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Pownced! October 3, 2008

Posted by Chris Wright in Blogs, Internet, Life, Technology.
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2 comments

My experiments with Twitter, documented in previous postings here have stubbornly refused to yield any conclusive proof that the tool is useful for anything other than spreading gnomic utterances about life, my blogs, the universe and er…. computers. I struggle to write interesting one liners -and deprived of the context that Facebook provides it’s status line, the one liners really don’t do it for me. I’m full of beans but do I really need to tell the world?

The problem, I think, is that when I consider it, I don’t have a lot of practice in meaningful many to many communications - in fact the relentless march of technology has herded us all away from the family dinner table, into either 1:1 communications (txt, telephone) or 1:Many (n) communications (radio, TV). We’re just not that good at n: n. I challenge you to remember the last conference call where you didn’t have to IM a colleague to enquire “Who is this talking?”.. Actually, the dinner table doesn’t generally yield fantastic results - except possibly in volume, but at least I usually know who’s talking. Probably me.

Which brings me to Pownce ! Just what I need, I thought, another microblogging / social software solution - only Pownce actually has some rather interesting features. Starting on the basis that it is a microblog, it has the concept of friends (not followers, thank god! I was never comfortable with that conceit). Messages can be broadcast or private - ie the app can be used to IM with a friend. OK Twitter can as well if you use the direct message facility, but Pownce is a lot more intuitive.

The killer functionality though is file attachments - you can send in the free client, 50mb attachments as part of a chat session. A file - music, picture, or a link or an event. Signing up to the Pro version raises the bar to 250mb. To me this makes the application immediately useful, in a way that Twitter just isn’t.

Additionally, Pownce has a downloadable client, running on the Adobe Air platform which utilises both the WebKit (in common with Chrome) and Flash engines, has published API’s and a rapidly expanding list of supported / integrated tooling. Including inevitably iPhone support, Facebook synchronisation and a host of other interesting looking widgets.

I’m in. Once the user base has grown and the tooling supports automated Powncing in the same way that Twitter does, I see Pownce as a real contender - in fact, in these times of market turmoil I’d be tempted to put money on it!

Video Killed The Radio Star October 1, 2008

Posted by Chris Wright in Music, Technology.
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Who killed the recorded music industry? In the light of Apple’s veiled threat to shut down iTunes in the face of demands from the music publishing industry for a larger slice of the pie, this question is suddenly a lot more relevant. The central issue is not about Apple, it is about the way that society rewards artists and the failure of the free market to keep up with technology.

Before the gramaphone (ignoring the wax cylinder) there was no recorded music industry. Musicians made a precarious living by playing real instruments, live, in front of real people. Songwriters had a share of the sheet music sales from popular songs. as I said, the living was precarious.

The music industry as we know it, evolved during the sixties - by this I mean the infrastructure of the industry, the distribution channels, the manufacturing, recording and marketing instruments, the fundamental structure of a recording contract that tied an artist into promoting records on tours underwritten by the record companies, ultimately paid for by the royalties on successful records. and by records, I mean the physical vinyl artifact.

This arrangement suited the record companies very well, so well that when CD’s and digital file formats arrived, they completely failed to see the writing on the wall. It was abundantly obvious to anyone with the wit to look, that recorded music would be passed from person to person via computer networks. In one fell swoop, the record companies lost control of the medium and some would say, the industry.

Napster, the peer to peer file sharing service was the first to really get under the record companies skin - hugely successful, the companies invention, a peer to peer music sharing system created a model for a decentralised distribution channel that has proved impossible for the traditional industry to control. It took a federal government to close down Napster, but there are a host of similar enterprises still in semi legal business.

This is why it has been so difficult for the industry to deal with. For each track there is an owner of the sound recording, the record company. There is also a separate work, the musical composition - the song the artist sings. By law, each track of the CD is also considered a reproduction of the musical composition. On a typical CD, there may be 12 sound recordings and 8 separate music publishers. Multiply that times 3,000 record companies in the US, and 25,000 music publishers, times 27,000 new CDs per year. Separate individual negotiations for all these rights are simply not a viable option.

