There’s an episode of the Simpsons (Season Two, Episode 22), stay with me, where Mr Burns would like to be nice to Homer—but he knows nothing about him (nor really cares) so falls on the most bland of engagement:

“Hey there Mr….d’uh….Brown Shoes! How ’bout that local sports team eh?”

(Oddly for a great Simpson’s quote the video doesn’t seem to be on YouTube anywhere, but there is an audio clip here.)

Does that remind you of anything? Here’s a collection of Tweets reminding me of it that I collected on Friday:

It’s not exclusive to Twitter, nor the Royal Wedding: check out any number of Facebook fan pages or any social platform on a Friday lunchtime to see loads of “Hey guys, what are you doing this weekend. Let us know!” type-posts. They’re a close cousin of the way blogs starting up will often end their debut post with a plaintive cry of “what would you like to see?”

It is no doubt amusing to watch them all come in (and to watch the meme or cliche spread), but there’s something deeper I think—and some lessons to learn.

I think it sometimes happens because people are following what the mainstream media started to do a few years ago (‘have your say’). “Let us know!” became their coda to all stories, because they were getting to grips with the idea that people could converse and create en masse without their involvement. They were trying to channel this new thing called UCG through them so they could continue to act as gatekeepers, or perhaps they were genuinely excited by all of those pictures of snow. The TV programmes and the newspapers (and to an extent their associated online spaces) were offering an audience, much like Tony Hart in his gallery, and still do—hence the potential motivation for sharing your content through them.

Most brand social web channels don’t have such a huge audience, or if they have a big one it’s often very tightly around a subject—big wide and generic questions aren’t going to engage that audience. Your dry cleaners, or a skincare brand, aren’t the first place you think of to tell your plans for a Bank Holiday.

Possibly it also comes from a desire to “get into the conversation”, to make a brand seem like it’s one of your mates. Might work, if you’re trying to create a very small community round your social web space—if you’re usually about answering questions and sending out news, isn’t it a little odd? What are your other followers going to do with the information if you get it and and then you spread it?

Most of all, people probably do it because they see others doing the same. That’s one way to learn, but you need to think more deeply about whether any techniques apply to your situation—what they might achieve and how they might look. In essence if you’re attempting to engage around your brand then things closely related, or of direct relevance are going to hold more weight.

As a bonus here’s Mr Burn’s classic funk track ‘Look at all those idiots‘, including wailing guitar from Waylon Smithers. What’s your favourite Simpsons as metaphor for social web engagement story? Let us know!

(click through for big)

Last night I turned my sentiment analysis tool on two hashtags: #bcfc and #avfc, the most widely used tags to refer to Birmingham City and Aston Villa during their League Cup quarter final game. It was a chance to see if visualising to ‘competing’ tags around the same event would be a useful exercise.

Caveats that would apply to this:

• Some people use the tags instead of team names, meaning that they might be used by people supporting the other team (or no team at all)—most fans, though seem to tag with just the hashtag representing their team.
• Some tweeters use both—these tweets could be removed technically, but make no difference to the comparative scores.
• If there’s a subject that uses more slang or metaphor than football, it’s not often discussed on Twitter.

There was a generally a downward trend throughout the match, tension? Bad football? It could have been both. The first two goals seemed to have a much bigger impact than the third—this I don’t quite understand, but it seems to be more about the tweets themselves than the tool.

I could see how a special subject-set of emotion words could be created for football, which could cope with more nuanced or unusual words. It’s something to consider.

The sentiment scores in a Google spreadsheet, csv files: #avfc tweets (657 of which were during the game), #bcfc tweets (370 during).

The obligatory Wordle:

First was on the Personal Democracy Forum EU conference in Barcelona, for the length of the two-day conference I monitored the hashtag #pdfeu every five minutes:

(click image for larger view)

The highest rating was 64.4% (at 12:45pm on Tuesday), the lowest 49.6% (Monday at 12:14pm during a short power failure). What was interesting to me was that the “arousal” rating seemed to work well as it stayed pretty steady during the power failure  (or even leaped up a little) even as the happiness of the hashtag users  dived. Post-lunch conference lulls and periods of excitement (the big spikes in day two, at least, corresponded with much applause) were mapped quite accurately.

The overall average was 57.29%. If you would like to explore or graph the data yourself, you can see in all in a Google Spreadsheet here.

