DavePress

One of the problems of being a new media fanboy like me is that we sometimes get a bit too excited about this stuff, and fail to see some of the downsides of web 2.0. That’s why I have a copy of Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur on my bookshelf - I like to pick it up now and again to remind myself of the other way of thinking about using the web to increase participation and engagement. I might not agree with Keen, but it’s important to take a regular dose of what he has to say, I think.

In all of the pro-web 2.0 literature (Here Comes Everybody, We-Think etc etc) Wikipedia is often cited as an example of mass-collaboration in action, which of course it is. But I often wonder about how relevant Wikipedia is as the poster-child of genuine distributed organisation. This comment from Andy Roberts puts it pretty succinctly:

It was set up and continues to be run by a multi-millionaire advocate of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism philosophy.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Wikipedia is a great thing, and it’s usually one of the first resources I turn to when I need to get the skinny on something. But I do have concerns about it being held up as being a model to follow for other online communities.

Part of this is because of the complicated relationship between Wikipedia and Wikia, the for-profit site which provides wiki spaces for groups to produce content together. Wikia is developing a search engine, using Wiki technology with various ties into Wikipedia. There has been much comment on the fact that Wikia seems to be using the freely provided work of volunteers to power a project intended to make money for Wikia.

A great source of information, opinion and gossip about Wikipedia, Wikia and the search project is Seth Finkelstein’s Infothought blog. You don’t have to agree with everything he says, but his dissident viewpoint is often refreshing. I recommend you subscribe.

Gordon Burn, in Born Yesterday, writing about the erstwhile Eastenders actress Susan Tully:

A colleague had logged her onto YouTube for the first time that very afternoon, and the fact that just tapping the words ‘Michelle Fowler’ into the thing could back so many moment of the past crowding back - a pandemonium of fragments (an aggregation of fragments is the only kind of whole we have now)…

Isn’t this exactly what services like Friendfeed leave us with - just an aggregation of fragments? And how well does this represent us - are we more than the sum of our parts?

Part of the joys of the social web and the community that has built up around it is the sheer informality of the whole thing. Take this, for example: a tweet from Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic this morning:

Now, how many chief exec’s have you heard of that broadcast messages to the world about how they have just trampled some dog poo barefoot?

Not enough in my view. Thanks for sharing, Loic!

lgSHOUT! is another little service I have put together for local government, following on from LGSearch, which went a little way to fixing the problem of getting relevant search results. lgSHOUT! tries to do something about communication.

The idea behind it is that it’s a Twitter for local government types. People can easily sign up and then post short messages to the rest of the community using a box on the home page, so no need to mess about with complicated blog editors and the like. People can respond to others by directly commenting on a shout, or by posting a shout of their own. Everyone can have an avatar and at the moment that’s handled by Gravatar.

So what sort of things might people want to use this service for?

• Posting interesting links they’ve seen on the web
• Yelling for help on something
• Sharing good practice
• Having a bit of a chat

It’s built on WordPress and the Prologue theme, and as such took about an hour to put together. The biggest problem was getting URLs that were pasted into the box to be parsed into clickable links - in the end I found this plugin. Bits of work to do include:

• Trying to get it to work with TinyURL like what Twitter does
• Giving the option of hosting avatars at lgSHOUT! as well as using Gravatar
• Tidying up the design a bit

So, I hope it’s useful to local gov folk. If you’ve got any queries about it, or fancy having something similar for another sector, just let me know!

The diagram (click it for a readable version) above is one I put together a while ago to try and explain what I think the terms social media and web2.0 actually mean, and how the two relate to one another. They are often used interchangably, but I don’t think that it necessarily is the case that they are synonymous.

Social media for me is media made social. That might be obvious, but you have to think what you mean by media. Text is media, photos are media, video is media. Maybe a web bookmarkcan be media, and a presentation file too. How we make that media social is by making it commentable, sharable, editable, embdeddable. By allowing others to interact with the media, we have made it social.

Web2.0, for me, is the means by which we make our media social. The blog make text social, as do wikis. Flickr makes photos social, YouTube does the same for video, and so on. The infrastructure used to enable this is stuff like tagging, RSS, AJAX, mashups and widgets.

