Panic in the Streets of Whitehall

I’ve put off writing this post in the aftermath of the rioting, partly because I’m keenly aware that ranting about politics is not what this blog was originally set up to do, partly because I suspected in my cynical and road weary fashion that we’d get a bunch of soundbytes from Prime Minister Cameron asserting qualities such as ‘leadership’, blaming riots on the previous administration, followed by well, no coherent action. I wanted to see, if I was right.

Well frankly, in my wildest and most paranoid dreams I could not have predicted what a complete hash Cameron would make of it.

Firstly we got the soundbytes, exactly as expected. There was a lot of confrontational language on display. Words such as “fightback”, phrases like “zero tolerance” – not the words I would have chosen when dealing with a situation as potentially combustible as this, but exactly the sort of old fashioned Tory tripe I had expected to hear from Cameron.

And it got worse. Cameron enthusiastically blamed the Labour Party, the Police, the absent fathers – everyone and everything except the cuts, the joblessness and the despair his policies have visited upon the poorer sections of society. He proposed that not just the criminals, but their entire families be evicted from social housing. A suggestion immediately acted upon by Westminster council. A suggestion that flies in the face of fairness, human rights and common sense. And possibly the law.

Next, after a consultative process that must have lasted oh, at least five minutes, Cameron proposed to shut down Twitter, Blackberry messaging and damn it, if necessary the entire internet to stop these rioters communicating. I expect the telephone service and the royal mail to swiftly follow. Apart from the implausibility of the coalition actually doing this, isn’t this exactly what he so vociferously condemned the Egyptian government for attempting six months ago?

And then it got hilariously, stupidly, downright incompetently even worse. Without consultation with the police forces, Cameron appointed one Bill Bratton, ex chief of police for LA, a district so ridden with gang violence that it makes Tottenham look like Camberwick Green, to advise the government on how to deal with the societal issues that caused the riots. As offensive as this idea must have seemed to our own police forces, it was about to get even worse.

Bill Bratton is chairman of the private detective agency Kroll. (You can see where this is heading, right?) In June this year, Kroll were accused very publicly and in formal court papers by Dr Martin Coward, a city investment manager, of illegally planting covert surveillance equipment in his house and car. Evidence submitted to the court included the surveillance equipment and hilariously, a video of the goon squad going about their business. But of course as we well know, Cameron is a man who believes in second chances, so obviously he got his people to carry out background checks? Well, with crushing inevitability, it seems no background checks were carried out. So for the sake of a soundbyte, Cameron has done exactly the same thing he did with Andy Coulson. Arrogant? Ignorant? Incompetent? all of these?

There is just one good thing about this government. It is impossible to countenance the electorate ever again falling for a politician who combines poor leadership, empty promises and an empty headed view of people based solely on class, connections and money? Well, isn’t it?

One of Those Days in England

It’s hard after three days of the worst and most pointless rioting the UK has ever suffered, to put words together that don’t sound like cliches. I guess in part its because I used to live in London, only a few hundred yards away from where the violence erupted in Enfield and I know people who still live in London, in Tottenham and Wood Green where the worst of the violence was experienced. I feel guilty that I was powerless to help and ashamed that they had to suffer this awful ordeal. It must have been terrifying. I am only glad that my friends have come through unscathed.

Let’s not fool ourselves, these riots were not, unlike the student riots earlier this year, motivated by politics. They were not race riots, They were not the riots of protest in any sense whatsoever. This was society turning on itself. Looters robbing local stores, putting local people out of business. Wrecking lives, destroying confidence, ushering in a lawlessness and a new age of stupidity, selfishness, greed and cowardice. Let David Cameron talk about the “Big Society”.

The violence we have seen was, and continues to be perpetrated by a section of society that the government has made pay, in terms of jobs, cuts to services, cuts to immigration, for the disaster that was visited upon the west by the institutionalised greed of the financial sector. We have seen corporate greed in the shape of the News of the World obfuscate, avoid and misdirect a government enquiry, knowing that they would not be recalled. It sends a message. James Murdoch, immaculately groomed, fluent in corporatese, giving evidence that so far two of the sacked NoTW employees have denounced as ‘mistaken’ sends an unmistakeable message. And that message, received on the streets of Tottenham is “Fuck You”.

