October 15th, is Blog Action Day. The concept being to encourage blogs around the world to all write about one issue on the same day - hoping that through the various niches (social media types, big shoes, ZX Spectrum nostalgia) the message will reach as many people as possible. This year the theme is poverty.

Blog Action Day is a fine example of “organising with out organisations” as Clay Shirky puts it, how social media can facilitate a co-ordinated effort without the need for huge hierarchies. Started only last year and by only a couple of committed people (who all have other jobs) and now in its second year there are 8,240 Sites with a total of regular readers 9,203,161. Those nine million plus are subscriber numbers by RSS — demographics-wise I would say that puts those 9 million in the most digitally savvy groups of people that there are.

The web allows ideas to spread quickly, social media helps people to connect quickly, to collaborate on actions. It could usher a new era of awareness, or protesting could become so easy that it ceases to mean anything.

When talking of the internet and poverty the ‘digital divide’ is what is often focused upon. There really a couple of different things that this covers: the first, inescapably, is poverty. Some people are to poor (or too isolated in undeserved areas) to be able to get access to computers. This is where governmental effort or philanthropy is needed — moves like the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) might do it, eventually, but my best guess is that the technology will change faster than any initiative.

Blog Action Day is a call for as much of the blogosphere as possible to write about a specific issue on the same day - October the 15th - coming at the topic from your own blog’s angle. Last year’s topic was the environment, this year it’s poverty.

Birmingham-based bloggers have decided to hold a free drop-in “social media surgery” for any charities or voluntary organisations that would like to know more about social media in general - or ask specific questions.

Unfortunately, after helping a little to organise it I discover I’m double booked and not able to be there. It should be invaluable to anyone thinking of dipping their toe into the social media space.

Here are the full details:

I was invited along with a group of other local bloggers to the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham this week. It’s part of the party’s plan to do more in the social media space — including the launch of a blogging platform ‘Blue Blogs‘ on their site. Head of New Media, the very affable, Rishi Saha sorted out passes and security clearance and I met him on Monday for a brief chat about what they were doing.

Apart from wandering around the Conference itself — think The Ideal Home Exhibition with less, but odder, stands and more press — I attended a number of fringe events about the Internet. The most interesting was run by The Freedom Association and was intended to be about “Freedom and The Internet”, it was really a good chance to see and hear the most famous right-wing bloggers talk amongst themselves. The panel was chaired by Iain Dale, and featured Guido Fawkes, Dizzy, Devils Kitchen and MP Nadine Dorries.

While all of the other bloggers on stage blog in what I would consider a conventional way — it’s their opinion, on their own chosen subjects, they handle comments, link to others and form part of a community — Nadine doesn’t.

Part of this comes from what I perceived as her lack of interest, she admitted not to reading other blogs “don’t have the time”  and also doesn’t have comments on her blog — again in part due to lack of time. The other issue is what I would think a lot of other politicians suffer from, a lack of understanding.

Nadine’s blog is useful to her because of the speed and unmediated way it can get her opinion to those that matter — in her case journalists. That is a blog’s great strength on a “narrowcasting” level, although (in this instance at least) the same could be achieved by emailing the text to the people that are interested.

It was intimated that Nadine’s blog got her “in trouble with the Chief Whip” — something that she interpreted as her “honesty” being incompatible with high office. Her blog was even cited (in another panel session) as a reason more MPs don’t blog.

She’s “thinking of giving it up” — it isn’t proving worth the effort she’s spending on it (which considering she emails her “blogs” to someone to put them up for her isn’t too much).

So. Why don’t MPs blog?

If you’re interested in the super, open source, thingy WordPress — I hate to call it a blogging platform as you can do so much else too — you could do a lot worse than come to WordCamp UK next weekend. There are a host of talks, but it’ll be a great opportunity just to hang out with WP affictionardos and bloggers.

I’m planning on spending a lot of the weekend “broke out” around and about the venue, and I’ve organised a meet-up on the Friday and also a proper do (with a geeky quiz, prizes to be won) on the Saturday (I may even do some stand-up ).

You can book tickets here

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee has a Mac, he doesn’t use Skitch though, or Adium, in fact his menu bar was free of clutter when I saw him talk at NESTA on “The Future of the Web” (it was webcast [edit now up here], this isn’t it but the content of TBLs talk was similar). I suspect his mind is fairly clutter free too, you don’t invent the web (an idea his then boss called “vague but interesting”) without a talent for seeing through the mess to a simple system.