Secondly I tried a much shorter and more mainstream application, David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference:

The emotion tracking tool graphed here ran every 10 seconds during David Cameron’s speech to the CPC and analysed the last 100 tweets with the hashtag #cpc10 and the word “tories”. I chose two versions as I wasn’t sure that non-Conservative supporters would use the ‘official’ hashtag, I theorised that they would be likely to use the word ‘tories’. As it turned out I think that while there was a more even spread of pro and anti political types using the hashtag than I expected, but the ‘tories’ Tweeters were definitely more hostile. (See the data.) There was greater movement across the graph than on any other test I’ve run.

Conclusions? None so far, other than that I think this might be a very useful tool, and that more interesting data is created the more Tweets you have and the more you can afford (server-wise) to poll for results. I’m itching to try it on another big live event with conflicting opinions, that might mean training it on a reality TV event. Roll on the X-Factor.

It was surprisingly interesting to watch: despite its roughness, the internal consistency let patterns emerge. It broadly followed weather and sports results, with some peaks and dips you could map to specific happenings, or news stories.

It lead to a spin off focussing on Tweets from MPs, which I think influenced some of the developments that Tweetminster produced in the next year or so.

It was the patterns that lead me to keep putting off improving the algorithm, but recent Twitter API developments meant I had to do some work anyway and that (together with another project, of which more soon) gave me the impetus to give the project an overhaul. And here’s how it works now…

Twitter’s geolocation services are now much improved, so I can specify a point (the centre of Victoria Square in Birmingham) and a radius (10 miles) and get a reasonably accurate dump of Tweet data back—the algorithm calls for the most recent 1000.

Twitter is now the sole focus of data, in keeping with the ‘conversational pychogeography‘ aims of the project (in essence, words used without too much pre-meditation are more interesting than those written purely for publication). It also provides much more and more reactive data.

The words contained within these tweets are then compared to data from the University of Florida (The Affective Norms for English Words - PDF link). Within that data set each word covered (there are around a thousand in the set I’ve using) is given a score for Valence (sad to happy on a scale 0-10), Arousal (asleep to awake on a scale of 0-10) and Dominance (feeling lack of control to feeling in control  on a scale of 0-10). The scores are then collated and a mean calculated. The overall emotional wellbeing score here is calculated as a mean of the three individual means, although the scores are revealed individually on the site.

I’m unsure if combining the results in this way is the best, which is why the site reveals the working — the Twitter feed just goes with one value for ease of understanding and adds a rating adjective too:

The Twitter feed produces results twice a day, and these scores are being saved to visualise more graphically, but the website updates every ten seconds (and will self-refresh if you stay on the site) and also displays a word cloud of the currently found ‘emotion words’:

Thoughts on further development

I’ve been experimenting with more local results (here is a version running on just one Birmingham post code — B13) as well as live graphing. I also have a version that will analyse results for a hashtag—something we may use in conjunction with the Civico player to produce ‘wormals’ (graphs of sentiment) during conferences.

But for now, I’m happy to let the new algorithm bed in—wondering about the amount of data and frequency that will be required to see the most detail—and to see what patterns we can spot.

Feedback welcome. Go see for yourself or follow on Twitter.

“What would happen if the world were suddenly without people; if humans vanished off the face of the earth? How would nature react —and how swiftly?” That’s the question asked by the documentary ‘Chernobyl Reclaimed‘, and the answer seems to be ‘it gets on just fine without us’.

I’ve been wondering if the social web doesn’t work in much the same way.

The social web, or to be more technically correct the social Internet has been around for a long time. USENET is over a decade older than the World Wide Web and though its appearance is something like a forum it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s based on a hierarchy of groups, organised as something that we’d read like a domain name: sci.physics or alt.music.bjork or rec.music.dylan, users subscribe and their client keeps track of what’s read and unread. It’s not quite synchronous: the service or Newsservers that you subscribed to may only have taken a portion of the available groups and once you post it has to propagate through to the other servers.

That said, if you’ve used a message board or forum or Facebook discussion you’d be right at home — you can go off and try it now. Google Groups in part acts as a newsserver and you can subscribe to USENET groups and post via the web or email. You won’t find much action in most of them, and even those with fairly high post-counts probably aren’t as lively as the once were. I’ve just taken a look into uk.music.charts, a group I lurked in a little back in the ’90s and, while there are posts and the odd conversation thread, it’s about 60/40 with spam posts offering cheap watches, easy jobs and easy women.