With CD sales falling last year by 20% to ($7.4bn (£4bn)), the record companies now have a major problem. The artists do too, but the good ones are now making up the shortfall by playing live - this has to be good for the long term health of the art. By which i mean that new technology has been seen by the record companies as primarily a means of reducing recording costs - to the detriment of the quality of the product, as the art of songwriting took a back seat to the art of sampling. In the current climate, forcing acts to play live may encourage the use of technology to entertain the audiences again. But it’s not that simple.

Traditionally, the audience / society, pays the piper - prices are hiked and artists, record companies and publishers all live happily ever after. Now however there is a problem. Apple don’t own the medium, they are just the de facto owners of the largest share of the market. Rivals include Sony, who as a record and hardware company themselves, would be very well placed to mount a strong competitive alternative. So Apple will not want the price of recorded music to rise. The record companies, watching their profits dwindle daily are unlikely to want to take the hit, which leaves the publishers and the artists themselves.

Interesting times ahead. Should songwriters be paid for writing songs? Is it reasonable for the record industry to seek to sustain its profit levels when they no longer own the medium? What does the record industry do in these days of digital recording technology, to justify its profit? Should Apple simply raise the price of digital music?

What if the artist retains control of the recording? Is there any point in recording 12 song albums any longer? What are the implications of selling less songs? Would a tour the size of Madonna’s for example be sustainable on the back of the profit gained from a couple of singles? Actually the answer to that one is yes, ditto The Rolling Stones, but what of the middle ranking acts that depend on touring to shift albums?

But back to the central issue - we have an audience, millions of music hungry people with money to burn, who are quite happy to spend it. We have a computer company, Apple, capitalising on the digital format to charge the audience for the music at 99 cents per track. We have a music industry desperate to play ball with Apple because they no longer own the medium. We have a music publishing industry asserting its right to gain a higher percentage of the digital rights - so who loses?

Answers on a postcard please!

Influence & Authority in a Web 2.0 World September 23, 2008

Posted by Chris Wright in Advertising, Blogs, Life, Technology.
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When we talk about influence and authority in the Web, it means ‘the quality of being a trusted source’ or more simply, ‘credibility’. In real life we tend to treat as authoritative, people whose position or profession suggest a degree of knowledge greater than or equal to our own. A questioning mind continually tests this authority and once lost, it is difficult to regain.

My thoughts on this topic have been meandering slowly towards some kind of conclusion, but last week two things happened to accelerate the process.

1) The publication of a report by Universal McCann entitled ‘When Did We Start Trusting Strangers‘

2) A thought provoking post by Shefaly Yogendra on the subject of ‘authority’ on the web

I quote liberally from these sources in this post - because they put it so much better!

On the internet, we have to use a different mechanism to decide what sources of information are trustworthy - everyone is, or could be an authority. Shefaly describes the process of gaining authority thus:

“‘Authority’ on the web is difficult to establish - and even more difficult to maintain - for several reasons.

One needs to be consistently authoritative in one’s views; this suggests that it is, über alles, a game of ‘content‘ or ‘substance‘.

One needs not just to be substantive but regularly substantive; one needs to be not a passive observer and a reporter, but a participant-observer who is not afraid to share knowledge, raise questions, initiate and promote debate, and do all of this gracefully. One’s opinions need to demonstrate one’s ability to ask questions, make connections, dig data and substantiate one’s points of view.”

So from the consumer’s perspective, a very reasonable reversal of the real life process is taking place - the suggestion is that we don’t necessarily trust a source of information (Joe’s Expert Blog) just because it exists, but we increase our level of trust as we realise that a consistent quality of information is being delivered.

Shefaly goes on to point out that ‘authority’ requires an audience and that it is the quality of interaction between consumer and provider that creates worthwhile measures of credibility. To me this represents as clean and incisive a definition of credibility as I could wish for. A further point is that the role of provider / consumer shifts - in other words, to become a credible provider of information, one should also prove to be an inquisitive and selective consumer. If only this were standard behaviour in real life!

Of course this whole subject of influence is of great interest to Advertisers - this is where the story gets really interesting. The Universal McCann report “When Did We Start Trusting Strangers?” crunches some numbers to offer some extraordinary statistics.

