Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Kevin Kelly’s decade-old but still seminal book Out of Control explained why it is so tricky to artificially assemble organic complexity. Describing how scientists sought to re-establish a lost prairie, the co-founder of Wired outlined why the web of relationships between all the different plant and animal species was so difficult to re-construct without knowing the precise sequence of their arrival and integration naturally.

The makers of Coca-Cola’s Zero Movement website had a good idea what a natural online grassroots campaign would look like, they just didn’t want to have to go to the actual trouble of fostering one. So they knocked up an ersatz version and optimistically hoped that their target demographic wouldn’t notice the absence of the Real Thing!

Kevn Kelly is currently researching his new book in which he hopes to answer the question: what does technology want? Unsurprisingly he is already “writing aloud” on Technium, which he describes as “a semi-blog“.

It is instructive to follow the debate in academic circles about the impact of migrating to online publishing models, particularly because it demonstrates a grown-up appreciation of what might be lost as well as of what is there to be gained.

There’s a recognition that blogging is fostering broader, more immediate conversations between peer-groups, extending conversations and connections that previously might have burgeoned only around the time of annual conventions.

• Trackbacks: bibliographies currently allow scholarly discussions to be tracked backwards in time, but if each citation triggered a ping on each cited text it would become possible for all future researchers to follow the conversation forwards in time
• Versioning: research texts would have greater freedom to change and to grow, a process that would be traceable
• Comments: electronic glosses within text could re-shape the process of peer-review.

The academic world is one with a well-entrenched set of gatekeepers representing organisations that are traditionally hierarchical in the extreme. Of course the open, organic model has its detractors yet some of the possibilities offered by electronic discourse remain unnerving for authors as well as the gatekeepers. Wiki-style versioning could mean that some research projects enter the public domain before formal assessment. This and the notion of visible, traceable change are perhaps the most radical, but even the idea of collaborative scholarship will strike some (especially in the humanities) as relatively outlandish.

It’s clear that academia is making tentative steps towards a new publishing and review model; it certainly won’t be gatekeeper-free, but a whole set of new controls are likely to be experimented with before a settled solution emerges. And many of the same pressures are likely to be felt in similarly-structured professions in the near future.

There’s an interesting new blog hosting a public reserach project called The End of Cyberspace which champions the idea that going online will increasingly feel less and less like travel to a separate virtual world - especially now that always-on devices are beginning to proliferate and many people use the Net as their primary tool for managing their social relationships:

“Our experience of interacting with digital information is changing. We’re moving to a world in which we (or objects acting on our behalf) are online all the time, everywhere. Designers and computer scientists are also trying hard to create a new generation of devices and interfaces that don’t monopolize our attention, but ride on the edges of our awareness. We’ll no longer have to choose between cyberspace and the world; we’ll constantly access the first while being fully part of the second. Because of this, the idea of cyberspace as separate from the real world will collapse. “

Further to my post yesterday, John Esposito has joined the debate about Amazon Connect. He too picks up on the lack of two-way communication but adds that he is interested by “the idea of blogging while writing a book as a way of generating and improving ideas,” which he thinks “is far more applicable to non-fiction where a good author will constantly be on the lookout for injecting new thought into a project.”

In my post from 24/11/05 I asked readers to “imagine a restaurant or film critic’s blog that blended their own with comments from both customers and fellow critics”. I had an interesting comment from Neil Mclean of the Travel PR blog who is considering just such a collaborative review blog: “I wrote restaurant reviews for The Sunday Times in Scotland for about 16 years. All very much one way traffic as per usual. If I can find a sponsor I’ll set up a public review site/mash up with Google maps, Flickr tags etc.”

Amazon Connect is a new facility open to “a select group of authors”. Given that it allows authors to post messages on their book and profile pages it has been touted as a blog, but as it lacks both comments and an RSS feed it is as yet but a toe in the water from the e-retail giant.

“Blogs are a long tail” Chris Anderson recently observed, in a post otherwise dedicated to explaining why so many people are uncomfortable with systems that depend on the “alien logic” of probabilistic statistics such as Google and Wikipedia. What he means is that you are far less likely to find a single blog that provides a comprehensive and authoritative viewpoint on any given matter than you would be in the traditional media. On the long tail pre-filtering is limited, and both quality and influence highly variable.

But there’s something even more alien about blogs to our everyday ways of analysis than Google. Search engines are still engineered around a reductionist view of the Web – reducing its millions of websites and individual pages to measurable units with defined values. Then sheer scale and processing power create the illusion of a holistic representation of the content available online.

