I work for Setanta Sports. Setanta at times is is a company much like a pubescent teenager. Big irregular growth spurts, co-ordinating different limbs can be tough, and every once in a while we’ll go and lock ourselves in our room until fresh investment arrives.

I’ll leave the bigger analysis to our friends in Media Guardian and Enders. They’re getting more right than wrong right now without help from this website.  Just one point on consumer relationships, a point that is in no way uniquely applicable to Setanta.

Here’s a role that every organization that relies on business-to-consumer relationships should have:

With apolagies to my friends in marketing and PR who do a great job, this isn’t about you. This isn’t about “telling a story” or getting a message out. It’s about open ears and interfacing. Taking the message that’s out there and reacting. Read Frank Eliason’s full blog post for reasons why.

Right now there are thousands of conversations on Twitter, GetSatisfaction.com and DigitalSpy about every media brand under the sun. If as a brand we’re not listening, and even more importantly not empowering those we ask to listen, we simply cannont win. This is nothing to do with new technologies and everything to do with new respect for those who pay our wages, our customers.

I spent Saturday at the first (and I hope) annual Africa Gathering conference, an orgy of ICT4D organized by the guys behind Geekyoto and held in Birkbeck College, London.

First up with a BIG statement was Tim Unwin, UNESCO ICT4D chair. His message was loud and clear.

It’s time to stop doing pilot projects and start doing things that are substantive and substantial.

Shades of Tim O’Reilly’s call for us to work on stuff that matters and I couldn’t agree more

The $100 laptop

ICT4D PhD candidate David Hollow had some insights into how the initial rollouts of $100 laptops in five Ethiopian schools. Using qualitative and quantitative research he painted a picture of laptops being enthusiastically received by students but ultimately alienating both teachers and parents. Students are learning how to use their new computers far quicker than their teachers and in many cases both teachers and parents have concluded that the laptops are good for nothing but games

There was a clear message that there simply isn’t enough meaningful content on these laptops. Until there are more textbooks and lesson modules uploaded as standard the laptops are going to continue to be used as glorified digital cameras and MP3 players. In other words it’s not enough to get these laptops into the field. They have to be supported with localized software and content. And it’s vital that parents and teachers are ahead of the training curve. So stick that in your USB drive Negroponte.

SMS on the Frontline

Frontline SMS setup. Super simple.

Ken Banks presented one of the standout presentations, how his SMS management tool, Frontline SMS has been utilized across the content. Frontline creates an SMS messaging hub by allowing a standard phone to be connected to a standard PC using a standard cable.  Why has he been so successful? Because Ken’s given the users the very basics and let them roll with it. He’s trusted them to follow some instructions, souce the gear, but the airtime even though this means the barriers to entry are slightly higher. When users do get everything working they feel massive ownership and become his best evangelists.

It takes big NGOs and government organizations months to build and deploy tech for similar usage, Frontline SMS allows end users such as field doctors and local media organizations bypass the tape and get on with connecting to their audience. And crucially it bypasses local authority structures, very important when monitoring Zimbabwaen elections for example.

Ultimately Ken makes a great point on the direction of technology in Africa. He’s distributing a small software package and letting people run it for themselves.

Mobiles in Africa: The Movie

Martin Konzett of ict4d.at presented this trailer of his current project. The full documentary is released next month. Great to see some humour in the mix.

Old School Networks: ColaLife

The most bizarrely innovative  story of the day was that of Simon Berry, the man behind ColaLife. This is a case of using social media tools here in the UK and around the world to push a cause in Africa. So far so standard, but it’s the cause itself that’s super-impressed me. Simon’s idea is real simple:

1. Lots of kids in Africa die from dehydration related illness.
2. Many can be saved if only hydration salts and medcines could be got to them.
3. Let’s use the existing distribution channels of Coke deliverers to spread the good stuff.

Here’s the video:

Could it be that using old-school distribution channels we’ll create new human collaborative networks? This simple idea has huge scaling potential and it’s something that companies like Coca-Cola should be jumping aboard way before Simon and ColaLife force them. We can apply this to all sorts of distribution channels and supply chains all around the world and the great thing is that the concept works without any hi-tech rocket science. Once the guys in the distribution centres are on board we have a winner.

And the rest…

A couple of interesting points from whiteafrican and Ushahidi co-founder Erik Hersman. In Africa it’s very hard for people to bounce ideas off each other. Here we do this with tools like Twitter, IRC, Facebook etc. Yet the speed of communication and thus the time it takes to disseminate ideas in Africa remains slower.

That said clearliy technologies, particularly of the open variety have leveled the global barrier to entry for developers everywhere. Technology allows Africans to overcome life’s inefficiencies,  whether that’s government, food or health.

And if there’s one technology holy grail right now is an open mobile payment structure that isn’t tied to any operator or even any country. Achieve this and then the playing field really does level off in a big way. If you’re to believe Erik and the majority of the attendees of AfricaGathering the phone operators have no incentive and are bringing no urgency to this issue. Having a worked with the European and US arms of many of these operators this comes as no surprise.

