cleanskies

become a deviant: y/n

2010-11-22T14:54:00.003Z

It's not a question you ever want to be asked in a work context; not in my area of work anyway! In some, I'm sure it's an asset. But for me, deviant, work, no.

That is, until I asked the manga girls whether they used Facebook. "Well, yeah," they said, "But mostly on Deviantart! Are you on Deviantart? Can we be your friend?"

Errrrrrrrrr. I said. Not yet, but I can be. What's your ID?

I'd picked up an ID on a trawl through online drawing groups years ago, but it had seemed a bit forumy, inexplicable and -- frankly -- grey, and I was sure that any profile, if it still exists, would be a tangle of abandoned fragments. Not to worry though, a shiny new profile is the work of a moment:

http://jeremy-spired.deviantart.com/

... and gives me a convenient place to drop any cartoons, pictures, etc. which I do at the art group which brought all of this up in the first place. I'm still feeling my way, because it's massive, with its own interface querks, dialogue conventions and games -- you can get an idea of the sheer size and breadth from the size of this meme-station:

http://meme-station.deviantart.com/

Here, meme mans a blank drawing game. Fill it in, have fun, invite a friend! I have to say, the focus on creating, on creativity and collaboration is refreshing, healthy and exciting. Interactions seem mostly positive and it's a rich and thrilling environment.

Maybe that moment of "erk!" when you have to tick yes to "become a deviant" does a clever trick. It marks that step into virtual space, that fourth-wall moment where you step into your ID, and embrace the pseudonym, the performance.

It looks like a place where you'd be able easily to shake off your past with a change of ID, and skip through different characters as your interests change. Like somewhere you could successfully play. And that has to be a freedom worth having.

Ten things that are killing the social web

2010-09-20T12:54:00.006Z

In common with lots of people recently I've been seeing a slow fall-off in numbers of people commenting, participating, chatting and responding on my various social networking channels. Part of the clue's in what I've just said; channels. More channels spreads attention more thinly, and stops people reliably getting your news.

You drift apart.

This annoys me; when I first joined the busy rush onto social networking sites (2001, my archives tell me) I had a bold vision of a world where I could broadcast important information easily to friends; where they could pick it up at their leisure without feeling pressure to respond or react; where I could see day-to-day details of their existence and by this resist the slow erosions of time and distance that lead us, in five years time, to be strangers again. This was my vision; a social group where no one is left behind.

It didn't happen that way. Partly, that's down to human nature. Lots of people don't enjoy the fragmentary communication style of online contact; others see computers as work and socialise away from them. I've made new friends and reconnected with old friends and walked along the social connections to friends of friends pretty much as you're supposed to, but right now I'm organising a party and the situation is far from ideal. In fact, I'm probably going to need to send out an email, and then send out another email, just like I did in the old days, but with even less chance of success thanks to hair-trigger spam catchers.

The messages are up, but the number of relevant people listening is dropping off. Plenty of interaction, but increasingly with partial strangers, as if this were a communication mode no longer sufficiently privileged for actual friends. And there's no point in trying to write IMPORTANT in capital letters or bold or even blink some text or use any other attention! indicator, either: years of deleting spam has taught us that the more urgent something appears, the less likely it is to need reading.

So much for human nature; there are also a bunch of things happening in the evolution of the social web at the moment which are stifling communication (even though some are enabling it). Confused? Let me explain through the medium of a conveniently numbered list:

Richer environment
It's a bit like trying to meet a friend at an Arcade combined with a Science Museum, gallery, Shopping Centre and Funfair. With so many shiny distractions around it's easy to miss something, especially when the first symptoms of offline crisis is online absence. Yes, your games, puzzles, ads, badges and prizes are lovely, but I need to go see my mate now, sorry.
Feature creep, usability decay
Currently Myspace's music player is flaky and Facebook is only intermittently alerting you when you receive an event invitation. At the same time, both are expanding their capabilities like excited slime moulds, colonising thrilling new features, while crucial central systems decay and reorganise, forcing users into multiple work-arounds and unbudgeted and unexpected learning curves to a soundtrack of struggling, swearing and giving up.
Social Networking Marketing Experts
Top of the social pile of the people trying to game the online social system are the people trying to build personal brand, leverage their online identity and create a buzz around [content]. They not only clutter my social space with idiot theories, annoying how-to videos and tedious single-insights posts, they also (and more insidiously) create nervousness among online freshers who are in a state about making a mistake; irritate and annoy regular users; and provoke veterans to throw up their hands and leave it to the Nathans.
Earn money from home!
Somewhere in the middle are gangs of teenagers, marketing students and stay-at-home mums earning small amounts of money for brand blogging, SEO optimisation, buzzes made entirely by a stable of fake IDs, and all the other myriad methods of white-to-greymarket online advertising. It's impossible to resent anything that produces such low wages and some of it is useful information, but the constant murk of UGG boots, random restaurants and price comparison websites gets wearing.
Spammers, scammers, hackers, script kiddies and their ilk
Bottom of the heap are the parasites who've trained us to ignore urgent messages, avoid clicking on links, and fear making friends with strangers. Who have distorted the development of websites so that vast resources are now poured into security and updating, rather than into improving the site for its users. Thanks to them, all websites are now less reliable, more prone to changes of service and more annoying. They are largely responsible for that slug of anxiety, paranoia and fear many people feel when they sign up to a new service or suffer interruptions or changes to a current service. It's driving people off the web, not least because there's no obvious way to punish the perpetrators.
Firehose of Me anxiety
Some people select one channel and stick with it; others skip around doing a bit here, a bit there (often precisely because their friends are scattered across different channels). Almost everyone has an additional channel for rich media, even if it's only a Photobucket or a Youtube. While combining these channels into one, single complete channel is certainly possible nowadays, all but celebrities and massive egotists flinch from full channel combination, the unmediated stream of an individual's online existence. That much of one person at once is overwhelming, and feels intrusive; even if it is, often, things you do want to see.
Overwhelementation
There is too much to follow. Too many cool things, nice people, fun events, neat new music and gorgeous art. Once the watched feeds get over a certain level, once the channels proliferate sufficiently, once you have above a certain number of elements on your page, following everything, reading everything, you either can't do it, or it stops being sociable fun, LOLs and gossip and turns into a joyless job-list, a round of sniffing posts to deal with and shout back at, grinding out your social existence like a grumpy prayer-wheel.
Intimacy drift
On the social net, the professional is personal, strangers are friends and family are filtered; privacy settings came in alongside the crowd of old schoolfriends, colleagues and acquaintances building their instant social groups, and all of us too status-aware and/or open to turn down even a dubious social connection. But as friend-groups swell, trust diminishes; and no matter how heavily we filter, the awareness is always there that as soon as anyone gets annoyed or feels someone should know something, or is simply sufficiently motivated to press ctrl+c, ctrl+v, our privacy is toast. It inhibits, and forces a backwards march into an inner circle, particularly during times of stress when we need new connections and fresh perspective.
"Share this" --with your mum
Sharing is a lovely idea, but enabling tools encourage oversharing, which leads to inhibition. The first step into any new application, social network or utility is nowadays increasingly likely to include a frantic dash through the settings, turning absolutely everything off, for fear that your skimming of small print has produced a cross-identity torrent of "x watched this", "X thinks kittens are cute!" and forced that most disagreeable of thoughts; Le spammeur, c'est moi.
Hesitancy of choice
Most of the central services (Facebook, Myspace) want to take on the functions (photoposting, status updates) of the specialist services (Flickr, Twitter). By the time you've figured out what to use, the urge has often faded. This is why I often find myself using Tumblr, the blogging equivalent of bashing big buttons with little thought. But Tumblr's simplicity means I don't tend to pass on its pretty updates, locking them away from the bulk of my friends. As a result, my friends are --word of the moment-- siloed into channels and unable to mingle.