Based on a sample of 17,000 people, spanning 29 countries, the study describes a “new influencer landscape” which is characterized by three significant trends: the rise in social media, the importance of digital friends, and the proliferation of influencer channels.

The study also mentions the impact of this phenomenon: an influence economy, the democratization of influence, and the new“super influencer.” Some figures illustrate the study’s findings:

  • 44% of people surveyed have a blog (compared to 28% in 2006)
  • 57.5% have a page on a social network (compared to 27% in 2006)
  • 42% download video clips (compared to 10% in 2006)
  • 34% of users share their opinions about music
  • 55% share their photos online

As I noted in my earlier posting ‘Are Friends Electric?‘, the arrival of social media has allowed millions of people to create content and publish their opinions online. Social interactions have become virtual and communication now takes place online and in writing.

We are able to “meet” people and maintain relationships that we may not have done in “real life” and we are able to keep in touch with old acquaintances much better than we could before the Internet era, when we relied on the telephone or even the written word, via letter, to bridge the distance gap.

Digital media facilitates interaction and enables influence to be established and to grow very quickly. Thanks to these new tools, it no longer requires huge efforts to become an influencer. The study found that:

“We trust the recommendations of strangers just as much as we trust those of our friends. We also trust information found in social media more than the information given to us by brands.”

According to McCann, we are finding ourselves in an influence economy. Brands are therefore forced to respond to numerous opinions published on the web, to become more transparent, and to open up to social media. Internet users have a penchant for music, films, and technology, but we also find the same phenomenon in a variety of other arenas like finance, housing, and insurance.

The democratization of influence: many individuals can become influencers, or even “super influencers.” Super influencers are very active in social media; they create and share rich content.

McCann recommends that brands should act according to four principles:

  • Transparency and honesty with consumers, without becoming ‘hyper-transparent’
  • Participate in conversations that generate discussion: create blogs, be present in social networks, etc.
  • Consider every person as a potential influencer and encourage the target audience to share its opinions
  • Approach new creators: bloggers, video creators, podcasters, etc.

The last one is the key measure of the importance the report attaches to the new information brokers - the report appears to be advising brands - ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’.

So, in the spirit of the McCann recommendations, here are a few questions to ponder..

1. Do you include blogs amongst your principle information sources?

2. Do you find information on blogs that you would not be able to find elsewhere?

My answer to both of these questions is emphatically ‘yes’.

And one for the conspiracy theorists -

3. Do you think that it is possible for advertisers to manipulate the market to the detriment of the consumer?

My answer to this is - consider the music industry. A CD or DVD is an artefact of very little intrinsic value, that generates a very large profit. The investment is in the creation of the content - in the case of pop music, that investment is pro-rata less than at any time since the early sixties when acts were manufactured for profit, at the behest of the labels…er hang on a minute.. Coincidence?

What Business are Google in? September 16, 2008

Posted by Chris Wright in Technology.
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So the fuss about Chrome has more or less died down - a few minor addendums, the cheeky ‘open in Chrome’ addon for Firefox being a particular favourite. But in spite of more bloggery than you can shake a stick at, the anticipated browser stand-off never really materialised and the really interesting questions around Google’s business strategy - such as ‘Why Chrome?’ have never really been examined.

Google started out in the algorithm business - search to be specific. Knocking out Alta Vista to become the search engine of choice and winning plaudits for the wonderful simplicity (usability) of their interface would represent a significant triumph for many, but since then they have pushed further into the field of web based applications and social computing.

  • Google Earth - phenomenally successful application, arresting interface and hey! nothing beats examining the roof for missing tiles from the comfort of my desk!
  • iGoogle - currently my home page - clean design, useful information, perfect start to the day! A portal basically.
  • Google Directory - The web organised by topic into categories - search by grazing
  • Google Maps - A lot of competition, multimap, AA, Satellite Navigation,
  • Google Video - builds on Search, but YouTube remains the video repository of choice
  • Google Groups - Usenet Archive, building on Search
  • Google Desktop - Brings Search to the local computer - records and analyses search patterns
  • Google Apps - Web based collaboration - GMail, Document Share, Calendar, IM
  • Google Chrome - Brings browsing and browsing habits to Google - thats a lot of personal information they can leverage.

