Hashtag usage — a survey
POSTED IN microblogging, my projects, twitter | TAGS : hashtag, meme, twitter 22 June 2010
I’m very interested in the motivation behind uses of hashtags on Twitter — I have a feeling that they are more created than searched.
I would be very interested to see Twitter Search stats — to see how many people actually look at collections hashtagged content rather than just pump them out because it seems part of etiquette. This hypothesis brewed when I saw how hashtag use breaks down of during real big events (World Cup, election) — as people already know the context, I am thinking that they are used more as a shorthand for context than searched or monitored.
Without much hope of getting that valuable data, I have created a very short questionnaire to get some feeling for use of hashtags. Due to the responses being self-selecting I am assuming that the results will be biased towards experienced Twitter users, but we’ll see. That this may be compounded due to my network containing a lot of social media profesionals is also a worry, so I would appreciate if you would spread it as far as you can.
New York, New Politics
POSTED IN Conferences & Talks, my projects, social media, twitter | TAGS : civico, democracy, innovation, Rhubarb Radio, streaming 25 May 2010
I’m off to the city that never sleeps next week for the PdF (Personal Democracy Forum) Conference — a conference on how social technology changes how politics operates. Very much looking forward to seeing Clay Shirky, Jimmy Wales et al speak and also to giving the Civico platform it’s first major test.
Civico is an offshoot of Rhubarb Radio, which I’ve been a member of for about 14 months. Rhubarb is an online community radio station, and Civico is an extension of that platform to cover democracy and events. Last year we covered the PdfEU conference in Barcelona, with what was little more than the streaming audio and a whole lot of hard work.
For this conference we hope to be able to use the newly developed Civico player. This has two great developments, one is that it integrates with the Twitter API to capture tweets alongside the audio or video. The second is much more exciting (and proud to say, developed from my original concept).
Once the audio, video, tweets (and more in development) are captured then users can share any fraction (or all) of the coverage — highlighting the best line, the biggest laugh or the most damming miss-speak. In other words it makes it easy to share the bits that you want to share. And share them by link or by embedding wherever they like.
Here’s an example from a recent conference in London, by link and by embed (this is still a beta, excuse any foibles or downtime as the player is worked on):
We’ve won a Webby (almost)
POSTED IN my projects, social media, social media work, twitter, writing work | TAGS : award, birmingham hippodrome, jon bounds, thanks, twitpanto, webby 14 April 2010
While it’s not made the final shortlist of five, there’s still a bit to be proud of as Twitpanto has been made an Honoree (US spelling) in the 2010 Webby Awards in the Net Art category.
As that shortlist includes big budget projects like BBC Blast, I don’t think we’ve done badly seeing as it was one crash hot web guy (that’s Matt, not me) and 20 odd (very) Twitterers on a cold December afternoon (which you can relive, of course, here).
In speech mode, we couldn’t have done it so well without the support of the Birmingham Hippodrome — or the hundreds of people that joined in during the play. Sincere thanks for going along with it.
Quite interesting timing as the RSC’s Twitter Shakespeare project launched this week with much fanfare, in some ways it’s a logical step on from Twitpanto and it’ll be interesting to see how it’s sheer scale affects the experience (a slight overreach of scale was one of the problems I felt with this second panto).
To read all about both Twitter panto experiences there are a couple of long and detailed posts here.
Hashtags, A new challenge to idiots
POSTED IN microblogging, social media, twitter | TAGS : hashtags, Olympics, twitter, Wall Street Journal 25 February 2010
Apparently the Olympics suffer from ‘Ambush Marketing’, meaning that if they don’t stop other people doing adverts that are a bit like they have something to do with the event then the official sponsorships aren’t worth as much dosh. It’s all about scarcity, just like how TV rights are only worth so much if you can stop other people showing the games (something that the sports world is also struggling with), or how news coverage (or at least the adverts that sit alongside it) only makes money of there are a limited number of people doing it.
The Olympic movement (and sport in general) is not know for it’s forward thinking policy on this sort of thing, we’ve seen people with cameras not being allowed in, Dutch football fans’ trousers being confiscated, and fixture list copyrights being policed with the ferocity of, well, only the music industry are equally as dickheaded. Not only that, but they’ve been accused of bizarre censorship around the current games:
So when the Wall Street Journal decided to stir up a bit of Twitter trouble, it was easy to find brands supposedly breaking the Olympic marketing rules (in which “nonsponsors are barred from referring to the Games and their athletes in name, likeness or imagery that evokes the Games in any media without a waiver from the committee” — this would now one would assume cover the “official hashtag”):
Verizon and Red Bull were the two accused here, by joining in with the conversations around events rather than sticking to broadcasting marketing tweets (“barketing”? if it’s not been called that before, I’m coining it) they’d broken rules drawn up in another information age.
You can’t control the use of words when you can no longer control the scarcity of information. Something even the World’s oldest organisations are going to have to learn.
Football and cats
POSTED IN microblogging, social media, twitter | TAGS : football, hyperlocal 15 February 2010
I always think that you can explain almost anything in terms of football or cats, and those of you who have seen me talk with probably of heard about one or the other — what I’m really doing is using smaller examples to explain big concepts. Football has given me another great example over the last few weeks, this time of really innovative, interesting and fun (hyper)local media.
