Ben Sauer’s Blog

Last night was a lot of fun, thanks to everyone for coming to an indoor event when there was such lovely weather and a beach so close by!

I am much happier with the results this time: the time I spent revising the concepts really paid off. I managed to explain the key points in less time, and with much more emphasis on personal benefit to the audience. Ellen’s advice on how to run the exercises was a big help: everyone understood what to do (although Google Reader was down for some of the time, great timing Google!).

Gavin has mentioned that there were still a few assumptions I made during the talk; I’m going to work on eliminating those.

Attendees

Those who came along should note that I’ve created a workshop page with some links to the things that came up, e.g. blogs like Ill Doctrine. If you need them, the workshop slides are also available (9mb PDF).

Happy feedreading, bookmarking, blogging etc!

Hello all you feedreaders (from the last workshop?) + site visitors,

I’m repeating my workshop on Thursday May 8th at The Werks in Hove.  Hopefully it will be much improved based on what I learned last time! Its been quite an interesting time since I did it: a few different parties/organisations have expressed an interest in me doing it for their organisation.

I’m being much more careful about the numbers this time, so please mark yourself as attending on upcoming if you want to come.

See you there!

Big thanks to everyone who came along last night: the weather was really dreadful (extra cake for you lot next time)! For those who attended: a PDF of my slides (9 mb), and the page of exercise links.
I think the event went pretty well: the feedback was positive from geeks and non-geeks alike.

My favourite moment was the stony faces when I put a blackly comic/gruesome bbc news article on screen. I had so misjudged how people would react (horror rather than laughter….) I felt compelled to laugh at myself for putting it in! Definitely a “Doh!” moment. Workshop attendees take note: I found this article by searching for “funny bbc” at delicious.

I’ve learned a lot too. Part of my reason for running the event was to learn more about how to convey ideas to people. Here’s some points:

• I didn’t know it beforehand, but people at the event were at very different levels of understanding. For example, I jumped straight in assuming that people understood already what a blog was. I perhaps need to work on some clear definitions earlier in the workshop.
• The whole thing was a bit longer than I planned! I don’t think people were bored, but I want to get the ideas across quicker next time, or perhaps cover less (but more effectively).
• I didn’t mention the benefits of some habits early+clearly enough, so we went straight to trying things before people had really understood why they would use something. I plan on trying to make the exercises more relevant to the individuals next time.
• The way I had planned the exercises was a bit unmanageable: I put the main instructions on the projector screen and got people to use a page of links at the same time. I really thought this would be a good way for people to run through exercises on the web while keeping the instructions visible elsewhere. It didn’t work that well, so I’m going to rethink this.
• I’m sort of glad that not everyone who signed up attended: many more than 11 and the time available for Q+A or discussion might have been a problem.
• I didn’t really have time to go through some of the more specific geek habits (e.g. GTD stuff). I think there’s room there for a series, its too much for one workshop.

Most interesting thing I learned about myself: at one point, Josh asked me what Feedburner was used for (it wasn’t part of the workshop). I rattled off a quick answer something like this - “it sits in between your site and the people using your feeds and tells you how many people are using it”. He said afterwards that he’d spent ages on their site trying to figure out what it was for (Gillian said the same thing), but that my description cleared it up instantly.

What’s funny is that I made up an on-the-spot quick description that works better than anything on their site, when I’ve just spent literally days working on materials/metaphors to explain concepts like feeds (with only mixed success)!

This leads me to question the usefulness of my slides, perhaps I need less of them: instead produce a very short conceptual description that does the job (which is supported by a slide).

I’m fairly confident I’m going to run more of these (watch this space all new feed subscribers!). James has suggested that perhaps I run some sort of monthly advice workshop, and this ties in with Gillian’s suggestion that we do a Q+A before the talk bit so that I can gauge understanding and interests first.

Thanks to Gavin for the photo above (and for being our resident geek!), Graeme for being the resident blogger, and James+Ian again for the use of the space.

So its been a while since I’ve blogged: I’ve had lots to say but not really enough time to do the articles justice. I don’t want to add to the noise that’s already out there: you’ll see from my digg article that it took me a while to process the results and write the article. I studied literary criticism at university, so I find it hard to rattle something off quickly. Perhaps I wasn’t meant to be a blogger: we’ll see how my time pans out.