I may have missed a few, but a picture begins to emerge - expanding on Search, Google are running up against some tough competition - YouTube have mindshare in the video market, Mapping, once indispensable, has lost out to Satellite Navigation.

One theory is that Google are going after the desktop and will therefore be competing with Microsoft in the Personal Computing space. Let’s examine that theory.

Prior to the internet, the IT market could be broadly categorised in two sectors - standalone personal computing and network attached computing. Microsoft dominated the first group completely, and mounted an assault on the second as business computing moved from centralised mainframe based services to decentralised network supported PC’s. IBM, with the Lotus Collaboration suite play in the second group. Oracle too. All three of these enterprises have a licensing structure that ties the number of users or the number of processors that software is deployed on to the price that is paid for the license.

The concept of web based software or software as a service is one which will have an immense impact on the way that software is licensed - IBM have made productivity software - word processing, spreadsheet and presentation (Lotus Symphony) available free of charge. Google have made almost all of their software available free of charge. Google however, have a strong revenue stream, advertising, that does not depend directly on an install base.

The nature of Google’s foray into the desktop then, could be predicated on the idea that information (about the user) will unlock greater advertising revenue, because they will be better able to target the ads. Significantly, Microsoft, by purchasing a share of Facebook have unlocked a similar revenue stream. Should we look forward to Microsoft offering free software to Facebook users?

These are interesting times - Google Chrome - just a neat browser or the latest move in a battle for the desktop?

What do you think?

The New Facebook September 13, 2008

Posted by Chris Wright in Technology.
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So as everybody surely noticed, Facebook has been migrating its users to the new layout over the last month or so. This week has been particularly trying, with menu items disappearing, switching positions, links failing, and most mysteriously applications evaporating…

We seem to be experiencing design by committee and there is a danger that we end up with a dromedary. Some of the changes are hard to fathom, some are probably driven by disgruntled application providers, some may be driven by user feedback. Certainly all the symptoms of a project not being thought through are present and correct!

The migration has caused a degree of consternation in the user population, as the new design represents a fairly major paradigm shift and ushers in a user experience that further differentiates the ‘book from its competitors.

There is an underlying theme - Facebook is looking like a more mature and businesslike application, and in this Facebook is playing to its consumer base. If we take a sample of the major social sites, and align them to their user bases, you get a spectrum that puts LinkedIn at one extreme, Bebo at the other and positions Facebook and MySpace somewhere in the middle. Facebook has steadily carved out a niche as the creative professionals preferred site, leaching users from LinkedIn in the process - MySpace has similarly captured the up and coming musicians and teenagers. The new Facebook consolidates this positioning and will continue to polarise the user base accordingly.

Facebook 2.0 Home

Facebook 2.0 Home

The new look takes Facebook further into Portal territory - instead of a single page, infested with useless crap whimsical applications, the default profile and home layouts divide the users domain between a number of different tabs. The default home page is the Feed, with items filtered into Status Updates, Photos, Posted Items, and the default News showing a judicious mix of all three - the user can choose to see more or less items from any individual. this I think is a major improvement and offers the user some control - the noisiest people need no longer dominate the space.

The Profile is the area that seems to be causing the most pain to the users, and by messing about with the navigation, ‘in flight’ Facebook is trashing one of the fundamental rules of GUI design - consistency has been abandoned in recent days as menu items shed functionality and swap places with all the orchestration of a vexatious gibbon. One wonders for example why they found it necessary to switch the position of the Home and viewable Profile (Chris Wright) links?

When the new look was first unveiled, the first thing I did was jettison a whole slew of applications that had accumulated like paperclips on my profile, the default tabs offering Wall, Info, Photos and the imaginatively titled Boxes (applications). An extra tab makes it possible to add an application with it’s own tab - however it is sadly not possible to create a tab and move a bunch of similar applications into it. ‘Reading’, ‘Writing’, ‘Listening’ for example.