Finally,  just to show the day wasn’t all serious save-the-world ernestness, Juergen Eichholz gave a quick presentation on Afrigadget and the even better and funnier Afrifail.com. Check them out for some great upcycling action.

“

AfriFAIL [photo (c) flickr.com/photos/jennerm

-Edit

Here are some more blog pieces on the day which I’ve just lifted from Alasdair Munn’s piece on the day. Cheers Alasdair.

• My Take on AfricaGathering in London - Juergen Eichholz
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 1 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 2 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 3 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: Talk 4 summary
• ICT4D.at – Africa Gathering: panel discussion
• Karola Riegler’s Flickr Photoset on AfricaGathering

A month ago I was inspired to enter the Social Actions Change the Web Challenge. The closing date was mid April so unfortunately if the entered app, Battfone, was a horse it would be still out there running.

But let’s not worry about trivialities like that, changing the world is more important than winning coding competitions and collecting cash prizes. So with that in mind here’s an update to what I’m still trying to achieve with Battfone.

So what’s the big idea?

Here’s the detailed application overview used on the CTW site:

It’s Saturday afternoon and Josh has some downtime so he’s laying back on the couch watching some football. He’s not particularly interested in the result so he’s got his IM open on his laptop and he’s texting his friends planning his Saturday night entertainment.

Then the BattFone goes off. Adam receives a Twitter DM alerting him to a Social Action hot off the wires from Idealist.org. There’s an asylum seeker at the local welfare centre and they need a translator in a hurry. Just so happens Adam speaks “foreign” and so without much ado he’s down there spending less than an hour making someone’s life a lot easier.

Adam is the type of guy who’ll answer a call for help but he’s not always going to go out of his way to look for the needy. That’s where BattFone comes in.

***

We want BattFone to be considered the early warning alert system for the Social Actions. An APB for the API.

We aim to combine the Social Actions API with Twitter and eventually other networks  to create a multi-way Social Actions communications system. Using http://BattFone.me users will register to be alerted via Twitter, e-mail and other means when actions they’ve specified an interest in are created.

BattFone is a filter and alert system to get the right Social Actions to the right Social Actors at the right time.
The right time isn’t always quarter a after midnight during a surfing session. It can be whenever and wherever the Action is created.

BattFone is focused heavily on the end-user. It’s main purpose is to act as an instigator of real world action. We want to take relevant Social Actions off the social networks and put them into the hands of people who will answer the call for help.

We expect BattFone to be most useful in urban environments where rich sets of actions will be targeted at the most focused set of actors possible. As the Social Actions API develops we expect location awareness to play a key role. Right now however we’re working with what we can in this regard.

Great Idea, now go build it

Part of my day job at Setanta involves designing and managing the build of applications far more complex than the one above. So Battfone was going to be a piece of cake, even for a someone like myself who doesn’t usually get their hand covered with code feces. Wrong.

First up was designing a model. The concept is straightforward enough.

1. A user registers interest in receiving Battfone alerts
2. User provides Twitter ID and states what action types they want to help with along with their location
3. Battfone polls Social Actions’ API regulary
4. Battfone matches new Social Actions’ location and action_type with user location and action type.
5. If there’s a match we compose a tweet and dm the lucky user

After taking the app through some bigtime thought revisions the bones remain pretty much as is. The order of that if statement has changed but the result is the same.

So with a model sketched out in too-soft-for-my-liking-HB pencil it was on to the application stack itself. One given was that the app was going to be hosted by Joyent. I’ve had nothing but great customer support there over the past few years and already have a ton of small blogs (including this one) safely housed there.
Next up the stack itself. One of the great rules set down by the guys at Social Actions is that all the apps end up published with an Open Source license. Add to that that to kick off there’s only going to be one developer working on this and there goes a .NET stack.

Second contributing factor was the APIs that were going to be integrated; Twitter and Social Actions. Twitter in particular has a ton of libraries and documented code snippets already built for it. Social Actions is getting there. To utilize these my choices were down to Python, PHP, Java and Ruby. I played around with Python for a while but eventually settled on Ruby. With Rails I could scaffold a working database model (I thought at the time) quickly, not worry about the front end design until way later, and concentrate my efforts on the app brains of matching social_actions with users.

I’d like to have investigated Django a little more. I really like what the guys there are building but there’s simply a lot more Rails examples and tutorial out there right now and if I was going to build this, or at least a proof of concept, on my own I was going to need to tap into the crowd wisdom already on the net.

What’s taking you so long?

I’m going to save an actual code overview for another time. Some big problems I’ve faced so far aren’t issues with my conceptual problems, but simply knowledge gaps associated with using any stack for the first time, in my case Rails. It took the best part of a week of evening to get MySQL’s local paths sorted on my dev environment. Twitter has been turning OAuth on and off for the last month meaning that testing any Twitter functionality has been hit or miss. It’s still out and I’m not sure it’s worth the hassle to re-engineer Battfone to handle password logins that are soon the be deprecated anyway.