We read about the mysterious workings of the Chipping Norton set that apparently control the government, creeping in by the back door to Downing Street and know that their lifestyles, of shopping in Venice, Hunting, Polo and Governing small European countries, is not for us. The message again, received on the streets of Tottenham is “Fuck You”.

We have suffered in Cameron and Osborne, leaders so utterly lacking in empathy that Cameron considers it more important to massage his ego by having his photograph taken, tipping an Italian waitress this weekend instead of cancelling his holiday and flying back to London to witness first hand the destruction his “Big Society” has visited upon the country he aspires to govern.

We have also seen the incredible amplification that social media can achieve. Sadly, initially by facilitating the carnage, but latterly by providing a channel to organise the clean up Hackney campaign.

I’m through writing about this. Others will do it much better and more eloquently. I’m ashamed to be english today and that I think is a feeling a lot of english people share.

Social Capital – What’s it Worth?

I’m reasonably sure, despite various comments from parents, colleagues and partners that I don’t feature on the autistic spectrum of behaviour – well, no more than the next geek anyway. I will confess to taking an interest in how I interact on the social web though, spurred on by a couple of sites I have found mildly diverting. PeerIndex and Klout.

Both sites purport to measure influence and they do so by tracking your use of the social web. PeerIndex asks you to register such things as your Twitter id, Facebook, Quora and Blogs and then divines a result based on retweets, comments etc. It presents its findings in the context of reach (number of people engaged with), Authority (Divined by number of people engaged with in the topics you typically comment on) and Activity (the volume of content generated).

I approached PeerIndex with some trepidation as I figured the sheer range of topics I engage with would militate against me. I blog at length on Music, Politics, Social Media, Photography, IT, Television and Film. Having worked in all of these industries except thank god, politics, I figure I may have something to say – on politics I admit, I’m simply venting!

Initially, my worst fears were quickly realised – with every fresh post, it seemed my authority rating diminished, while that accorded to more focused (ok, monomaniacal) contributors such as Jemima Kiss, Armando Ianucci and Guido Fawkes (one visualisation in the dashboard compares your rating with that of posters you have interacted with) were gaining credibility with every post. Personal Branding it seems, works. After several weeks, I noticed a peculiar thing – my authority rating began to rise as the search and analysis tools took on more of my output. This was encouraging and reflected in the visualisations presented on the dashboard page.

PeerIndex is at worst, engaging. The feeds it takes are limited, so I have not been able to register all of my blogs and I would like to see Flickr added to the list of defaults, but I like this tool and the possibilities it raises are interesting. We have the technology now to graft analyses onto vast quantities of data and I expect to see social media being used far more effectively by the bodies that are most threatened by it – broadcasters, record companies and newspapers. If the tools used by PeerIndex were applied to, for example, tracking the contents of Facebook pages looking for content related to a single artist, program or film, it might yield some interesting information about the makeup of the audience – and critically, where to find them.

Klout takes a different approach – analysing Twitter and Facebook interaction in terms of influence divined by amplification and reach – in other words, the more likes and retweets accumulated, the higher the score. This seems very satisfactory, at least until I noticed the tool registered my most influential topic as Cricket. A game I follow with the fanaticism of a Yorkshireman, but have never to my knowledge offered an opinion online. Perhaps this puts the value of my online opinions into a new and even more unflattering perspective!

I think that Klout is in the business of identifying influencers for the purpose of marketing. It has always been critical in PR to identify influencers – this is how we used to promote nightclubs back in the nineties and it defines the relationship between for example, Katie Price, The Press and her customers – the people that pay to have her open a shop, nightclub etc. If she didn’t generate the press, she would not be considered to be so influential and her value would decrease. What Klout appears to be doing is identifying influencers who are influential because they tap into a large following based on expertise, not notoriety. That could be a powerful asset indeed.

So Farewell HTC Peep…

Keith’s mum says if she wants Tweets she’ll feed the budgie, but that’s another story. It was clunky, slow and in the end HTC couldn’t be bothered to maintain it when Twitter remodelled their authentication module. Quite why this was allowed to happen when HTC are positioning themselves and the Android platform as a serious rival to the Apple iPhone as a social software platform is a question I’d love to know the answer to – it’s not as if Twitter didn’t warn people.

