Archives - September 2010


What the Foursquare: Down with Auto-tweeting!

 

So a great day was had at Playful 2010, various writeups are starting to pop up, and looks like others had as enjoyable a time as I did. Hurrah.

Just before lunch I took part in ‘What the Foursquare’ (more in my previous post), which took the form of a hustings, whereby we each had 2 mins to put forward our given argument, and persuade the audience to pass our motion. Ringmaster Hammersley was unable to join the proceedings, so Russell Davies – who first inspired the whole thing in his talk at last year’s Playful – stepped in to officiate.

First up was the talented genius responsible for half the interwebs – Mr Phil Gyford. He set the bar pretty high with an eloquent and witty plea for why we shouldn’t check in at home. He’s posted up his speech, and I urge you to check it out (not least because it contains the awesome phrase ‘We did not build this country on willy nilly!‘). Unsurprisingly, the motion passed with a resounding yes.

Next up was gaming goddess Paulina Bozek, who made a very convincing argument for why we should be able to check in on buses – not least because surely, if there’s a badge for being on a boat, she should be allowed to check in on the 371? It was a close call, but it was a tough crowd, and the audience decreed that no, checking in on buses should not be allowed.

Then it was my turn. Truth be told, I had the easiest job, as I think my motion was pretty much commonly agreed as bloody annoying behaviour before I even started, so I was pushing at an open door.

I didn’t prepare such a beautifully wordsmithed talk as Phil, but here’s the gist of my argument of why autotweeting your Foursquare checkins is evil and must be stopped:

Why do we follow people on Twitter? We follow them because they’re they’re friends who we want to keep up with, they’re particularly interesting, funny, or give good link. We keep them in our stream, because they offer value.

I don’t know about you, but if someone in my stream was tweeting the minutiae of their day, telling me what they were doing at any given time, I wouldn’t find that especially valuable. Why should your followers give a shit that you’re at Starbucks. The fact that you’re now the mayor of Chariots Roman Spa isn’t hugely exciting (although, saying that, salacious locations may be the exception!). I don’t give a crap that you’ve been ousted as mayor of your gym. I highly doubt the rest of your followers do either. My personal favourite though is the ‘I’m off the grid’ autotweet. If you don’t want anyone to know where you are, why the hell are you broadcasting your checkin to your followers?!

See, if we want to know where you are, we can follow you on Foursquare. It’s almost as though the app were designed for that purpose – crazy, huh? And if I want to be alerted to where you are at any given time, there’s this fantastic piece of functionality within Foursquare that enables me to ‘turn pings on’, and the app will push out a message to let me know where you’ve checked in. And equally, if I’ve turned pings off, that’s because I don’t want to be actively alerted to your location.

But when you push this out to Twitter, it’s all or nothing. I either have all your stream, checkins included, or I unfollow you. And if you’re my friend, or you’re fantastically funny or interesting, or you give great link and keep me up to date with brilliant videos of cute kittens, then I don’t want to unfollow you. That makes me sad. But I don’t like spam. Unless you’re adding some really fascinating description by way of providing context to the tweet, where’s the value? If we want to know where you are we’ll follow you on Foursquare. If I’ve turned pings off, it’s for a reason. Respect this choice – and stop polluting your – and consequently my – stream with spammish checkins.

Keep Twitter good. Keep the signal to noise ratio up. Ladies and gentlemen, I beg you, to please stop autotweeting your checkins.

Like I said, I was pushing at an open door. The motion passed unanimously.

DanW then rounded off the session with an awesome and rousing call to ban the drive-by checkin – which I’m pretty sure also passed, although I got distracted by the laptop by the side of the stage with Rattle’s fantastic ‘Did you have a nice day?‘ live Playful monitor.

And lo, and thus it was decided on the twenty-fourth of September, two thousand and ten, the audience hath spoken and it shall become LAW.

September 28, 2010 in Talks | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Blogging like it’s 2000

Ben Terrett’s launched a campaign to get make blogging good again, under the call to arms to start blogging like it’s 2004. Several people agreed, and have vowed to come on board.