Right now I’m at the stage where I have just about every individual class working independently.  I have a scaffolded app running with a few bugs and I’m trying to add in the classes and functionality one by one. I’ve no front end work done but that’s the fun part so I’ll sail through that in a couple of nights.

If there has been one hold back on the API side though it’s been with the location attributes of each social_action coming through the Social Actions API itself. For the vast majority of actions the location attribute is not set at all. This makes sense in many cases, why should a petition for example need a real world location set for it. However in the case where locations are set they are not always easy to parse and match up with a user. I know this issue is still under development on the API side and it hasn’t stopped John Brennan building his fantastic Google Maps mashup at http://www.imdoingmypart.org/community/map.

imdoingmypart.org

I can only commend Joe and Peter from Social Actions who have been super encouraging during the whole process. One of their aims with the competition has been to incubate a developer community around the API and that’s certainly happened.

So onwards!

There’s alot more to come on the onwards applications of Battfone, I’m hoping to have a working version online in the next couple of weeks. You can follow the test Twitter account @battfone to get a good idea of the state of play. And of course if you have any feedback, ideas, offers of free coders and so on please shout.

Because I don’t have enough to do with my time right now I am thinking about entering the Social Actions Change the Web Challenge. Closing date is Friday 3rd April so it’s all hands on deck right now.

Needless to say the app I’ve got in mind right now will integrate with the SocialActions API along with the Twitter API and I’m also hoping to add in some magic web 2.0 ingredient, time’s the big issue though. It’s been a while since I waded knee deep into code torrents this rough.

Social Actions are attempting to become the world’s clearing house for actions run by charitable and philanthropic organziations. By the looks of things they’re going about it the right way, building a central API that can communicate with a whole ton of online bodies in the charitable space. Through the Change the Web Challenge they are also incubating an interesting Developers Network here. More power to them.

That’s right, change the web, change the world. Now, back to the code.

There’s a trust deficit in society. Technology can play and is playing a huge role in rectifying this.

I’ve just read Causewired by Tom Watson. The book is Watson’s attempt to summarize the current state of play in the world of online philanthropy, social causes and network based social action organization. Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World as the tag line suggests.

I’ve a lot more to come about the subjects Watson tackles but right now I’m going to take on the subject of trust, particularly in light of the last two posts on this site concerned as they are with Digital Britain and Modern Liberty. There’s a gaping trust void in society right now. Our government clearly don’t trust us and in the midst of a  recession the likes of which none of us have know before there’s a danger that society fragments and turns away from the most needy, and from the most grave causes.

The central thesis of Watson’s book is this:

New Technology and the human urge to communicate will create the basis for a golden age of activism and involvement, increasing the reach of philanthropy and improving the openness of politics, democratic government and our major social institutions.
[BUT, working against this is the current global recession. Governments are running into budget shortfall and cutting spending in all social areas.]

So, just as our governments are failing us by cutting back on spending that increase social cohesion, we are coming up the the technology and the ideas to bind ourselves together in social economies without our governments’ help. I’m going to have to leave my reaction to government responses here to another post, needless to say it’s a big issue.

Whether our governments get it right with initiatives like Digital Britain, Watson’s point is that there’s a whole ton of people in the doing-something-that-matters space that aren’t waiting for their government. And why should they. Private (and open source) enterprise has given an historically unprecedented number of people the tools and inspiration to take action in a whole host of fields.

For now I want to take a look at some of studies in Causewired and see how they are tackling matter of trust.

What technology is allowing us do

A quick overview of what this technology is allowing us to do is in order. Watson’s beat is online philanthropy. That means free giving. And by free I mean free as in speech, not beer. Giving of one’s own volition. So who’s giving and who’s getting? Watson hones in on some prime time examples: DonorsChoose, Fundable, Kiva and Facebook Causes.

Each a very different application or platform but some bigtime shared attributes and functions, not least of which in my view is the way trust is leveraged, certainly in the case of the first three if not quite so strongly with Causes. For those not familiar with these companies it’s worth clicking the above links and checking their about pages real quick. In all of these examples Watson is showing us that the abstraction between the giver and receiver in a philanthropic situation is being removed. If I use DonorsChoose to donate textbooks to classrooms I know what text books and what school is involved. If I loan money with Kiva to a person or project in a developing world country chances are I have a photo and story behind the whole deal. The personalization and directness strengthens the sense of empathy with in turn cranks up the trust motor.

How is this being achieved

Watson highlights the transition from anonymity to real identity on the social web as key.
From Charles Leadbeader in We Think: Freedom is a slippery idea, but I believe that the web will be good for freedom of expression in four respects.

• The freedom to think what we like, to form and express ideas independently
• The freedom to shape our identities, to be who we want to be
• The freedom as consumers to choose and buy what we want
• The freedom to express ourselves through creating things that matter to us.

