a comment on comments

I've been thinking about commenting on comments for a while now. But a visit to the Guardian's open weekend and a drop in to a session with their Comment is Free team has pushed me into action. Well, digital thinking and typing action. It seems to me that the technology and funtionality behind commenting on the internet hasn't moved on very much since it was invented over a decade ago. Which seems strange as every thing else has, including how we interface with hardware (from mouse and keyboard to jesture and touchscreen), how we organise ourselves and our communications, and pretty much the majority of services we consume and acquire.

 

Commenting has largely kept with one excerpt of text under and another though. Much like this..

 

So where could commenting go? Well the team at the Guardian are doing some interesting things I didn't know about until yesterday. For example opening a dialouge for their audience to tell them what kind of content they want to see. And then actually going and commisioning selected requests, you tell us / you told us. I really like this, it's simple but very effective.

 

They're also allowing for different levels of engagement in commenting. Not everyone has the inclination to leave a full verbatumn. Some might want to simply add their opinion to a yes or no poll. And this might act has the first step up a ladder into a fully engaged commenter.

 

 

So how much further can commenting go? I personally think there'd be room to explore more intuative instant message based interfaces like MSN/ BBM or Apple message. These obviously work and read well in the back and forth, tennis like, conversations between two individuals but might not work so well in a group situation. But what could a new aesthic for commenting look like? Particularly given that many see the future of communications as being "more real time, more conversational and more casual".

 

Another point of reference for me would be stuff Adam Buxton gets up to with comments in Bug. The way that Adam deals with comments is to make them into stories of their own, that are interconnected with their fellow comments and live in an ecosystem of commenting communities. Plus he makes commenting very funny.

 

 

It's these stories within comments that interest me the most I think. And one great example of those stories being brought to life is the new Guardian print ads. Where the splits in the communities of commenters tell a story in itself. The below being a very real reflection of the current state of the music industry for example.

 

I find these kinds of stories missing from the real world experience of commenting though. Unless you read every single comment, and have got a good head for insights, you're unlikely to ever see these stories.

 

So I thought about a way that they could be surfaced. And came up with the below simple interface where each comment thread could begin to group it's contributors based on pre-defined segments. Then it would be pretty easy to visualise these stories as nice looking insights at the start of every comment section.

 

 

I'd like it if I came across something like this I think. It would make the edges of my mouth raise.

 

 

In another session I was in on the open weekend Clay Shirky said that "people are now consuming stories through word and pictures much more than words alone". I agree with Clay.

 

ideas for London

I've had some ideas for London. Alain and the Evening Standard are asking for ideas at the minute, so I'm going to enter them in return for the chance to win a night in a boat on the roof of the South Bank. Here's my ideas, as wonderfully illustrated by Maggie at Scriberia.

 

idea 1: The Good Old Days

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An idea to get young people and old people talking to each other. That would manifest itself in a series of ongoing events (The Good Old Days). Such as vintage film screenings where the participants, both old and young, would have a chat with each other after the event. Think speed dating for random strangers both old and young.

 

idea 2: Finding the oyster in oyster

Almost £30 million is left unused on Oyster cards every year. £30 million that could be put to very good use if only it could be released back into the world again. Why not create an affiliate charity Oyster card targeted at tourists and short terms visitors, where the remaining unspent balances are donated to chosen charities (with the purchasees permission) after 12 months of none use.

 

idea 3: #occupy culture

An idea to create a yearly London based '#occupy culture weekend' where a broad cross section of Londoners, who don't normally attend cultural events, are encouraged to apply for FREE tickets to a wide range of events. Participants are simply encouraged to consume less stuff and more ideas for a weekend.

 

idea 4: The really real London tour

Let's create a new kind of guided tour for London which takes participants through a selection of the realities of England's capital.

 

idea 5: Conversation Olympics

During the Olympic fortnight create a series of 'conversation with strangers' evening picnics across London's Royal Parks. Taking the unique opportunity of a time when the international community of London guests is at its richest. And doing stuff outside of the Olympic venues to constructively fill people's time while they're waiting for public transport to calm down a bit.

 

idea 6: Save the Hello

People don't say hello as much as they used. Let's try and 'save the hello' from a long, slow departure from our lives. Here's just a few ideas of ways that we could collectively save it.

 

 

china and circles

China likes circles, it invented yin and yang after all. So I've got a new theory on China and circles.

 

 

While I was in Xiamen I visited these UFO type buildings (Tulou's) which litter a particular valley in the area. They started to appear in the 12th century, and still continue to be build up until this day, as a solution in self protected communities when the area became increasingly lawless. Internally they were pretty much self contained affairs with their own private and shared spaces and dedicated wells for water etc. So the circle in this case provides an internal secure world from the outside world where the vast majority of the variables for living can be closely contained (much like the country as a whole at present).