2004 wasn’t a vintage year for my blog, as I was doing my finals at university, moved to London and started my first graduate job, and found that my time was spent more on real life rather than updating my blog.

So for me, I thought maybe I could take it a bit further back, and think about blogging like it was 2000, when I first started blogging, over 10 years ago – I’m not sure if the 2000-era style of weblogging quite fits Ben’s idea ‘proper blogging’, but it was definitely my most prolific year, and thinking about this brought on a wave of nostalgia, thinking about how much the world of blogging has changed since then.

I started blogging in May 2000, mainly because my good friend Tom Coates said he was fed up with me emailing him links to post on his weblog, and why didn’t I just start my own? I’d published my first website on (the now defunct) Geocities back in 1997, but I bought my first domain in honour of my foray into this weblogging thing.

Hosted WYSIWIG services like Blogspot, Typepad, WordPress.com or Tumblr didn’t exist. Neither did Moveable Type or WordPress.org. Pitas had launched in ’99 and was used by a few, Groksoup came along (and went) whilst Dave Winer launched Edit This Page. But most of us used Blogger – the old Blogger, the version that was discontinued in May 2010 – hosting our blogs on our own servers, and publishing via FTP.

We didn’t have permalinks or comments. So the way you commented on a blog post was either to email them, or to write a response on your own blog (the trackback wasn’t yet a Blogger feature, so you had to have tracking embedded in your code so you could check your server logs to see who was linking to you, to see such responses. Or of course, you’d see it anyway, because we all read each others’ blogs).

It really was a small, and pretty tight-knit community. A new UK blog being created was big news, and as RSS readers weren’t yet commonplace (if they’d even been invented?), we kept tabs on who’d joined our blogging fraternity when they were updated through the Updated UK weblogs list. And in fact if you wanted, you could find a list of pretty much every weblog published by going to the Eatonweb portal, published by Brigitte Eaton: in ’99 she compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. It’s still going and now it’s a massive directory, but back then it was a personal and hand-curated list of pretty much all the weblogs out there on t’interwebs, all listed in one place. It was awesome.

Technorati didn’t exist yet, but we fed our obsession with rankings by feverishly checking our position on the Beebo Metalog, which listed the most popular weblogs (back when these were blogs lovingly created by inviduals, not huge media enterprises like the Gizmodos and HuffPos of the world).

To avoid slipping down the Metalog, if you went on holiday, you’d get someone in to guestblog for you, giving them blogger access to post while you were away. Coates and I had a lot of fun guestblogging at Riothero.com – not just blogging, but redesigning the whole site, and as I recall, plastering the naked torso of a hot young stud as the background.

This resdesign and general mischief-making then became a front page post at Metafilter. We had a blast tinkering around and having fun with this new form of publishing, and took it as high praise indeed when we were described like a stream of bat’s piss:

Now, I came around when Tom and Katy were Accidentally Rio Theros, because Goddamn those two are witty, smutty and vile. I love them. Like a stream of bat’s piss, they shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark

I’m so tempted to put that on a business card or as a LinkedIn reference.

But more than accolades about streams of bat’s piss, I’ve made some fantastic friends through blogging. I met Dan Hon, Meg Pickard and Jen Bolton at the first ever UK blogmeet in June 2000. And lovely folks like Matt Webb, Tom Armitage, Bobbie Johnson, Simon Pearson, Phil Gyford and Mo Morgan, were befriended at subsequent blogmeets, amongst many others. International friends too. When I went to San Francisco in 2001, I had dinner with Heather Champ and Derek Powazek, and chatted with other bloggers like Ev Williams (yes, that Ev, he of Twitter fame) at Derek’s Fray Day. When Caroline van Oosten de Boer came over to the UK, drinks were organised. When Jason Kottke was in London, we had a transatlantic geekout mooching round Borough market and eating cake at Maison Bertaux. Not all of these people are still blogging (though most are, albeit most of us on different domains), but they’re still friends.