It isn’t a big leap of logic to suppose that for freedom to exist within a social space the atmosphere of that space must be made up of a large dose of trust. Example: I am only free if I trust my cohabitants to obey the rules of the social space and  thus not impinge upon my freedom. The future threat of the curtailment of freedom may in itself act as that very curtailment.

But freedom within an environment is not enough within itself. After all, if a user can have a trust based relationship only within a closed space how can a movement or cause grow. The trust relationship must expand. That may mean the expansion of the [closed] environment or it may mean the migration of the users and their attached trust outside the environment.

From an interview with Causes’ Sean Parker Watson tells us turning users into propagators is key.

“Deliberate viral engineering, how you turn your users into propagators through careful optimization was very important “

This is illustrated in another case study,  Kiva, the developing world online loan agency. By allowing users to help many causes and many users to help each cause there’s a natural urge for donors to tell more people to donate to their cause and see their cause succeed. Watson likens this to a child collecting baseball cards.

Watson isn’t afraid to be a little cynical in illustrating his point when he mentions the black tie ball philanthropy that continues to pull in big money in New York. Being seen at the ball is a big part of the play.

Causes do not spread just because they are good, they spread because people spread them. This seems simple and rather obvious but it is the secret sauce behind the rise of all the online social networks. In short, people like being asked nicely by other people they know to do things for them; that request validates the relationship.

Bringing all this back to trust

One of the most important observations Watson brings to the table in Causewired is this:

Optimism is inherent in people. Consumers will switch brands for causes, particularly young consumers.

Exampe: Every summer Coke and Pepsi go head to head with youth orientated promotions. Collect 20 bottle tops and get a free iTunes voucher. How about if these were led by social causes instead of iTunes giveaways.

83% of Americans say that companies have a responsibility to help support causes and 87% would switch from one brand to another if the other brand is associated with a good cause.

That’s a lot of brand loyalty simply migrating because of people’s innate desire to “do the right thing”. This highlights a couple of glaring facts:

1. The online social philanthropy space is potentially huge
2. Our governments need to be in there getting a piece of the action

Let’s bring this back to trust again. It’s natural to wonder why governments don’t take on this job of turning users into propagators of key services. The private sector is now shining some big fat arc lights down this road, it shouldn’t be hard for our public services to start taking some big steps here. It’s also natural to wonder what we can do to reduce the trust deficit that exists between the government and the rest of us (as outlined here). It our governments aren’t going to trust us on some big issues right away, the least that can be done is the services and applications be put in place so we can trust each other. Then let us do the hard work.

Conclusions

Whilst researching this article I came across this piece by Tom Watson.

…on one hand, people are ever more conscious of philanthropy and its role in commerce and society; on the other, these people are talking to each other more so than ever before.

If you keep talking you can change the world right? And now talk is cheap, easy and global. In theory the more we talk, the more we get to know each other and empathize, the more we trust. In the UK right now the government, through Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, is attempting to map out the digital future. It believes at the end of this future there is a Digital Dividend, the spoils of which will greatly benefit all of society. Lord Carter could do worse than spend a few hours reading Causewired and learning how that dividend is already being created.

There’s two massively important movements taking place right now in Britain, here are some important connections between them. I’ve already written a little about the Digital Britain interim report but more importantly Charles Leadbeater has written a lot and put it all together in a handy portable pdf. Download it here.

The original report either isn’t aware of, or Lord Carter, it’s author, didn’t have the balls to ask some big questions. Leadbeater does. There’s far to many to list here, go read the document, however I will highlight one important conclusion.

It strikes me, as it has done Leadbeater, that the government on the one hand is proposing what they think is an ambitious drive to take the UK’s new media industry and infrastruture forward into the next quarter century. Yet they don’t want to involve us, the public. Moreover, they patently don’t trust us.

Reading Digital Britain one cannot help but feel the government finds the opportunities for people to self-organise through the web all too unsettling for its more technocratic, controlling tendencies. Digital Britain conveys none of the excitement that many young people feel about the world of semi-structured free association that mutual media is creating. This interim report, written behind closed doors in an era of open communications, is little more than piece of space filling to persuade us the government has a vision for the future when in reality it seems to have none, at least not yet. (A model of what can be done, even in government, is the parallel The Power of Information report, which is fully of exciting recommendations for how government can open up its information for citizens to use in novel ways. )

The government say that the UK must be allowed compete with the most advanced nations on Earth and to do this we must have an advanced IT infrastructure. But to use an advanced infrastructure, to create an advanced infrastructure, we must have entrepreneurs, thinkers, dreamers and digital literates. And they must be given tools and those tools imparted with trust.

– –

This basic mistrust of us the people is the reason the Convention on Modern Liberty not only happend this weekend, but was much needed. What could have been another umbrella demo by the SWP and their ilk has the potential to be a real political movement. Here’s why.