I'm aware that I'm listing problems without knowing solutions, and that it's only my opinion, and that I'm no trendsetter or important voice; but I know I'm not the only one posting things like "...tumbleweeds here..." right now. And, as it happens, I do have some advice, although it's not new, not rocket science, and not an easy answer to all your online marketing needs.

Don't neglect your core functionality
Build new features when you need them, not for their own sake or keeping up with [SNx]
Engage with your marketing population and encourage them to enforce good behaviour
Make it easy to share and not to share on a post by post basis
Play nice; you'll win in the end

flexibility key for making the most of facebook

2010-08-27T14:43:00.005Z

Of all the various social networking outreach tools we've been using, Facebook is drawing ahead fast. Occasionally Twitter will throw up a surprise sharp enough that I'm careful to regularly check my @ and direct messages, but the bulk of the work is out in the Facebook.

Continuing in my experimental vein, I'm taking every opportunity to compare and contrast different approaches. Conveniently, two main agendas (Positive Activities and Choices/Pathways/Connexions) provide me with a very neat pair of comparators. Whenever I'm uncertain about how to approach a task, I can take one route on one page, and the other on the other, and learn by doing.

So, the two pages get slightly different approaches, on the advertising, the character of the posts, the numbers and character of the links. Spreading out further, the different groups and projects are all pursuing their own contact style and behaviours, according to their needs. At first this caused me some anxiety. As members of an advanced bureaucracy, stepping outside consistent procedure is panic-provoking. As people who work with people who are young, and often vulnerable in other ways, we are naturally concerned that our actions are consistent, kind and safe.

However, as practice developed, I began to feel that this very multiplicity of approach may be crucial to successfully using social networking in a youthwork context. Where workers made up their own approach, in collaboration with the young people they were working with, groups flourished and grew. Where workers asked to be shown how to use it, then followed instructions, their enthusiasm quickly waned and online groups began to fade.

I've come up with a few reasons why this might be:

The fluid nature of social networking environment requires flexibility.
Social Networking is a dynamic, constantly evolving environment. To respond best and most creatively users must be open to exploration, experimentation and change.
Social networking is a naturally subversive act which resists rules and authority.
From the informal communication register to the multiple oportunities for time-wasting, deception and mischief-making, Social Networking is sub-rosa, sneaky, circumvential and generally an area of experimentation, boundary testing and play. This makes it a rich environment for youth work, but one best engaged with informally, collaboratively, and on the young people's own terms.
Successful usage requires proper submersion in the Social Networking environment.
Following rules and tapping through checkboxes doesn't communicate the true appeal of the online environment. Not that workers should spend their whole time watching youtube videos, talking rubbish and playing pointless web games! But some exploration and experimentation is crucial. A phrase I use is "be guided by your offline practice", and here I would quote the climbing wall. Go up and down the wall yourself. You'll be a better worker for it.

on the refolding of identity

2010-07-13T16:05:00.003Z

Scandal this week as huge online multi-player game World of Warcraft decided to introduce their forums to real name culture. The predictable outcry masked a broader anxiety about the brave new world of total connection. Now that the entire world is online, will it have to become less free? Or, put more simply; are most people really idiots?

World of Warcraft backed down, of course; several days of female roleplayers gently sharing with the site organisers their extensive personal experiences of being stalked, threatened and harassed did the trick nicely. But Facebook, the native home of the real name culture, is alive and well and winning the internet.

The internet started out as a pseudonymous culture. Faced with character name limits, people created aliases. Realising they were different people with different groups, they made multiples. Feeling the need to escape in an overpoweringly male-dominated world, women went male, or gender neutral. People put on imaginary bodies and made strange worlds. They met strangers and found out new ideas, explored new territories of identity and expression. They were able to switch and change to meet new challenges and rest from exhausting interactions. It was thrilling, empowering, exciting.

Compared to that, the real name culture of Facebook feels like being a pop-up gopher in the hammer game -- the same friends, the same connections, the same short list of faces/friends/family, chattering back endlessly. It's quite nice, but also quite boring. You respond to someone, you see more of them. You ignore someone, they go away. It simulates the experiences of popular kids everywhere, which is fine, I guess; but if you only stay in your own pretty playpen you're kind of missing the point of going online.