And amongst these friends, there were blog marriages too. Meg Pickard and Paul Tweedy, Heather Champ and Derek Powazek, Sasha Frieze and Darren Shrubsole, Meg Hourihan and Jason Kottke, all met through blogging and subsequently got hitched. Though there are tonnes of stats about how many people have met their partner online nowadays (not least due to the advent of online dating) this was pretty unusual back then – Meg and Jason’s romance through blogging was even featured in the New Yorker – first in 2000, then in a follow-up piece in 2006.

But at the time, the whole thing was still very much outside the mainstream. I was interviewed for an Evening Standard article in Aug 2000 about this strange new phenomenon called weblogging (complete with screen capture of my eye-bleedingly awful site design at the time & snapshot from my webcam feed, because a cam feed was de rigeur at the time (see below), and then again 2 months later for an article in the Guardian. The world was small, so my little UK blog made it into an article about this new blogging thing in the US mag CMJ Music Monthly.

 


[ click on image if you have some strange urge to read the full article ]

 

Our writing tended towards shorter, more frequent updates with a mixture of personal diary entries and random links we’d spotted – and because there were many fewer places to discover links, there was a good chance you could actually be the first to blog a particularly interesting link, and could derive a smug sense of pleasure for successfully claiming first-to-blog.

Rebecca Blood wrote an essay in Sept 2000 entitled ‘Weblogs: A History and Perspective‘, which so eloquently describes what ‘old fashioned blogging’ means to me:

The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. Weblogs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website. A weblog editor had either taught herself to code HTML for fun, or, after working all day creating commercial websites, spent several off-work hours every day surfing the web and posting to her site. These were web enthusiasts.

Many current weblogs follow this original style. Their editors present links both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles they feel are worthy of note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by the editor’s commentary. An editor with some expertise in a field might demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted article or certain facts therein; provide additional facts he feels are pertinent to the issue at hand; or simply add an opinion or differing viewpoint from the one in the piece he has linked. Typically this commentary is characterized by an irreverent, sometimes sarcastic tone. More skillful editors manage to convey all of these things in the sentence or two with which they introduce the link (making them, as Halcyon pointed out to me, pioneers in the art and craft of microcontent). Indeed, the format of the typical weblog, providing only a very short space in which to write an entry, encourages pithiness on the part of the writer; longer commentary is often given its own space as a separate essay.

Whilst the world may be a very different place, in some ways, our blogging style of shorter, more frequent & often link-based entries isn’t hugely dissimilar to the way we use Twitter or Tumblr – it’s just that we spread our microcontent over different platforms – so perhaps we’ve come full circle…

September 22, 2010 in Communication | Permalink | 12 Comments

What the Foursquare?

I can’t believe it’s nearly a year since Playful 2009 (when I got up on stage and talked about some of my favourite examples of how playful interactions & game mechanics can help encourage behaviour change). And yes, Playful 2010 is a month earlier this time around, but it’s still gone bloody fast.

Anyway, it’s Playful time this Friday, and there are some cracking speakers lined up for our delectation. And then there’s a little spot before lunch when we’re going to have a bit of a location-based-gaming smackdown.

In the words of Richard from Playful:

A few days ago, Hunter Walk from YouTube wrote a guest post on Techcrunch revealing his research into how people use the Off-The-Grid privacy feature of Foursquare, and also how Foursquare’s “pure play focus” gives it the one-up on Facebook Places.

So I thought it might be high time to announce something we’ve been working on for this year’s Playful, based on a flash in the pan survey conducted live on stage last year by one mister Russell Davies…

Has anyone ever had a dig at you for racking up points for checking into a newsagents? Or riled you for not sharing your location with your bestest online buddies? What about trying to convince you that you should only check into a place when you engage with it…like sitting down, buying something, or at least spending some time there?