Henry Porter quotes David Cameron in today’s Observer. Scarily I agree with him:

“When academics look back on Labour’s time in power,” he said, “the erosion of our historic liberties will surely be one of its most defining, and damning, aspects. Things we have long thought were part of the fabric of liberty in this country – such as trial by jury, habeas corpus with strict limits on the time that people can be held without charge, the protection of parliament against intrusion by the executive – have been whittled away.”

And Nick Clegg from the same article is a little less dramatic but a little more on point:

“We are the most spied-upon country in the developed world, with a million innocent people’s DNA on a criminal database, more surveillance cameras than anywhere in the world, parents snooped on by council officials checking up on where children spend the night, and ceaseless attempts by government to limit our freedom of expression. That’s why the work of the Convention on Modern Liberty is so important in highlighting the liberties we have lost and inspiring a new alliance in Britain to take our freedoms back.”

Both of these quotes go back to the trust issue. Nobody highlighted this issue better than Philip Pullman in his address to the convention. If Clegg highlighted the problems above, Pullman took the higher road and asked us what sort of society we WANT to live in. For if we don’t know the answer to that what have we got to complain about and what have we to aim at.
Courage, virtue, intellectual curiousity, modesty and honour are five big optimistic virtues that are pulled out and analyzed. You won’t find me arguing.

Just imagine for a moment a nation with the courage, with the modesty, with a simple wakeful clarity of mind that are so
near at hand, so easy to find, if only we knew. Imagine a government that trusted the people who elected it. Imagine agencies of the state that regarded the people’s privacy as something it was the state’s duty to guard, rather like the value of their money and the historic individuality of their town centres and their freedom to speak and write as they like. Imagine a nation that cherished these things as a kind of natural blessing, something obviously good that needed no justification, something like sunshine or kindness or clean water. Or honour.

Now what have these things to do with freedom and the threats to freedom we have been hearing about today? What has the virtue of delight to do with virtue of liberty. Everything. A nation whose laws express fear and suspicion cannot sustain delight for very long; joy does not flourish in the garden of anxiety. The society these laws seem to be designed to bring about is one of institutionalised paranoia of furtive hatred and low-level panic, every scrap of delight and gladness we can find is a blow against that fear; every instance of civility and kindness we come across is a clean wind dispersing a foul vapour. Every example we cherish of imaginative play, of the energy of creation and of the enchantment of art and the wonder of science is a weapon in the arsenal and I say weapon, advisedly: we have a fight on
our hands. “I will not cease from mental fight”, said William Blake, and this is the fight he meant. The fight to defend, to restore, and to sustain the virtue which is not now but could so easily be, the natural behaviour of the state.

We are a better people than our government believes we are; we are a better nation.

That really is a big concept yet one that you won’t find on the manisfesto for government of any of the major parties. At least not yet you won’t. That could change.

This is my last post on SXSW. It may be the most important one though. As I’ve written, I went to SXSW thinking it would be a tech event. I’ve come back to London with the realization that it’s not about bits and bytes. It’s about people. It’s about the keynotes and the audience who take on those keynote speakers. It’s about regular panels and the individuals who stand up and wait for a turn to ask a question at the mic. And it’s about all those lunatics who see a twitter calling for a mid-afternoon tweet-up at a random bar and despite knowing nobody turn up and make friends. Thanks for that twitter.

I would like to briefly go through some standout panels and keynotes at SXSW. He was subsequently outshone, or certainly out hyped by other big guns, but for me Henry Jenkins really brought his A-Game. Thesis: Society and its leaders and its media are switching from an ‘I’ culture to a ‘we’ culture. Examples: Survivor and Lost’s level of audience participation. These prime time shows do not exist without their online audience examining every last secret detail of every frame of every episode.
Exampe: Barack Obama talks using the post-boomer inclusivity language of ‘We’. Hillary Clinton does not. ‘I’ plays a big part in Clinton’s speeches and represents a person born of a political generation that wholeheartedly embraces the one way medium of TV. That’s over Mrs. Clinton.
Daniel light adds to Jenkins’ thesis in his excellent post:

“This isn’t presented as happening at the expense of individuality or self-determination. On the contrary, this is not communism but communalism, seeing the interests of the community best served by the divergent creativity and initiative of we, its constituents.”

Social Networks such as Twitter and Seesmic are obvious manifestations of this communalism. They represent the audacity and urgency of intimacy that I think Jenkins talks about.

Mark Zuckerberg
A whole ton of stuff has been written about the Zukerberg/Lacy interview. It was a cringe worthy affair. So what, let’s get on with the show. Neither Zuckerberg nor Lacy came across as particularly interesting individuals in person, but I do want to examine a few points Zuck tried to get out between acts of audience revolt. Sure, audience participation via online social network back channels is interesting but not in a huge manner right now. Come on, this is one of the biggest geek fests on the planet, if it’s going to happen anywhere it’s going to happen here.