For anyone who read about online freedoms and felt a sinking sense of horror, you're absolutely right. While you can engage with this freeedom creatively, make interesting content, have fun, make new friends and generally have a brilliant time, of course many people take the other route. They grief, flame, stalk, harrass, break and vandalise things. They do appalling things almost unconsciously, without a second thought; and their excuses are very simple and very clear. It is easy to do, anyone could do it, lots of people want to, and nobody's stopping me.

Are they right, though? Are they really now the dominant online group? Or, to put it another way, are most people really idiots?

If what's predominantly happening is that most people are routinely thoughtlessly acting out without worrying about consequences because there are unlikely to be any bad consequences and it's just so easy, yes, some form of unique registration might have an effect. However, if what we're seeing is an aggressive minority indulging in deviant behaviour because that's what they want to do, then it seems likely that people will get round the checks and blocks and continue with what they're doing because that is what they do when they're online.

World of Warcraft's forums, for the moment, are continuing to allow their users fictional creations their voices. But if the moronic and monotonous sock-puppet slaggers outnumber the real and honorable interactions, what conclusions should we draw?

Bye bye Bebo, so long Livejournal

2010-05-20T15:38:00.002Z

"Everyone talks about Bebo, but nobody uses it," she says. I'm talking to a group who are using Facebook to promote gigs at their Young People's Centre. It's been incredibly successful. They made friends with local bands, promoters and music fans. They made friends with everyone in the Youth Club, on the local Town Youth Council and the local Youth Forum. Once they got enough friends in the age-group, they just started being suggested to the local young people as a suitable friend. And the young people laughed at the building pretending to be a person and notched up another friend-mark on their tally sheet.

At 400 friends, it's impossible to be sure who's on your friends list any more. Is it a risk? I take them through some of the risk points, ignoring the irony of teaching kids to use Facebook. Sometimes they need it, but not this lot. "Oh yeah, I was stalked," she says, with a lopsided smile, and launches into one of the standard stories. She snaps open a chat window as she talks; one of the bands wants info about an upcoming gig. She fires a question across the room, someone fires off a text, the information comes back and she responds. I'm looking at the text as she types. The language is formal, kind, elaborately polite, bracketed by smilies and see-you-latwer commonplaces. Subtext made explicit; I'm busy, but I still care.

Bebo, then, does anyone use it? "I think my little sister... used to," says one of the older young people. "She's got a Facebook now. She's only eleven." We launch into another discussion of online safety, terms of service and protecting yourself. They know the script, though; they're looking out for each other, they can take their concerns on to staff, family, friends.

Does anyone read blogs? "I have a friend who writes one, I think..." They look a bit bored. Someone's sent through a message. "We told them the stage times, didn't we?" she snaps, "They know this!" She types up a quick message. "Who is it?" asks one of the younger young people. She tells them. "He never remembers anything," he laughs, "Too much *phweep*." Her response, typed with machine-gun speed, is as unfailingly polite and concise as her chat.

Do you have any trouble with people being rude on the wall? No, no. Of course they don't.

So, Bye bye Bebo. We didn't get much more than a year's use out of it in the end, before everyone was flooding onto Facebook. And the blog can go, too -- fold it back into the general site news and the timeline. Twitter and Myspace can stay, for now, utilities filed next to Slideshare and Youtube. Glad I elected to use Livejournal for the blog, though! Downloading an archive copy was a piece of cake.

recovering from the personal effectiveness course

2010-04-19T10:08:00.006Z

It's been a couple of weeks since I went on the Personal Effectiveness Course, and I've just about recovered. No disrespect to the trainer (she was very good) the course content (some interesting insights) or the training arrangements (nothing like being presented with an assertiveness challenge partway through the day), but, let's face it, if a person has problems with assertiveness, effectiveness and so on, there is, by definition, a problem. Problems are seldom sorted out by a few useful insights; this presents the beginning of the work.

I have the usual issues common to operational, hands-on staff with training around "personal improvement". I feel it's sort of waffy and handwavy, dancing around the work without actually getting on with it. In this spirit I've set aside time each week to complete training that will improve my effectiveness and capabilities at work -- those clear goals and that work focus help me feel satisfied that the training is valid use of my time, but at the same time, most courses start or involve a bit of personal improvement.

There was the usual round of reprove/excuse/allow over my doodling during the session, but as you can see from the page below, it didn't really slow me down. So, what struck me?

The notes on trying to form a relationship is related to people (including bosses) feeling annoyed or overly distracted when people socialise at work. While the option of just telling people (or requiring them) to do things is available for a few lucky people, most need regularly renewed social connection to avoid awkwardness when sharing out work. Social glue becomes a lubricant to progress.

My bulleted list refers to the triple preventers of progress.

Me getting angry and frustrated,
people going silent,
agreements not leading to action.

I was looking for answers to these problems, and didn't really get them. I have a lot of tips and tricks for calming myself already, and I know about lists and faulty thinking and triggers and so on and so forth. This section of the course depressed me, and the "we instruct people how to treat us" doodle hits the crux of the problem. There was the usual discussion of family roles and how these direct your interactions as an adult. For some people, this is a revealing insight, but for those who grew up in difficult emotional situations, this statement can arrive like a life sentence; the abused destined always to perform their negative, reactive, limited roles, the abusers able to merrily carry on in intentional absolution.

I would rather believe that you can put away your childhood habits, those bad communication glitches learned from difficult family interactions, and learn to operate with other people -- colleagues especially -- as a rational, respectful and kind adult. That way, as you move along social connections, as you increase them, you can set aside childish things and ways of behaving.

P.S. I've included the picture of my cat because the internet requires kittens; the face of increased financial anxiety is something we all wear from time to time.

unsafe interaction, cyberbullying and resilience

2010-03-02T14:58:00.004Z

Cyberbullying seems to be the flavour of the moment. Local news stories. Government campaigns. Angry parents and government scandals. And I've been processing the winning entries to Oxfordshire's Anti-Cyberbullying competition, where young people were invited to submit/design posters, cartoons, poems, etc. against cyberbullying. What with the anti-bullying mp3s and last year's posters, I'm beginning to rack up quite a lot of online anti-bullying resources.