Despite that the web is complex, in fact TBL likened what the web has become to (and I roughly quote here and later, from my notes):

“that sort of gunky-hairy thing that you get out when you unblock the sink. You don’t know how it got that tangled, and you couldn’t have planned it, but there are lots of ways for bugs to get from one point to another.”

It’s also huge. He showed us a slide of the exponential growth in the first couple of year and there’s no sign of that slowing.

TBL (and others) have come to the conclusion that the web needs studying:

“Because it’s big, tangled and complex, and we have a duty because we created it. We have to ask ‘is it going to lead to a society that we want?’ ‘How can we engineer it so it does?’”

To do this properly, they argue (they being the Web Science Research Initiative) a new field of science “Web Science” needs to be developed, pulling together the social studies, the networking studies and the data studies. There a few interesting points on this in The Guardian’s interview.

TBL’s ‘Future of the Web’ - Semantics

TBL doesn’t like to predict with “Future of the Web”, which is why he wants to be able to study it in greater detail, his thing at the moment (and as Bill Thompson pointed out, with a question from the floor, for a long while now) is the Semantic Web. He attempts to explain it here on the Today programme (via NBSE blog and others), but it is a difficult concept to grasp. More in depth discussion here as part of a podcast.

In short (now I may be getting it wrong here) the Semantic Web is a bunch of standards that describe the data available on the Web rather than documents (pages, graphics, video and the like) and how the data may be accessed. It’s confusing and scary in a way as the distinction in our minds between the data and the documents isn’t clear. TBL calls it “the interesting bits in the documents”, he means dates, times, facts, relationships. I don’t think interesting is the right word here, for we all enjoy the flowery stuff around the facts, the soft context — but the ability to get at the facts and relationships in a standard way opens up a real progress in the ways we can communicate.

It’s starting to happen a little already, with APIs being a must have for all sorts of services, but “semantic startups are still guesswork”. Like the Web itself, the applications that will build on the Semantic Web are pretty much unknown — TBL says (and what a sentence to be able to come up with:

“When I built the web, I didn’t know what would happen. Soon – as long as we give people a place to play – there will be new innovation, something we haven’t thought of.”

There are already standards being agreed on, by the W3C (an organisation TBL formed, he says “like jumping into a bobsled to try to steer, after pushing it off”), but the data standards are designed so they can be expanded by individuals within the agreed framework.

To get the Semantic Web up and running there is a huge amount of work to do to. It’s daunting because we don’t separate data from our words and pictures naturally. Folksonomies like tagging help but, at least in the short term, if individuals are to contibute to the “web of data” it’s going to be through services designed to take it from us and process it to meet the standards.

The ‘other’ Future of the Web - the battle for control

Alongside TBL on the panel at the event were Charles Leadbeater, author of ‘We Think‘, and Andy Duncan, CEO of Channel 4. You can see why they were invited, to help provide a bridge between the intended audience (not sure that was us geeks) and the super-brain of TBL, but as others have said time with TBL was limited and precious.

Not scientists, these guys were more comfortable with talking about what they thought the “future” would bring, although in Andy Duncan’s case he didn’t seem to have many ideas (he talked of “innovation”, but didn’t manage to get any opinions across).

Charles is a very astute thinker, however — he sees the main question, the main challenge of the web to not only keep it open (echoing TBLs “ISPs - give me fast non-discriminatory access, and don’t sell my click-streams”) and to actually prove the social worth of our connections. “Can we make these open communities last, prevent creeping re-regulation… share skills and values… are we capable of self regulating?”.

I may have missed the point of Andy’s contribution, the two main threads boiled down to - paraphrasing horribly (Simpson’s-style voice in my head) “won’t somebody please think of the children” and “Google’s YouTube is pinching our content”. He was worried about the lack of control over the internet, where as I think that precise “lack of control” is what made our tangled gloopy bunch of hair what it is now.

Tickets are now on sale (at £35 or £70 if you’re feeling philanthropic) for the two days of Wordpress geekery that will be WordCamp UK. It’s to be held at The Studio (formerly the Orange Studio) just off New St in Birmingham. Saturday and Sunday 19th & 20thof July

I’ll be there, hanging around the “break out room” (or bar) for the most part, and so will around 100 or so or the UKs most passionate Wordpress users. Here’s the event on upcoming.

I’m trying to organise some sort of social events around the weekend, an informal drinky-poos for those in town on the Friday and something more involved on the Saturday night. Any ideas or offers of help are welcome (email me or have a splurge on the wiki)

I’m on the panel for this debate on Wednesday, organised by Birmingham Future, with Ian Taylor, commercial director of Marketing Birmingham and David Clarke. I doubt there’ll but much internet talk, although PR really is very much about the social web these days.

