A few clicks on from another excellent Mashable update and we’re demonstrating and debating our own variance in social behaviour with chat show style banter on Google Buzz. Here’s the discussion thread…

Following an email around the office this morning, investigating what our individual thoughts were on Google Buzz, I received a few pretty cynical responses. To be fair, many people are still recovering from Google Wave: asking where and what now?

For me, it’s a bit different. Google is half my social equation. I have a Gmail account and am also a member of Tech Meet Up, Mobile Monday Edinburgh and Girl Geeks. TMU is a Google group, as is Mobile Monday and for Girl Geeks we organise information around Google Sites. I have a number of files in Google Docs, plus I’m in and out of Google Maps all the time. It’s fair to say I like Google.

Not everybody feels the same though. Here were a few thoughts from other Blondes about Google Buzz, starting with our tech team:

“It’s like twitter, but without any clients and unable to tie into any other of the microblogging/social media things…

It does follow the two people I have set up in googlemail already though.

Sadly, until they create some reason for it to exist my thoughts are:
“Just what the world needs, another twitter-clone.”

Oh it has “like” from facebook, which twitter haven’t managed to add yet.”

The bandwagon of Buzz bitchin’ rolls on…

“If everyone starts using it then it becomes really relevant. Haven’t seen a killer feature yet…

Google have been, shall we say, intermittent in their marketing of services so the jury is out about how big it will become.”

Having said that the current debate (going on around me while I’m typing this) is that if you are a heavy gmail user (I am) then it does appeal -as long as the take up is good.”

And then the rest of the planning team jump in….

“Google Buzz – initial reaction = “groan”.

Groan because as a digital marcomms professional I’ve got no option but to try it out, when my gut feel and the input (via Twitter) from people I trust are telling me that it’s going to be no great shakes.

Groan because I resolved this year to add more depth to my social graph (more emphasis on RSS, blog writing and commenting), and this feels like more breadth. That’s my personal take on the whole signal to noise issue.

Groan because there’s this stool called RSS, and there’s this other stool called Twitter, and I can’t see a valid role for anything between those two stools.

Groan because I only ever use Gmail for opening Twitter accounts. I really really can’t be arsed to have another following mouth to feed.

So I’ll watch with interest how it develops but at the moment it’s not even coming out of the box for me. “

And the tech team is still going….

“It just seems way to complex and unfocused.

Twitter
Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.

Facebook
helps you connect and share with the people in your life.

Simple. I get it.

Buzz
Go beyond status messages
Share updates, photos, videos, and more.
Start conversations about the things you find interesting.

Try Buzz in Gmail. (why do I have to do it in gmail by the way?)

You lost me at “Go beyond status messages”. Er.. not so sure I get it.

Really bad design as well. I find it really hard to scan. Twitter is so easy to just fly through and pick what’s interesting. Buzz is a mess and feels horrible to read.

Google seems to have forgotten their design roots. A million miles away from one input box to search shit.

Social network app fail.

A lot cleaner in t’iPhone though. Bordering on being useful.”

Before finally concluding…

“My friends are on Facebook (for the most part)
My friends aren’t on Gmail (for the most part) and if they are they’re not updating their status there.

So, for social/picture sharing stuff = Facebook.

I get interesting web/marketing/wotsit links by following people and searching on twitter.
I don’t get that from Buzz (yet, since there’s noone on it)

So for interesting links/finding out what random “famous” people are upto/whatever = twitter.

Buzz is only as good as the people using it – and currently noone is.

I expect it to go the way of Google Lively, to be honest. “

It appears I am the lone voice of Google Buzz support here.  I don’t think this product… this service… from Google is anywhere near complete and of course I’m aware of the privacy issues, which have been flagged up; but I need something that bridges the gap(s) between LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Social networking online isn’t this simple. I don’t want my engagement with professional communities to be confined to LinkedIn. I want meaningful, human-to-human knowledge sharing, which goes beyond the offering of Twitter and I certainly want a richer experience than Farmville updates on Facebook. I’m not arguing that Google Buzz is the solution, but given the incredible insight Google now has into our online behaviour, I’m holding out for some improvements first, before I search for a conclusion. Here’s to growing out of Facebook and Twitter…

What do you do when attention is your currency and making trouble is one of your core values?

Answer : some very interesting things indeed, based on the presentations at Channel 4’s Meet The Commissioners session in London yesterday.

We heard from Louise Brown, Head of Cross Platform, Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor for Education and Tom Loosemore, Head of 4iP.

As well as some impressive examples of digital thinking in action, there were some interesting themes for the afternoon.