Recent advances in online media monitoring and analysis have followed the Google lead, applying complex, speedy algorithms to search criteria and statistical models to their output – but the approach is still essentially reductionist in nature. It’s not surprising that digital media monitoring specialists like Cymfony still appear more comfortable talking about blog monitoring than about blog analysis. This is because the blogosphere is inherently more holistic and the statistical/reductionist methodology - only just getting some traction within the community of communications professionals - is consequently less effective at extracting insights here. (It’s possibly also why there’s still no fully satisfactory blog search engine out there. The blogosphere is the webbiest part of the Web. )

So perhaps many of the same communications analysts that have struggled to educate their colleagues about the rigorous ’scientific’ outlook needed to understand the media in their new digital garb will themselves have to learn how to think more organically if they are to successfully define the value of blogging and other social media on the Net.

Jeff Nolan asks whether business decision makers read blogs, on behalf of his CMO.

In the comments, I argue that it doesn’t matter:

You’re right Jeff, this is an important question that deserves answering. I’d argue it’s the wrong question though, and it doesn’t actually matter whether business decision makers read blogs (I don’t think “reading” a blog is a good qualifier, anyway – a lot of people wouldn’t know whether they’re looking at a blog or not – it’s just a web page they clicked on when they searched “SAP” on Google).

I think CMOs should actually be asking themselves “is an opinion expressed about my company/brand/product/service online worth knowing about?” If not, then fine, walk away. If it is, then forget about who else is reading it. Just make sure you are!

Does your CMO care about opinions expressed online about your company, and if so is he/she reading them?

With new media eating into print circulation, The Daily Telegraph is striking back for traditional media by offering a daily podcast service. This takes the form of a free audio broadcast of highlights from the day’s paper, no doubt as a teaser for its recipients to buy the full edition and/or visit the website. It includes a step-by-step guide for those new to podcasting, plus a helpful set of FAQs.

The Telegraph podcast itself take the forms of a traditional radio news bulletin, with more in-depth reports from the likes of their City editor. It is a surprsingly long with around 30 minutes of content, so may provide an ideal introduction to the day for us poor commuters. It’s certainly easier than trying to read the actual broadsheet on the tube in half a square metre of space. Some contributors are better suited to the spoken word than others, but it is still informative and well produced.

With podcasting still in its early stages, this is unlikely to transform the paper’s circulation overnight. However, as the first national newspaper to offer this service, it has stolen a march on its competitors who are likely to be considering offering a similar service. Certainly they will be hoping that regular subscribers will be more likely to chose the Telegraph to get the full take on the stories of interest.

While the ‘traditional’ Telegraph demographic may not quite be ready for podcasting, there are still considerable sections of its readership among the iPod generation and this kind of innovation may help to change attitudes and open up new areas of readership.

I wrote a few months ago about Google’s experimentation with predictive search. Today on a (work-related!) search for football forums, I noticed an interesting development in predictive search – predictive search history.

I had previously done a search for ‘football forums’ and after finding a couple of relevant sites, I decided to widen my search to ‘ sports forums’. While the previous version of predictive search would add related terms, e.g. suggesting ‘gin & tonic’ during a search for ‘gin’, this search went a stage further by suggesting ‘football forums’ (see screenshot below).

Given the tremendous number of sports available, suggesting ‘football forums’ is too detailed a suggestion without some degree of personalisation. It seems highly likely that Google had taken into consideration my previous searches and suggested a niche query based on my searching history.

I would even suggest that as a Google Desktop user, it may even have taken into consideration my football obsession and offered suggestions based on my interests. Now that would be an interesting development.

I’d be interested to hear your explanations.

My own informal research suggests that many of the blogs run by communicators represent an attempt to establish a dialogue between haves and have-nots (or in some notable cases a monologue!): The blogger occupies an information niche, and his or her visitor is assumed to need expert guidance through it. The end result is rather like a consultant’s shop window, complete with chatty shop-owner standing in the doorway. This kind of channel can of course be very useful for the information have-nots, but many of the haves are peddling much of the same stuff as every other consultant in the blogosphere. It will be interesting to see how many of these individually-branded platforms mature into spaces where original thoughts can be shared between the haves. Those that don’t may end up losing their constituency – as information shoppers become more skilled they may desert their local ‘corner-blogs’ for the better located super-blogs which have faster and more direct access to new content and ideas.