Is Birmingham A Second City? The Big Brand Debate Wednesday 25 June 2008

“Birmingham was the original hotbed of entrepreneurialism, innovation and cutting-edge technology, our ‘City of 100 Trades’ was a proud forerunner in the Industrial Revolution. Since then, we have suffered an image crisis – maligned in the media and the butt of many jokes despite huge strides in improving the built environment, infrastructure, amenities and leisure offer for the city’s inhabitants and visitors.

So what can we, the next generation of city leaders, do to change these outdated perceptions of our city? Is the Second City banner, coveted by a number of other English cities, a positive or negative for Birmingham? If not the Second City, then what are we? The First City for Innovation? The Youthful City? Diverse City? International City?”

I’m not sure if there are places available, or if hearing me is worth £15 + VAT and the chance of missing the first bit of a Euro 2008 semi-final (although the other guys should be good), but you should be able to find out at the link above.

I’ve just come back from The Big Debate (part of the New Generation Arts Festival), a cosy couple of hours listening to talk on the subject ‘Digital Uptopia — more power or powerless?’. As is the way of these things the proposition was skirted round by most. The lack of a digital naysayer on the panel might have warned the organisers that it wasn’t to be a heated discussion, I think that the twitter/liveblog backchannel (albeit composed by the local digerati, who ought to be on the ‘power’ side really — the digerati in the room were hampered by failing wifi tho’)  tried hard to counteract that but still…

Two of the panel, Anthony from the BBC and Doug from BT, would have had be commenting on the live blog like mad during their opening addresses. Anthony, who works on the iPlayer, seemed to confuse “choice” with “power”,  I was waiting for the payoff where he reconciled the two concepts but it never came. How the choice to watch the same stuff on TV (by other means) at different times equates to ‘power’ I couldn’t grasp — the day they let people chose what is made rather than transmitted would be when iPlayer effected power at all.

Where as Anthony seemed not to have got hold of the right end of the stick, I’m not sure Doug was even in the same building as the stick. He talked (again, again it seems to those of us that follow discussions of this nature — something picked up on the live blog) of the history of media and how people hadn’t looked at the problems of what he wants to call “shape shifting media” yet. Shape shifting media seems to be an IPTV version of “chose your own adventure books”, and there was much online grumbling that the 30 odd years of video gaming has been addressing exactly that. “Not quite a game, not quite a film. Somewhere inbetween.” was one of his phrases. I’m not sure that this has anything to do with power (power to be entertained in a slightly different semi-interactive way?), and I’m not sure this is anything like a laudable aim (anyone remember the pretty but boring Don Bulth games?).

There are sort of two threads to the discussion that work for me, one is whether the ‘democratising effect’ of social media does mean more power in the hands of the individual, Jo had a few good points on that from the standpoint of local ‘traditional media’, but apart from that it wasn’t overly discussed. Again I think because the panel were all of the mind that there was more power, (but think about privacy for example) — oh for a member of the No2ID lot on the panel.

The second topic, and a secondary thread to the first, is whether (accepting that internet access is empowering) there really is a “digital divide” and if so how is it best dealt with. There were interesting points from the audience on this, “was the divide one of motivation, or economics?” and if economic who should pay? A great discussion, but not one there was enough time for here.

Really, for me at least,  the true digital empowerment of the digital age for me has come at the expense of events like this. Apart from Joanna Geary, whose opinions I have come to trust though her writings and actions, the panel had to work very hard to make their points to me. In the pre-internet age, the opinions of panellists, debaters, those “selected” where the only ones heard and would be automatically given credence, but now unless the reputation of the speaker precedes them I can think of twenty people I regularly communicate online with who would tear the discussion apart with wit and experience.

It’s those voices that I want to hear and online is the only real way to get them all together.

I spend a very interesting and informative night at the first Birmingham Bloggers meet-up. It was interesting as the people who turned up were connected only in that they wrote (or really liked) blogs and they lived near enough to Birmingham.

So blogs and Birmingham was the main conversation that seemed to emerge. Which kind of alienates those that blog, but not about Brum - of course not all bloggers blog directly about their lives or the place that they live, most have an angle or a subject.

Everyone seemed interested in somehow improving the visibility of Brum blogging tho - to wit Dave decided to build Brum Search (based on Google), and over at nunovo there’s much talk of Rivers of Brum. There was also much general consensus over the use of “birminghamUK” as a more general tag - so I’ve expanded the scope of upyerbrum to bring through anything tagged that onto its front page (although only items tagged “upyerbrum” get automatically added to the digg-style voting pages).