My blog - jon bounds

February 1st, 2010

Hashtags and the desire to own and organise

One of my favourite books on social technology is ‘Everything Is Miscellaneous‘ by David Weinberger — a book about the power of disorder, that’s disorder in information organisation rather than the more visceral milk bottles, petrol and rags sense. It’s a book that will leave your head bursting with the potential of information, its sharing and searching. The essential point is that computing power and overarching networks allow us to dispose of restrictive methods of information organisation and sort only at the point in which we need. The concept of tagging (assigning keywords to objects) is a big part of this — it allows patterns to emerge through folksomony.

Tagging objects that aren’t easily searched, such as photos, especially benefit from the social indexing that tagging can provide — to me it’s all about how common descriptions (or picking out the ‘important bits’) emerge.

On Twitter tagging has a slightly different, or an additional, reason for being. The hashtag (a word, or collection of characters identified as metadata by use of a # symbol in front of it — based on an IRC convention) is used more to facilitate collection of tweets about a single issue.

When they were first used, Twitter was a much smaller (and more difficult to search) place — users had to follow an account especially to get updates of hashtags they were interested in — it was part of registering those words as important enough to be worth searching; as not every word could be. Twitter is now much easier to search (although the persistence of the database is not great) so tags aren’t needed in quite the same way.

A random list of things that I find interesting about the use of hashtags on ‘modern’ Twitter:

They’re part of a folksonomy, requiring no registration or official status — yet organisations feel the need to have “official hashtags” and some people feel the need to ask “what’s the hashtag?” when they could look and try things out themselves. Both of these seem to come from a fear of disorder.
Twitter search (and other search tools) don’t do anything special with the # — so if the word is unique (eg firefox – at least in the computer sense) then the hash symbol does nothing except indicate that the user thinks the word is important.
The pressure of creating that “official hashtag” is between readability (eg #hellodigital), conciseness (eg #hd) and uniqueness (eg #hd09). It’s very hard to get that right.

The idea of an “official” meaning for a tag within a folksonomy is an odd one, for tags to be usable in ‘collection’ they need to be unique — but as they lose meaning and become tags for machines (that is for aggregation) rather than for people (readable, searchable without prior knowledge) overlap is inevitable.

A year or so ago, I decided to try to define a format for people to explain what a hashtag was representing — I wanted something that could be done in a tweet and searched for with whatever search method that people were using. We ended up with an account @tagref that you could tweet with a definition (meaning that a search for a hashtag and “@tagref”) would bring up the definition. This didn’t really take off — Twitter’s lack of holding tweets in the search for more that a few days was a bit of a problem (a long-running tag would need to be re-defined), as was the ‘death’ of search (for most people it’s acceptable to ask questions of the network rather than use tools.

But some people have used @tagref or a number of similar services — and that led me yesterday to the battle being had over the #esm hashtag. I saw this definition:

“#esm is definition Official Experts of Social Media hashtag”

This piqued my interest, mainly because an “expert of social media” is really a bit of an insult round these parts (rightly or wrongly) — so I had a look to see who was using it. Therein I came across this bit of protectionism:

a sort of “I was here first” message.

Deliberately hijacking a hashtag is spam, of course, but to accidentally use the same (short, non-obvious, non-descriptive) tag — hardly a crime. Both sides were getting a little heated, so some people decided to lighten the mood — and maybe prove a point about how conversation can’t be kept within boundaries on an open system.

What are hashtags for, why do you use them — and do you expect to ‘own’ them?

by Jon Bounds | Posted in social media, twitter | Comments | Tags: esm, hashtag, hastags

January 26th, 2010

Know your place

I’m speaking at this next Wednesday, although how much freelancers have to learn from the way I work I’m not sure (maybe it’ll be what not to do).

Know Your Place (which sounds a bit Frost Report to me)
“Find out first-hand how freelancers in the world of illustration, photography, writing, design, PR, Publishing and web make a living. We’ll share some practical hints and tips about how to market and promote yourself to gain attention, generate new leads and stand out from the crowd. “

by Jon Bounds | Posted in Conferences & Talks | Comments |

January 19th, 2010

Huge list of tools for visualising data

When people talk "mash-ups" they often really mean interesting ways of viewing data. This is a huge list of mostly free tools for doing that visualisation. [link]

by Jon Bounds | Posted in del.icio.us | Comments | Tags: data, infographics, information, software, tools, visualisation, visualization, work

January 5th, 2010

Wordpress MU for BEN PCT

That hail of acronyms is my way of announcing that the new site for the Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust that I’ve been consulting on is now live to the public. It’s based on a Wordpress MU (multi-user) installation, which will allow the team to very quickly set a new site live for special events and allow individual services or centres to have their own sites, easily administered by them but controlled from one central area.

The design work is by the team at Substrakt, who also developed a plugin to deal with the wide variety of data that can be pulled from the NHS Choices API. (The plugin would be very useful for local blogs as it would automatically allow search and display of local health services — hopefully it can be released publicly). They’ve done a great job of producing an accessible, clear site with in the NHS brand guidelines.