In any case, the new authentication mechanism is more secure and in the end more user friendly – password changes can be maintained from the provider, Twitter, rather than held in the app, so that is goodness. I’ve moved to using the official Twitter client for Android, cunningly named Twitter for Android and so far it’s a massive improvement; faster and with more functionality than Peep, though in fairness that may be due to the coincidence of upgrading to Android 2.1.

Upgrading Android on HTC Hero

Early adopters of technology must sometimes feel like hamsters, interminably stuck in the exercise wheel. Yesterday evening, having nothing much better to do, I decided to upgrade my HTC Hero to a newer version of the Android OS, my transparently ridiculous excuse being that location awareness in Twitter posts is obviously something I can’t live without.

A cursory inspection of the HTC site showed that upgrades were available for the Orange branded handset and I downloaded the build and read the instructions. Unsurprisingly, the phone needs to be connected by USB to the computer where the binaries are held, and so the HTC Connect software also needs to be installed.

Now, my experience of running the HTC Connect software in Windows Vista was so flaky that I hastily uninstalled it, but my general experience of Windows 7 has been so much better that I decided to reinstall, noting that there would be the possibility that my HTC supplied version of the software might not support Windows 7. I was correct to be suspicious, the software installed but resolutely failed to connect to the phone. No problem I said, I’ll just go and download a more recent version….how naive, I really should have known better!

The Windows 7 compatible version of HTC Connect installs fine and recognises the phone. However the support statement says that Android 1.5 is the minimum level of OS. I discovered why, as soon as I kicked off the firmware upgrade – the drivers are incompatible with Android 1.0. this manifested as an I/O error, so no damage was done, though I am curious as to why HTC Connect recognises the phone yet the upgrade software doesn’t.

Plan B was implemented – installing the HTC Connect software on a Windows XP powered laptop enabled the right drivers to be in place. I copied the binary for the upgrade across to the laptop and kicked off the install. It took approximately ten minutes to complete. Afterwards, with the newly upgraded Android 1.5, I was able to sync the handset against my Windows 7 machine.

A word of warning for the unwary – the firmware update wipes the ROM completely – that means your address book and custom applications, your Google, Facebook and Flickr connectivity, all gone. What would be useful for HTC Connect to feature might be a way of restoring these values during the sync?

Another grumble – in syncing my address book from Outlook, it would be really useful to flag certain addresses as being unwanted. Outlook has a habit of hoovering up addresses from the copy lists of every E-mail you recieve and respond to, hence I found 271 new aquaintances cluttering up my phonebook with e-mail addresses. Surely HTC Sync could provide an interface to the phone that allows you to delete batches of addresses instead of going through the list manually and deleting one at a time?

The good news is the phone appears to run faster than it did, it gave me an opportunity to install newer versions of a couple of apps and discard the ones that I don’t use. New wallpapers are available too, so the handset looks and feels like a new phone. Location awareness in Twitter? Haven’t a clue, just need to find something worth Tweeting about…

Digital Derelicts

I was interested to read Cory Doctorow’s musings on the Digital Economy Bill in yesterday’s Guardian, ‘Why does Mandelson favour the analogue economy over the digital’. The Digital Economy bill is indeed as pernicious a piece of legislation as we’ve seen from the present government, but to reduce it to a simple analogue vs. digital argument is overly simplistic in my opinion. It also begs a comparison.

Disco of Doom
It is well known that business controls government in none too subtle a fashion. When push comes to shove, fear of lost tax revenue delayed the banning of smoking in public places, costing hundreds of thousands of lives as governments on both sides of the Atlantic dithered in the face of industry pressure and published falsified data designed to obscure the link between smoking and cancer. We see similar pressure being exerted on our government by the music and film industries now, as instead of embracing new delivery channels, they seek to preserve their crumbling analogue monopolies by legislation. The irony here is that the one person in the music industry who has displayed a flair for innovative thinking has chosen to use it not to promote music, but to generate vast quantities of personal power and cash. Simon Cowell, whatever else he may be is not a force for the good of music.