I like to joke that I feel bullied after doing the anti-bullying content -- ground down by exposure to miserable content, comic sans, tales of terrible suffering -- but there is a serious point there. Exposure to concentrated information about an issue can make you more likely to suffer it; or, to put it better, information aimed at awareness-raising can actually increase feelings of victimisation and powerlessnes, if it lacks strategies to decrease the problem or increase resilience.

Checking back over my notes, I found this very revealing comment from a presentation about online safety: harassing individuals report being harassed; bullies report being bullied.

This insight isn't very difficult, if you can step back from a moment from the langauge or victim and perpetrator. People who act in an inflammatory and unsafe way online are likely to suffer reprisals. You could argue that they deserve it. Possibly they do; however, although some people are malicious, others are (also) young, inexperienced or may simply make mistakes. Things that start by accident can become habits, or get out of control. Things done thoughtlessly can quickly become entrenched in a mass of bad feelings and message board spats, and it's all too easy to get into a vast and pointless cycle of bad behaviour and suffering.

When I started writing up guidelines for supporting young people online, among the things to do if young people start flaming, bullying, or making false accusations, I included "always offer cyberbullying support". It's a temptation, in the online world of anonymous comments, to think that the rules of Do As You Would Be Done By can safely be ignored. However, even the safely anonymous can't escape from the fact that aggressive interactions will lead to negative experiences.

Another thing on the list is "diversion", recognising that boredom and neglected spaces encourage bad behaviour. If bad things are happening, put up a video, link to a game or upcoming activity, give people something to do. Refresh your page. The question presented in the picture below, "why are we always interacting with the most irritating individuals?" betrays the vulnerability of the purely reactive; you must do positive, interesting things, too.

As you can tell by my expression in the picture above, the last thing you may feel like doing is being positive and creative when someone has been nasty and hateful. But it's a crucial part of being resilient, and resilience is key to emerging emotionally unscathed from aggressive situations. That, and knowing that it's OK not to respond, that you can just walk away, that it's not an admission of defeat to drop or friendslock an online identity, any more than it is to have locks on your front door and chain up your bicycle.

Surprisingly often, online, doing nothing is the best response. Walk away, don't rise to jibes, don't respond, do another thing. And if things get too aggravating, delete your Facebook. You can always get another one.

Foursquare, Knowhere, and the quest for locational knowledge

2010-02-08T14:24:00.005Z

We have this ongoing problem (hardly unique) that we need to be able to locate (positive) activities in time and space somewhere where young people already are. Such a quest inevitably leads you to Facebook. However, Facebook's events system, kept clunky and timeconsuming to flummox spammers, is not suited to the large lists produced by a government directive to provide all young people with two hours of directed positive leisure activity a week. There are apps which can enable this (meet the Boredometer, for example) but then there's the question of uptake, maintenance, development, etc.

Also, and more broadly, there's the question of whether Facebook is currently being used primarily to organise leisure time. After the redesign dropped events to a less prominent position on the page, I stopped using it so much to figure out what I might be doing this weekend. I'm now far more chatting and interacting with (geographically) distant friends and frelatives. I've seen this before, on other sites. It starts out as a place to organise parties, pub nights and gigs, and then it suffers social erosion, eventually becoming a place where you chat/interact with the friends you met there and those of your friends who successfully adopted. One of my new year's resolutions, I kid not, is "map existing social groups and identify reliable communication routes for all". All too soon, your tool for better organisation of social groups is muddy with natter, farming games, quizzes, memes and people throwing sheep and kinder eggs around -- and while you can hide that interaction, what you can't do is get back the attention it has taken away. The inbox is full, and your personal interaction has been crowded out by commercial cuckoos.

One approach to this degradation of social channels is to find/create a popular SN site that is built entirely around events. I spotted Upcoming, one of the elder statespeople on the scene, in a complaint in a friend's twitter stream only the other day. It never quite stretched beyond a certain audience, though, and a glance at what's on it in the Oxford area hints at why: e-campaigning forum, geek night, geek jam, xml summer school, e-chem-info, psychoanalysis... the bar for participation rests high. No gigs and parties here.

But that did spark me to start looking around. Meetup has folksy charm and a lot of actual users, even in this smallish city. I put an ID in it and marked it as a project for a rainy day. At least a few things I can obviously do there, and do I like to contribute. But it's not for work; this is a grown-up space. Then a link and a mention sent me off in the direction of something called Foursquare.

Foursquare doesn't look like it's aimed at grown-ups. It doesn't even really look like it's built by grown-ups. The mobile interface is flaky, it keeps going down and the information on it -- well, with the bar set that low, some of it's going to be bogus. I'm not quite sure why even I'm persisting with it, except that if it wasn't giving me something I wanted I wouldn't be annoyed with its shortcomings. I'd just have left and forgotten about it.

If Twitter is a way to say (Oi look!) or (I think!) or (this is what's happening here) or even (I say I say I say) at a distance, then Foursquare might be a way to say (Hey! Over here! This is neat! You should try this! I like this place!) -- a virtual I waz here, basic and banal. It touches that simple, primal urge to mark out your stamping ground, the physical space in which you exist.

Most of all it reminds me of a site called Knowhere that captured the ideas and opinions, largely unfiltered, of skater kids and parkbenchers, dirty stop-outs and schoolkids, all those people who knew a place because they'd been there, lived there, had fun there. You can still see it online, although it's like an abandoned seaside town now.

It also gives a sense of the virtual world squeezing a little closer to the one in which we walk to work, dig the garden, wave to neighbours and drink coffee; that ideal of not going on and off the internet, but existing continuously in one data-enriched world, where you can plot a party en route and interrogate places about what you can do when you get there.

playing the verification game

2010-01-18T10:42:00.003Z

Recently I've been given an exciting present; the PAD, aka Positive Activities database. In line with guidelines, access is via a web interface, and (as presented) it had obvious issues. A quick round of user testing later, we're sorting out most of it. It looks better, there are better links, the langauge is more friendly and other improvements are dropping in as we work down the list.