I think just about every web2.0 service can be described in this way: Google Docs is word processing and spreadsheets made social, for example. The interesting bit is when it all works well, and that’s the ovallybit in the middle of my diagram - enhanced communication and collaborative, which at its zenith becomes community.

How do you define web2.0 and social media? Does it fit in with mydiagram? Feel free to borrow it, edit it and reuse it.

We’re off for a trip next week, to Cornwall for a few days. There may well be some light blogging ahead. Anyway, we are trying to cram in as much stuff as we can, and make the best use of our membership of both English Heritage and the National Trust.

(It’s always done my head in that there needs to be two different organisations to manage heritage properties in the UK, but I am sure there is a good reason for it. Probably.)

Anyway, there are a number of things that are quite important to consider when planning what we are seeing when, for example: the distance between places, the distance back to where we are staying, how long each journey will take, how long we might want to stay in one place for.To get this done, we had to:

• Look in the two different handbooks to see what places we might like to visit
• Check the map to see if they were near each other
• Use Google Maps to work out distances and times
• Record it all on a spreadsheet

This is a pain in the arse. Fair enough, you don’t want to plan these things too much, else it stops being fun, but some idea of an itinerary is probably a good thing if you want to make the best use of your time.

I did think, though, that it would be easier if we had a Google Maps mashup, linked to a database containing the postcodes of EH, NT and other touristy type attractions, where you could build a route for each day, maybe the system could even suggest stuff that’s close by.

I’m sure this wouldn’t be so hard to do, if you had the information available. As David Wilcox reported, EH are starting to do stuff in the social networking space, albeit focusing on volunteers etc rather than visitors (I think). Having quickly Googled, I couldn’t find any kind of online community for people interested in these kinds of places, not even a forum. OK, so I didn’t look very hard, but this is pretty surprising.

There’s opportunities everywhere.

Danah Boyd writes a post about a rather worrying occurence: a friend who had their Google account taken away from them:

Earlier this week, an acquaintance of mine found himself trapped in a Kafka-esque nightmare, a nightmare that should make all of us stop and think. He wants to remain anonymous so let’s call him Bob. Bob was an early adopter of all things Google. His account was linked to all sorts of Google services. Gmail was the most important thing to him - he’d been using it for four years and all of his email (a.k.a. “his life”) was there. Bob also managed a large community in Orkut, used Google’s calendaring service, and had accounts on many of of their different properties.

Earlier this week, Bob received a notice that there was a spam problem in his Orkut community. The message was in English and it looked legitimate and so he clicked on it. He didn’t realize that he’d fallen into a phisher’s net until it was too late. His account was hijacked for god-knows-what-purposes until his account was blocked and deleted. He contacted Google’s customer service and their response basically boiled down to “that sucks, we can’t restore anything, sign up for a new account.” Boom! No more email, no more calendar, no more Orkut, no more gChat history, no more Blogger, no more anything connected to his Google account.

Maybe no-one should rely on just one company to do everything for them. I really only rely on Google for my email, but even if just that disappeared, I’d be seriously pissed off. Again, this is one of the anti-web2.0 arguments: relying on these third party services is all well and good, but what happens when something goes wrong? How can we trust these people with our data, our information, our identities?

This week saw some outage on Amazon’s S3 and EC3 services. Many people might think of Amazon as just a supplier of books and CDs, and a whole lot of other stuff. But they also offer services for people who run websites, hosting and that sort of thing. It’s used by an awful lot of Web 2.0 startups, because it means they don’t have to even buy a server to start a company - let Amazon handle the headaches for a monthly fee.

But when this giant back-end, if you’ll excuse the unpleasant image, goes down, what’s left? For those of us that are trying to sell the web 2.0 and social media dream, what’s left is potentially a face covered in egg. We need to have confidence that the ideas and approaches we want people to take up are going to work 99.999999r% of the time. Especially when we are talking government, and public services, where stuff really has to work (though to be fair it often doesn’t).

The BBC are coming up with guidance on how staff should pronounce the phrase “Web 2.0″. Is it, for example:

• Web two point oh
• Web two point zero
• Web two dot oh
• Web two
• etc etc etc…

I have always been a two point oh kinda guy myself, which puts me in line with most folk. I do think there is a nice simplicity to just web two,  but it misses the essential nerdiness of the extra version number, redundant as it may be.

What’s your preferred pronunciation?