Social Media politics

Once Parliament is Prorogued Members of Parliament still receive their salaries but may not campaign during the election period as 'Joanna Blogs MP', indeed they have to drop the 'MP' for the duration. In the last General Election it was noted that many a was-MP-now-candidate had to stop using their 'normal' website — because it included 'MP' in the domain — and create a separate election website. They could retain the old one, just not update it.

Well next year we'll be seeing a similar problem arising with all those MPs who Twitter or use FaceBook. People such as JimMurphyMP, patmcfaddenmp, AdamPriceMP, MikeOBrienMP, willierenniemp, TomHarrisMP, DewsburyMP will all need to change their names on Twitter and in some cases can't just drop the 'MP' as other people already have the handle (eg. MikeOBrien) and on other services it isn't possible to change your handle.

Could make 'name recognition' a whole new issue next year...

London #140conf - all it could be?

On November 17, @JeffPulver came to town with his 140 Characters Conference show, following in the footsteps of past 140conf events in New York and Los Angeles. Selecting the Indigo at the O2 as the venue was an interesting decision, given that the conference supplied no coffee nor meals (which must have annoyed those paying the full fee of £425 though it seems few, if any, did so) and none of the coffee shops at the O2 opened until shortly before 9am, so that with registration from 8am there were lots of people wandering around looking for their caffeine fix. It was also discovered, fairly quickly, that there was no WiFi available to attendees, and that there was no heating. But these weren't why people were attending.

We were there to hear about what other people were doing with Twitter, and occasionally other short message services: the "140 characters" of the title. Indeed the most interesting presentation, for me, was from Kevin Holly (@gadget37, co-inventor of SMS text messaging) who gave us the technical background about the development of texting and just why the limit is 160 characters — the 140 for Twitter et al is because the remainder get used for the 'from' and 'to' — and their using 7-bit characters to squeeze them all in.

So, initially, all the seats were filled for the sessions and the event was opened at 9am by Jeff Pulver alongside Jeffrey Hayzlett (@JeffreyHayzlett, CMO of Kodak, who sponsored the event). Pulver presented his 'State of Now' spiel — you can find it on YouTube — and Hayzlett talked about how Kodak had made use of the crowdsourcing opportunities to improve their products and their customer service, including a very interesting review of how we used Twitter to rename a product he felt had a somewhat non-marketable name. Pulver was due to be followed by 66 other people discussing everything from music to education, news services to eBay, The Police service to dreams. Although a technical breakdown with the connection to the USA and a few people having travel difficulties changed the timings it was a still a busy schedule and, with only the single lunchtime break, possibly too intensive for some.

After Stephen Fry (@stephenfry, pictured) gave us a wonderful — and extended — review of how the immediacy of 140 characters has effectively changed the world (and was crowned as a 'Twillionaire') many of the seats emptied as people moved to the back and sides of the hall or left for the coffee shop for their own discussions and a multitude of laptops and netbooks appeared.

According to Twitter, the highest concentration of their users is to be found in London and this conference had attracted many of what could be termed 'the usual suspects' on the London Social Media scene: we already have a vibrant social cafe circuit active most days of the week and spreading over the whole country. In that sense, and because just about all the attendees were experienced users and promoters of the use of these services, there was a strong sense of 'preaching to the converted' here which may not have been the case in New York or LA. Nonetheless there were other gems in the day, including hearing about the tweeting Police of the West Midlands and the education panel.

All in all a day to remember, but not necessarily repeat.

This is an extended version of my guest post on The Next Women.

The Thought Process

How different people approach the same problem is an interest of mine. Ever since I first started analysing requirements for computer programs — and then designing, writing, testing and documenting them — the reasons behind the decision-making process of each individual for the design choices and selections they make has been somewhat of a puzzle.

'Back in the day' when I started hacking code — the early 1970s — Computer Programming was still very much 'an Art'. Something little known to the majority of the population, almost the practice of a religion by its acolytes and preachers who deigned to tell the rest of the world how things would be done, rather than expect the congregation to perform the rites themselves. By the late 80s I'd felt things had changed so much that I left the industry for a while and joined the entertainment business — sound engineering, lighting design, tour management — as an escape from the keyboard and a recognition that writing code was a far more wide-spread and, sadly, less artful activity.

Now though I write stuff again, either because it is something I particularly need for my own purposes — and if I see that others might find it useful too I release it as open source software, usually under the GPL — or because the idea of solving that particular problem appeals to me.

Last week one such problem appeared on the horizon. The Tuttle Club — a weekly meeting of 'social media' types which I take part in as often as I can — has had a sign-up facility on a wiki for a long time now, yet it has fallen into dis-use as fewer people mark their intention to attend. In so doing it loses the benefit of the list for others to know who was there when they need a prompt for the name of the person they had an interesting chat with and want to follow-up the discussion that was started at the meeting, so Lloyd, who mostly started the club, commented that some sort of 'bot' was needed where attendees could more easily indicate their intentions and check on who came would be useful.

