social network
When free is a bad deal
POSTED IN good practice | TAGS : social network 8 August 2007
In my daily trawl of everything relating to Birmingham that appears on the interweb I came across this story about a programme to provide community groups with websites, called E Voice and run in conjunction with Digital Birmingham. Sounds like a great deal, but I had reservations. I sent the link off to Nick Booth of Podnosh, who is a bit of an expert on community action on the web, voicing my concerns that the websites are awful and it seems to be funded through the use of proprietary tools (eg. ask.com refering).
Nick put it better than I could, and had additional concerns of his own:
“The principal problem with both is ownership. Yes you can sign up and fill in your organisations details and create a webpage – but the chances of you using it are slim. But there are other problems too.”
He’s right, ownership of your own web identity is paramount if you are to create any use, promotional or otherwise, and the ability to control the content is not only needed – but quite a difficult skill to pick up for some. To offer training in a proprietary tool (especially one that is so limited) is not a sustainable way – and if the training enthuses the people and they want to move on, well that’s it you’re on your own to learn HTML or even how to use blogger.
Local blog stalwart Pete Ashton has some thoughts about how blogging can help the creative community which are great in principle, but there are a lot of people – creative and in community groups – that just aren’t ready for blogs yet. Blogs are only one tool, and for many are stuck as electronic newsletters, it’s the wider concept of the the web that needs training. How to use sites as well as how to create.
I think this is a problem that will somewhat solve itself as the younger generation who’ve been myspacing for years grow up, but there will already be people for whom the web could really help that need help.
I’m rambling, but I doubt that “training” as government orgainisations see it is the answer – as to what is I don’t have a solution – yet.
A Flash Of Inspiration #2 Social Ethical Shopping
POSTED IN future web, my projects | TAGS : barcodes, database, ethical shopping, mobile, N95, social network 4 August 2007
I’ve had this idea for a while, but want to get it down on ‘paper’ so people might be able to take the idea and sort it out. I could probably hack together the software side myself (not quickly, it’s a big job), but there’s a huge need for hardware and legal back-up to get it to work properly which I don’t have.
It combines three technologies, but aims to solve the problem of knowing how to be good. In short “should I buy this product”, “how does it sit with my values”. For example you may decide that you don’t want to buy any products from Heinz (as I don’t), but Heinz are a large company – it’s not always obvious in the supermarket which company ultimately owns which brand. Or despite the labeling, how can you really work out the food miles in some products?
In this system you can use your mobile phone to scan the barcode (already possible on the Nokia N95, but you could write an image processing app for most camera phones that are coming out onto the market now) and a small application on the phone interfaces with a website to give you the information as to whether the product sits in your ‘ethical space’.
You would have to sign up to the site and set ‘ethical sliders’ showing your views on different issues (animal welfare, economics, food miles, fair trade, local issues) and also your home area (for calculating some distance based ethics). You could then get a personalised yay or nay on each product you were unsure about.
Two potential problems here – collecting and updating all the information, which would hopefully be solved by using a very tight database and allowing users to add information on each product (if a barcode wasn’t in the database , you’d get some sort of message asking you to help populate the information). Luckily I think that a lot of this information is already collected by campaigners and if it was easy enough to add to the database on the site it could be filled up quite quickly. The other main problem is the litigious nature of major corporations, this product would have to have some very good PR and legal back-up, and be prepared for a long fight.
The project could self-finance in a number of ways, for a start there would be a wealth of accurate and self-entered data on shopping requirement that could be used for research (and sold perhaps, once de-personalised – the ethics research itself could act as a pressure on retailers and suppliers), the site woudl also be able to offer very tightly focused advertising online (even on the phone app itself, IN the supermarket, offering an alternative product that did fit in with the ethical map of the user).
It’s a social web-app, a wiki-database- and mobile technology. It’s very clever I think, technologically possible now and broadly speaking very 2.0. It just needs a cool name.
The people that disapear
POSTED IN social media | TAGS : bug, facebook, social network 3 August 2007
At least two people I’ve spoken to – and a few others I’ve heard from – say that their facebook profiles have disappeared. They are unable to log in and their friends tell them that they’ve disappeared from contact lists and group memberships.
The problem with facebook being a data black hole (data goes in, it doesn’t come out) is that there’s no way to back-up any of the content that you’ve put in there.
FB carefully now.
UPDATE: Some of the original profiles are back, but people can’t login. This suggests a database failure and restore from back-up. I’ve not heard any communication ffrom FB on this.