However, I’m not resting on the laurels! For a while now I’ve felt that there are some developments and concepts that need explaining to people outside of the geek bubble some of us seem to live in. Its all very well discussing the next big thing on the web, but there’s been precious little effort promoting or explaining some of the things early adopters (curious geeks) already take advantage of (e.g. feeds/RSS) to everyone else.

I’ve decided to run a workshop for some of the people who I feel would benefit from this stuff on the 13th of March in Hove at The Werks. I know a lot of artists and entrepreneurs would could use a quick introduction. Please check out my upcoming event to register your interest and read a full description.

Its ultimate purpose is twofold:

• to raise their game (in whatever they’re doing)
• to improve my presentation skills

In my consulting work I’m having to present concepts more often, and I feel like this would be good practise: explaining abstract concepts about the web to regular folks!

Big thanks to James and Ian at The Werks for letting me do this.

So an idea that Sophie and I have had bubbling away for quite some time is starting to get moving. We’re joined by Danny Hope of Hobo Internet in our efforts, who persuaded me over lunch that the key idea was good enough to put some serious effort into.

We’ve started a blog to track our progress, get yourself over there for more info. I’ve detailed the inception of our ideas in a post.

The recent riot over at digg got me thinking again about the role of the media in our society.

The articles on digg.com only hit the front page if they’ve been submitted+voted there by the users. Digg presents quite a threatening, democratic model to ‘old’ media. This doesn’t mean there’s no editorial influence, it just means it takes a very different shape.

When the owners of digg buried a recent story for fear of litigation, the users revolted. It was a fantastic display of democracy in action (or not), watching the same story hitting the front page over and over again. I do wonder though, what has been buried in the past without the users noticing!

Users who submit to digg tend to use quite sensationalist headlines to grab attention (and diggs), but I’ve often found that they’re highlighting issues outside of the ‘media circle‘ (important issues that even the left wing press won’t draw attention to, such as corporate influence on the media itself). This was particularly noticeable when Tony Blair criticized the media recently: neither he nor the media even mentioned the underlying problem of media ownership. That, to me, is a far more important question than the ‘tone’ of public discourse, as it sets the agenda.

I digress. Since my impression of digg was that this (hopefully) democratic news channel might provide hidden secrets, I decided to do a quick test to see if it was worth further investigation. I asked a simple question:

Are popular articles of news on digg getting the same attention in the mainstream media?

Answering this question might give us a sense of the hunger that the public have for items that the mainstream won’t touch.

My chosen method for this test was to compare digg to Google News, where its easy to gauge the amount of attention an item of news is getting from ‘old’ media (leaving aside the issue of how Google does this and how reliable it may be!).

My methods were extremely unscientific, but again this was just a brief test to see if its worth taking further. I welcome criticism of and alternatives to these methods.

Here’s what I did:

1. Took a snapshot of the top stories on a section of digg (politics - the a topic that gets plenty of attention at digg and in the mainstream)
2. Recorded the popularity, the date/time of the story, and (rather subjectively) picked a few keywords from the story to search Google News with.
3. Search on Google News, recording the number of media outlets reporting the same item.
4. Chart the relationship between digg popularity and media exposure.

Here’s the chart. The initial results are are striking in their shape.

I’ve approximated some of the numbers here: the count on Google News was too small to chart in many cases, but for anyone interested, here’s the spreadsheet complete with links, stats, and more.

Step 3 is where my methods really fall down. There’s a big gap between the way something is reported on digg and the way its reported everywhere else. Some might say its not even the same item any more.

For example: there were two stories on digg highlighting the same issue: that a small group of US politicians are sponsoring a bill to impeach Dick Cheney. The digg articles highlighted the third and fourth senators to sponsor the bill. Searching for ‘cheney impeachment’ at Google News gave no clear results. Some articles in the media mentioned the bill, but mainly the results were were about efforts to impeach Bush.

Making it harder still was that occasionally Google News gave no grouping to the items (a helpful feature when it recognises that the media are reporting the same item), which could lead to several conclusions:

• there really wasn’t a central ’story’ - quite often the digg articles highlight a single fact/quote from a broader item (there’s that that sensationalism again)
• My keyword choices didn’t accurately connect with the media’s take on events
• Google News didn’t group the items (for whatever reason)
• There’s a potential gap between the time of the digg articles and the media exposure

My count of the Google News items was a bit of a compromise: if the grouping for what was obviously the same item, I took that number. If not, I went through the results counting the number of strongly related articles.