The site is to be run by the team at the PCT, so a lot of the consultancy process has been about making sure they understand as much as possible about the possibilities and the (simple) procedures needed to administer the site — confidence to experiment has been vauable. We decided on WP MU as there are plans for may sites and sub-sites — a MU install can have a site up and running in a matter of minutes, and with a set of themes designed they can all fit the brand straight away. We’ve also set up a system allowing each site to have a completely separate domain name if required — so no-one need know that they’re related to the main PCT site.

The flexibility of Wordpress allowed the team to build a mock-up site very quickly, with a very basic theme, and work on the content internally collaboratively — which was then skinned with the completed theme. For the user, the site offers RSS feeds of any of the categories, and many pages will have commenting on — both standard features.

The first of the sub-sites is under development, as well as experiments with the commentariat theme which is a theme built to make consultation on documents easy. I look forward to seeing the developments.

by Jon Bounds | Posted in my projects, social media work | Comments | Tags: BEN PCT, consultancy, NHS, Substrakt, WordPress MU

January 4th, 2010

Twitpanto 2009 — The Sequel

After proving that online pantomime could work last year, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to repeat the trick — but eventually the lure of doing it again with the experience of how it went before proved too much. It does take a long time to organise, and I wanted to do something more complex with the viewing platform which required more tech skills than I had, so I was very grateful to the Birmingham Hippodrome for their support in making it happen.

The structure of the pantomime was very similar to Cinderella last year — there was a cast, who had ‘motivations’ (character bios) and a script to follow (or improvise around), and a private “director” account for prompts and the like during the performance. Most of the differences were to do with how the medium (Twitter) has evolved over 2009:

The main difference is it’s reach — here’s an Alexa (usual caveats apply, Alexa is a skewed sample to both the US and to ‘techies’) graph of PageViews for the Twitter website (remember also that a huge number of Twitter users very rarely have cause to visit the site):

With more users comes both the problems of noise and an altered demographic — it wasn’t possible to rely on as much shared knowledge of either how Twitter works or shared culture if we wanted to reach any more than the same people.

Many people found following Cinderella (last years #twitpanto) hard and were happy to use Matthew Somerville’s Roomatic hack which highlighted cast members within the stream — but I felt that this would still be too hard to read this year. So, while it was still possible to follow the hashtag any way people liked, I planned a version that separated those ‘on stage’ more completely using two different windows. Here’s my mock up:

The changing nature of Twitter also presented issues for casting, I found difficulty balancing keeping the cast open to as many people as possible, while making sure that they were people who would ‘get’ how to do it difficult. Due to this, and also the possibility of a collision with the Hippodrome’s offline panto (which due to real-world rehearsal commitments didn’t happen) I wrote a scene that would contain characters from other pantomimes, so people could be in it without having much impact on the story.

With increased interest in being in the cast (people were clamouring from May) , I wanted a panto with a good number of characters, but it was also imperative that the plot was very well known. Twitter isn’t a great medium for establishing scene or location, nor one where curtains can be drawn between scenes — there’s also the conceptual problem that there can be no secrets from one character to the other (we ask for suspension of disbelief, unless it’s a good plot point). For that, and the obvious men in tights gags, I chose Robin Hood.

The script this year was written to be less in-jokey than last years (where I not only knew the audience better, but wasn’t attempting to get a wide audience), which was more of a struggle but — with a good chuck of help from Danny Smith — it turned out I think to be a good deal funnier. In fact it’s readable and enjoyable out of context, if I do say so myself.

What I was more sure of this year is that Twitpanto is a collaborative and open piece of art — played out online — and as such the live, free and interactive nature of it is the main thrust. There were over the Christmas period attempts to do “real time” twittering of both Home Alone and It’s A Wonderful Life — interesting, but too tightly scripted to be anything than transposing to a new medium.

The ’set’ worked, after a few Twitter hiccups, brilliantly — and even more impressively Matthew modified it after the event to allow a replay — it’s the iPlayer for Twitter and very clever. You can watch Twitpanto ‘as live’ here.

It proved a little difficult for the cast to use, I’d advised them to use the Twitter website and keep refreshing, as it wasn’t quite fast enough for them to wait for their cues on anything using the Twitter API. There were also some early web issues for a few of the cast, which contributed to the rocky start.

I also had to stop myself from being overly directorial, I felt at times that some of the improvisation was making it difficult for people to find their cues — disappointingly for me also muddying some of the jokes. But all in all the cast were brilliant in staying in character and interacting with the whole messy experience. It was especially difficult for some with only one or two lines to stay quiet for the duration, in retrospect fewer, bigger, parts work better.

Nudging, which is really all you want to attempt on the social web, is a difficult theatrical directing style to achieve, here’s what Joanna Geary (whose involvement got us a bit of press from The Times) tweeted:

It was better attended than 2008 — the #twitpanto hashtag was one of Twitter’s top ten trending phrases during the “performance” — very unusual for a UK based topic to trend these days. There were over 1,500 tweets containing it between 3:30pm and 4:30pm (1,500 is the limit that Twitter’s search facility can recall on any one search).

Whether the model can work outside the structured chaos of the pantomime I’m not sure, but happy to try (maybe a Shakespeare comedy…), but it’s certainly the most innovative drama experience on the web.

Thanks again to all the cast (find ‘em here) all at the Hippodrome (follow them here), Libby (who contributed last minute lute) and all that participated.