My own immediate thoughts were that Twitter by itself could provide the required interface and storage capacity; use a hashtag or reply to key into the bot and a simple code would provide the flagging of who was coming and who wasn't. Indeed a few people have created bots using such a technique and they do part of the task.

But I say part of the task because I quickly noted that whilst such a simple service was easy to create it wouldn't actually be of much use. After each event, at some point, you need to 'wipe the slate clean' for that meeting so that people can show they are coming to the next one. In all likelihood that can't be too late otherwise there isn't time to mark the next meeting yet it will also lose the attendance at the previous one — and sod's law says that you will want to check someone's details after it was wiped not before! So I sat down to spec out a 'better' (in my opinion, anyway!) specification of what I'd like to be able to use such a bot for, and first registered a suitable domain name and twitter id for the purpose.

My notes included that the London Tuttle isn't the only one now; it has offspring as near as StationX in Bletchley, and as far away as Los Angeles. It isn't only on a Friday — just recently there was a Wednesday meetup which I attended along with a dozen others not all of whom I know the names or handles of yet would like to — and the need for better publicity for sponsors and to generally 'be more useful' suggested to me that a 'proper' solution would be more useful in the long run, both to organisers and attendees, than the short-period recording otherwise available. So, although being slowed down by the events of 'life' — in my case visiting my mother for the weekend and taking her out — that 'more complete' version is what I have 'specced up' for me to develop and hope to present to the world in the next few days.

Oh, and once I'm happy with it then yes, most of it will surely be open-sourced, as that is what I do.

Socialising people

The current fondness for "Social media" suggests that much of the media isn't 'social', yet perusing the racks at your local newsagent will produce reams of printed matter coving the social antics of the glitterati and Z-listers whom — for a reason I've never been able to fathom — many people across the country actually profess to be avidly interested in.

Arguably the better term would relate to social media as content which is both user-created but also publicly accessible and — most importantly — where discussions between users take place. I am an avid Twitterer (AlisonW) and of the bank of computer screens in front of me at the moment, Tweetdeck holds my regular attention on one of the screens, the other screens — when I can tear myself away from actual 'work' — may include Facebook, LinkedIn, Meetup, and many more of the 'social services' that provide the background to being a freelance worker based on the road or in a home office. Instead of the hubbub around the water cooler or coffee machine we interact not quite in real time but asynchronously to pass on titbits of our lives or of news we have just heard about.

In the same was that the ubiquitous broadband and WiFi covers our lives when 'working' the replacement for the freelancer not always having a works' "do" to attend becomes the socialising of psuedo-random individuals brought together by the networking sites who create "Real Life" events in bars, clubs or offices. I've been regularly attending one at the ICA on a Friday morning called "Tuttle" (after Archebald "Harry" Tuttle, a character in the 1985 Terry Gilliam film Brazil) which is otherwise known as the London Social Media Café, with a mixed crowd of bloggers, journos, techies, and geeks chatting about life the universe and everything over a coffee or two. Earlier in the week it was a women's event - "Silicon Stilettos" and other nights also have regular offerings such as "Mobile Monday" or "Wiki Wednesday". Social, certainly, and media? Arguably yes. The attendees not only network but publicise their networking, drawing in others to discussions on business opportunities every bit as much as what they thought of the latest film or book.

Marshall McLuhan once pronounced that " The medium is the message" arguing that the medium by which we hear news influences our feelings about it. The same news distributed by the British Broadcasting Corporation and by Fox News will be spun in different ways and — as pure recipients of that information — we can only hear and see what we are given. When the medium is the people we've been following via the social media routes however we can take that same 'professional corporate view' and discuss not only the facts but also the interpretation, pulling in other elements from additional sources and from those who happen to be 'on the spot'.

Social Pantomime

This afternoon I 'took part' in a social network pantomime. No, I don't mean a client presentation which went badly, but a 'performance' of Cinderella (mostly) which took place on twitter . Using the hashtag of #twitpanto there were over 600 messages of 140 characters or fewer, some from the 'cast' (mostly well-known UK bloggers or social network pundits) but the majority from the other users of Twitter. Lots of audience participation of the "Behind you!" and "Oh no he's not!" category made for an escapist hour and a half. For myself, I've always believed that pantomime requires rhyming couplets, so most of my tweets were in that form. Of course, the end of any panto needs a song where the audience join in, and so a link was posted. And everyone was rickrolled, so maintaining another web phenomenon. So with that, I'll wish all my readers, wherever you may be, a happy Solstice / Yule / Xmas / Winterval / New Year / Hannukah / over-indulgence in wine, women and song.

Connections

With all the 'Web 2.0' services come 'Friends'. They aren't necessarily people you've met face-to-real-face or even people you might want to ever meet, but the standard phraseology appears to be 'friends' nonetheless. Today, therefore, I added some new friends to my Twitter stream and to my Blogroll. Some of them by seeing who had 'friended' me and others on the recommendation of others. An interesting web of connections gets created by all these relationships, meaningless in many ways but indicative of levels of interest anyway. Yesterday's creation of a short-url service has resulted in my updating my ReadTwitter module to recognise links in a twitter post and convert it to a link. The new version will be available for download later today.