To conclude: this quick and dirty test indicates there might be a real desire for the media to cover a wider range of topics, and place a very different emphasis on some.

Moving forward: I’m going to spend more time on democratic news channels (e.g. ohmynews). I’d really love it if my digg test were a long term experiment (perhaps using the API’s of both sites to automatically record/chart the results), but I’m unsure of how to get over some of the problems with my method. It does seem like every item needs human input to collect/verify results.

I’d welcome ideas about how to get this going: for example, could you send a link to the Google News API to gauge media popularity instead of using clunky keywords?

A moment ago I visited boingboing.net (as I often do) and for the first time ever I noticed the top banner ad, instead of applying a mental blind spot like most users do. I was struck by why this happened, and had an idea….

Before I continue, I truly hope that:

1. this idea I’ve just had won’t catch on
2. that its not already in the wild!

During the page load, my browser paused for a moment after displaying the top banner. For a couple of seconds, no other content was visible. Naturally, my attention was drawn to something I’ve never cared for, by virtue of it being the only thing to look at. Now imagine if pauses like this were technically possible (I’m sure they are, and I’ve seen things that are similar but more obvious): could they become endemic?

I should point out: I am obsessed with reducing the amount of advert intrusion in my daily life. I even mute the TV during ad breaks, every time! I believe strongly that advertising/marketing/PR have had an extremely detrimental effect on our mental well-being. Which in a strange way is why I’m drawn to the web: we can choose what we give our attention to.

So why do I point out this tiny moment of my life? Because every time I notice something like this (even accidental), I start to feel uneasy about the ways in which we’re manipulated that we don’t notice. How many am I missing that pass ideas into my brain without my consent?

I believe firmly that if marketing has any fair place in our culture, it needs to be transparent and non-manipulative. What that looks like, I’m not sure yet. Ideas welcome.

Even before the web was smacked sideways by the new generation of socially oriented websites, the academics were getting interested in how the web might affect us socially. I can’t find it right now (it was years ago), but a really interesting theory I read proposed that far from the internet cutting down on the amount of travel we do, it actually encourages it by making us feel ‘closer’ to people, a somewhat counter-intuitive theory. Yes, people are travelling more, but the ludicrous lack of taxes on airline fuel may have more to do with that. Other theories are more neutral on this issue: that the internet augments our existing social lives, not making us more or less reclusive.

In the past six months, this issue has really hit home for me. Everyone and their mother seems to be on facebook: people who I imagined were extremely sceptical about using such technologies are really getting into it. My feeling (rather than a solid theory!) is that things are really changing very fundamentally.

In the same way that most sceptics have been won over by email and mobile phones slowly through the years (even the most ardent), I feel that our social communication is going to change even more for all but the most frozen of hearts. My limited experience with twitter seems to back this up, although time will tell which technologies will grab the attention of the masses.

We’ll be much more aware of what our friends are up to and be encouraged to make more frequent physical contact as a result. I wonder whether the momentum behind this change would have been possible without SMS. Its has been critical is lowering the barrier for social contact: as its now possible to invite someone non-intrusively to a meetup with a single word (e.g. “Pub?”), a large part of the awkwardness and formality of traditional contact has disappeared.

But I’m getting off topic. If we’re becoming more aware of what our friends are up to, and hence encouraged to make physical contact more often (perhaps regardless of distance), how does our local community fit in?

It strikes me that as our day-to-day awareness expands to people we perhaps wouldn’t normally make frequent contact with, there’s an area of our lives that’s been sadly neglected with the growth of the tv-industrial complex: our local community. I’ve grown up in places largely unaware of my local communities, and I don’t think I’m alone (as a city-dweller). Modern living has made us withdrawn, lest we forget that it wasn’t so long ago that our local community was our largely our only social community.

So I’m now wondering what’s on the cards for local awareness. If we’re being drawn into socially-oriented technology by way of peer pressure, is there a force for making us locally aware? The technology is starting to emerge, certainly. Sites like Topix and Who Is Sick provide fertile ground for this kind of awareness.

