I’ve been inspired by OffMessage’s - A Little Every Day re-invigoration of his blogging and decided to follow suit. It’s time to eat my own dogfood again, so here goes.

Recently I’ve been working on the Collaborative Tools Project at the University of York which aims to improve online collaboration. It’s a fantastic mix of designing and providing tools, evangelizing Web2.0 concepts and hands-on training… I’m absolutely loving it!

So my plan is to share some of what I’ve been doing, thoughts, tools, results in a one blog post a day for a month format… or close enough anyway (don’t hold me to it). For me at least, it’s going to be Collaboration Month.

See you  next Monday…ish for day one which will be about the Use Cases we gathered.

This week I have been at Dev8D, a JISC-funded BarCamp-like conference which included a whole heap of three minute lightning talks from other JISC. Three minute talks are a wonderful format, long enough to hint at detail and short enough to skip boredom or irrelevance.

The best bit was of course my lightning talk, not because mine was “any good™” but because by doing it Jim Hensmen at Coventry University came up to me afterwards and introduced himself. It turns out that he is running an almost identical project to the Collaborative Tools Project at the University of York. Over lunch we shared our ideas and experiences so far, like Oompah Loompahs complaining about getting chocolate out of our uniforms.

This one meeting, for me made the whole trip worth it. Jim and I have arranged to share our directions and thoughts and results with each other.

Session: Yahoo Pipes

Tony Hirst gave a beginners guide to using Yahoo Pipes to scrape and shape data. I already follow Tony’s blog, Ouseful, and so didn’t learn anything new (that’s not a criticism) but I did manage to create something that I have tried and failed to do before ( a slightly complex aggregator publishing site ).

What I find fascinating about Tony’s work is that he has an almost maniacal avoidance of “programming”, creating things that “you can do too” without the need for programming skills. Added to that, he also has a unique ability to spot opportunities lying around the web, conceive of them in terms of tools like Yahoo Pipes, then he has the grace (like a bad magician) to carefully show you how he did it.

It was interesting to spot how many developers he’d infected with his mode of thinking, I kept seeing people Yahoo Piping all over the conference.

Session: Arduino

The wonderful Garry Bellamy, who isn’t a million miles from the Fast Show scientist who’s colleague was called Dave, gave us a beginners’ guide to Arduino. Arduinos are mini computers to which you can attach lights, motors, sensors that migt detect light/humidity/temperature or mini speakers, in fact almost anything, and make your own devices and robots.

I have so wanted to get my hands dirty with these for ages now, probably not because I will ever make anything but it’s nice to know what it’s like and what you might do. In our session I began to try and make our little and lovely LED light to blink in morse. I thought it’d be nice if a single light might be connected to a twitter account or search and tweet in morse, not so that anyone but a super-spy might read it but so that it could become an ambient “activity indicator”. Tweets tend to appear in an instant, displaying them via morse gives them more of a “visual echo” in that they simply take longer to “appear”.

Session: Amazon Cloud

Like playing with LEDs, I found this session extremely illuminating too. We created a computer in Amazon’s cloud, installed a webserver and MySQL, moved it onto a disk (also in the cloud) and then accessed it. What I appreciated most about this session was that it worked. Well prepared scripts were downloadable to do the things we needed to do (great preparation). We stopped when anyone got lost (for anyone read me). By the end of the session I had a number of servers running all sorts of services ( Alfesco, LifeRay etc).

Session: IPhone Development

This session gave us a introduction to iPhone development. I’ve tinkered before. I actually learned a lot, who’d have though THAT was the difference between header files and, er, implementation files. About three quarters of the way through the session my code stopped compiling and I couldn’t salvage it.

The thing that I think I took from this session is that I think I’m just too stubborn to accept crap programming language syntax. If the answer to a question why is “because you do” then my awkward gene throws a wobbly. I don’t think I will ever learn Objective-C and the world just probably be thankful for that fact.

Research Repositories

Throughout the whole event there was a buzz surrounding LinkedData and libraries and repositories. It’s ironic in a way that I found out about ePrints (a research outputs repository) is used at our university, from someone at our university (hi Aaron in the White Rose Grid) at the Dev8D event. Hey, I’m new…. still.