However, one problem remains, arguably the most thorny -- and definitely the most important. Verifying, extending and improving the data. This isn't just about checking accuracy (although that's important) . It's about capturing in the database all of the possible searches that might lead to a particular activity. It's about presenting an image of existing activities that the young people taking part in them will recognise. It's about increasing search returns without drowning the searcher in irrelevant data. Here are some examples:

If an activity describes itself as "street dance" will a young person looking for breaking and beats find it?
If someone describes their dance nights as "fun" how can we get that verified by young people taking part in the activity?
If someone wants to do salsa, how can we strip out Tap and Urban?

The answers come in, sometimes technical, sometimes a phone call, sometimes as old fashioned as requesting annual reports. But there's still too much filter between the people providing the information and the people who need to use it; we need some way of making this process dynamic, user-led and participative.

At around this time I watch a 51-minute video of Luis Von Ahn speaking about human computation. Well, I say watch; obviously I mean that it was running in a corner while I was doing something else. Keep it visible, though; there's some fun stuff in the slides. He's talking about persuading humans to provide data verification through playing games -- from captcha cracking farms to his own project, an image-tagging game called ESP.

I find myself thinking of Farmville and its ilk, all of those fiendishly popular and addictive sims-esque games on Facebook. A frequent complaint is that playing them serves no useful purpose. Could you kill the sense of time wasted by presenting people instead with a stylised leisure map of their own town? Ask them to fill in information, and reward them for information also entered by other people?* If they play accurately enough, give them the usual set of toys, treats and games to add into their dream home town; grass to roll across the streets, unicorns to graze in the park, penguins to populate the shopping centres.

Develop it for long enough, and it might even become a consultation tool for town planning.

It seemed like a fun idea, so I took it to my gamer deep throat -- currently working on making video recognition work for a celebrity exercise coaching game. He instantly started talking about Second Life and the various world-builder/politics games that small companies make and sell to governments, which was a problem -- small audience, very technically focussed/escapist. Not my real world ordinary leisure experts. Also, he was bang on the money when he said he wasn't sure it would appeal. Why would you waste time building an echo, a photograph, of the real world again in the computer? Even the four-dimensionality would pall. It's already yours. You already live there.

So it's back to running the verification game the old-fashioned way, at least for now. A shame though, I kind of fancied playing games and being useful!

* Players in the GMAP games are awarded points when they enter the same information as a randomly-assigned partner --either one playing at the same time as them, a verification play, or a saved game.

tales from the e-safety conferences

2009-12-21T11:33:00.004Z

It's in the air; it's in the news. If there's been a 2009 buzzword for me, it's been e-safety, to the tune of two conferences, a consultation event, and multiple smaller exchanges both online and in the real world.

But, I must confess, the entire concept irritates me. A bit like being told by a policeman that I shouldn't walk the streets at night, on my own, I feel annoyed and disenfranchised by the e-safety barriers, the nannyware and the shock-and-scare ads about the scary people on the other end of the IM chat-line. I feel like my entire online experience is being knocked out of joint for the sake of a few nasty individuals and/or accidents.

That said, bad things do happen online. I can pull out ten or twelve scary stories, but you'll probably have heard all of them already. Many make the news. People end up distressed, abused, dead. But all of these things can and do happen without the mediation of computers.

So instead of the bad stories, let's have a few good ones I've heard at these conferences:

"The internet has been an absolute godsend. She goes to a special school, and all her friends are scattered all over the county, plus, with her disabilities it's a major campaign to get out and about. But she can go on the computer and chat to her friends after school, she doesn't even need to hold a phone to her ear (which is difficult for her) she can just wear the headset. She's just so much more connected than she would have been."

"My daughter and her friend were on [a popular networking site] and someone started making friends with them and trying to get them to meet up. They thought this was a bit weird and called me over. I learnt over the screen and told them what to ask and he was obviously some creep. He disappeared right away once they started asking searching questions and then we blocked and banned him."

"My son has a bit of a problem with using [a popular social networking site] after he's supposed to have gone to bed. So my mum -- his gran -- logs on and tells him to go to sleep! I was worried he'd be embarrassed by me turning up online, although I made friends with him of course. But it's important to allow them their space."

The notes below were from an e-safety conference notable for having a dearth of positive stories in the presentations. Even the story where a bunch of young teenage girls had spotted a slightly creepy presenece hanging around their social networks, taken their concerns to an adult, had the police act on these concerns, and the individual had been stopped before anything untoward had happened, had been presented as negative and scary.

At this event, as at others, I ended up sat with a few people quietly sharing positive stories of long-distance friendships, homework help, games, good times and online romance. We hear too much about the bad things, and any sharing of the goodthings is greeted by an instant barrage of yeah-buts. Don't believe me? When I mentioned homework help above, did you not instantly think of plagiarism?

It's difficult to use any tool well if you're afraid of it. Empower people to be happy, confident users and the vulnerabilities that let in the scammers, abusers and other losers close and heal.

cleaning off the spam

2009-11-09T14:18:00.008Z

Every morning begins with me checking my spam bins. Tedious but true. People who get in touch with my website aren't email experts, and those messages which aren't one-line, misspelt and sent from an unlikely-sounding hotmail address are probably going to be in multi-coloured html and sent to a slightly random address. I exaggerate, but so do my spam filters, and if I don't check the filters, things get lost.

As a person who's written poems and comics about spam, as someone who finds delight in the random collision of words, and has had (over the years) a series of favourite spambots from Nanaimo to Hello/Hi, I'm probably one of the better selections for such a job. But still, the endless run of viagra, violence, fraud, diet, porn and phish grinds me down. It's like taking a dip in humanity's effluent, every morning.

But while I'm fishing the spam sewer for legitimate communication, I take snapshots of the weirder freaks in the stream. Most of them get filed in online communities with names like "spampoetry", but the ones with a side-helping of doodle (like this one) end up in my blogs.

will anybody use a ning?

2009-09-22T14:58:00.005Z

I went to chat to a young volunteer who was keen to support a local youth council/forum group to make a website yesterday. They'd done some layouts in word, and wanted to know about "what was possible"?