Facebook 2.0 Profile

Facebook 2.0 Profile

For a few weeks it has been possible to add applications without assigning them to a page, a fabulous idea which I wholeheartedly approve of, software on demand! Access was possible via the Applications Bookmark. This promised a clutter free environment and a laudably usable navigation. Unfortunate then that this is now restricted to the Wall, the one place I didn’t want applications to appear! The ready access to application bookmarks via the Applications tab has been replaced by an apparently unconfigurable bottom bar which ushers in a new low (sic) in pointless and unusable navigation facilities. So if I want to use or view an application today, I have to navigate to the page that it lives on - how tedious, and so last year! I suspect that the application providers were behind the rethink, perhaps reasoning that a visible application will get installed by more people. Shame.

Facebook has dropped another clanger in restricting the tabs to a single application - let’s explore an alternative: I am a voracious reader and writer - I have installed many applications that are connected by this behaviour - for example, the peerless ‘Just Three Words’, Visual Bookshelf’, ‘WordPress’ etc. I’d like to be able to group these under a single tab, or at worst to be able to nest my tabs. This is not possible today, and worse, some applications don’t support pages, so there is no option but to place them in ‘Boxes’. This capability has been around in portals for several years, so I wonder why Facebook are making such a mess of it?

So in keeping with my theme:

Magic

Tabs
Wall
Filtered Feed

Lies

No user controlled Nested Tabs
Ever ‘improving’ top level navigation
dysfunctional javascript
application navigation

I have no doubt that the coming weeks will see more improvement and perhaps even stability. I’m optimistic and actually, despite moaning horribly about the many implementation issues we are being subjected to, I prefer the new look. I expect to be updating this post - the sooner the better!

Update 14.09.08

The application list in the bottom left hand corner is now configurable - reorder by dragging. applications also appear on profile - box mid-right.

Burnished Chrome September 3, 2008

Posted by Chris Wright in Technology.
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To a deafening blast of bloggery, Google Chrome was finally released - the technical side has been pretty comprehensively covered by now, by more informed people than I, but what of the non-technical, why is this not just another product release?

Well Chrome is significant for maybe three reasons.

1. Its the first big power play from a credible power broker in several years

2. It’s the first credible threat to Firefox

3. It does things differently - under the covers it’s been written for speed, it has been designed as a web application platform (old fashioned browsers did not have Web2.0 in mind)

So how does that translate?

The IT landscape is dominated by a very small number of companies, this has happened in part, because Microsoft managed to acquire the desktop to the extent that it’s operating system is the default on every PC sold. They were only prevented from ‘acquiring’ the browsing experience, by legal action forbidding them to make Internet Explorer part of the operating system. Other corporate contenders have expanded by acquisition as well as by market growth, leading to a landscape not unlike the Premiership, where the ‘big four’ companies appear to be there for the long term.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but nobody forecast the extent to which Search would become the lynchpin of the internet. I have an ancient copy of ‘Wired’ magazine that features an interview with someone who used to make a handsome living by ‘finding’ things on the internet for corporate clients. How pleased were they when Alta Vista came out? Google came out of left field, revolutionised search technology and reinvented the business model, making advertising the principle source of income and by going public, gatecrashed the party at the top table in the process.

So now, Google (and quite a few others) want to carve up the desktop - the browser is the most used application by a country mile, the concept of software as a service is catching on fast and Google, in releasing a web browser are after their slice of the pie. Microsoft, presumed to be vulnerable in the wake of Bill Gates departure and the extreme negativity attracted by Vista, don’t seem to have much to say - though watch this space, it’s not on their nature to rest on their laurels. The significance of owning the browser, to Google, is that access to the users browsing habits will enable them to target advertising even more accurately than they do currently, using the data gleaned from user’s search patterns.

So the release of a new browser, re-engineered to render complex web applications is big news - success will buy Google a new market.

How does Chrome perform?

The Magic and lies:

Most striking is the uncluttered gui, it’s simply a window, the default tab, which contains your most clicked pages, arranged in a table. Like all the best GUIs, it’s simple, it works and it will be copied.

Google Chrome - Tabs

Google Chrome - Tabs

The tabs are at the top of the application - emphasising the fact that effectively each tab is a different application - so if one tab freezes the other live on - I was unable to test this, but I believe that is the general idea.

I was unable to see much difference in speed, testing on Facebook, which is the slowest application I know.