Other competing products/services that popped up in talks and mentions were Mendeley (ben.dowling@mendeley.com) , which I’d previously dismissed as an alternative to EndNote, a personal research bookmark-keeper but is more akin to LastFM’s audio scrobbler for research (it even has an open API). Interestingly, it tracks reading of research papers (how long I spent) so may have something to offer in terms of measuring the all important IMPACT factor in the future.

Mendeley and Zotero are things I will have to swot up on later.

Other sessions included:

Edina from the University of Edinburgh. Unlock Places a Geo Information Service. It includes hierarchical information… footprints, polygons, historical names of places

Twapperkeeper.com, an archiver of hashtagged tweets, brilliant for conferences.

Linked Data demos from Hugh Glaser, University of Southampton, http://rbkexplorer.com/demos/ http://sameas.org

Ross McFarlane @rossmcf gave an honest “lessons learned” introduction to Processing, the visualisation tool.

In the afternoon I learned Scala from Tom Morris, but, and this isn’t a criticism, Scala to me feels like Jython done different rather that Java scripting done right, but that’s just me, I only have room for a few languages in my head at once, including “body” and “english”.

Graham Klyne gave an insightful presentation on agility, demonstrating how the “travelling light” approach had lead them to avoid working with a web framework altogether (it was all done with Javascript, RDF, SPARQL, Lucene, Json, smoke and mirrors). An interesting assumption (which framework?) artfully and completely avoided by using gadgets (I guess).

All in all, a fantastic conference with the right mix of hands-on, sit and listen,have fun, get involved, just chill activities.

The catering was excellent. The whole event was well organised, friendly and helpful.

If I had a criticism it might be that some of the sessions suffered because the wifi really couldn’t handle a roomful of geeks downloading a development environment at once.

I do have  one suggestion …. I don’t think I quite “get” the whole LinkedData thing. Don’t get me wrong, I get the basics having noodled around with RDF/semantic stuff for years (very badly) … but there wasn’t a “get your hands dirty with the basics” session for LinkedData… I would have definitely enjoyed one of those, a session where I could go home with less than a page of working code that I’d written that maybe did something fun and simple with dbpedia and ePrints perhaps.

Last night I dropped in on the Illuminating York exhibits. In previous years, there were more varied, smaller events in old churches around York (we have quite a few of those) but this year there were only four main events.

The first was some bangin’ choons and some two people doodling with another doing the zoomy animation (it seemed). It all was projected onto the tower in Museum gardens and very colourful. At 8PM, an artist arrived “all the way from Venezuala” and hilariously did some doodles like a precious granny playing Pictionary - you know those artful flicks and embelishments that the insane quivver onto the page.

The striking thing to me was that here was a medium that had something (dualling doodlers) being used by people that didn’t.

Then there was a piece at the back of King’s Manor by Bright White. It was visually very lovely, with animations of owls and moons and moles and foxes and hedgehogs - what’s not to love? But it felt like a 10 minute ident for a spooky nature channel.

For me, any installation of this kind should have some empathy for the space and so almost rule itself out from being used elsewhere, whereas this felt like an experience that would work just as well in a cinema in Cleethorpes or projected onto a Library in Macclesfield.

For me, this piece broke the cardinal rule that I call “Don’t Just Project Stuff Onto A Wall”… in that no thought was put into this wall, the shapes that are already there, the history, anything. I have a friend who’s telly is almost as big as the wall of King’s Manor, what is brought to piece by not having central heating, comfy sofas to sit on and Sky.

To put it another way.. if you are going to “Just Project Stuff Onto A Wall”  why not use all the walls in the courtyard and live a little. Do something that can’t be compared to my mate’s telly.

We missed the KMA piece (it’d ended) but I can guess what it was all about. It was called 5circles so using the vast powers of my imagination I can see an installation where you walk about a bit and circles of light follow you around. KMA already have this particular “been there done that” badge, maybe they should move on or set their ambitions a bit higher now.

I did see some lights on a tree that might have been an artwork or maybe it was just the mushrooms kicking in.