One interesting side note is the reference Zuck makes to how Facebook is helping revolutionaries in Colombia. Look at the Guardian piece on FB’s backers. Is this thus a huge surprise. Government and big business have sought to control information and access to information since mankind invented media. ie forever. The reformation was enabled by Guttenberg’s wresting of information control from the Catholic church after all. If I’m the CIA, you better believe I want to control, or at the very least have readily available access to these information paths.

One worry here is that as with Google, as large corporations start to gain an ownership on our information and relationships they can massage these in different ways. McLuhan’s statement on medium and message rings true. Our thoughts and the way we think adapts to the medium. Control that and control the message.

Zuck stated quite audaciously that Facebook represents the biggest paradigm shift in media since the launch of the newspaper industry. Maybe he’s actually right, did anyone think of that?

Newspapers didn’t shift society’s thought functionality on their own, it took the invention and adoption of the telegraph to put them over the edge. The telegraph removed the limitations of space and time on the newspaper industry. The newspaper press was then free to become the first medium to involve human interest and sentiment en masse. With that the telegraph ultimately dimmed the privacy of the book form.

Nearly 200 years later social networks are doing a similar job in dismantling barriers of intimacy in our communications. The generation of school children on Bebo has grown up with almost a complete, non-technological, tool set to use social networks to communicate.

Commentators in their twenties and older wonder how this generation is going to grow up and hit the work force with all their teenage trials and tribulations shared online for the potential employer to vet. But that isn’t the employee’s problem. They are comfortable with their shared intimacy. It’s the employer who’s going to have to deal with it. In the past decade we’ve had two presidents in the US and a leader of the opposition in the UK who have crossed this Rubicon in terms of records and recollections of student drug usage. This is surely the start of a societal change from punishing past indiscretions to an open acknowledgment of mistakes.

We’ve already stated that the newspaper press wasn’t the catalyst for the changing of media consumption in the 1800’s. It was the Telegraph. And so social networks. Flash AJAX deployments and integrated APIs aren’t the killer app here. These aren’t changing society. But what might do that that is the integration of mobile devices. This is why Google is spending so much on Android and wireless. It may be that Social Networks will finally come of age and be the instruments of change that MZ proports them to be when they fully embrace a mobile world. This is the only way they are going to penetrate Africa for example.

So to Frank Warren
I’ve been a fan of PostSecret since I first saw it in some Sunday supplement or another. It’s collage like art/intimacy I think connects with a lot of people. We’ve all got something hidden inside us.

However seeing Warren’s name up beside Jenkins and Zuckerberg was something of a surprise. This guy’s an artist/currator. How does that fit into an interactive conference?

Well let’s look at what interactive means. Warren has created more direct interactions than perhaps anyone in the auditorium. And on an incredibly intimate level. It’s fair to say that Warren knows how to extract the intimate in just about anyone. The hour long talk featured quite a few tales of anonymous secrets, but the amazing thing was what this outpouring of secrets did to the audience. The Q&A section, or rather mass secret section produced one spontaneous proposal of marriage, lots of confessions and one hug from Frank for a woman who fell into floods of teams in front of 2,000 super-geeks. Wow. Nothing I write here can do him justice. Some of his talks are online. Find them.

Four points from Jane McGonigal’s talk on the happiness industry. All recent research on happiness points to four key areas that are pre-requisites for bringing happiness to a life:

1. Satisfying work to do
2. The experience of being good at something
3. Time spent with people we like
4. A chance to be a part of something bigger

What’s this to do with interactive? Jane’s a multi-player game expert. And multiplayer games bring all four of these in spades. If your industry doesn’t it’s time to think why not.

So on to other highlights. George Kelly gave the most sombre talk of the weekend. He read like a Telegraph obit. The funeral was that of the newspaper industry and George obviously cares. Not that that’s going to stop the declining sales, slash and burn approach to the world’s news rooms and a mass exodus of advertisers to green online pastures.
That leaves me with this question though which I want to explore over the coming months. is it a given that these forms of communication and participation will jump the gap between international geek community and mass adoption. Facebook has done it, but can Twitter and Seesmic really go mass market in their current guise or will they simply be sold off for their API’s. Does the real innovation lie in ancillilary apps?

Finally some learnings at a basic level. Despite our web 2.0 tools it’s vital to connect in a real way, not just at a Facebook or MySpace level. Without real interaction, and maybe even face to face communication these web2.0 relationships do not mean a whole lot. Gary Vaynurchuck understands this. Watch how he communicates with his audience. But big media doesn’t. It they get Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, it’s at a marketing level. Useless.

Nike is a company that I find absolutely offensive for their continued outsourcing/labour issues, BUT they get this. They are using their brand and social status to connect people in the real world. More companies need to get this too. And like Nike they may well be companies that haven’t done this before. If you work in the world of sport, an area that is invented to accomodate social interaction you better be thinking this or you’re going to be left way out by your audience.