Routes to attention

Ideas judged against how they…

Get attention.
Keep attention.
Turn attention into value.

Digital Business Models

This was a major theme from Tom’s presentation. As well as investing in sustainable non-broadcast public service initiatives, 4iP is actively experimenting with alternative business models for online start-ups. As he said, if Channel 4 finds an advertising revenue model challenging with 10 million monthly uniques, 4iP will take some convincing that an ad-only model will work for a start-up.

Accountability

Matt talked about a 9 point (3×3 square) grid against which each project is measured.

The objectives of getting attention, keeping attention and turning attention into value run along one side. Along the other are three types of audience engagement : visitors, fans, contributors/distributors.

Using this grid, objectives and metrics can be entered in each of the nine squares. A simple but highly effective way not only to retrospectively report on a project, but also to run actionable ongoing diagnostics during a project.

All in all a useful and thought-provoking session.

(Thank you to davysims for the photograph.)

EdTwinge is a Twitter-based, crowdsourced, realtime Edinburgh Fringe rating application.

It monitors tweets that mention any of the acts at the 2009 Fringe Festival and/or the most commonly used Fringe hashtags. It then matches the content of these tweets against an extensive database of positive and negative words and phrases.

The site publishes two scores for each act at the Fringe. The first is “Noise”. This is simply the number of tweets that have mentioned the act in an Edinburgh/Fringe context. The second, and more important, measure is what we call “Karma”.

A full, geek-friendly explanation of how Karma is calculated can be found on the Edtwinge site. But basically it is a measure of the net positive sentiment about each act, which is based on a robust statistical analysis. This statistical analysis ensures that the Karma score is as reliable as possible. For instance an act mentioned in, say, five tweets, all of which are positive will have a significantly lower karma score than an act mentioned positively in 60 tweets out of 70. Phrases are prioritised over words, so “shit-hot” would be correctly identified as a positive statement for instance.

The top ten tables for the Fringe as a whole, and for each genre of show, are primarily derived from Karma. Noise only comes into play if two shows have the same Karma rating. In this instance the act with the higher noise score would rank above the other.

The site also allows the user to search and view karma and noise scores for any act, and to view in chronological order the verbatim tweets that underpin these.

EdTwinge is also the result of a garage-band style collaboration with some very talented, sparky and creative people.

Mike Coulter – social media exponent at Digital Agency (the original idea was his).

Andrew Burnett – another social media exponent and expert traffic driver.

Jim Wolff – digital misfit (his words not mine) who joined Leith part way through the project.

There is no paying client behind EdTwinge. It’s been a fun and fruitful diversion from the day job for those of us lucky enough to be involved. And what we’ve learned about tag-team style collaboration, baton-passing Twitter account shifts, and fleet-of-foot digital seeding and amplification has been as valuable as the technical, under the bonnet of Twitter stuff.

Early days yet (3 and a half days into the Fringe at the time of writing), but there has already been a significant amount of positive commentary and the site appears to be performing well. A big thank you to our friends at Stripe for securing some really excellent profile for the project.

I’ll post a more in-depth analysis of results and learning in a couple of weeks but average time on site is currently running at over 4 minutes on the back of an average of 5.22 pages viewed per visit according to Google Analytics.

Follow us (EdTwinge) on Twitter for regular updates. And/or embed your own EdTwinge Top 10 widget, like this one that we prepared earlier…

I was fortunate enough to see Guy Kawasaki on his feet yesterday, talking about the Art of The Startup at Edinburgh Informatics. He’s a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and ex Macintosh brand evangelist. He also part of the team behind Alltop, the online magazine/news aggregation site that answers the question “What’s happening?”

Over the course of an hour he talked through 10 themes that summarise his view on what makes for a successful start-up. There’s little point in me recounting in detail what he said because Ewan McIntosh was live blogging and has pretty much nailed it on the 38 minutes blog.

So enough about the content, what about the delivery?

This was most definitely a gig, and had several things in common with the musical kind (all good).

1) VIP, access all areas style wristband.

2) Guy played a great set. It was clearly not the first time he’s spoken on this topic, but his familiarity with his material made for a compelling 60 minutes. He was most certainly not going through the motions.

3) His material was good. Interesting points, well made, with examples that were new to everyone. Peppered with candid and personal anecdotal asides. The equivalent of a continuous series of crowd-pleasers with no duff tracks off an unfamiliar new album.

4) If his ten themes were the equivalent of ten songs, then the linking banter between them was spontaneous and tailored to the audience. He wasn’t afraid to go off piste for a while.