So, we’re going to try and establish some rules, via the medium of audience participation. Mr Phil Gyford (who blogged about the question of Foursquare rules last year), Ms Paulina Bozek, Mr Dan Williams, and, er, me, will be given 2 minutes to persuade you why you should vote for a particular rule, expertly kept in line by ringmaster Mr Ben Hammersley. And then the audience votes. And lo as the audience hath voted it shall be LAW.

I’ve blogged about the (lack of) rules of engagement for tools like Foursquare before. So you may be able to hazard a guess as to what behaviour I’m going to be trying to lay the smackdown on.

Let’s get ready to rumble!

September 20, 2010 in Play | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Week 7

[ photo courtesy ]

So, obviously I’ve been a bit, er, lax, about the weekly part of weeknotes. So playing catchup.

The Goodby project is now all wrapped up, client and agency both really happy with what was delivered, which was a lovely confidence boost as that was my first freelance gig. It was very much an early-stage strategic direction brief, so the work that this strategic thinking will inform is a way away, but that’s now with Goodby and looking forward to seeing what they come up with. They were awesome to work with – though as they’re in San Francisco, we haven’t actually met face to face! Going to be making the annual pilgrimage to visit friends in SF after SXSW next year, so we’re looking forward to some very belated beers then.

Currently on the plate is Project Alberta, a nice gig for a small but lovely client who have a wonderful brand, a great purpose idea & all-round delightful offering – they just need some help bringing it to a wider audience. I’ve brought my brilliant mate (and former colleague at Naked) John Connell on board to work on this, as I didn’t have the capacity to give this the attention it needed within the timeframe needed, and didn’t want to turn them away – and luckily he’s got a perfectly-timed window of freelancing before going off travelling in India & Nepal. Furthermore as this client’s business is all about sustainable design and John helped to develop the Naked Planet sustainability offering, he was the perfect person to bring onto the project. All going swimmingly so far, and John’s just as great a partner in crime now we’re both freelance as he was when we were working together at Naked. Good times.

Also been speaking with the IPA Social team, as we’re supposed to be on a panel at the Advertising in a Social Media World conference in a couple of weeks, and we’d like to try and stir things up a bit, and raise a few provocative points of view, get some debate going, as panels where everyone agrees with each other tend to be dull as ditchwater. Some of the broader areas we’re thinking about are etiquette, what you should do vs what you can do, and the ever-present issues around privacy.

Looking forwards, I’m very excited about the conversations with the fine folks at Rattle about coming on board to work on Project Southwold – it’s a fantastic project, with some exceptionally talented people lined up to work on it, so really chuffed about this one.

It’s been really inspiring to come across so many people who aren’t content with just doing things the way it’s always been done, who are experimenting, trying new things and forging new ground. Chatting with the lovely fellas at BERG and Rebel Alliance, amongst others, got my brain buzzing, and that’s a Very Good Thing.

 

In other news, I:

…went on a hen weekend and took part in my first life drawing class. I cannot draw for toffee. I apologise now to Andy the model for my depiction of him. It wasn’t very flattering.

…went to dConstruct & OpenTech, as written up in my previous post.

…have been playing with Mappiness, the delightful app which maps happiness across space in the UK, as part of a research project for the LSE (thanks to Charlie for the heads-up).

…have been loving If You Only, the wonderful creation of my friend and writer Bobbie Johnson as a means of surfacing brilliant long-form content (the full name of the project being ‘If you only read one thing today, make it this’). It’s perfect Instapaper fodder for the iPhone / iPad and makes you want journeys to last longer just so you can read some more wonderful writing – and it got a lovely write-up in the Observer to boot.

..have been enjoying my former creative director Jim’s latest creative tinkerings, with his pal Mark (of Fast Show and Harry Potter fame) – a mini sketch show featuring Mark in the character of The Bishop of Chiltington recording his thoughts & observations as he explores Other Villages. Lovely little microcontent using Audioboo, it’s really charming.

… still haven’t seen Inception – though I did see Scott Pilgrim vs the World which kicked ass.

September 14, 2010 in Weeknotes | Permalink | 1 Comment
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