs: to facebook, to skype and to tweet.
Of the lot, Twitter is the most slippery: the most difficult to grasp, and the one with most potential. It’s particularly favoured by the media, and with newspapers suffering catastrophic declines in readership, journalists have been embracing Twitter in their thousands as an alternative medium. They’ve dubbed it a digital news wire, a forum for debate, a lead generator, a hotbed of citizen journalism, and faster than anything that ever existed before.
In November last year news of the Mumbai attacks was broken and tracked on Twitter; the iconic image of the US Airways aeroplane sprawled in the Hudson was published there just moments after its crash; a year before all of this, a prolific blogger named Robert Scoble smashed a digital boundary when he ‘live tweeted’ the birth of his son Milan online; and, just two months ago, Sky News appointed the world’s very first Twitter correspondent. What the future is going to look like, nobody knows.
It’s easy for people like Barbara Ellen to sneer, caricaturing Twitter as nothing more than a drab hangout of restless narcissists; but what are the real motivations behind the bile? Is it an underhand desire to suggest that their own lives are filled solely with high thoughts and meaningful actions? Could they be prompted by fear? Thinly veiled admissions that the media is no longer the exclusive fiefdom of the educated and powerful? Or is it just worth remembering that these were probably the very same people who were complaining about the introduction of email in the 1990s, the calculator a decade before that, and were probably carping away about the dangers of The Beatles in 1963.
Either way the world’s changing, 140 characters at a time.
Numbers and Social networking
Adding Up
Here’s some maths for a Friday morning:
- I’ve got a 246 ‘friends’ (their word) on Facebook. So far this year I’ve interacted with 14 of them. (5.69%)
- I follow 102 people on Twitter, of which, I’ve interacted with 28 in the last two months. That’s just above a quarter.
Now, let’s compute this with some social anthropology. In a study published in 1992, Professor Robin Dunbar, then of University College London, published an article in the Journal of Human Evolution that proposed a theory that came to be known as ‘Dunbar’s Number’.
Here’s how Wikipedia explains Dunbar’s Number:
Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150. (link to Wikipedia)
Dunbar’s Number was calculated by studying apes, their social networks, and by extrapolating up until he had a relative number for us humans. And if you apply this number of 150 to social media, then the results can be revealing.
Broadly put, our brains can only cope with mental mind mapping for 150 people. So, even if I did nothing else spend my time on Facebook, I still wouldn’t be able to properly follow the activities of all my 246 friends. If you go with Dunbar, it would be biologically impossible.
But if you look at the active numbers of people in either my Facebook or Twitter account, the numbers suddenly become more sensible. 28 on Twitter and just 14 on Facebook (none these, incidentally, overlap). These 42 people constitute my active social media network – a number that I, as a simple primate, can understand.
A bit more maths:
- I have 46 names on my telephone of people that I keep in contact with (I’ve just checked) by telephone or day to day contact and without using social media.
- As I demonstrated earlier I know about 42 people via social media and I, more or less, can understand what they are up to and where they fit in. (88)
- Add to this a collection of family members, office colleagues that I see on a daily basis and other casual contacts that might number around 50 more. (c.138)
Then you are getting something approaching 150. Accuse me of bad maths if you like (I was never any good at it anyway) – but I think that it serves as an interesting approximation.
So what about all the others? The people on Twitter that follow thousands? All the Facebookers with hundreds of friends? The Blip dj’s with scores of listeners? How do they keep up?
The answer is that they don’t. It’s impossible. We just can’t do it. Our brains are not sufficiently well wired to spool a constant stream of information from a vast number of people. But that’s not to say that people haven’t tried.
Jim Connolly and digital burn-out
Social media burn out is a real and dangerous possibility. The most notable example, I think, comes from a marketing specialist named Jim Connolly who went on a famous, high-octane tour of Twitter during the second half of 2008. Connolly’s online marketing strategy was to meet as many people as possible and propel his brand into infinity – and he did this through Twitter.
He followed everyone, and they followed him back. He was polite and useful and helpful and spent vast amounts of time responding to all of his followers’ questions. One quote from his blog notes that:
‘I was amazed to see that even during a fairly quiet period, I was investing an average of 2 and a half hours each day!’
A further quote was even more revealing:
‘The rest of my Twitter time was spent dealing with the hundreds of Direct Messages I get each day and filtering through the hundreds of people who follow me each day; to see from their profile whether or not to follow them back. This is an increasingly time consuming problem, as so many people are now doing that follow / unfollow trick, to attract auto follows and make it look like they have lots of followers.’
Most of the Direct Messages I get on Twitter are people asking me; ‘please share this link with your followers Jim’ or asking me to look at their blog / website and give them some tips. I’m also getting stacks of spam sent to me via Twitter’s Direct Message. This all takes time to review, answer or delete.’
Quite predictably it ended in burn-out. Admirably Connolly held his hands up before his 22,250 followers and declared one day that he couldn’t possibly do it any more. If only Professor Dunbar could have got hold of him, he might have pointed out that it was probably because he was more than 148 times over his golden limit.
Social Media or Broadcast Media?
Let’s not miss the point here. The large numbers of followers, friends, contacts and so on that are associated with social media are, in the main part, to do with advertising and not engagement. Simply put, we are all getting better at broadcasting our own lives. Stephen Fry is an excellent example of this and by most sensible measurements; he is no more engaged in social media than the Queen is.
Fry is remarkably adept at broadcasting his life to the world – through his Twitter account or through his blog. And whilst he does answer individual Tweets and respond to direct messages, I suspect that any real interaction that he had with the public through social media has long since vanished.
There’s nothing at all wrong with how Fry uses social media, but don’t be mistaken: he uses it to broadcast and effectively manage his fan mail. He’s not a long-term component of an online conversation.
The Economist talks about this:
‘Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.’
I want to keep my social media activity useful. I realise that my Facebook account is already a lost cause, but I want to keep my Twittering to the point. To that end I don’t automatically follow everyone who follows me (something I used to do) – I prefer to keep it simple, meaningful and manageable.
Dunbar pointed out that many institutions had been organised around the number 150 – Neolithic villages and the maniples of the Roman Army were notable examples – and it’s good to get some historical perspective. Because, after all, we’re products of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and despite the fact that social media has arrived with a jolt in a few sharp years – we still firmly live in a world where it is impossible to have seven hundred friends.
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Image from Flickr