I went to SXSWi expecting to be dazzled by technology. I wasn’t. Instead I was impressed by the application of technology. That may not sound like a huge difference. It doesn’t matter how good the technology is after a certain point, it’s the passion the user-base brings to the table that puts an application or a service over the edge.
So back to the point, the impressive technologies and apps were those that were being used, that had all the ad-spend but none of the on-the-ground grubbiness. I’m thinking you in particular Silverlight.
In no pearticular order shout outs to:

Utterz
If I had a US phone bill I’d have been using this in a big way. A tumblr crossed with friendfeed for mobile access (kinda). (I think).Utterz is just about unique enough to work. It can be accessed via any mobile or landline in the world and it connects to your kitchen sink.

Seesmic
Didn’t take the convention by storm the way it could have, but for my money it’s the best insta-vlogger on the market. Once it perfects it’s mobile interoperability and good video handsets (ie a few more N95 clones) come down in price Seesmic is going to explode. So see me after SXSWi 2009.

Friendfeed
I thought FriendFeed was going to save my life. It aggregates all you ‘friend’s’ web2.0 feed and delivers them in a daily dose. But now I’m not so sure. After using the service for a couple of weeks I’m starting to think spam! Maybe I should just turn off the daily notifying email. Lifestream services are 10 a penny right now, and the word on the twitter feed says the best two out there are FriendFeed and Social Thing. We’ll see.

Meebo
Meebo’s been around a while. The best thing about it? It works. Meebo were a major sponsor for SXSW but their investment went beyond some sales inventory in the guide books. They created a live chat room for every panel of the interactive conference and they were used as a pretty good back channel for some of the discussions. So far so 1999. But it worked. Social networking doesn’t have to ride the zeitgeist like a Harley every day of the week. Nothing wrong with improving proven concepts.

Twitter
Last night twitter saved my life. Glad to see Gary Vaynerchuck is on the same delayed reaction post SXSW buzz as Keepfakingit. Read and watch him here. garyvaynerchuk.com—twitter-vs-facebook kinda. I endorse his view on Twitter completely. Though my Jersey accent isn’t quite so pronounced.

Wordpress
When the bloggers of the world combined at SXSW they did it in a sponsored press-area-esque room called the BlogHaus. And Wordpress continues to dominate the market. Not an interesting statement but a true one.

Viddler
Is Viddler the most interesting streaming video player on the market right now? It could well be. I saw nothing at SXSW from Brightcove or YouTube or any of the other big players. It’s time for someone else to step to the plate. Viddler may be ready to go. It’s got the social comment thing down. And it looks nice too. Check it.
Drupel: Fast Company have just jumped aboard the good ship Drupel and at a panel on the current state of CMSs the open souce solution looked good.

Next New Networks
I’ve already said it but these guys are where CNN was quarter century ago. And they’ve got the feet-on-the-ground professional approach to content that means they may succeed where the podcasting and blogging aggregators have failed. Theirs was also one of the best parties. Public displays of Rock Band in an adult environment is a good thing.

Android
I didn’t hang with the Google guys. Not my scene. But amongst those whose scene it was, Android was making a serious impression. There may be no such thing as the mobile web, but it’s going to take a big heave to get the world’s population mobile access that really works. And there’s no denying that that’s what the world’s internet population wants.
I’ve seen enough shysters in my time telling me they were going to make me, and those I represent, rich from half-baked mobile apps. Mobile apps aren’t going to make anybody rich, but apps that can go mobile are. And Google are primed to pick up some of that revenue. If I were a startup, or a blue chip app creator, I’d make sure I had an incubator with with Android developers beavering away on something. On anything. Can’t win the game if you don’t know the rules.

Live.Rezpondr.com
So that’s the overview. But I keep coming back to the people and the talent at SXSW. live.rezpondr.com is a great example of smart creatives using a host of different services to put together a media package that meets specific events, in this case SXSW. So big shout out to Phil Campbell and Documentally. Big media could do worse than bring these guys in on a consultancy gig to shake up their news room.

So now we’ve got a mission statement for SXSWi 2008. Or at least I do. What are the supporting themes that are going to shape and direct this media adventure? From the hip: Personality and Participation.

The first formal panel I attended on Saturday was “Quit you day job and start video blogging” chaired by Next New Network’s Tim Shey. The panel featured Shey along with a host of video blogging pioneers. A couple of interesting points worth noting. First off, all of these people were talent and talented, knew how to act in front of a camera and crucially had something more interesting to say than the “fed-the-cat” stories that many blogs consist of. Whether the distribution medium is network tv or online vod, talent is talent. You simply can’t succeed without it.