Chrome has a marvellously uncluttered interface, but consequently lacks the widgets - StumbleUpon, ScreenGrab, Delicious etc that have made Firefox such an important application. It allows ‘anonymous’ browsing - no cookies, history etc - now I can only think of one section of the market that would see this as a Firefox killer - which bring me neatly to the licensing issue.

In common with Facebook, Google have decided that they want the free and unfettered use of everything that passes through the browser. It’s well known that any media uploaded to Facebook effectively becomes the property of Facebook, now Google want a slice of the pie - so if I use Chrome to upload my photograph to Flickr, Google own the rights to reuse and distribute that photograph. If I use Chrome to upload the photograph to Facebook…hang on a minute, they can’t both own the image? Can they? Well, no, they can’t. So far as both companies are concerned, the author holds the copyright, they simply want the right to use the material without paying a royalty.

The spirit of the license, in both cases, one is asked to believe, is that the companies concerned wish to protect themselves against opportunistic legal action. Both companies use the term non-exclusive and both explicitly say that copyright and intellectual property remain with the originator. So to be clear, in uploading a photograph using Chrome, to Facebook, the user is granting both companies non-exclusive rights to do with that photograph what they wish, including sell it.

Will Chrome be successful? - It lacks the wow! factor of Google earth (or Search). It looks like an old fashioned Apple Mac application and not in a good way - visually it doesn’t blend seamlessly with the OS in the way that we are beginning to expect. It is the ‘Flock of Seagulls’ to Vista and Apple’s New Romantics, SteamPunk it ain’t. The licence gambit seems to be attracting as much criticism as Facebook’s similar play, and the anonymous browsing feature is superfluous for most people. Having said that, the code I have is beta, and it didn’t crash once today - so top marks for testing. I certainly won’t be using Chrome as part of my toolkit just yet - but I’m keeping an open mind - Firefox is becoming bloated and unreliable, throwing more processing power at it is expensive and a new browser is free….

Are Friends Electric? September 1, 2008

Posted by Chris Wright in Blogs, Friends, Life, Technology.
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I was reading Mariella Frostrup in the Observer last weekend as I tend to do over Sunday breakfast. She is remarkably level headed for someone who, like me, used to work in the music industry and something she said made me think hard about the nature of on-line friendship.

The context was not promising - her correspondent was considering having an affair with a long lost lover, recently contacted on Facebook and Mariella quite correctly and with great wit pointed out the obvious flaws in such a notion. She went on to say (and I apologise for the paraphrase, but it was a long article)

“As for Facebook forays, I must say I remain unconvinced by the so-called ’social networking’ craze….. There are unarguable merits to an impoverished kid in Uganda connecting with a privileged western teenager and both learning something about the outside world, but how often is that the case? Facebook and its fellow sites offer teenagers a virtual social circle, and dissatisfied adults the chance to sit alone in a cloud of nostalgia. All fine and good if you have hours to waste ‘connecting’ on the most superficial level. It’s hardly revolutionary to suggest that the more time we spend on virtual friendships the less time and energy we have for our own flesh and blood encounters. Why show your holiday photos to 200 virtual strangers when you can sit down with your best friend and chat?“

Its at this point that Mariella and I differ. Now there are a lot of strands in this and I may even take two posts to cover them, but these, I think, are the salient points.

Mariella differentiates between virtual friendships and ‘flesh and blood’ encounters. I may be missing the point here, but not one of my virtual friendships has actually replaced a real life encounter, anymore than the telephone.

On line friendships, just like real life friendships can burn brightly, I have many online friends who I would count as ‘real’ friends in terms of warmth, reliability, humour, and well, friendship. Equally I have many online friends who I have shared a joke with, sparred with on a comment trail or just bumped into so often that we made contact - no more significant than smiling at somebody in the post office really. and that is my point - it’s the baggage attached to the term ‘Friend’ that I think confuses people of a certain age (sorry, Mariella, but you and me, both).

People of ahem, my generation (born in the fifties) tend to attach a great deal of meaning to the word friend - acquaintances are many but friends are few, we differentiate between friends and networks in a way that a teenager today would probably think odd or even quaint. So it’s hardly surprising that we struggle with the concept of social software - however it would be a huge mistake to dismiss it as frivolous.