Monopolies
X-Factor is effectively a monopoly. It determines the number one single in a way that is unprecedented. Simon Cowell promotes the show, profits from the show, signs the acts, profits from their recordings and spits them out when he’s finished. Unpleasant as that may be, it’s not in itself any different from music business as usual. What is different is that he has found a way to use TV as both a marketing vehicle and a ‘talent’ pool. It’s not the dismal quality of the acts that bothers me – it’s the power of the monopoly. It worries me because I’m seeing it elsewhere and in Cory Doctorow’s simplistic reduction of Mandelson’s bill to digital vs. analogue I’m seeing something that worries me a lot. A blinkered assumption that Digital = Good, Analogue = Bad.

Digital Derelicts
Two years ago, I said that social software was opening up new opportunities, enabling new ways for human beings to connect, fostering the exchange of ideas across continents and cultures. I think it does deliver on all of these points, but Cory Doctorow’s throwaway remark about homeless people scavenging discarded netbooks actually stopped me in my tracks. Because the divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ is getting wider, not narrower.

We have an underclass out there who are unable or unwilling to embrace the digital world and are finding themselves progressively more alienated and more unable to cope with the simple transactions in life than ever before. Booking holidays, Banking, Borrowing, everyday activities that digitally enabled, deliver freedom of choice on an unprecedented scale to the digerati.

Paradox
So, where is the problem? Well, the problem is right there in front of us. We are creating freedom of choice in a digital world, but in exploiting our right to choose, paradoxically we are closing our options down. The digital economy is ruthless and it has resulted in prices being driven ever lower. We have seen in recent weeks, Borders the bookseller bankrupted because most people now prefer to buy their books from the supermarket at knock down prices, or from Amazon.

We have seen, as recently as this week, MySpace announce a radical change in their delivery model to enable it to retain an audience that has been stampeding towards Facebook. Bebo…do they still exist? We have a single messaging solution, Twitter, enthusiastically embraced by celebrities, politicians, sportsmen…the world. And it’s good. No doubt about it. We have new opportunities for consultancy as business strives to compete for the attention of their target demographic. While we focus on ‘leveraging our mecosystems’ © , the monoliths that make up the digital universe are getting bigger and more powerful in a way that will ultimately prove to be limiting – we are not creating bests of breed, we are instead complicit in the all conquering power of the organisations with the best business model.  Facebook, Twitter….This is not always a good thing. X Factor? Big Brother? The producer of Big Brother was recently heard to say that ‘British Television has never been more innovative’. I wonder what Dennis Potter might have to say on that subject.

The Invisible Tweet
And so here is the question that irks me about the social software monoliths….what happens to somebody if they are excluded from one or other of these monoliths? That only happens to other people right? Well no, it can happen to you, or me. In fact in a small way it has happened to me. I run a music blog, Chimera Musica and have set it up to send one line reviews to Twitter. A harmless enough activity and who knows, perhaps the recommendation of a song might brighten somebody’s day. It’s unlikely to make it worse! At any rate, one day last week I was logged in to my personal account and decided, out of curiosity, to look at my music blog’s Twitter profile. So I typed the name into the search – no results. Hmmm, odd… I thought. I typed a couple of other searches – name of song and act that I had recommended – no results. It’s worth noting at this stage that these tweets do not contain a link to the blog.   To cut a long story short, Twitter reserve the right to block from their search listings, any user that they suspect of anti-social activities such as spamming, from their search engines. So apparently, recommending music is deemed to be anti social….well ok, I have questionable taste, but anti-social?

The point of this is not to rectify the issue with Twitter, actually I couldn’t care less about the invisible tweets, the real point is that I don’t have a choice – there is no equivalent social network with the same reach that I could use for the simple recommendation of a song.

Monopolies come at a price. That price is nowhere more evident than it is online. As Murdoch readies himself to take on Google, one thing only is for sure. We, the consumers will end up poorer.  I am now, at least as far as Twitter is concerned, a digital derelict. Look out for your netbooks…

Social Media – it’s all about You!