It’s the Billesley United FC twitter feed. Billesly are in the third division of the Birmingham AFA League (I think, it really doesn’t matter), and have had an un-named fan covering their matches this season:
It’s fun, partisan, a bit rude, cliquey and at times incomprehensible (cold fingers and the mobile web aren’t the best combinations for reports) but it’s great.
With only nine followers (including me who doesn’t know any of the team, or anyone connected with the club) it’s not reaching a big audience — but I suspect that they aren’t bothered. It’s everything that’s great about social media: they’ve just gone and done it, and not been drawn into any conventions that mainstream media have used before.
A real point that’s missed by some people in the hyperlocal land-rush is that since no-one’s paying you can do pretty much whatever you want. Sometimes that will find a wide audience, sometimes it won’t — there may not be an audience there — but if you do what you enjoy then that’s enough of a point.
Hashtags and the desire to own and organise
POSTED IN social media, twitter | TAGS : esm, hashtag, hastags 1 February 2010
One of my favourite books on social technology is ‘Everything Is Miscellaneous
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?
Twitpanto – worth your vote
POSTED IN my projects, social media, twitter | TAGS : award, shorty award, twitpanto, twitter, vote 6 January 2010
I’m not usually one to hold much stock in awards, but I like the mixture of democracy and professional opinion that The Shorty Awards has (public vote sorts out a shortlist for such luminaries as David Pogue and MC Hammer to preside over). They are pitched as the Twitter Oscars — so as what I guess is the best dramatic use of Twitter, I think Twitpanto deserves a vote. It’s (currently) doing quite well in the ‘art’ category.
Vote here, or just click on this bit and tweet for Twitpanto (please?).
Twitpanto 2009 — The Sequel
POSTED IN microblogging, my projects, social media, social media work, twitter, writing work 4 January 2010
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.
Twitpanto 2009
POSTED IN my projects, social media, social media work, twitter, writing work 14 December 2009
Last year I wrote and “directed” (what I believe to have been) the first proper piece of drama on Twitter — Twitpanto. I still think it’s the only time that attempts to integrate theatre with the social web have gone further than people copying and pasting their lines — or awful “chose what happens next” video series. It worked really well, and this year — on Friday 18th at 3:30pm — it’s happening again.
Thanks to support from the Birmingham Hippodrome we’ve got an improved version of Matthew Somerville‘s “set” for people to watch on. This time it goes a step further that colouring to identify cast from audience — with a stage and stalls. There’s even iCal reminders built in, if you head over too early (go on, head over there now).
The involvement of the Hipp has allowed me to spend more time on the development work than last year, but has made thinking around it a little more challenging — did we need to build in moderation to the stream? Did we need celebrity guests? How much more explanation do “new” Twitterers need?
So far we’ve gone with moderation of a sort, the ability to remove tweets from the audience section (although there wasn’t a single tweet that I’d have removed last year) and not worried about star power — although Joe Pasquale and fellow real-life panto star Ray Quinn have helped with the promotion.
A lot of last year’s cast are returning, including Tom Watson who’s going to play the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. How will it go? Tune in to the #twitpanto hashtag on Friday.
Bounded groups – fast changing overlapping networks
POSTED IN twitter | TAGS : bounded groups, dunbar number, groupings, groups, online, social networks 29 September 2009
You may have heard of, and I’ve mentioned before, the Dunbar number (which reflects the limit of the number of people with which you can maintain social relationships). You can supposedly cope with around 150 people, but this seem doesn’t to tally with our online experiences. It seem that we can hold many more relationships, but I’m not sure. I think that the Dunbar number is still a valid theory.
Here’s a simplified view of traditional network, from the point of view of the red dot:
From your point of view you’re surrounded by your group (they have different an overlapping groups themselves). In offline society the theory holds well, you have relationships with people and they reciprocate (you may care more, or invest more in the relationship — you’re closer or further from the centre of their circle than they are in yours — but you’re both in each other’s group). This extends well onto social networking sites where “friendship” is a reciprocal arrangement:
Conversely as far as your expectations may go the online grouping is likely to be the smaller one, there are people you know who you don’t connect with offline. Trying to represent this here is the solid blue (both on and offline contacts), with whom your communication is obviously most connected.
Online however we see groups forming where the isn’t reciprocal “friendship”. Within a Twitter network you can have people within your group that don’t have a group containing you — and this can have within it people that you connect with offline only that follow your online activities.
But — and here’s the main way that online communication is changing grouping and networks online — you can exist simultaneously in a great number of these groupings. Moving within them, paying more or less attention as your mood or activities require.
These groups overlap, some almost completely, some not much, all are flexible and have flow to and from at any one point. Groups can quickly appear, disappear,and change size and composition rapidly.
You still may only be able to maintain a Dunbar number of relationships, but the free flow allows you to “place relationships on hold” (not breaking the ties, just not using them for a time)— vastly expanding the number of connections, while not weakening any one individually.