But I wonder about those sceptics: perhaps peer pressure won’t come into play, like it does when a social network becomes ‘the’ way for a group of friends to stay in contact. It will take something stronger, like a local issue or crisis to draw people in. The key to it is the ‘low barrier’ though, or perhaps a ‘killer app’ (if bird flu really does take spread, Who Is Sick might find themselves in a blackly comic position). Someone’s involvement/awareness in their local community needs to be easier than it is right now, or perhaps rewarding in unexpected ways (like rediscovering friends on facebook).

I’m starting to gain a little awareness myself in this respect: our local politicians are starting to blog, and not necessarily confining the topic to news. A building caught fire on the seafront a couple of weeks ago, and they blogged about it. As I don’t trust/read the local newspapers here, I suddenly realized how novel it was that I became aware of a local news event through A. my local representative (never listened to them before) and B. my feedreader (Google Reader - not exactly a typical medium for this kind of news).

I hope there’s a real trend here: local communal awareness blurring into a more democratic, people-oriented space, free of the trappings of old media.

Which brings me back to the topic of my blog, as its something I’ve been struggling to define, but I think I have it now. I’m not quite as interested in social networking as the beginning of this article suggests: I’m more interested in how ideas for societal good take hold. The mainstream media seems to be stuck in a pattern it can’t escape, so perhaps the avenue of humane progress is to be found in fresh means of communication.

Ideas like freecycle demonstrate this feeling brilliantly. A group of people fed up with consumer culture and endless piles of unwanted junk decided that there is a better way of doing things, and all they needed was the means to find each other.

That’s the kind of thing I’d like to see more of in this world.

Last week I attended The Future of Web Design in London (more on that later).

One of the more interesting talks was given by Denise at moo.com. Moo make mini-business cards with your own photos printed on one side. Denise’s talk was about how to address a user of a website, and how to create character for your site by thinking carefully about how you address users. Her advice is very valuable, because moo certainly impressed me, and left me with a warm fuzzy feeling.

I hadn’t heard of moo before, but I have been handed business cards created using it, and wondered where they came from. Becoming aware of moo was timely for me: I need a new batch of business cards. The thought of handing someone a business card with this photo on it both amused me and filled me with horror.

I’ve just finished creating a batch of simple business cards using it, and I really had to blog about it, simply because it was one of the most pleasant web experiences ever: short, sweet, easy, cheap, and even though I’ve left the site, I’ve got something personal to look forward to in the post.

Users of flickr can just click the moo link on the home page of flickr to get started. Some plus points:

• its very cheap. £13 gets you 100 cards (with as many photos as you like within that 100)
• I filled in virtually no forms (I paid using paypal, which had my delivery address)
• I uploaded no photos (my entire flickr set was retrievable through moo)

The only vaguely involved task was to choose the photos and define a crop, which was simple and fun. I’m going to order some more fairly soon (creating greeting cards from your photos is another option), just to examine the interface more closely!

The tight integration with third parties (flickr/paypal) was very impressive. I am reminded of my first painful experience of ordering photo prints online: moo was an absolute joy in comparison.

Highly recommended.

A lot of people have been blogging about twitter lately, but not enough has been said about where this kind of service is leading us socially.

I’m not an addict, but I am certainly deeply interested in twitter.com as a social enabler. Twitter is hard to explain (so I won’t bother): you can explain the mechanics quite easily, but people just stare at you blankly, because its hard to grasp the benefits of using it.

If you’re at all interested and want to have a go, you’ll need at least two other people willing to start at the same time as you and become ‘friends’ on twitter.

One principal benefit of using it has been called ‘ambient awareness’ - and that’s my favourite part of it. I can be aware that a group of people I know are socialising casually in a time and place without any of them explicitly inviting me.

This benefit is one of the reasons I love living outside of London, in smaller places. When I was growing up in London, my social life was almost entirely prescribed. You had to arrange to meet people. Moving to a university campus changed all that. I could randomly bump into people I knew every day. Brighton’s good for this.

This has got me thinking lately about what mobile phones are NOT doing for us. They could be telling us when we’re near friends, for impromptu gatherings. They know where we are, they contain a list of people we know…. why not?

Anyway, give twitter a try: its not for everyone, but we’ll see more and more services like this in the near future. The mobile phone networks are behind in this respect, but I’m sure they’ll catch on soon.