Let’s start with the common misconception that putting your holiday photos online is the same as inviting 200 virtual strangers into your life. People are attracted to content first and personality second. I have proof. I run three blogs, this one on technical matters, Chimera Obscura on music and Grapes of Wrath (a work of total fiction). The comparison between the growth cycles is interesting, but I’ll save it for another post. The point I’m making here is that unless the photographs are extraordinarily good, it is unlikely that anyone will view them for more than a nanosecond. frankly, getting them printed in an old fashioned photolab will bring more browsers to your holiday snaps! No, the only people who will look at them on Facebook are your ‘friends’. And by and large their commentary will be funny and well, friendly.

But this is not only about Facebook, the Blogosphere too has a part to play, this debate is about social networks mediated by electronic means and I look back to commentators like Howard Rheingold (Virtual Communities) and Nicholas Negroponte (Being Digital) when I hear people discussing this phenomenon as if it were new. In many ways, you get out of a virtual community roughly what you put into it - socially active people have more friends, just like real…. yes, quite.

As for “connecting on the most superficial level”, what’s not to like? Sorry - seriously, I have managed to make some good friends who have introduced me to music, literature and art that I was not previously aware of - by the most serious and old fashioned of definitions, these people deserve to be called ‘friends’. I also have many ‘friends’ online who have brightened my day in a host of different ways - a Tweet here, a comment there, a photo.

As a mobile IT consultant, living a percentage of my life in hotels, I can unequivocally maintain that reconnecting with old friends is a fabulous thing - through Facebook I have connected with very close college friends with whom I lost touch over thirty years ago, ex colleagues, ex students who I am always delighted to see, but somehow never have the time or the geography to actually meet - I have yet to be disappointed. Quite the reverse in fact. I connect with other literary enthusiasts and engage with writing workshops, none of which would be possible in real life (just too busy). The world of asynchronous communication facilitates these activities and as a result, my life is substantially enriched.

I struggle with the difference between a virtual social circle and any other kind - in fact the toast ‘to absent friends’ surely celebrates the notion of a virtual social circle - the days of living in the same town as your friends were numbered by the invention of the steam engine. Actually come to think of it I wish some of my real friends were a bit more virtual! My social life and that of many people I speak to has been fractured by careers, marriages, divorce, relative success and failure. I would probably struggle to put together a real social circle - tennis friends, musicbiz friends, work friends, old friends, new friends - not an iota of commonality between them!

The age range of my virtual friends stretches between 22 and 75, the class, geography and culture range is undeniably greater than my ‘flesh and blood’ friendships and in considering this I am reminded of a remark made by one of my younger, virtual friends. “Facebook” she said, “is a great leveller”.

Twitter - Oblique Strategies August 23, 2008

Posted by Chris Wright in Music, Technology.
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Oblique Strategies is a set of published cards created by musician Brian Eno, and artist Peter Schmidt in 1975. The cards are printed with odd and interesting methods to solve a conflict or dilemma.

The concept is derived from techniques used by Brian Eno in the recording studio - when ’stuck’ he would select a card and follow the instructions, no matter how bizarre. In his own words:

“These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognised in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated. They can be used as a pack, or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear…”

This led him to the conclusion that the strategy could be applied to other creative situations and he worked with Schmidt to produce the first set, released as a limited edition. The set has been edited and re-released and is now available at The Oblique Strategies Web Site.

So somebody has diverted the idea to Twitter -

Sample tweets:
“Take away as much mystery as possible. What is left?”
“Instead of changing the thing, change the world around it.”
“Question the heroic approach.”

http://twitter.com/Oblique_Chirps

I am indebted to K. Star St.Germain for alerting me to this - check out her article Cute tech: Twitter // Form vs. Function on her blog This is Star for some other interesting tweets!

Twitter this, Twitter that August 14, 2008

Posted by Chris Wright in Blogs, Technology.
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So after a couple of months of use, I find myself facing the tricky question, ‘what exactly is the point of Twitter?’ or to put it another way, ‘how come Twitter got to be so popular?’