One trusts that those still frequenting those groups have learned to live with the spam, they have good filters or a high tolerance— or perhaps, despite the hassle, still find the groups the best place for what they do and the community survives.

Spam isn’t the only reason to move on, of course,  and some of the more general groups have found discussion splintering, devolving and just going elsewhere.

I thought for a time that this might lead to a social Internet Gaia hypothesis: that the various systems on the Internet are ” closely integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains the [economic] and [conversational] conditions in a preferred homeorhesis” to paraphrase the original. In short that the social aspect of Internet routes around blockages much like the data packets do.

In shorter: people move on if the space no longer works the best.

And they’ve certainly moved on from the group that is uk.local.birmingham (stared I learned the other day, by a friend of mine back in the early part of the 1990s). I still keep a subscription to it on the off chance, but from a 1999 high-point of nearly 3,000 messages a month it’s now dribbled down to about 20. Apart from spam, the only surges of activity are bile-filled back-and-forths somehow connected with sometime Birmingham ‘King of Clubs’ (with all that entails) Eddie Fewtrell. In any real terms this newsgroup has returned to nature.

And yet it’s still going.

The spam is automated, so it doesn’t know that it’s not reaching people. The website (in my case) and newsservers don’t know that the traffic isn’t human so they continue to serve it. Those few real subscribers either no longer use the email addresses they signed up with, can’t be bothered to unsubscribe, or have long since filtered the responses away. Or they’re me—too sacred to mis anything—or the blokes whose ’70s territorial spats are best  conducted from the safety of a kitchen laptop. With Smooth FM on.

The Internet doesn’t care who or what is using it, it just bats content around. People set things up and then leave, it still carries on. How many services have you set to autopost, or synced with newer or better spaces and then sort of stopped using?

If every real person left Twitter tomorrow, like some dystopian novel (the film would be terrible), Twitter would carry on. As long as someone was still paying the server bills: pumped in Facebook statuses would still be posted, Foursquare mayors would still be declared, ‘news’ from thousands of company sites would be Twitterfeeded (or similar) to a gasping lack of public. And bots would generate new, Twitter only, content some silly, some aggregated, some spam.

The words ‘New Blog:’, ‘Breaking’, and ‘I am Jack’s colon.’ would still appear, and a lot of those posts would be shuffled off to Identi.ca or even some Facebook statuses. Autopost is the weed that would grow over our cities, spam is the animals slowly taking over. Our social web Ghosts in the Hollow.

In a way this already happens, there are thousands of social web accounts that exist purely to exist: automatic and unweeded, they either spam or have been set up and discarded. The amount of companies ‘talking’ to each other on Twitter is amusing to behold, often set up on a whim and operated from another service (usually Facebook) the accounts Tweet— but really that’s all that’s going on.

I was alerted to a local shopping mall being ‘on Twitter’ the other day, it’s been ‘tweeting’ for nearly a year. Following’ (despite never, it seems, logging into Twitter or dealing with @messages) 114 and being followed’ by 126 accounts. 90% of both of those numbers are other organisations tweeting nothing in much the same way, or people who work for those organisations. The account is a bot, talking to other bots and doing nothing except perhaps disappointing anyone who did want to engage with them.

The weeds are poking though even in fairly well ‘Liked’ Facebook pages too. Facebook page spam is on the increase, leave your page unattended for a day or so and if it’s popular enough to have attracted the attention there will be Russian brides and pyramid schemes posting. If it’s a page you created for fun, fair enough. It’s all about effort and no-one will think any less of you—but if it’s your work, I think you owe it to whoever you’re trying to talk to to care a little more.

What can you do? Think carefully about what you automate, close or mothball old and unused profiles and pages. The usual stuff you’ll never get round to doing.

Twitter, reportedly, has about 3% of it’s servers at any one time full of Tweets about Justin Bieber. That’s some power of stardom, but think about it: how many of those accounts are autoposting to Facebook (or vice versa)? That’s 3% of Facebook’s severs too. And ping.fm’s and mySpace’s, perhaps. Maybe 1% of the Internet?

I’m guestimating to the point of losing all thread of argument, but the ecological consequences of auto-posting to dead services is probably fairly significant. We could be sucking the planet dry with our automated laziness.

But the animals and plants will do just fine.

I'm writing to you to ask for your support in helping work out how our elected officials can deal with online campaigners. If we don't act soon then the opportunity to create huge grassroots movements will be marked as SPAM.