I think York City council are being ripped off a bit because, although enjoyable, lots of the work isn’t art - it’s more like entertainment where the chances of catching your death are quite high.

York City council should maybe also think about the permanence of the pieces. If you remember when they projected candy colours onto the Minster, it was fantastic, what a sight!  That piece should be shown every Illuminating York if only for a few hours.

If the pieces could be easily re-constructed (or left in situ) then each and every year the Illuminating York thing would only get bigger and better. It needs to.

I’ve always being fairly celebrity-blind. I don’t forget faces but names are fleeting at best. Last year I spent a train journey chatting to (the charming) Kevin from Grand Designs on Channel 4 and it wasn’t until Doncaster that the penny dropped that he was a star and by then he’d shared his plans for a new series and Fizzy Pigs with me.

I think it’s time this strange celebrity blind spot or as I like to think of it, “blessing”, of mine should be made more widely available. It’s time for the death of celebrity as a concept - we don’t need really don’t need it and without it my life will be that bit easier… won’t it?

So, who is it exactly that needs celebrities? Well, the music industry for one and the vast amount of profits they cream off, supposedly to find and develop new talent as if talent needs funding. The problem is, talent is doing it for itself. Listen to Tom Robinson’s show for a night (or subscribe to his podcast), cruise MySpace or listen to BBC6 and you’ll hear what I mean. Contrary to the X-Factor evidence, there’s loads of actual talent out there.

The press and fashion industries both seem a shade too comfortable with celebrities. And it seems to me that at the opposite end of celebrity-love is blatant contempt for you and me. Us plebs. The fashion industry’s love of re-touching photos is actively harming your and my daughters, projecting a body image that simply doesn’t exist onto every screen and magazine cover and surface that can be bought. Ralph Lauren (and his kind) are evil misogynist prats, but you knew that already.

The simple fact is this. We don’t need celebrities any more. In the olden days  their “output” could be carefully crafted, manipulated, pumped out and charged for - but nowadays, they are on twitter, facebook and their blogs… And you know what, they’re nasty, thick (and often racist)  talentless twits.

The celebrity spell has been broken.. you really wouldn’t want to hang around them - and don’t. Even Stephen Fry, surely a contender for most affable and interesting bloke this side of the grave, shows himself up to be a bit lacking and, well, human, like us and nothing like the Wildean version of him that celebrity confers (Even just mentioning Stephen Fry increased my likelihood of using a word like “confer” by 200%). In “real life” he’s a let down…. And should be, thank god.

And not only do we not need celebrity, they don’t need to be that ridiculously rich. Even Radiohead (a band who, in my opinion have avoided that crap album syndrome, apart from Kid A) don’t need THAT much money, because nobody does. Just because you’ve ended up with that much money doesn’t mean you earned it (or that you should keep it).

You might say that there are “useful” celebs, that act as a figureheads, like that dumbo Jamie Oliver and that School Dinners campaign, except, thinking about it, common sense should have sorted that one out really. Feeding kids saturated fat and sugar was always a crazy scam, I mean, that’s what an inreasingly litigious society is for -where were the Kids Fed Fat and Sugar Scam headlines? They were on page 23 after the Katie Price coverage.

There has to be enough twenty-something chubbies with diabetes and heart problems to bankrupt the entire primary and secondary education system by now. Schools would change quick sharp to healthy school dinner diets after a few stinging compensation court cases. So, really, thinking about it, we should be ashamed to have needed Jamie Oliver.

There does seem to be a difference between stars and celebs. Stars are like rye-bread where Celebs are white sliced… and, like rye-bread, you don’t ever really fancy it, it just does the job.

But at the end of the day, celebrities aren’t sustainable. In order to be a celeb, you’ve pretty much got to have at least five massive fuck off cars and spend half your time in an aeroplane snorting coke. And then, record companies, having to cover expenses like getting your hat flown first class to New York have too invent lunacy like the “Home Taping is Killing Music” campaign and Lily Allen to pay for it.

I think that we might still need figureheads though, but like carrots, your figureheads should be locally sourced (say within a 20 miles radius of the required figure-heading activity)… And you definitely can’t import them.