For the uninitiated it is a microblogging site which allows the user to publish 140 characters at a time. It is simple to publish by text, and by using third parties such as Twitterfeed, the ‘Tweet’ can be inserted into a Facebook status line. The term microblog is used to describe a blog consisting of or allowing only very basic content, typically text only.

In Twitter, one can post a message or ‘Tweet’ and it is possible to follow individual users and in this way build up or join with a community. The obvious and possibly most common use of Twitter is social (I’m off to see Radiohead in the park - anyone fancy hooking up?) - I wonder actually how much bigger the ‘rave’ scene would have been had Twitter existed in the 80’s…

An interesting development yesterday saw Twitter cancelling it’s outbound SMS service, at least in the UK - which I suspect was one of the features that has made it so popular. The reason for this is the high charges Twitter face from the telecomms companies involved in forwarding texts internationally. It seems that talks are ongoing with several providers, can’t help wondering if this was something that could have been negotiated before the service was introduced?

Other ways I have seen Twitter used are various - posts of the type ‘I’m in the supermarket, pondering the benefits of veal’ abound - and seem to me to add little to anyone’s life. More useful are the Tweets broadcast from conferences - Lotusphere for example was broadcast virtually live from presentation to the internet in seconds.

Where Twitter really excels is in the viral spread of news - links to industry gossip, breaking events etc are everywhere and given the 140 character limit, extremely quick to deliver. As a channel, Twitter is useful to me for this type of content - choose your ‘follow’ list carefully and you will quickly find yourself plugged into the niche networks of your choice.

Perhaps less useful is the small industry of addons - each ‘Tweet’ is appended with the source, (added from the web) personally if I see a Tweet added from Twinkle or Twhirl instead of web or txt, I’m compelled to check out the source in case there is some new gadget I’ve missed! So very effective indeed as a displacement activity!

Spamming is a small problem so far - I was bemused to find myself being followed by ‘PornSite25′ some weeks ago - but this is not as intrusive as it is with E-Mail for example. And if it’s not effective, then it’s unlikely that it will become a major problem.

I’m not sure I’ve found an answer, but it has been useful enough for me to want to continue - there is a sense that the more you put into it, in terms of providing useful content, the more useful the application will become. I’ll continue the experiment and report back!

MiniBlogs, Music and the Death of Rock Criticism August 6, 2008

Posted by Chris Wright in Blogs, Music, Technology.
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With the notable exception of Laura Barton, who impresses me more with every article she writes, I have declared the practice of Music Journalism to be dead.

The game was effectively up when the first sinister rustlings of electro made their entry some time during the late seventies. Practitioners struggled manfully on, filling pages with turgid hagiography on Kraftwerk and god forbid, Amon Duul, but the death knell was effectively sounded by one of the best electro records ever made - ‘Set it off’ by Strafe. To a lyric consisting entirely of the repeated phrase

“Set it off on the left

Set it off on the right

Set it off”

With the occasional interjection of “Let’s Get This Party Started!” Strafe ushered in the ecstasy generation - the air now well and truly let out of the ‘rock criticism as cultural commentary” balloon, scribes had to fall back on their writing skills. Predictably the few that could actually write - Jon Savage springs to mind, shifted their attention to writing books and journalism proper, the rest shrivelled and died.

So what has this to do with MiniBlogs?

I write, a lot, I also listen to music a lot and have collected records for nearly forty years. However mindful of Frank Zappa’s comment that “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, I have studiously avoided any sort of comittment to writing about music. I’ve no doubt I could fill pages with turgid dross, but frankly what’s the point?

So the miniblog - it occured to me that if I restricted the length of the review to say 150 words, it would focus the pen and might even make the whole exercise useful - so my newest blogging venture is Chimera Obscura. This will consist of mini reviews of albums that I feel fall into the category of cult or wilfully obscure. It will inevitably reflect the contents of my own collection to an extent, and will also feature books, films and photography in the fullness of time.

The miniblog provider I’m using is Tumblr, a setup of such startling simplicity that posting a new article takes minutes or even seconds. So far I’m impressed, it’s not a blog, it’s a tightly themed litany. Let’s see how it goes…