I’ve been thinking more about the hoo-ha when new Tory MP Dominic Raab was being vilified for his attempts to make sense of his Parliamentary inbox. He claims automated online lobby groups are creating too much correspondence to deal with in a meaningful way—and while attempting to hide his email address wasn’t the right way, he’s got a point.

His big moan was directed at fairly new group 38 Degrees, who were very active during the election, who he claimed at some points were sending 200 “cloned” emails a day. He said:

“Look at why 38 Degrees took on that title – it is the angle at which an avalanche falls. Their aim is to create an avalanche in MPs in-boxes. Others apply the same tactics, so spam filters won’t solve it – that is why I want the right to opt out of them using my email for those purposes”

Subject: Act now to get the best communication from your Elected Representatives

Dear Sir or Madam,

I'm writing to you to ask for your support in helping work out how our elected officials can deal with online campaigners. Causes that have most to gain from demonstrating mass support need to makes sure that power isn't diluted.

Tom Watson MP has experience of this, being deluged by emails even when he was on the same side as the lobby group—and that’s part of the problem, the mass campaign tools have quickly worked out how to match you to your MPs email but opinions on policy aren’t easy to automate. Even if they did, that’s not how people work—the nudging actions on the social web mean that people will want to press send to “do their bit” and join in. Clicking on that button is too easy to require much thought.

The emails are a problem because the accepted wisdom is that direct communication requires a response. The problem is no longer establishing the communication, but managing it. These emails are very like a petition, but one with the proposal very so slightly personalised by the signatory so requiring a separate response.

Subject: Act now to get the best communication from your Elected Representatives

Dear Sir or Madam,

I'm writing to you to ask for your support in helping work out how our elected officials can deal with online campaigners. We must look for ways to harness that nudge power to produce real actions as well as acts of me-too-ism, or else we're just building complicated petitions.

Maybe we need to mature a little and be realistic—if communication takes minimal effort then it must deserve appropriate effort in response. We can’t expect the same response to an automated email as we would to a bespoke email or conversation—but does that mean we’re back to petitions?

Petitions give a central point of contact and collate strength of feeling, but are binary — you have to agree with everything the petition says, there’s no conversation or discussion. I might think that more research is needed into triage-by-phone services, but petitioning I can either “save” or “shut”.  They can easily be dismissed if the petitionee is of a mind—you can pick holes in the most tightly worded statement, and what then? Do it all again?

We’ve fallen out of love with petitions, local authorities were obliged to build online petition sites just over a year ago and in Birmingham at least nothing much has happened. The site cost £7,500 to set up followed by an expected annual running cost of £1,332 but it’s not exactly been inundated by petitions or signatures. In a year, in an authority area of over a million people there have been only 29 petitions submitted, of which a tiny 19 made it to the website (from this FOI request)— only two seem to have got responses (both of which say ‘thanks but no thanks’ pretty much). At the time of writing there are just four live petitions, none of which have any hope of affecting policy.

Subject: Act now to get the best communication from your Elected Representatives

Dear Sir or Madam,

I'm writing to you to ask for your support in helping work out how our elected officials can deal with online campaigners. Because they've got to learn that it isn't working too.

I’ve lost count of the number of emails I’ve received during the Labour leadership campaign, I’ve checked it wasn’t a real email from an Ed, or a Miliband or one of the others (unlikely, but possible— the giveaway is that only auto databases ever use my full name), skimmed and deleted. In some cases I’ve thought “I’ll read that later”, but I don’t think I have—because email isn’t a persuasive medium, particularity at scale. When the size of your email mailing list is important it’s because you have a list of supporters, some of whom will respond to requests or calls to action. Hitting the unconverted just blends into the SEO emails and the random, bizarrely rich, Nigerians.

Subject: Act now to get the best communication from your Elected Representatives

Dear Sir or Madam,

I'm writing to you to ask for your support in helping work out how our elected officials can deal with online campaigners. Your heart pretty much always sinks on the receiving of another email doesn't it?

Think before you hit send, are you contributing or SPAMming?