It's very much one of those "how long is a piece of string?" questions. If you want to buy a web address, get some web space, and knock together something using the free templates provided, you just can, assuming you've got no problem with shelling out a few dollars, know a bit of html and are prepared to fiddle with the settings a bit. Setting up a blog and sorting out some photo hosting and tying it into a Facebook Group is even easier and completely free.

In fact, it's so easy, that the world is littered with built-and-abandoned websites, blogs, streams profiles and forums. So I asked them a few questions:

What do you need the website for?
What are the expectations of the young people?
How will you maintain it?

They're going back to the group to ask about the first two (they'd already considered the third, well done!). I've also suggested that they ask around the group to find out:

Which social networking site is most widely used and would they like a group set up?
Is there a young person with experience of creating websites who could make them a website?
Here's what I can do for you, is it what you want?

They were, however, disappointed. They wanted me to recommend a short training course that would teach the young volunteer how to make a website, ideally one run by the volunteer's manager's employer. Then she would make the website.

Maybe I should be running one. I'm sure I wrote one, a few years ago.

But, instead, I suggested that they set up a Ning. I'm in three or four, and I think they ought to fit the needs of a group of young people who want something to be:

Separate from the main social networking sites
Serious in appearance and use, but easily cutomisable and flexible
Friendly to multimedia content
Closed, only accessible to a particular group

I don't know if they'll go for it yet, but the last two groups I suggested it to did not, and I'm still not quite sure why not -- or why I don't use my Nings as much as I should, for that matter.

Although it might have something to do with the comment notification, which irritates me every time it turns up; it says there's a comment, but not what it says. It has that in common with Fiends Reunited; it won't tell you what's going on until you're actually on the site. And frankly, that's not very social.

risking the wrists

2009-08-26T13:57:00.004Z

I'm breaking up the office at the moment, in anticipation of the upcoming office move, and in a pile of recycling I came across this doodle drawn at a conference. It's a good reminder, this one; don't stress, the stress makes the wrists worse.

I've had my brushes with RSI in the past of course; there's hardly a webmonkey from the turn of the century who didn't get it, one way or the other. I didn't get it bad; just some problems in my wrists and shoulders, a bit of pins and needles in a forefinger and thumb. But it's chilling when you get it; I remember being in absolute panic that the only way I knew to earn a living was being chopped off, removed, placed beyond my reach. Of course, the panic makes the pain worse, part of the trick is learning to approach your work in a way which makes it less stressful.

Therefore, I'm trying to take it easy, for this office move. Breath deeply and let it happen. Who knows, maybe it will all go well...

consultation and information

2009-07-15T14:23:00.003Z

I'm clearing my office prior to an upcoming move and I keep on finding bits and bobs from all over the place. This is from the Oxfordshire County Council Consultation Team. It's introducing the the Oxfordshire County Council Consultation Tracker which allows the public to keep in touch with ongoing consultations.

The function of the snakes should I hope be fairly clear: they're reminding you that every consultation needs to have a clear, defined format, purpose, timescale, location, method and audience. Below the snakes I've added three notes:

demonstrate and report effects of consultation
management of the empowered - empowerment of the powerless
increased communications is a normal outcome

The first note is very important for communicators: it's not enough just to listen and make changes based on what you've heard, these changes must then be feed back to the consulted body. The second is a reminder that the groups being consulted are going to have different levels of personal empowerment and expectations, and that these must be managed. In particular, those who feel marginalised and disempowered will need encouragement to participate. The third point is a warning; that a dialogue, once started, is likely to continue.

how many social networking sites can you think of?

2009-06-15T16:36:00.003Z

Attended a talk about young people, social networking and contraceptive health, by Barbara Hastings-Asatourian, inventor of Contraception, the Board Game. Lots of interesting stuff, both from her presentation and the reaction from the workers.

One of the things she asked us was how many social networking sites we were aware of. For me, this was a question than ran and ran, throughout the presentation, and I eventually ended up with the list below:

Pretty scary stuff. In a world with so many social networks, how can messages like safer sex penetrate successfully?

This second page has some of my ideas, but I probably have to interpret:

Not sure of the significance of the woman on wheels? Let me elucidate:

Select a few big services and link up your service/message across them. Who's on the page? Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace -- Bebo should be there, too.
Use these services to network and make connections with other people working in the same area (either geographically or a topic area).
Join groups, post links, create stuff and generally use your social networks socially.
Targeted advertising on Facebook -- probably worth a try.
Don't put large amounts of resources into one thing; the internet is fickle.

During the session, Barbara encouraged staff to share their anxieties about social networking, always useful, and a lot of the regular anxieties you always see turned up; privacy, timewasting, social/work blurring, alienation, potential for abuse.

There was also a staff member who was more forthright about the value of social networking and online communication in general (including email!) "People aren't socialising properly, they're not learning the skills to talk face to face any more, they're just talking online and that's not real communication, it's all happening in their head. They're just sitting behind screens, tapping away, what's that doing to them, mentally and physically?"

An interesting question. I didn't answer during the session, though I had to bite my tongue hard not to; I remember my first time, on telnet, talking to people in America. It was amazing, and it didn't replace offline communication, it enabled it. It made it better, and broader and less parochial. For the first time I felt like a world citizen, even if only in a small way, in a small out-of-the-way part of the world. But, OK, what has it done to me?

Enabled regular contact with a broader and larger group of people
Created social contacts outside my immediate geographic and social area
Allowed me to hold onto friends I would otherwise have fallen out of touch with
Enabled me to sample broader sets of information and advice
Made it possible for me to revisit/rediscover/run away from friendships from the past
Made me a more flexible and thoughtful friend
Let me find out about far more things than I would have done otherwise
Added a new dimension to existing friendships
Helped me keep in touch with family members
Taught me new and interesting ways of socialising

Physically? I'm average.

twitter promoted to standard list

2009-05-12T14:49:00.005Z

There are a bunch of websites I talk about to people who are running things like local youth projects, clubs, young people's centres, and so on. It's not a long list, because all these people are very busy either running work with young people IRL, or in the back room doing admin.