5) He’s a natural front man. OK so there was no band behind him but he owned the stage.

6) His slides were his supporting act and he was the headliner. Like all really good presentations, this was about him not his Powerpoint. How many times do you see the reverse in action?

7) Encore. Courtesy of Mike Coulter in the Q&A, we were treated to an encore in which he speculated on the monetisation of Twitter. He suggested that Tweets could be treated like text messages. Say 250 free Tweets per month and $5 for more than that. The audience seemed to react well to this idea.

I was invited by TRC media to speak about Branded Content to a group of independent production companies last week. I was the last on of several speakers but decided to spend the day to listen to what the others had to say. I’m glad I did.

The other speakers were Mike Dicks of Bleedinedge, Adam Gee, cross-platform Commissioning Editor at Channel 4, Lisa Sargood, BBC Multiplatform Commissioner, and Charles Wace, Chief Executive of Twofour Group. Each was speaking about their experiences in the realms of multiplatform content, 360º commissioning and/or platform convergence.

As usually happens when you attend an event whose scope lies outside your usual areas of interest, it was disproportionately interesting. That said there were some useful parallels between the world of TV company commissioning and that in which we talk digital marketing with advertisers.

There was a general feeling that the multiplatform bit of multiplatform commissioning was growing in stature and influence – no longer the poor relation of the “main”, broadcast programme idea, no longer the bit that comes “after”.

Parallel 1 – Digital is no longer the poor relation to broadcast.

This is being driven by a growing catalogue of award winning case-studies and some amazing numbers being delivered by multiplatform properties.

Parallel 2 – TV companies are suckers for awards, just like us and our clients.

Many examples of multiplatform excellence were cited, one of the most compelling of which was that of the partnership between CNN and Facebook for the live streaming of the Obama inauguration speech. The numbers (quoted here on Mashable) were tremendous.

What made this especially interesting to commissioning editors is the way in which a mass online event became a “shared” viewing experience. You and your Facebook friends could share feelings and observations in real time, creating the virtual equivalent of the mass, shared broadcast experiences whose demise as a result of media fragmentation is lamented by traditional advertisers.

Taking this comparison further, Mike Dicks described Facebook as having “gone ITV”. In other words its user base has expanded well beyond the geeky early adopter phase and is now a genuinely populist channel, potentially affording populist opportunities to advertisers.

Parallel 3 – Commissioning Editors, like advertising clients, are turned on when digital channels deliver “broadcast” numbers.

Based on his experience of multi-platform projects, Mike presented an ideal multi-platform production process and timeline. Contrary to the instincts of most TV producers this has the digital components of the multi-platform property commencing before the video/film aspects of the project. This was music to my ears. Mike’s full presentation can be viewed here and the timeline is slide 14.

Parallel 4 – the digital aspect of a multi-channel project should be aforethought, not an afterthought.

Building on the CNN/Facebook case-study, Adam Gee waxed lyrical about Sexperience. The online element of this property delivered 1 million page views in a single night, and continues to deliver 5,000 elements of user-generated content per week, long after the series has gone off air. At its peak Sexperience was ranking number 3 on a Google search for “sex”. It is still appearing at number 6 at the time of writing.

He also cited the example of Embarrassing Teenage Bodies. 99,000 teenagers took online STD risk assessment tests in just 4 days.

Building on the theme of user-generated content, Adam described himself as not so much a commissioner for content, but a commissioner for the infrastructure for content. For instance the back-end technical engine for Sexperience online is being re-used for an Adoption project on which he’s working – a direct lift of the technical IP and a direct lift of the infrastructure. Multiplatform commissioning editors are waking up to the fact that there is long term value not just in content, but also in the technical IP that turns that content into a compelling user experience.

Parallel 5 – content IP and technical IP can be equally valuable.

Adam finished his talk with a list of significant differences between what he called “networked media” (they are no longer “new” media) and television. These differences  are the foundation for the challenges and opportunities with which multi-platform commissioners are presented.

And there’s our sixth and final parallel.

Parallel 6 – a TV mindset doesn’t cut it in a multiplatform world. This applies equally to commissioning editors and advertisers.

Amen.

This weekend (14-15th March) saw the Maker Faire UK set out its wares as part of the Newcastle ScienceFest 2009.

Bit of background, Maker Faire was established by Dale Dougherty who along with Tim O’Reilly, founded O’Reilly Media. Dale is the founder and publisher of Make: magazine which celebrates tweaking, hacking, creating, merging and generally mangling technology.