 

 

I also spent a fair bit of time at Chinese dinner tables. Circular tables which support a spinning centre wheel where dishes are placed and then shared with each dinner by communally spinning the content of your meal. Fundamentally different to western dinning where we order our own plate of food and eat only that, and sit a mainly rectanguar or square tables.

These circles lead themselves to a much more social and communal dinning experience. Everyone at the table is within eye contact and a conversational distance. It also leads to far more scruttiny being placed on everything within the circle, if a single dish isn't desireable for example it will quickly be recognised, discussed and outed. This scruttiny also lends itself to the inhabitants of the table leading to high social status dynamics. The consumption of fine wines for example have been in 25% growth in China recently, but reportedly in many cases purely for social status reasons with drinkers mixing £1k bottles or putting ice cubes in the most exclusive of fine wines. This trend recently came up against the growing Chinese challenge of fakery, bootleged, bogus and consumed bottles being refilled with far cheaper wine and resold. And the effects of bogus wines has directly caused a loss in confidence in investors, leading to a drop in trading prices by up to 45%. This article makes a fascinating case study into an example of the current challenges of the internal Chinese consumption market.

 

So there's are both opportunities and challenges in becoming part of an internal circle, and the scruttiny that will be placed on you once you're within it. Again much like the Chinese market and country as a whole.That's my circle theory.

 

 

 

conversation and now

I've written about conversations before, a few times. And I've written about the now before. Today I've been thinking about both, especially in relation to real time online chat. 

 

I've always wondered why Blackberry is still around in such a competitive mobile handset market place? My own experience of them has been that I came across a lot of business people using them a few years ago as 'they're good for reading and sending emails'. Which made sense as asethically they looked very 'business'. But then they seemed to get into the hands of teenagers, culminating in BlackBerry Messenger being pointed to as a fascilitation to the London Riots of last summer. As far as I can make out the reason why so many teenagers own a what is made to be a business tool must have been that all the phone contract shops pushed Blackberry's hard to a teenage audience. And I imagine there must have been some kind of commision or incentive for them to do this. Then the take up of Blackberry's must have reached a tipping point, fasciliated by BBM and the fact if you didn't have a Blackberry, you didn't have BBM and if you didn't have BBM you weren't going to be able to talk to your peers. The short point being that the way I see it the majority of Blackberry's value is tied into the service provision of BBM rather than the actual handset or brand (we saw the problems caused when BBM crashed a while ago supporting this argument). And that if they were smart they'd build and protect the BBM service is all sorts of clever ways rather than worrying about the handsets so much. It looks like Apple have got their eye on this and are already making plays not to be left behind. And Facebook haven't been slow to spot the same trend in real time, conversational, casual messaging.

 

 

Another example I'd give in the rise in importance of real time conversation is the new US dating site Nerve Dating. Taking the traditional, and dominant model, of the creation online dating profiles and matches based on profile criteria, and moving to a purely real time conversation based dating service. Users simply create a basic profile and answer the question of what they did last night and from here start to have immediate conversations with other users, forming opinions of who they're interested in and not interested in from these conversations. These are just examples, the potential for more of the current services we depend on being influenced by real time conversation is pretty much limitless.

 

The over arching thought being that the product is the service. And the service is simply the facilitation of real time conversation.

 

on balance

 

I went to see a block of arctic ice melting on the steps of St Pauls Cathedral on the weekend. It looked like this.

 

 

And I got chatting to the people who put it there who tried to explain some science to me. It went a bit like this, when things of different temperature are put into the same environment with each other they'll have a fight with each other in trying to achieve an exact balance between each temperature. So for example if you put the left overs of your roast chicken in the fridge before it has time to cool this will raise the internal temperature of the fridge until it balances that of the chicken, and then the fridge will then fight the chicken back down to it's normal temperature again. This is why we feel so cold when we go outside in the winter, our bodies are fighting to make the outside temperature the same as ours and the outside is fighting to make our temperature the same as it's own. That's a battle we're never going to win so we get cold. There's a name for this but I've forgotten it.

 

Anyway it made me think about other kinds of friction between elements that are fighting each other, and how they'll only settle once a balance/comprimise is achieved. It could be true of politics (government policies meeting peoples ideals), business (services matching expectations), economics, nature, relationships, the lot. And that the fight is pretty much a consistent as change is a consistent. So we want balance, but will never get it.