A lot of talk recently about using Social Software to increase ones visibility. This is a positive step forward from the amusing stories about people being sacked for injudicious observations about their employers, or in a twist on the old story about being snapped participating in a riot while supposedly ill in bed, posting observations about the quality of their hangover…whilst pulling a sickie. So, this is a development, and the thinking behind it is very closely linked to the art of public relations.

We are to the world, the sum of what we make available for others to consume.  We are judged by our words and our actions. In this new world of social software, whether we like it or not, that amounts to a hell of a lot of personal data and believe it or not, we can alienate people just as easily online as we can in the flesh! It is a two way street.

Let me explain – on a course recently I was asked, as part of my introduction to name one thing about my colleagues that I found profoundly irritating. The course was called ‘How to make lifelong enemies out of potential friends’ or something similar. I wracked my brains for a non controversial answer, but eventually, after dismissing the possibility of ‘brown shoes’ and ‘golfing trousers’ (well, actually I find everything about golf profoundly irritating from it’s accessories to its supposed invention in Scotland, but that’s another story), settled on flagrant self promotion as my answer.

I used as an example, some Tweets I had randomly seethed at – ‘Am sitting with a Vice President, two Distinguished Engineers and a Prince of the Realm’, ‘On a conference call with the Sultan of Brunei’, ‘Having a mineral water with the CEO’. To my astonishment, virtually everyone in the room was totally in agreement, except for one chap in the corner who was feverishly punching away at his mobile phone… These tweets are nothing more than self promotion by association and I would ask the perpetrators of this nonsense to consider whether they would repeat the tweet out loud to a room full of their closest friends before sending!

The principal of ‘Brand Me’ is well established and executives in forward thinking companies are encouraged to use social software to advance both the brand they work for and by association, their own imprint on the public consciousness. In IT, people who have done this to great effect (although not necessarily with social software) are Steve Jobs, synonymous with Apple, Bill Gates – Microsoft, Larry Ellison etc etc. These are bona fide celebrities with a lifetime of achievement in their lockers.  However no technology has done more to advance Andy Warhol’s claim that ‘in the future everyone will be famous for five minutes’ than Twitter.

Twitter is a global phenomenon, we have rappers dissing one another, celebrities celebrating and a pattern of usage that extends from the useful to the banal.  Twitter can be fantastically useful – in breaking news, in serving small virtual communities, simply in keeping in touch these technologies enable an exchange of ideas which is extraordinarily potent.

My point is this, self promotion is not straightforward. In some cultures it is practically compulsory (the music business, fashion), in others, frowned upon (law). It’s a difficult trick to pull off without offending someone, somewhere. My own view is that self promotion is necessary at times, and that in this information frenzy, so is self editing. A judicious tweet will win hearts and minds – an injudicious posting will live for ever!

Social Media and Public Relations

These are interesting times, as the economy buckles and sways under the onslaught of rising debt and falling sales, the new economy, espoused by Wired magazine back at the turn of the century suddenly seems relevant again. As traditional companies fall by the wayside, a new breed of Digital Media Agency is poised to leapfrog the traditional PR practice and take the art of promotions into the 21st Century.

For traditional PR companies, the art of publicising a brand, be it a drink, a musician or a charity, is well established. Essentially, market research gives a picture of the current awareness of the brand and of the temperature of public opinion. This is compared to the desired state for the brand and a strategy is created that moves public opinion from the current position to the would-be position. At least, that’s the theory.

Most campaigns have a certain amount in common. Traditional media such as Print, Radio and Television are used to host advertising campaigns whilst promotional slots are arranged with ‘influencers’ appropriate to the desired brand. So an interview set up with Jonathan Ross for example on prime time BBC National Television will have a massive influence on the intended audience and will reinforce the effect of a straightforward advertising campaign.

Nowadays however things are changing. It’s hard to get a slot on the Jonathan Ross show and there are only a limited number of slots available in a season. Didn’t somebody say Facebook had over 300 million users? Hang on a minute! Jonathan Ross averages only 3.5 million…. and so logic being what it is, a new industry is born.