In a post from Nov 15, I recounted the tale of how a well-known broadsheet critic has acquired his own personal online detractor. B.L. Ochman also picked up on this story a couple of days ago, suggesting that blogs have the potential to provide checks and balances for big-name critics of all kinds. Of course, such pairings of mainstream commentators with mirror-image bloggelgangers are going to be less common in the future than old media writers that become more blog-like in tone and platform. Consequently the ‘official’ view and the opinion of consumers will no longer tend to be located at different hubs on the Web. Imagine a restaurant or film critic’s blog that blended their own with comments from both customers and fellow critics.

John Husband’s Wirearchy reflected wisely a couple of days ago on the social phenomenon of blogging and on the pyschology of blog scepticism:

Many people won’t blog, or don’t perceive a need to blog, or don’t really have the skills, discipline, inclination or (dare I say it) the courage to wrestle with their thoughts, ambiguous issues and beliefs and don’t want to express and expose the possibilities.

A good number of business bloggers insist on writing as if they were communicating at audiences, delivering a set-piece speech rather than fostering or contributing to a debate. You might think that the blogosphere has room enough for all kinds of alternative modes of discourse, but there are certain basic characteristics of the medium itself, its very personal nature, the regular nature of postings and the piranha-pool of professional and amateur critics out there, that might make the broadcast approach to blogging a potentially hazardous pastime in the long run.

What to do when the feedback goes beyond a good set of constructive comments plus the odd flame or two? Frank Bruni, the New York Times chief restaurant critic has acquired “a literary doppleganger he can’t shed” according to the AP’s Adam Goldman. Rapidly rising to a parallel fame almost as great as the weekly target of her mockery is blogger Julia Langbein, forerunner perhaps of a new breed of critic’s critic. Even more so than traditional journalism, blogging is as much about listening as it is about speaking. Forget that and you might be running the risk of acquiring your very own online nemesis.

Right now the BBC may be neglecting to use RSS enclosures for delivering audio and video content, but down in the digital culvert that is the BBC Radio and Music Interactive R&D team they are experimenting with annotatable audio – a system that allows the “collective creation of useful metadata and wikipedia-like content around radio programmes or speeches or podcasts or pieces of music.” Read more about this and see some screenshots of the demo here. This surely points the way to an era when all media is glossed in some way, either by ‘individuals’ (blog-style) or by collectives (wiki-style).

The old joke goes, how many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to want to change.

I’m left with a similar feeling after viewing Gap’s new viral, Watch Me Change, although the general reaction in this corner of the office is Make Me Stop.

You can’t fault the execution. It is slickly produced with some excellent work in Shockwave, including some impressive dance moves if you can make it to the end. The concept is that you recreate you own likeness by creating a virtual you, even down to your age, eye width and muscular definition. You then dress yourself and you are ready to go.

You then have the bizarre experience of watching the new virtual you perform a strip-tease to music, although fortunately you keep your underpants on to spare yourself total embarrassment. Then the advertiser is revealed as the Gap telling you that ‘Change. It feels good.’

Perhaps it was thought that the appeal to the more voyeuristic elements of the internet would make the viral more, er, viral. Certainly the concept of inviting you to select a new look for yourself from the Gap catalogue is fine, it’s just what you do with yourself that bothers me. It suggests the design agency wanting to strut their virtual stuff with their impressive dance moves. I know dance is a common theme in Gap’s stylish advertising and that this is about shaking off the old you, but I’d rather watch Madonna strut her funky stuff anyday.

This year has seen an ever increasing usage of Windows SharePoint Services as one of the knowledge management solutions we develop for our clients. On the surface, this allows the developer to create tools such as extranets with surprising levels of flexibility. For someone brought up on the art of HTML coding, the ability to create navigation items and sub-directories on the fly through a simple Content Management System is particularly liberating.

I say ‘on the surface’ because that is where the fun really starts. For example, to customise the look and feel there are a series of preset colour themes to chose from to almost instantly transform the extranet stylesheet. However, if the colours and fonts on offer do not match the client’s branding requirements, then you have the option of entering the complicated world of editing SharePoint stylesheets in FrontPage.

FrontPage offers its own complicated interface for customising the stylesheet properties of the chosen theme. For more traditional coders, there is the option of finding the correct stylesheet (out of many!) and editing the property manually. However, if you go back and use the FrontPage theme to make a change then it will overwrite any manual changes that you have made, much to your frustration. Thanks to some quirks of the product there are usually one or two changes that need to be made manually and thanks to the inevitable quirks of development work, there are always one or two final tweaks that need to be made in FrontPage, thus overwriting the work you have done.

Don’t get me wrong, SharePoint remains a valuable tool and contains many notable improvements over the previous SharePoint Team Services. No doubt the next version will address some of its little quirks that can turn an afternoon’s customisation into a very late night.