So How Do We Lead A Celebrity Free Life Tom?

I haven’t a clue.. You could try to boycot anything that is remotely celeb-driven. I do, but that’s not deliberate.

We should all relentlessly push for transparency and the publication of celebrity wages, particularly of talent at the BBC . For example, Jonathan Ross is quite funny but not a million pounds funny… He’s about £50,000 funny.

And how about maybe….

• Let’s all agree not make new celebrities… let’s make friends instead. Only go to see live acts that would return the favour.
• Go to a gig, buy a CD at the end… let’s all reward the creative process but not the creative industry
• Buy a book written by someone you know
• Go to the Library, I’m not sure why, but go anyway
• Go to a comedy club … invite the comedian home…
• Find B Movies and watch them. Don’t watch any film with anyone you know in it.
• If you see a celebrity in the street, take a picture of the person next to them and ask them for their autograph.
• Buy a slightly over-priced handmade mug
• Use software recommendation engines such as Last.fm rather than endlessly brain-washing yourself with stuff you’ve heard before
• Scour your local gig listings for something worth going to see. If you can’t find anything - TAKE A RISK!

Instead of worshiping celebrities, we should celebrate small fish in smaller ponds - it’s simply more humane, I mean, most celebs whinge about a celebrity life anyway, let’s save both them and us the pain.

And lastly, in this war on celebrity, we should all maybe stop wanting to be one and grow up.

I was looking forward to Light Night Leeds 2009 in Leeds, a packed evening programme of sound and light public artworks of various kinds, all finished off with a tour of an installation at the magificent Temple Works building. It sounded fab and this review is admittedly a review of just the things I saw, which down to time and geography (it was a 3 mile walk all in all!) wasn’t much.

The first thing I saw was a feminist projection onto Old Broadcasting House.

#1. Projecting something onto a building is neither big nor clever.

In fact, it’s rubbish. No thought was put into the where on the building it was projected, what audio should be used (there wasn’t any) or anything. In fact, ironically, round the corner is a walkway with interesting lighting that I thought might be an artwork.

At the Old Broadcasting House there was an animation and a projection of a flash “My Galaxy” application.

#2. Putting an interactive digital thingy on a projector doesn’t make it more interactive.

In fact it makes it worse because then everyone else in the room is automatically (whether they want to or not) placed into ” a virtual queue”… waiting to “interact”… or more likely bored to tears at being forced to watch interaction. I hate these digital arts things that essentially say to you, add your stuff then watch as nothing in particular slowly unfolds. They come the same stable of digital arts projects where crappy animations respond to your voice, movement, hand gestures. Ooh look, arm-waving and purple blobs…Big deal.

On the way down the hill back into town, there was a projection of a marionette onto a building. In a Leeds Met entrance hall, there was a band on with a small crowd around it. Whoop de doo. Mind you, the entrance was lit interestingly.

At this point I saw 4 people wandering along in hoodies swinging glow-in-the-dark balls on strings. I noticed the huge car park to my left and how it was lit.

#3 Just because you’ve got some balls, doesn’t mean it’s performance art

The only things that hadn’t annoyed the arse of me were architectural, the walkway, the hallway and a yellowy car park in the drizzle. So far, Architects Utd 3 - 0 Leeds Creatives.

Cutting through the centre of town, at the Art Gallery there were some speakers making bubbling watery noises. I quite liked this “piece”… it wasn’t “interactive” so that you’d notice, it was entertaining some kids there and made me want a wee.

In another beautiful building there was an exhibition of the The Yorkshire Overland Sailors, which, er, despite being a great idea and cause, wasn’t art. It was a museum or educational exhibition, like a trade show stand for zany charities.

On the buildings there were some projections on buildings. Lame, lame, lame.

Dashing through to New Briggate I saw “The Idea of the North” by Lumen and  Terje Isungset, which was nice and contempletive and by far the best attempt of the night. Although it still gets my goat when something with a couple of screens and some audio is described as “immersive”…

It was then a brisk march down to Temple Works and we were initially introduced to the ante-rooms to the main room in which some pieces has been created and they were eyeball-stabbingly bad.

