Social web & social media, consultancy, training and advice from a flâneur of the internets. Blogger, writer, broadcaster and runner of Birmingham: It's Not Shit. I also do the odd bit of art.
August 9th, 2010

Lost and Found

Meet Scabbycat. He pitched up in our front yard last week sometime.

Found in Billesley Lane/Springfield Road area. Border of B13 (Moseley) and B14 (Kings Heath)

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?

by Jon Bounds | Posted in future web, social media, twitter | Tags: , , ,
November 15th, 2008

The hinternet, the internet we’re missing

There’s a new digital divide, a fissure opening wider and wider as the social web makes encroachment into most forms of information. You may have heard of the ‘darknets’ — unseen networks of computers for filesharing — networks you’re only allowed onto if you’re trusted not to give the game away. What I think I’m seeing the emergence of is almost the exact opposite, but increasingly disconnected.

There are hundreds of websites, lovingly researched and maintained by enthusiastic and knowledgeable people, that it’s becoming almost impossible to find. The sites are built on old technology, and that contributes to their decreasing visibility but it’s not the only reason. The lack of RSS feeds, pinging servers, dynamically generated sitemaps and up-to-date robots.txt files makes it more difficult for other sites to keep in touch with them. That they are often built in HTML by hand makes them more difficult to update, and fresh content is prized by search engines.

The lack of RSS and knowing when updates occur also decreases people’s awareness of the sites, you either have to remember they’re there and how you found them — or bookmark — and check for updates on a regular schedule. Less reminders, less nudges, so less incoming links.

They are often in very niche areas, like local history, local news, and so generate a limited number of hyperlinks from other sites. They often only get links from each other, which is great in a community sense but means the incoming links are low in pagerank (which would push them higher up Google searches).

As more and more sites get better and better at search engine optimisation, as blogs and other social websites link and link again and expand into more areas, and as Google relies on the same sources more and more the sites are getting less and less visible.

And that’s bad because they have a wealth of important content that we need to be able to find.

I’m calling it the ‘hinternet‘.

(From hinterland, in German the part of a country where only few people live and where the infrastructure is underdeveloped.)

Solving the problem is a tricky one: Google’s mission to index the entire World’s information doesn’t always mean that we can find what we’re searching for, the semantic web will only work if the correct metadata is stored with the hinternet sites (and they’re already often “behind” technology-wise).

Search needs to get better, but us on the social-web also need to help. We need not only to link to these sites, but — where we can — help nudge the guardians of the hinternet towards greater visability by becoming “social”.

by Jon Bounds | Posted in future web, social media | Tags: , , , , ,
July 6th, 2008

Twitter engagement for organisations

This post is prompted by the Birmingham twitter “community”‘s reaction to what some saw as unethical and “anti-social” behaviour on joining twitter [edit: as the guys from Artsfest say in the comments below, it wasn't an official account. It's now gone.] by the local council’s yearly arts festival, um, artsfest. In short, upon (laudably) starting a twitter account, they (either by bot or someone with a sore mouse finger now) started aggressively following people starting with locals, and it seems radiating out through their contacts lists.

They ended up with around three thousand followees (many very unlikely to be interested in a UK-based arts event) — the sort of thing that gets you a high ranking on twerpscan (this a screengrab of Pete Ashton’s):

Skitch.com > peteashton > The company Artsfest is keeping
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!
Twitter users, and the early adopters of Birmingham as well, will tend to jump on these things — it’s a form of comunity policing, although I sometimes think that it can border on the haranging.
That said, the people behind the artsfest twitter have misunderstood, at least, the nature of social media conversation — conversation being the right thing, broadcasting your PR message being the wrong thing. Here’s a few more general points that come out of it for me:
  • Following thousands of people (people unrelated to your niche especially) is not only pointless (you’ll get blocked by people that otherwise might have followed you, your message is useless to many of those people) , but will get people’s backs up. Not a great first impression.
  • Even if the twitter account is for an organisation (anonymous, or multi-authored) people need to see that it has personality. Bot-like behaviour isn’t useful — if those thousands of people followed you back, could you hold meaningful conversation with them?
  • Twitter is made up of mainly tech-savvy people, pushing your PR message (that they could get from your blog or other channels if they wished) at them is SPAM-y behaviour, it’s shouting, duplicating and attention grabbing. Although there are many people that autopublish their blog links to twitter, the sort of people that will follow your tweets will normally be able to follow your blog on its own — what twitter is great for is additional more ‘personal’ information, nuggets that are exciting or interesting, but not worth a blog post.
  • Re-tweeting your main message after each @reply (or aside) is wrong — those following you will get that message repeatedly, SPAM. Very few twitter users will find themselves at your page on twitter, and the tweet at the top is not your “most important message” it’s just the most recent.
  • You need to interact, if people send you an @message or a direct message you should respond. Can you listen to thousands of people’s tweets? No, of course not, so don’t follow people unless you need to interact with them. (Using a bot to auto-follow people who follow you could be a time-saver tho’).
  • Use tools like summize hashtags.org or tweetscan to keep an eye on conversation about your product, organisation or subject area (you can get RSS feeds of all of your search terms). This isn’t eavesdropping, it’s all publicly shared information, and if you see conversation (negative or positive) then you have a conversation opener with those people talking about you. You may learn some really useful things about how you are perceived — and be able to genuinely help people (always popular!).
May 8th, 2008

Can you Get Satisfaction from your local Council?

I’ve been quietly impressed with Get Satisfaction, which is sort of best described as a “social customer service” site. Twitter and some other big-name players on the internet use it for their official support channels – the idea of the site being that employees of the companies join in with discussion of “problems” that people are having. Some employees just join to help, others are granted “official” status and can speak on behalf of the organisation.

Of course lots of problems that we have with products or services aren’t really problems (or are well know and documented) – in these instances other users are happy to help (very much like unofficial forums for software). ‘Users’ are also welcome to point out possible solutions to anything – and of course they do.

So, I thought, could this work for a local council? Imagine time saved by council officials if knowledgeable citizens helped answer questions, imagine the resources available (once someone had explained how to apply for a licence, the information would be there for everyone), imagine a monolithic body “joining the conversation”.

Rather than deciding to attempt to persuade my local council (Birmingham City Council – one of the largest in the UK) that this would be a good idea, I discovered that – as the site is “a space for an open conversation between you and other people with interests and passions in this organization.” – anyone can set a company page up. So I have.

I don’t have anything to ask at the moment, but I’m hoping that it might get used.

“Sometimes representatives from the company or organization may take part in the conversation too.” says the blurb — wouldn’t that be great?














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