The problem I have with this event is the name: Maker Faire. It conjures up images of paper doilies, home baking and bad arts and crafts, even the website graphics use party bunting which doesn’t really help matters. The reality of the situation though is that it is a lo-tech nirvana full of passion, creativity and innovation. It is more about personal technology and making technology personal than slick, mass produced tech which, as an approach, is refreshing in itself.

The Faire was in a Marquee in Times Square, the Life Science Centre and also the Discovery Museum. There were about 30 stands that covered everything from virtual graffiti, twitter controlled devices including Arduino bot, a host of audio and visual interfaces to robots, plants, dolls and hats (all of which were far more interesting than I just made them sound).

Walking round the event with two kids both under the age of six did pose a few “issues” for me but I managed to get a fairly good overview of Make: and some of the fantastic projects the guys had created. This is a small selection of what was on offer:

And the weekend wouldn’t be complete without some Robot Wars thrown in courtesy of Robo Challenge…

A week ago we set out our stall to provide live tracking of EdTwestival socialising as it happened.

The idea was to do this using a newly created Twitter account @wemet. By sending a direct message to WeMet with the Twitter @names of the people you met, you would help to create a real time database of all the social interactions as they happened.

That was the theory…

In practice in turned out pretty well. The EdTwestival event itself was an unqualified success – well organised, well supported and much appreciated by all who attended. By comparison the live tracking element was more of a mixed bag.

What worked

• Roy, Andy and Fraser did a grand job in a short space of time to grapple with the Twitter API, develop the application and sort out the front end interface.
• Excellent support for the idea ahead of the event from the EdTwestival team and the “community”.
• At the event itself there was a generous spirit and plenty of good intentions to participate in the idea.
• In the end, from a universe of 189, a total of 58 people sent direct messages detailing conversations with 118 others. These “meetings” involved 124 unique names or 66% of the universe. The resulting social graph of the event is shown in the image above and the movie below. You can also view a replay, condensed into 5 minutes, here.

What could have been better

• Despite the best efforts of the EdTwestival guys the venue wifi couldn’t cope with demand for bandwith resulting from the furious content creation of 200 avid twitter-bloggers. We ended up running the application through a 3G dongle that could only manage a 2G connection.
• A design that looked great on screen could have been better optimised for large scale projection.
• Despite the predictably high penetration of iPhones within this geeky group, many people simply weren’t packing the right kind of mobile devices to make participation easy.
• Even with an iPhone, sending a direct message at the start of every new conversation is actually an anti-social act. In the end, an idea that was enabled by technology was also limited by technology. More accurately, and reassuringly, the idea was limited by people’s desire to be socialising rather than technologising.

Nonetheless a big thank you to all who did “technologise”.

To retweet this post, copy and paste the text below into Twitter, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Twhirl, or twhatever.

Results of Wemet live tracking at #EdTwestival – http://bit.ly/yblG3

Code should be elegant and pure and in fact some believe it’s an art form. The following is an extract taken from the TOPLAP draft manifesto. TOPLAP are a conglomerate of interactive programmers better known as live coders…

We demand:

- Give us access to the performer’s mind, to the whole human instrument.

- Obscurantism is dangerous. Show us your screens.

- Programs are instruments that can change themselves

- The program is to be transcended – Artificial language is the way.

- Code should be seen as well as heard, underlying algorithms viewed as well as their visual outcome.

- Live coding is not about tools. Algorithms are thoughts. Chainsaws are tools. That’s why algorithms are sometimes harder to notice than chainsaws.

Inspired.

Related:
Fluxus Live Coding Workshop

I’ve always been interested in the interaction between humans and machines. Recently Superstar DJ ENO passed this over to me and I thought it was well worth a mention.

Felix’s Machines Composition 2 is a lovely example of what would be known traditionally as Mechanical Music taking reference from music boxes, barrel organs, player pianos etc. The real appeal for me is the inherent beauty created by a hybrid of computers (sequencing), mechanical engineering and structural sound design – a lovely contemporary take on a 9th century idea.

Subjectively, it’s melodically and rhythmically beautiful and well worth a listen. Objectively, it’s a great idea.

Hey, maybe it’s really shallow, but this made me feel good. Software registration telling you that “you ROCK!”. In caps. With an exclamation mark.

That just makes me want to register more software, see what they’ve got to say about me.

Adobe > Thanks for registering, you really are the best. Really. I mean it. We love you… don’t go away.. hello… please be loyal.
37 Signals (if they had desktop stuff) > Your rock, but we rock way more than you do. Way more… Can’t tell ya how much more.
Microsoft > It looks like you’re looking to receive an unwarranted and shallow compliment…

I ROCK! Versions app says I do. So there.