Someone had made a man out of rubbish (bless!). Someone had taken some monitors and put stuff on it. There was a Cornelia Parker-esque collection of plates on fishing wires but not enough for a tea party. Bizarrely, there were some bloody fashion images of pretty girls in dresses which I hoped were harkening back to the previous tenants of Temple Works, the Kay’s Catalogue, but suspect was just a chance for a photographer to work with pretty girls. In one room there were some shelves attached to which were photographs.
The piece de resistance (and I mean piece as in “taking the” ) was a performance artist running around like a mad Mrs. Mop from kids telly pretending to clean the place.  Dear god!

The work was appalling, embarrassing and vaguely insulting. When it comes to shit art, I’m actually quite tolerant, in fact I even like it, but shit art should pass at least one of my basic rules of thumb …

1. Has some thought gone into it? This is the biggy, some works of art I don’t even need to see because the idea is so fab that simply hearing about it is (almost) enough.
2. Did it take a long time to do? Effort can be a great substitute for thought.
3. Did it take some skill? Skill is underrated these days, but can still be admired, especially when you might be a bit light in the Thought and Effort departments.
4. Does it look nice? Hey, sometimes you can just get away with this one.
5. Does it make me re-think the space? Space is a funny thing and when short of stuff to put in it, simply tarting up the physicality is an option.
6. Does it make me laugh? For me, although not strictly essential, most good art makes me laugh out loud. Some makes me laugh probably as an attempt to cover up my fear, some at the preposterousness of someone’s Thought or Effort, some just because it’s funny.

These six criteria all fit together in a concept called Is It Any Good? which come in handy when looking at shit art because you can pretend that what you have just been looking at wasn’t a complete and utter waste of your time.

And then came the worst part, after having spent a long, long, long 30 minutes being held in captivity looking at rubbish, we still were no closer to seeing THE BIG ROOM…Like being locked in a never ending school pantomime, all smiling, bemused, embarrassed and wondering dear god when will this end.

I jokingly asked if we could leave. And asked again more seriously. I gave up and bailed and went home.

On the way home I got a text that said “would have bailed too - but they shut the bloody doors! Was really shit, you missed nothing.”. The organisers very pleasantly told me they’ll up the tempo for future showings and offered me a second run at it, but.. meh… like so many light-based installation events, the photos afterwards are often the only non-shit bit. (The Photo by Jim Moran of the main room is stunning isn’t it? But if I was been full on snarky, and so far I’ve resisted (a bit) it is just a great room with some lights in… or did I miss something? I’ve not seen any positive post event blog posts yet).

FOUR TIPS FOR LIGHT NIGHT ORGANISERS

Not that I know anything about events organisation, but…

1. Throughout the night there was the heady reek of  “audience participation” boxes being ticked for arts organisations. Repeat after me “projecting something onto a wall doesn’t make it interesting and doesn’t make it inclusive”… in fact in many ways, it does quite the opposite if you think about it.

2. Just because it’s on, doesn’t mean you have to list it. Lots of the pieces were small and crap, and if I’d stumbled across the plinth people by accident I would’ve found them charming and fun but they are a disappointment as a destination. They aren’t a “main act”.  It’d be like listing a witty remark about MPs in some bar as satirical entertainment.

3. Create a few big key events, something worth going to see, on a grand scale. Leeds as a city has that scale and the stuff I saw was more Dewsbury. The events should bring people together (briefly) to punctuate the evening somehow and create a shared experience… a tempo… a point.

4. Next year, why not try to avoid anything that uses the words, interactive, inclusive, immersive or projection…and put on something that is Any Good™… something to be proud of, to remember, to talk about.

I hope that helps…

I’ve had a lot of responses to my post about twitter, attribution and passing on links. And most people have been commenting on the retweeting/attribution side of things but that wasn’t the point I failed to make.

My point is this: When people share a link what is in their mind with regards to audience?

It might fall in the bleeding obvious category, but everyones’ audiences are different… And so when sharing a link (or a gag) you can’t know if you are late to the party or an early worm. Do people think about this or even care?

Do people know what, if ALL of their followers RT’d them would be the total number of people who would potentially see their tweet? Is tweeting just blogging lite or something else?