In my own small way I’m experimenting — this week sees the launch of a—yes—paper-based magazine that Danny Smith and I have been working on for the best part of six months. This is what it looks like:

Things we’ve worked out so far:

• Print is really expensive at small scale, but it’s still much easier to get people excited to work for and to sell than web content.
• Brand is all important: we’ve gone for wilfully obtuse and arty—we think that’s a sector we can sell to.
• A clean break between web and print means that you need to create lots of reasons for, and a fair amount of, ‘related but not similar’ content. Content that reaches the same audience, but isn’t seen as either a free or a second-rate version of what you’re asking payment for in print.
• A new thing needs its networks—we’ve tried to make sure that everyone that can feel ownership of the magazine finds it easy to talk about and share stuff about it with their networks.
• If you’ve got a brand, related events can make a fair bit of money—but they’re an additional risk. We’re operating at small scale, but publishers have tried this — Wrox Press when I worked for it’s web design offshoot was trying to maximise return on brand by conferences, it didn’t bring in enough money to save the company. It seems easier, however, to sell a specific happening via the social web than it does an ongoing concept.
• No-one’s going to pay to get past the paywall on a Twitter account—well only about ten people in my experience.

As well as being exhausting and a great hobby, there’s been a fair few opportunities to try out different promotional web-tricks that I’m going to use again. Issue two shouldn’t take so long.

He’s okay, bit neglected looking — but doesn’t have plans to leave, so we’re looking after him as best we can. He can’t come to live in our house as he might have something that our cats could catch, but we’ve got him some shelter and are feeding him. The vet’s has confirmed that he’s not microchipped (so we can’t find his owner), and is reasonably healthy, but there’s nowhere for him to go for a few weeks — none of the cats homes or sanctuaries we’ve contacted have a space.

We’ve tried tweeting and blogging about him, but the chance of connecting to his owners is only improved if they are good at searching the social web.

There is, if you Google, a ‘National Missing Pets Register’ website. It’s nothing official, rather a altruistic effort by a web designer called Steve Dawson — but it has some sort of traction, and visibility is all in this instance. There aren’t a great deal of lost/found notices on there, but it’s the main site certainly.

The site notes that developments are still ongoing — search on the site would be an easy win in the sense of making the site better (no idea how easy technically), as would listing by location (the tighter the better), notifications, RSS feeds and better photo handling.

A few of these would help other people spread the information (location-based feeds especially), but there’s nothing here that harnesses the social power of the web — so I’m going to throw some ideas about, maybe there’s a service someone could build in here.

For me the problem is that the only people on the site are within the transaction — they’re the people who have either found or lost a pet (and they’re a subset of all of these even). We need something than can use the connections and serendipity of the social web to increase the chances of a reuniting.

With tighter location feeds the site could power lost/found pet widgets for local sites and blogs. That would increase the likelihood of some who can make a connection spotting the pet — but also increase the awareness of the site itself.

Is there something in game mechanics? — Possibly attempting to match descriptions or photos of lost/found animals (currently no way to really search for matches) or in some way improving the descriptions/tagging/locations of found animals.

What could be done with mobile or locations? — Is there a way that “spottings” (helpful, but not as good as a find) could be registered easily? Could you add poster information or information found on the streets but not added by the owners for whatever reason.

Direct feeds in from dog wardens, cats/dogs homes/police/vets — could a site it be useful for them too. Making it as easy as possible for the overworked needs to be given thought.

Is it ‘fixmypet’?

Can you add? Or more importantly can you build or fund?

There has been chaos within the methods of communication used between authority and those it claims authority over for hundreds of years — but until recently you could only see it with the scale of hindsight. There hasn’t been a transition from calm to chaos, merely a speeding up of that chaos.

Stop thinking that it’s about to calm down any time soon, or ever.

And then Flipboard came along.

Flipboard is a news reader for the iPad with an exquisite interface that’s just right for the touchscreen interface — it’s all page turning and large buttons. So far so Reeder (my favourite iPad RSS reader), but Flipboard does a couple of things that make it stand out, and doesn’t do a couple of things that make it on the way to being the sort of thing that will make RSS feeds as user technology scarcer:

• It presents curated bundles of feeds ‘FlipNews’ or ‘FlipStyle’ — editorially picking the major (ie mainstream, “just good enough”) feeds for  subject areas.
• It allows you to sign in with Twitter and Facebook, pulling in links and content linked to by people you’re in contact with.
• It doesn’t mention (or it seems actually use) RSS, it just grabs the content and shows it to you.
• It doesn’t let you add your own feeds.

There’s no attention profiling that I can see, but there’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t be an addition that the makers are working on. No, it won’t replace an RSS reader — but it’s not trying, and in many situations it’s better for that.

Some work to do to implement something similar that works on other sorts of devices (a conventional computer would need a very different interface), but for iPad it’s good enough.