But is a useful list, because a Social Networking presence is both a point of contact and a way of promoting your work; engagement and participation, if you're lucky. It's less work and more fun than running your own website, and young people are often already there, on the look out for new contacts and things to do.

These websites used to be as follows:

Myspace - the choice for young people's music projects, art, creative
Facebook - for youth parliament, volunteering, young campaigners and sport (seniors)
Bebo - good for health and social groups and sport (juniors)

These aren't hard and fast divisions, of course. There are some big campaigns on Bebo like It doesn't have to happen (knife crime), and there are lots of major, minor and local health providers on Facebook (like the Oxford Chlamydia Screening Project), and there's plenty more than music on myspace (the British Youth Council, for example). All the social networks have the tools to post tunes, picture, updates and so on, and all allow graded privacy, so you can let some people in, but not others. Often the only really key question is what do you use, and what do your young people use?

Which led me to someone coming in for this chat, and starting by saying, "What about Twitter?" Received wisdom says Twitter is not popular with the right age group, not a good way of forming groups, and not a good way of disseminating information (as the updates are too short). Or had everything changed again? I went off to check.

Short answer; it's changed a bit. The age distribution has crawled down a little, and the emerging conventions for linking and topic threading have made it a more useful communications channel. And I've made myself a work Twitter in anticipation of it changing some more, and so I can demonstrate Twitter safely to colleagues.

However, as far as advising workers goes, I'll be sticking with saying (much as I do for blogs, in fact) , don't do it unless it's something you would do anyway. At the moment there's just not enough value added -- or enough of your local young people there to reach out to.

chasing accessibility

2009-04-26T14:13:00.004Z

Part of the redesign work at the moment is improving accessibility. Not in the sense of making things sound comprehensible to as screen-reader or having adjustable type size; although that sort of thing is certainly on the cards, I'm expecting that to come in through design. My concern is mostly with content, and with making it more accessible to all.

To this end, I had a meeting with a specialist who helps young people with delayed language or learning difficulties access information. Very interesting. I was expecting that she would be producing translated materials, may even have some I could adapt. That wasn't the case, as the group of young people she supports has issues so diverse that each one needs an individual approach.

However, she explained, there are concepts which everyone can use, to make information more accessible to all:

Cut up information into single concepts
Step through each concept bit by bit
Use subheadings to divide up information
Highlight key words
Use one sentence to say one thing
Use active sentences and short, unambiguous words
Use explanatory images, not decorative images
Keep things clean and clear, without additional, distracting content
Use CAPTIONED video

... a very useful starting point -- one that suggests perhaps a "simple view" style sheet? We'll have to see.

In the meantime, I obviously went off researching websites which provided good free information resources. for young people with LDD. Mostly, I just found people selling packs, but I did turn up this: Songs for Your Body presents Personal, Social and Health Education for Young People with Learning Disabilities through the medium of catchy songs!

writing for the web

2009-03-26T13:42:00.003Z

While I was off work I had time to think about my skills. How are they doing? Are they still set to web 1.0? I decided a course was in order. I did a bit of research, then asked friends if anyone had experience of the various courses I'd identified. Learning Tree's course, Writing for the web, seemed absolutely appropriate and the company got the thumbs up from a friend who'd done their Technical Writing course.

The course was good stuff; informative, practical and focussed. At the end, we were asked to identify the three things we'd be taking back to the workplace. Here were mine:

Let's quickly reproduce that:

- Learning some sales techniques which may be used to sell/reposition services which are met with resistance
- Checklists for readability and accessibility which can be shared with authors who are not primarily writers, to explain necessary changes
- Formalised process for creating imaginary users, with research examples and background reading to back it up/add authority

There's a lot of writing coming up soon, as the website I'm editing increases in content by approximately a third. Obviously, I won't be producing all of this material, but I expect to need to a do a lot of rewriting, one way or another. It's often very hard to explain rewriting to people without things getting fraught. This course was full of good, non-judgemental ways to talk to people about improving writing and content.

twittering from the hospital

2009-02-21T14:11:00.002Z

Had one of those nasty accidents on the way into work in late January. You know, the sort where you ask the Doctor if you'll be OK to make your meetings that afternoon, and he just gives a bit of a hollow laugh and says oh, I don't think so.

In the end I was taking painkillers in the hospital for three days, while the swelling around my wrist came down, with only a mobile phone (and various visitors) as my lifeline to the outside world. So I naturally twittered my way through hospital, and Loudtwitter, which at this point in time was shipping my tweets to my livejournal daily, propagated my twitters to my blog, keeping my friends up to date. Without my having to painfully call them all.

Unfortunately, I hadn't factored into my consideration the twitter-haters, my friends, the twitter haters. Not all of my friends, of course, but a significant minority of them, who loath twitter and enthusiastically share this fact with depressing frequency. A few weeks later, reading the umpteenth comment box rant pile-on about how stupid twitter is, I regretfully closed off my use of Loudtwitter. Lifeline it may have been, but it was not an elegant solution to the problem. Some people had liked it, but other people -- as had been the case when I first tried blogging by text message -- found it bewildering and infuriating. These are people who have chosen to communicate within a blog/journal environment, who do not appreciate communication by fragment, who do not enjoy the tiny bites of information that twitter delivers. It's not their mode. Forcing my twitters out of their native environment and into one that is journal-focussed was creating a jar, a communication difficulty.

So no more Loudtwitter for now. I'll have to come up with a new solution. And until then, not end up unexpectedly in hospital.

dealing with negative comments in blogs

2009-01-08T09:48:00.005Z

How do you respond gracefully, factually and transparently to negative blogging without looking like you're overreacting, missing the point or being hopelessly heavy handed? Relying on your natural poise, grace and politeness isn't going to cut it in a formal situation (e.g. if someone's saying rude, inflammatory or inaccurate things about your service), and it certainly won't help in a situation where someone's being deliberately provocative. Like many information workers, I find inaccurate reporting, or personal prejudice being passed off as fact quite irritating. On occasion, in fact, it leaves me boiling with anger, hardly in the right frame of mind to put together a reasoned response.