Do people know what timezone their followers (and followers followers) are in?

Which of the people you follow get RT’d most?

Does it matter? I don’t know… I too share links, but don’t know WHY I do it…or who I do it for (me probably?).

If you don’t know, there was a joke that rippled around Twitter about  ‘H from steps being dead‘. Relax, the gag was just a picture with no malice involved… but it caught on…

What I found interesting, and then annoying was how it rippled around (my) twitterverse. Initially, I heard it lots…. and lots… Some people chose to attribute (or retweet) their source with an RT, others didn’t, some attributed the person they heard the joke from, but not the person that that person had heard it from.

The next day it started to happen again as a new crowd started laughing at the same re-cycled joke… and people did the same with regards to attribution. Hearing a joke for the six hundredth time can get annoying.

And then, perhaps days after that, it hit Facebook and sparked off another round of comedians sharing the love. And still some people were more inclined to claim authorship (by omission) than to accredit the source…like, for example, Tom Hingley who isn’t pointing at the original twitpic, but a copy that has been put on a server somewhere else completely. The Facebook resurgence awoke part-time twitterers to pass the joke on… What absolute never-ending joy!

I think there’s something interesting in whether or not name their source when they pass on links, and I know sometimes you don’t have enough characters to be able to do so, and some people don’t know how to, and sometimes life is simply too short but what I think is important is what people are really thinking… Are they, deep down, knowingly stealing? Are they pretending that the gag was theirs?  Like we all do in real life… Like I did last night for example… I told a friend unloading his worries that he shouldn’t fly RyanAir because they’ve bought in a surcharge for emotional baggage… I can’t remember where I heard that meagre gag, but it got re-used, royalty, copyright and credit-free. Almost humour free too.

I’d love to see a visualisation of a twitstorm that took into account peoples’ willingness to credit the source with regards to a “H from Steps” meme or any other meme where there is clear personal benefit, such as “being a wag”

But this then lead me onto to thinking about, what are people who post links in twitter thinking? Why do they do it? What is it for? What do they gain from it? Who do they think their audience(s) is/are?

So when someone adds a link (or lots of links) in Twitter, there are a number of scenarios…

1. You’ve seen twenty times already! Argh! Unfollow!
2. You’ve seen once before already from someone you both are following
3. You have seen it before from someone this particular person isn’t following
4. You’ve seen it before from someone, and they haven’t accredited the source
5. You haven’t seen this yet

… and depending on your overall grumpiness rating, your respective reactions might be…

1. And your tweet is the one that made me realize, as a news source you are at best, late, top spamming me, unfollow
2. You are arse-licking at worst and making yourself redundant at best
3. I really didn’t need this link, I’ve already got it, you are only useful as a measure of popularity
4. Ooh… not only are you a spammer, so now you are noise AND a dirty rotten retweeter.
5. Thank you very much, that link made my day

Which makes me think, that given you can’t see your audiences’ worlds (they’re all different to yours) then when passing on links you are either always there first (you up-to-the-minute saddo) or you have a dullard audience (you saddo) or you have a one in five chance of not pissing people off.

Like those odds?

Then again, I don’t think many people care about pissing people off with the amount of stomach-lifting, puke-making tweets I see. I started collecting them, but found the stench too much to be able to keep it up… but if I get enough I’ll post a link (please RT).

Last night, under the banner of “You TWEET if you want to: the web is for opposition, not for governing”, Fishburn Hedges and Channel4 brought us Twinge. What was essentially a twitterfall page where us public could chip in with questions for Ed Balls, Miliband and others by adding the hashtag #twinge to our tweets.

And despite Simon Redfern declaring…

Suffering a bit of a #twinge hangover this morning.
Format worked well - perfect for conference, real engagement with outside world.

… It was a Twitterfall page. Nothing more and nothing less. Hardly what I’d call real engagement and more like standing outside the city walls in a big gang and shouting. And like all Twitterfall pages, it quickly succumbed to the inane (see screenshot below)… And yes, I took part in that inanity, the really funny thing was that everyone else I knew did too, at the same time.

