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 – 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

Just as the English talk about the weather, everyone in digitaldom talks about SEO. A brief overview of search engine optimisation is included in this presentation along with a number of the most popular viewpoints.

As ever, comments welcome.

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Sources Used:

“Daily Mirror’s Matt Kelly puts SEO in its place” by Robert Andrews [link]

“Google’s secret algorithm revealed” by David Douek [link]

“How SEO is changing journalism” by Shane Richmond [link]

“A journalist’s guide to SEO” by Kevin Gibbons [link]

And the walls fall down

Digital publishing has come a long way. Six years ago (or so) all websites and blogs could only be updated from computers that were connected, with long lengths of cable, to the nearest telephone socket.

But then along came Wi-Fi. Suddenly the Internet was in the air all around us. You could hook up your laptop or, more recently, Smartphone, whenever you got a sniff of it and suddenly all the old boundaries of digital publishing tumbled down.

The mobile Internet meant that people to could publish on the fly from almost anywhere. And when I signed up to the Africa Rally – sometime early on last year – I wanted to do just that.

The Africa Rally

The Africa Rally is best described as a charity touring event, which is organised by a company called the Adventurists. The aim of the rally is to successfully drive from England to Cameroon in Africa in an old, unsuitable or amusing vehicle. I signed up with two old friends and we decided to have a go in an old VW Beetle. Our team name was to be Camervroom.

Blogging it – (problems)

Such a long and peculiar journey immediately struck me as excellent material for a blog. A blog would help us to stay in touch with family and friends at home, it would remain as a record of the trip after we had finished and it would serve as a new publishing challenge – just enough to satisfy my ongoing Internet addiction.

But there were lots of problems. The journey was (at best) going to take a month and to stop each evening and compose a reasoned blog was going to be too time consuming. Even if we did find the time and my two friends did have the patience (which they wouldn’t have had), the likelihood of finding an Internet cafe whenever I wanted one in various corners of Africa was low.

The obvious solution was to cut out Internet cafes and blog via telephone. There are lots of powerful telephones available at the moment and, in particular, the iPhone has about as much publishing clout as an entire newsroom would have had just about a decade ago. You can take photos, shoot video, record audio and send email on the iPhone, all in a few jabs of the finger. In addition it records useful meta-data as you go, including geographic location, local times and date – all of which comes in useful if you want to do some data mashing later on.

Still, taking an iPhone along to Africa is certainly about as stupid as it is clever. On the rally we were passing through 12 different countries, each of which had perhaps two or three different mobile service providers. Any concoction of these may or may not work, depending – or so it seemed – upon a million different capricious factors.

On top of this you have the problem of cost. Everyone has heard horror stories of enthusiastic holiday makers generating enormous telephone bills in just a few short days in Mallorca. Add on to this the fact that an iPhone is just the sort of expensive, desirable object that you shouldn’t carry out of the country, and all things considered it could end up a dysfunctional waste of space.

Blogging it – (solutions)

Enter Posterous

Posterous hasn’t been around that long. In fact, it was only launched in May last year but it has quickly grown in popularity as one of the best platforms for mobile blogging or, more fashionably put, lifestreaming.

The idea is simple. All you have to do is send emails to Posterous and thereafter it is the software’s job to make sense of the message’s content and cobble it together into a post.

For example if you take a picture on your telephone and then email it to Posterous, within a minute that photo will have been blogged alongside any accompanying text that you include in the body of the email.

Here is a good explanation of how to get the most out of Posterous.

All in all, a blog can be prepared, posted and published within about two or three minutes and you can post to Posterous from wherever you phone allows you to connect to the Internet. A decade ago people wouldn’t have believed it.

Connectivity

So Posterous worked for the blogging software, but what about connectivity? Well, I called O2 who are my mobile service provider and told them that I was going abroad and that I wanted to use my iPhone to connect to the Internet. For £50 a month they set me up with a bolt-on package called Date Abroad 50, which allowed me 50 Mb of data, downloads every month while I was out of the country.

(For a full-scale blog for a month, this isn’t quite enough. But if you are careful (you can monitor how much data you are downloading by studying your telephone settings) and just use the phone to send emails then it should be a good amount to start off with).

Connectivity Again

So. I had a phone with the potential to write emails, record videos and sound and take photos. I had Posterous which had the ability to take all of this information and process the code into a meaningful post and I had a bolt on package from O2 that allowed me to send data while abroad at an affordable price. All done.

Or not.

The iPhone worked perfectly in France and Spain and fitfully in Morocco. After that the cellular network quite predictably fritted in and out continuously. It didn’t work in Senegal, worked a little bit in Mali, failed totally in Burkina Faso and Benin, reappeared dramatically in Nigeria before vanishing again in Cameroon.

In countries without sufficient network coverage I was forced to resort to WiFi. This was a more tricky task, but luckily West Africa has an enormous number of unsecured wireless networks that usually pop up at opportune moments, most of them in hotels, banks or on the streets outside governmental buildings. Three minutes stood outside one of these buildings in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Benin or Cameroon was long enough to post a brief update. And usually that was all that was needed.