Given those figures, a digital media campaign ought to be able to deliver unprecedented conversion rates – shouldn’t it? Well a measure of caution may be appropriate – advocacy is often blinded by a fatal mixture of naivety and hope. There are a number of very significant factors, reducing the potential of digital campaigns to much more realistic figures. For example the degree to which a large audience might identify with the brand. Is it global or niche? Is it possible to correctly identify the location of the target audience? We know that Facebook tends to attract young professionals, creatives, writers and artists, that MySpace attracts a younger audience that is interested in music and movies but within those broad demographics, how easy is it to get to the target audience?

Let’s examine a case.

The movie ‘End of the Line‘ is a documentary which puts forward the idea that if current fishing practices are allowed t ocontinue unchecked, we may as a species succeed in turning our oceans into a primordial sludge supporting only single cell organisms – within our lifetimes. Apart from the compelling nature of the subject matter, a few things make this film especially interesting.

The film has now run for four weeks in the West End of London and has been picked up by cinemas around the country, with bookings until the end of September. The cause has been taken up by mainstream mass media - the Sun, Hello and Heat magazine,  as well as regional and local papers and the entire national press.

It has also engaged with the corporate world in ways no one can remember any other British film doing. The head of a major High Street presence, Pret a Manger, saw an early screening and changed his entire company’s policy on tuna.

Waitrose put backing into the making of the film and even Morrisons is now advertising some of its fish as line-caught.

The fact that the film has struck such a chord with the people and companies who have seen it has put the issues in the film on the political agenda, in ways they were not before.

This is remarkable stuff – and unprecedented for a documentary to cause this much of a ruckus. Here are some more facts.

1. Facebook profile - 4,596 fans
2. YouTube trailer – 41,566 views
3. Twitter page – 2,225 followers
4. Claim your Piece of Ocean Campaign

Notwithstanding the emotive content of the film and I’m quite sure it would have had a substantial impact in it’s own right. it has undoubtedly benefitted to some degree from a well orchestrated PR campaign based primarily on using Social Software to raise the profile of the film. How was this done?

The film was backed by a web site and merchandising, so far, so Web1.0, but where this movie moves away from the mainstream is in it’s espousal of Web2.0 sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and it’s innovative use of a web site hosted campaign that gives viewers a chance to make their presence felt. What is especially interesting is that Twitter was added almost as an afterthought – a fact which is reflected in the comparitively low number of followers.

It is possible to visualise a campaign, something like the figure here. Web1.0 technology, traditional media, funding etc all have a part to play.

The key to leveraging Web2.0 technology is in fostering a sense of community, and it is on Facebook and YouTube that viewers have the chance to make their opinions known.

It is this sense of involvement that encourages users to return and continue the conversation, and critically, to recommend the site to their friends. In this way, it is possible to encourage almost exponential growth for a message which has a universal meaning. It might be more difficult to stimulate the same degree of growth for a line of clothing or a CD, but the principle remains the same.

Twitter has a particular characteristic that gives it huge potential in this space, the character limit of 140 and the inclusion of a URL make it possible to attach a clickable link to an irresistable tag line. This is a very different notion to the idea of pirating the hash tag to insert a completely inappropriate advertisment into the trending topics. Retweets spread the link virally and the takeup, relying entirely on the suitability of the content to the task in hand could encourage users to self select – I’m reminded of a campaign that ran in the New Musical Express in the mid seventies, to promote the T. Rex album The Slider – the first few weeks a teaser campaign ran consisting of a small photograph printed on multiple pages – a rear view of Marc Bolan, unidentifiable except perhaps for the trademark curls. After a couple of pages, the photograph appeared with a caption, printed large across the photograph “Bolan’s Back”. The campaign scored a bullseye with the intended audience and the album was a substantial hit. In a sense, the same kind of opportunity is available with Twitter, a tag line, sufficiently intriuging to deliver the click through would serve to tickle the appetite of the target audience.  The beauty of Twitter is that the model dictates that anything resembling spam would die a death, Twitter depends on retweets to spread the message.

The key to success in harnessing the power of Web2.0 technology is to engage the audience with a strong message, and interesting content, to choreograph the interconnectivity of multiple forms of social media in a pattern that reinforces the message, keeps content fresh and encourages the audience to revisit and to pass the message on. Blogging, Web Sites with a high degree of interactivity, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr may all have a part to play.

Pownced!

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!

Twitter – Oblique Strategies

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!