Stepping aside from the sniggering masses for a while, there is so much more that could (and can) be done that move beyond the simplistic idea that a Twitterfall page is real engagement. As a participant you get to make and see your question amongst heaps of others which has a twinge of excitement because it feels like you are participating and more importantly, that hundreds of your fellow participants have read (and enjoyed) your tweeted contribution.

The fact is, however, that because everyone else in involved in the same activity… vanity tweeting (Ooh look I’m on telly) … they probably didn’t notice your hard wrought comment. Add to that the fact that when hundreds of people “engage”… you simply can’t read them all, there’s too many.

So, given that the technology is a bit rubbish, we have to improve it….for example…

Make the question selection process transparent

By this I mean.. Currently what happens is that everyone contributes and then “magically” somebody’s question gets used… Presumably there are some researchers queuing up good candidate questions, seeing a list of those would alter what I choose to contribute. I can imagine a sidebar of the tweets being stacked up, like Post It notes…

Be transparent

The fact that there were Fishburn Hedges employees taking part in the jollying along of the twitterfall stinks. It simply makes me feel that everyone else is a bot… a paid stooge, a hired hand. If you can’t get this bit right, Twitterfalls like this will be dead in the water before they’ve gained any traction because everyone will feel that the discussion has already been hijacked by PR wonks.

Cut the spam

How hard can it be to filter out some of the bots that jumped on the Twandtwagon (and don’t you hate it when everyone is still “tw”-ing words?). Looking at the remnants of the #twinge comments here, it’s unfortunate that there are so many “download a movie here” comments that need clearing up. Of course, clearing up tweets is a tricky one if you are then seen to be censoring dissent or trolling.

How about voting?

A simple voting up and down of comments may help with “making the selection process” transparent.

How about comment limiting?

What if you only get three tweets. You might use them more wisely. If you receive karma for more votes, maybe you get to make more comments. In effect this would be a real-time election of representatives from the masses on the fly.

How about a chuckle tool?

I have to admit, I like the silly stuff that people tweet in these situations but at times it drags. If a real engagement-oriented twitterfall page had a “chuckle” tool, then I’d be free to filter those too… and only let the ones with a guffaw ranking get through (or vice versa).

Add Some Bloody Value

There are so many functions and features that could be added to a Twitterfall page. You, or Fishburn Hedges,  could even just make it look nice(r) like this, which might accompany watching the TV show better than a disorientating scrolling vertical list.The visualisation of the tweets could, potentially be wonderful, not in an eye-candy fashion but to empower the participant… What if all URLs mentioned were shown in a sidebar and summarized (in real-time)… what if the most RT’d items were kept on screen (this again might help with the transparency and selection process ideas).

But the important thing is that this could be a new form of engagement and isn’t.

Yes, I know it’s early days and broadcasters as well as audiences are still getting to grips with the tools, shaping them as we go but slapping up a Twitterfall is so unambitious.

I’m not even sure if the likes of Twitter will be able to deliver when it comes to engaging with the masses and maybe it will always  just be like shouting outside the city walls at the silly burghers - but let’s at least have a try at enabling real engagement rather than something that looks like it.

…as if I have the foggiest!

At the ThinkVisibility conference, Karyn Fleeting’s ( Tinderbox Media ) gave a talk on business blogging where she outlined lots of handy tips for making corporate blogs a success. Most corporate blogs are, well, a bit dry to say the least which given the hype blogging has had, and giving the money corporates have - does make you wonder why they’ve made such a clearly poor fist of blogging. Even the CEO of a Timber company’s blog was a bit wooden.

And then I noticed something. Many of the speakers, at some point in their presentation said something along the lines of “So you all read <insert microfamous blog name here>, right?” … and everyone went “er, no, never heard of it“.

What was surprising is that this was a group of people with roughly similar interests and we didn’t share common blogs that we read. We are all reading and enjoying very different collections of “experts” and all assuming that everyone else reads them too.

And so I started to wonder, which blogs are successful, which blogs do we all read (be they corporate blogs or not) and remember.