Real time rally – some observations

I posted 84 times on the Camervroom blog – most of these coming on the road and in the last month it has been read by around 4,000 unique visitors.

I’ve always thought that a good definition of a successful blog is one that has more total comments than total posts – and Camervroom, with more than 100 different comments, passed this test easily.

There were many benefits of using Posterous – its ease of use and reliability were the main ones, but another little quirk that worked particularly well was its ability to detail the geographic location of a post, making it easy for people to see exactly – to the very spot on a street – where we were.

Lesson learnt

For me, working in digital media, there are a couple of lessons to be learnt here. Firstly, people want to know what is happening in real time: writers, content producers, journalists and whoever else should be willing to occasionally substitute the overall quality of a piece for the amount of time that it takes them to get it out.

This change can be reflected by the frequency of posts, but also in the style and mindset of the writer. An author can write in the present tense instead of the past tense to give a sense of an ongoing journey, they can end a piece without reaching a conclusion or post a picture without an explanation.

All of this flies, of course, in the face of creating a fully coherent journalistic piece, but lifestreaming is something quite different to that. Simply put, you don’t always have to finish with a conclusion because your reader will know that you are going to be back soon.

Secondly, if you are going to have a go at lifestreaming then it is a good idea to experiment with different types of media. By this I mean audio (podcasting), visual (photographs) and video, and the very best applications to use for anyone with an iPhone are Audioboo and You Tube to help you do this.

Thirdly, think about your readership. Posterous is very good at sending out automated updates across a host of different platforms: Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and so on. But does everyone in all of these communities want to know about what you are doing three times a day?

The best bet, until you know otherwise is to manage this yourself manually otherwise over-publishing will be seen as spam and any effort that you are putting into doing something may well have negative consequences.

Micro journalism

I attended Journalism.co.uk’s News Rewired event on Thursday and was interested to hear Greg Hadfield, someone that I hadn’t ever heard of before, say something that I agreed with completely.

He said, journalism is now much more about individual journalists doing little projects than large organisations and enormous projects. And I think that using Posterous for little projects like this is a perfect example of that.

Ok. This was a rally and a holiday, but the same methods that I used on the Africa Rally could easily be used by journalists on projects abroad, by aid workers at the height of a crisis, by managers at a business conference, or by a music journalist on the road with a rock and roll band. You could imagine each of these resulting in excellent pieces of journalism – micro journalism if you like.

Ingredients for a lifecasting blog

• Download Posterous, set up your email to post directly and Google Analytics (optional)
• Get a Smartphone with the ability to connect to the Internet
• If you are going abroad you need to agree a roaming bolt-on with your mobile service provider
• You need a USB cable to connect your telephone to fixed computers when you get the chance (in Africa I took my USB cable everywhere and it acted like a wonderful umbilical cord between this world and the virtual one)
• Make sure you have some good telephone insurance

Cost

All told, in one month Camervroom cost about £150 in additional telephone bills. Just about everything else was free and as it is going to be staying around for as long as the Posterous servers exist (fingers crossed), then I don’t think it is a bad investment at all.

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Links: The Camervroom Blog

On Tuesday Yoko Ono published a Flickr album with various translations of John Lennon’s famous slogan: ‘War Is Over’.

I immediately liked it. I’ve always been interested in the effect of slogans on popular culture and human psychology (think of the power of Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’) and here was one of the most famous of the twentieth century, republished digitally to coincide with the anniversary of John’s assassination and Christmas.

The only problem was that Yoko – or more likely one of her administrators – had issued each of the images without a creative commons license. Her choice, but the strict license seemed contrary to the spirit of the message and in direct contradiction to her invitation to:

“Print & display in your window, school, workplace, car & elsewhere over the holiday season, and send as postcards to your friends.”

All Rights Reserved – the stiffest of the six creative commons licenses, would have prevented bloggers or website owners from reproducing the image digitally. This, in turn, would have reduced the chances of the images going viral, which I imagine was her intention. The creative commons was, I supposed, just another little quirk of the Internet which needed explaining.

And this is the thing that is wonderful about the Internet:

One email to her Flickr account and an hour later they were all altered.

Easy as that.

So here you go. All 47 images are available with the Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license. Quite a mouthful, I know. But it basically means that you can put them up on your blog or site and as long as you attribute them with a link, then that’s quite alright.

It’s sharing and crediting – two key characteristics of Web 2.0.

This will be the last blog post for My Digital Notebook in 2009.  I’m off on Sunday on the Africa Rally. The first year for this blog has been a quiet one; I’m planning for much more next year. Merry Christmas everyone – (the War Is Over).

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image credit: Yoko Ono Official

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

Given at City University London on 16.11.09.

As the You Tube videos don’t seem to work, I’ll add this excellent one below:

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