The second more interesting point taken from this panel was I think mentioned by an audience member (note, the audiences at SXSW are the best in the business, but more of that later). The current state of play for online video producers and aggregators was likened to that of CNN and the cable networks in the US thirty years ago. The cable nets were a new game in town, run by young entrepreneurs who could think quicker move faster and than their counterparts in CBS, ABC and NBC. And crucially the FCC had limited jurisdiction meaning that there were virtually no limits on what the programmers could do. They utterly changed the rules of TV. Well guess what, that’s what it looks like to those working at the likes of Next New Networks. As the barriers to entry for online video networks lower, the truly creative are taking over from the truly geeky. The talent is spending more time on the shows and not worrying about html, bandwidth and hosting. And the likes of NNN are putting in place a layer of professionalism to bring in the revenue and quality control.

One question that has only occurred to me since SXSWi relates to the level of audience participation these new video producers are bringing to their shows. It would seem that they should be ahead of their network cousins. Are they? The subject simply didn’t come up.

That the old networks still don’t understand their audience isn’t even a question. Exhibit A: the text and phone scandals that hit BBC hard and brought ITV to its knees in 2007. Had these institution a clue about how to communicate with their viewers the voting rip-offs simply couldn’t and wouldn’t have happened. But back to Texas…

I suspect participation has been a theme of SXSWi since its inception; come on, ‘i’ is for interactive. But let’s take a quick look at what participation meant in 2008. Every single one of the tech companies that I’ve highlighted here have mass audience participation as either key USP or a key functionality component.

I’ve already mentioned audience participation. During every single keynote, panel and talk there existed back channel conversations involving the live audience. These conversations were formally or informally hosted by the likes of Meebo, Twitter and Utterz. The more astute chairpersons paid attention to these back channels and directed conversations accordingly, props here to Robert Scoble and David Dylan Thomas amongst others. The less astute and plain bad (I’m thinking Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg here) simply lost control to a collective intelligence in the auditorium that was simply too powerful for them to handle. It was amazing to be in one of these auditoriums, filled with maybe 2,000 normally sedate tech people, and be part of a collaborative revolt against the person meant to be directing proceedings.

If this behaviour is going to happen anywhere on Earth it’s going to be SXSWi, where thousands of the earliest adopters are gathered trying to out-geek each other. But there will come a point when these technologies and behaviours go critical and spread to the outside world. This was the participatory theme of 2008.

SXSWi finished a fortnight ago. Over those two weeks I’ve traveled home, read what others have had to say on the event and tried to pull some of those thoughts together. No apologies for the delay, there have been some advantages to waiting this long before writing about SXSWi.

Below I’ve attempted to distil and bottle my version of the SXSWi elixir. Maybe it’s easier to start off with what for me SXSWi is not. It’s not a tech conference in the manner of E3. It’s not a West Coast think-in á-la TED and it certainly isn’t an economically driven cock-fest such as Davos. It shares common factors with all of the above, as well as some PodCamp, BarCamp and any other kind of tech/media trade camp show that you may care to list. It takes elements from all of these, cross pollinates and spits them back out into one very social and sociable long weekend in Texas’ capital. What struck me most of all was the insights into current media culture on display. By that I mean media in its truest form, as extensions of our senses, not the definition of media limited to depressing discussions on the state of our commercial mass media such as network TV and the newspaper industry. I was so taken with this big picture look at media that since the event I’ve dusted off “Understanding Media” and gone back to McLuhan to structure some of my thoughts.

Of course I’ll put an asterisk against the opening words here. This is my take, there are a thousands others many of which will show deeper and more informed insight than myself.

It is human nature to look for patterns and assign themes where only true randomness exists. I’m most definitely guilty of that below, but I think it still worth while to look for common threads across the five days of SXSWi. Reading the discourse coming back on the event online one concept is calling out over all others. With the year that’s in it let’s call it “the audacity and urgency of intimacy”

Through posts on the themes, technologies, events and questions of SXSWi I intend to show that the out of control freight train that is new media is pushing social communication into truly new places and there isn’t anybody out there who really knows where it will ultimately take us too. Not Mark Zuckerberg, not Eric Schmidt and certainly not myself.

So let’s take my newly minted paraphrase backwards. The Intimacy comes from the new level of connectivity society is embracing, particularly those under 20 and living in the West. We’re connecting and sharing our lives at a base level never before done through a mass medium. This is urgent in that we’re pushing these connections right now and regardless of consequence. The teens of today may be in their thirties before the ramifications of this new connectedness comes homes to roost (that sounds like a warning, it isn’t, I’m optimistic for this Bebo generation). Finally the audacity. Anyone who has heard Mark Zukerberg speak his enthusiasm for Facebook’s mission can’t help but describe him using the adjective ‘audacious’. He believes he’s fueling a media revolution not seen since the dawn of the modern newspaper. And he thinks that despite the very public pushback the likes of Facebook’s Beacon are getting. Zukerberg may well be right though.

Millicent, the super lo-fi, low-cost, use-it-with-web2.0-things is profiled in today’s MediaGuardian. This is great. I think. Particularly the distributed collaboration aspect.

Let’s see if we can get a demo of this for a team that is split in three locations around the British Isles and is producing non-live content for web and broadcast. We’ll post some results here maybe.

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