I think that the best blogs are ones that, like a film, or like an elevator pitch for a film, tells a story or at least starts a story, or even better an Impossible Quest. A memorable blog has built into its concept a trajectory - it’s going somewhere!

And so that blog where someone traded a pen for a house, or that one where someone is recovering from cancer or a plane crash or that blog where someone bought a ramshackle house and did it up taking pictures along the way, or that one where a girl (I’ve met) has made a list of 101 things to do and is doing them or those ones where someone logs their journey across wherever…

Which made me think. Good blogs are journeys, whether they reach or even intend to reach their destination or not. And, because they are a story, the idea or concept of them is easily meme-able, both being easy to remember and easy to pass on.

Blogs that are “another day in the <insert any industry here>” typically will only appeal to someone in that industry… if you are a talented writer and lucky! These are the soap opera or reality TV of blogs, offering no guarantees or promises about what you are going to get. My own blog has been one of these, essentially a random collection of stuff that is interesting to me from programming to toilet design. If my blog was a film I’d walk out ten minutes in and ask for my money back.

And so, it may not be rocket or even domestic science, but if you want to have a successful blog, maybe think about what your elevator pitch for your blog would be to Ridley Scott. I don’t think, “some rants about stuff I saw” cuts it anymore, or ever did… I never knew.

On Saturday I had the pleasure of attending yet another great Think Visibility conference. My talk, How To Make Social Media Suck Less, was based on an ongoing discussion with Andy Theyers of Isotoma about trying to work out what makes some social media sites really work and some not.

Around a whiteboard we attempted to come up with a “Social Media Theory of Everything …. in a diagram”. We might not have THE answer as such, but we do have some inklings about what might be called (loftily) Engagement Architecture… about many sites fail to offer any form of interaction/engagement unless you are registered.

We also “discovered” that maybe, a social media’s strapline or branding message or proposition, should have a motivation that is ENTIRELY SELFISH and that the social aspects of your site should be a deferred benefit (not the reason to join).

I enjoyed Julian’s (from The Telegraph) talk because it reinforced some of my beliefs about the people-oriented aspects SEO. The Telegraph has seen a phenomenal growth adding a million unique users, month on month on month. He (rightly) says that using “traditional” SEO or PPC practices that this would at best be expensive and at worst be completely unsustainable.

So, how did The Telegraph achieve this ridiculously huge growth in visitors and rankings? By setting up what was effectively a very small in-house team whose job it was to “coach” the entire organisation on SEO concepts. It’s as simple as that. Reporters, understanding SEO basics and then doing the things they do ever so slightlyly (is slightlyly a word?) differently has made all the difference. A million users a month, every month difference.

I felt Julian’s (and my) talk might have been better if a little shorter (to be more punchy) but was kept entertained by his red trousers. I guess everyone needs a cheap gimmick

Of course, the real work and insight of any conference happens in bar afterwards and I vaguely remember being involved in the development of a genius screenplay (remember 5% of that idea is ours!), the birth of a public toilet doors that make fart noises and an art concept that involved wheelie bins…. and much, much worse!

The Think Visibility crew are now looking for speakers for the next conference, so if you know anyone with something to say about “the things that usually get left behind in the web design process”… give them a nudge. They’ll enjoy it!

Sophie’s next course starts in October 2009, read more on the Word Sauce site.

On Tuesday I went to Doodle Manifesto and had a really wonderful time (at the Mucky Duck in York). What Doodle Manifesto is is a group of people getting together with armfuls of pens and nice paper and a few hundredweight of MDF drawingboards Stephen brought along… he must have a good chiropractor or a fork lift at home.

After a certian period of time, the length of which I have no idea of because like a cheese-loving kid in a cheese shop… I sort of drifted off… into a terrible metaphor…

I found the process really challenging and exciting. I’m both a huge believer in the power of collaboration and a mildly creative egomaniac and both sides of me were, er, tickled.

I strangely found that I felt a certain ownership of the doodle I myself had started (above) even though I probably put more time and effort into other doodles. Odd. The other doodles the group created are here ( photographed after a few pints ). And if I do say myself… they are bloody good… or did you just have to be there?

I hope to make the next one.. every Tuesday… in the White Swan, York.