This is where good procedures can really help, and I absolutely love this Air Force Blog Assessment Flow-chart, which steps you through the process, tells you what to consider in your response, and how to be graceful about correcting facts, take the opportunity to make positive contact, and know when to step away. Via Jeremiah and lots of other places.

Air Force Blog Assessment, originally uploaded by jeremiah_owyang.

... and here is the flow-chart in full. More details, including fully legible text, on the click-through!

thoughts about the keynote speech

2008-12-08T17:55:00.003Z

The whole service conference was on last week, and I'm rounding up some of my thoughts from the speakers. On the whole, the conference wasn't very web relevant (apart from me -- I was looking at people's web needs during break time) but one of the key note speakers did exhort us briefly to use the web and not fear it (good man).

This was the other speaker, and he was a lot more traditional in his view of young people and youth work. However, some interesting insights:

Deprived of actual war or threat, young people recreate a war in their heads This is more of an interesting thought experiment than a statement of fact. One to turn around and ask the person with a problem; are you approaching this problem as if it were a war? Is that the right response?
Young people see themselves as threatened and expendable - "I might be wasted any minute." This is about the exaggerated sense of threat that many people feel, especially young people about violence other young people. We are widely told that violent crime, assault, etc. , all these are very rare but we all know victims -- how to square that experiential anomaly? The speaker tried statistics, but didn't convince.
Young people don't want to do the shitwork that their parents did I hear this one. That's why we went to school, that's why we put the hours in. "Improve work" is part of the solution, but there are also complicated issues of status, gendered behaviour, and social climbing tied in with this. It's a challenge.

Useful stuff for the website? perhaps. With Connexions coming in, we have much more careers stuff, and so unpacking the shitjobs concept might help that content; bullying and personal safety information could benefit from advice aimed at lowering young people's perception of threat rather than the actual threat, and from encouraging ideas that don't draw on the easy roles of war (innocent victim, savage agressor, traumatised bystander) but instead focus on rethinking schoolyard conflict.

virtual voices - a final thought

2008-08-11T13:00:00.002Z

This comes courtesy of Charlotte Black, with a timely reminder of why the most enthusiastic proponents of new media are (obviously) going to be the old media pofessionals.

virtual voices - emerging platforms

2008-08-05T13:29:00.004Z

Skipping over a workshop where I made a podcast from the future with two media studies lecturers (fun and useful!), onto the afternoon lecture at Virtual Voices!

Interesting stuff in this panel from Derren Lawford, who edits the Panorama Website, but Simon Hankin (from the company that does the Skins site) had less of interest to me to add, while Charlotte Black, a commissioning editor for Channel 4, seemed rather unable to tell us what she did at all. Slightly odd vibe in that although it was about emerging platforms, the people up in front were all the New Media facelifters of traditional media, and lots of the people in the audience seemed concerned about where the new generation of media studies pupils were going to get jobs in a media world seeing "the death of the expert". Personally, I'm not convinced by this "death of the expert" business -- truly knowing your topic inside out is always going to be both rare and valued -- but the warnings against parochialism and the reasons for reporting from unpopular/ist areas were considered and useful. But with no-one on the panels from large independent online-only providers it was hard to get the full picture, and the small businessmen in the audience, especially, got very aggravated -- one buttonholed me after the event and told me it was a disgrace that public money had been spent on my attending the event. Like most education professionals, I'm always ready to challenge people when they put forward unconsidered views, and I had plenty to say to that.

Mindful of getting my money's worth for the tax payer, I stuck around to see the short film programme. Good thing I did, because I suddenly found out what it was that Charlotte Black (who'd done the selection of the films) actually does. The films were, without exception, truly excellent. Original, controversial, gripping, honest and clearly produced with the full participation of the young people involved. You can see them all over at South West Screen's Youtube Channel, but this one on homelessness is particularly standout. I'm already recommending it to projects in Banbury aimed at persuading young people to stick it out and successfully negotiate with parents rather than leave home:

virtual voices (3)

2008-07-29T11:31:00.010Z

The News Panel was on next, which was a bit off topic for me, but I was interested to hear their take on user generated content. Perhaps predictably, it was depressing: Martin Fewell revealing that 90-95% of their public emails come from the same small set of people, and in the email equivalent of green ink; Vicky Frost hinting at the abyssal awfulness of many of the comments coming into comment is free. There was, among the media professionals, an (I felt not altogether misplaced) mistrust of the "popular" news story, admixed with a appalled fascination with the awfulness of their most voluble audience members. Tory blogger was also on this panel, and his relationship with the awful, cringeworthy commentators was quite different. They are not populist sirens to mollify, improve, or ignore but his validatory bread and butter, the underswell of common opinion setting the media deliverers to rights, righteously. Also, notably, compere Nick Roddick asked him to sum up something (I honestly forget what) in two words. We were there for a while.

Oh, and Martin Fewell had a few words about the dangers of pandering to the Youtube generation (difficult, they agreed, to maintain integrity when their managers all want them to get onto the "most popular" and "most read" lists) and he used as his exemplar of popular non-news "videos of cats falling off pianos". I think he probably meant this one:

Cat's a genius.

virtual voices conference (2)

2008-07-23T14:49:00.004Z

I sketched this one during the keynote speech and housekeeping. The keynote was from a prominent Tory blogger who gave a Powerpoint presentation (in blue, with lots of swooshes) mostly about what his blogging circle ("the most influential political bloggers in the country") do. He also described anyone over 40 as "by definition, a technological luddite" --- hmm, how old is Tim Berners Lee now? ... and ... I'll stop there.

His "abuse magnets" list was quite interesting, though -- these being the comment-guarantor topics, if he posts them on his blog, he gets fights in the comments section. Put it into perspective: during a later panel, someone lets slip that 90% of their comments are identifiably coming from just a few people.

The owl is sad because internet owl was previously unaware of the thriving Tory blogger scene. IB's a typical blogger because he's assuming truth by saying things loudly and with conviction. I catch myself doing the same from time to time.

The woman saying "people in black are your friends" is telling us what to do in event of a fire. She's one of the organisers.

The internet is an angel in fishnets because it just is.