 

Or if we do it might be based on the complete removal of something else. 

this is not an advert for Facebook

Even though it's the title of the post and it's mentioned 8 times in the text.

 

 

Type 'Facebook advert' into Google Images or Google Video and you don't get any ads for Facebook, they've never had to make any as far as I know. But that's not to say that Facebook has never appeared in media spaces that hold advertising, they probably appear more often than those who are paying to be there.

 

I was listening the BBC World Service this morning and the word 'Facebook' was mentioned atleast 5 times in 30 minutes. It's such a normal part of everyday conversation now that we don't even notice it's mention. But should we? Facebook is a commerical organisation geared for profit like any other, when they get mentioned they get awareness, and increased user engagement which can then be sold back to advertisers for a reason to be there in the first place. Like a snake eating it's own head advertisers are helping to create a media channel monopoly by plastering 'like us on Facebook' everywhere and then having to pay out the other end for what they've created to get their ads into Facebook.

 

This free advertising ride has come to an end on French Teleivision atleast. Broadcasting regulators have issued a stern warning that name dropping both Facebook or Twitter and encouraging users to 'check us out on --- and ---" is to stop unless the companies pay for that promotion of their brand. 

 

Will be interesting to see if any others follow.

 

advertiser centric product development

This is a continuation thought on this previous thought.

American Football is a shining example of an advertiser centric product development. The DNA of it's game model is structured to cater for advertiser in a way that something like chess never will be. Multiple breaks, sponsorship opportunities and of course the holy grail of ad space; super bowl ads.

 

I've been thinking about 'advertiser centric product development' in contrast to the much more favoured 'user centric product development'. Particularly in relation to smart phones, and as a tactic to dislodge Apple from their lead in smart phone sales (won largely as the pioneers of user centric product development, and now probably beyond catch up).

 

Competitor smart phone manufacturers (anyone other than Apple) seem in complete disarray in trying to win their bit of market share at the minute. Probably rightly so as it's pretty much a rapid land grab for long term technology and platform relationships at the minute. One opportunity that seems a no-brainer, yet still not applied, would be for a handset producer to simply insert an RFID card into their handsets that allowed the owners to 'one touch' in their Facebook likes. Pretty much making that Coca Cola Village stuff universal. Then doing a deal with brands/advertisers to integrate the other side of the technology into the real world, and as there's something in it for them (real world like harvesting) they'd probably fund the process.

 

 

Because I still think QR codes are rubbish and will end up in the land fill of digital hype with Second Life, Friends Reunited and Myspace pretty soon.

 

like harvesting

 

Likes are the tangilbe return on engagement, marketeers like tangibles. The obtainment of them is becoming a currency in it's own right, often with a cost per acquisition/like. Likes are often confused with advocacy, but they're not. Marketeers like likes. Brands are keen to harvest likes with an appetitie like never before, with distinct opportunities to define 'harvest seasons' when cost per acquisitions look the lowest and like crops are at their most abundant.

 

We're going to need a bigger combine harvester.

 

Badly photoshopped by myself.

regression

 

 

Coffee shops

In the 17th and 18th century coffee shops were widely seen to house an intellectual and cultural age of enlightenment. Now we just use them to connect to the network through various devices in isolation from those around us.

Carbon

In order to keep global warming below a critical 2 degrees we'll need to reduce to carbon emissions to pre 1960's levels.

 

Perhaps we're going to start needing to go backwards inorder to go forwards.

 

clunk click everytrip

Not this, this..

A while ago I went to the Saatchi gallery and found they were being so kind as to give out free marketing to visitors. And it was attracting a bit of interest.

 

 

Well I went back on the weekend to find that they're still giving out free marketing, but they're keeping up with the times and collecting Facebook likes now to.

 

 

 

Very forward thinking for an entry point, the only problem is that it gets a bit clunky at the exit point, where they have to actively remind people to log out to avoid a very interesting engagement for the next visitor.

 

Which led me to think that there would probably be a lot of money waiting for the people who can create a very clean mechanic to procure Facebook likes in the real world. Like one touch payment stuff but for likes (which is pretty much a currency in it's own right now). To do this at scale you'd need infrastructure innovation, like when Oyster cards came along. A big opportunity for the smart phone market potentially given the size of Facebooks audience and that revenue is coming soley from brands looking to engage with that audience. If they'd only start to think about something other than copying the iPhone and trying to own music.

Then all those high street shops that are sticking big old Facebook and Twitter icons in the window could stick a little box behind them and get collecting some permissions.

 

 

(I know you can do this via QR code things at the minute, but they're pretty rubbish in my opinion).