The view from the 'Bloggers Booth' at the Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit

As something of a blogging obsessive, the opportunity to spend two days writing about some of my favourite topics at the Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit was too good to pass up. On Thursday morning at the Contact Theatre, Sarah Hartley and I set up a ‘blogging booth’ at the back of Space One in the Theatre. A bit of sweet-talking to the technical staff even gained us a 4-way plug socket to charge our laptops.

Being the seasoned journalist, Sarah opted to cover the Summit in a considered, reflective way – picking out the key stories and serving them up in easy-to-digest packages. I, meanwhile, being a real-time web junkie with the attention span of a fly with ADD, decided to liveblog the sessions.

What is a liveblog?

For the uninitiated, liveblogging is the process of covering an event in bitesize pieces by frequently updating a blog post with new information as the event goes on. Probably the most popular liveblog posts in the world are the ones that the big gadget blogs, Engadget and Gizmodo, do when Apple unveil a new product. The Apple faithful around the world frantically refresh their browsers as a blogger at the launch event keeps them updated with breadcrumbs of information about what usually amounts to a not-terribly-exciting incremental product revision.

I felt a liveblog would be a good idea for Futuresonic as quite a lot people I know couldn’t come to the event, whether that be for financial or other reasons. With some big-name thinkers in the social technology sphere talking there was bound to be a high level of interest, so I decided to provide a running commentary and leave the considered reflection for Sarah’s posts.

Choosing the right tool

My first job was to decide what tool to use for liveblogging. My options were threefold. Firstly, there was Twitter. With a short message format and the ability for people to easily subscribe to your messages it’s no surprise that until recently Twitter was a popular tool for live coverage of conferences.

The problem is that not everyone you follow is going to be interested in the conference and if you’re sending a tweet every minute about something they don’t care about you’re going to be heamorrhaging followers in no time. You could set up a new Twitter account specifically for the job but if people start to comment on your coverage via replies, you end up with a fractured conversation in which only you get to see the full picture. No-one else will get to see all the comments you’re receiving.

My second option was a dedicate liveblogging app. CoverItLive is a good looking, easy to use and feature-packed tool designed specifically for the job of liveblogging. Importing it into your blog is a simple process that takes seconds. You can publish reader comments directly into the liveblog stream (once you approve them) which makes for a much easier to follow conversation. ScibbleLive is another service that offers a similar featureset.

Some people were advising me to try one of these dedicated apps but I had other ideas. I wanted my liveblog to be as social, sharable and as fast as possible. For me there was only one choice – FriendFeed.

Created by a team of former Google staff who had previously worked on projects like Gmail, FriendFeed is the perfect example of where the social web is in mid-2009. Originally developed as place to share your content from across a wide range of web services (blog entries, photos, Twitter messages and much more) it has developed into a real-time multimedia discussion platform with huge potential to replace Twitter as the digerati’s communications service of choice in the near future. You can read why I believe this will happen in a post from a couple of weeks ago here.

Liveblogging in FriendFeed was a cynch. Having set up a dedicated FriendFeed Group for people to discuss the summit, I created a new discussion thread within that Group for each talk that I attended. The title of the thread was sent automatically to Twitter to help draw people into the discussion. I then spent the duration of each talk typing a short paragraph about each point that the speaker made. People following the liveblog saw these appear in realtime without the need to refresh their browser.

Reader participation was easy – anyone with a point to make could add their comment directly into the comment stream. People not at the Summit could add questions which could be answered by me or others in the room. What’s more, because the liveblogs are permanently stored within FriendFeed they’re easily sharable and searchable and people can add to them at any time in the future.

Is it worth running a liveblog?

Being a liveblogger means you sacrifice a certain amount of your own enjoyment of the event you’re covering. I needed to keep my focus entirely on the speaker, channeling their words straight through my fingers and onto the internet. While my readers got an instant commentary on what was being said, I didn’t get a lot of opportunity to actually reflect on the contents of each talk. It was also a tiring experience. My liveblogs towards the end of each day were slower and little thinner on detail than the morning ones. I also worried that I may have over-simplified or misrepresented some of the more complex concepts discussed. I’ve had no complaints about this as of yet, though.

Was it worth it despite the downsides? Absolutely. The FriendFeed Group only attracted 13 subscribers but a few people contributed their own thoughts to the liveblog stream, making it an interactive experience. There were also a good few ‘lurkers’ following along who either talked to me afterwards or thanked me via Twitter. Some of the speakers even used Twitter to link to my liveblog of their talk, which was a nice validation of my efforts.

Will I liveblog again? If the opportunity arises I’ll jump at the chance. In the meantime, if I brush up on my old Media Law classes from university, I’ve probably developed the skills to be a court reporter!

You can read my liveblogs from the Futuresonic Social Technology Summit over at the Summit’s FriendFeed Group.

Mobile Industry Review - a quality product but will people pay?

How much would you pay to read your favourite blog? Chances are it wouldn’t be much. Blogs add value to our lives but few are essential reading. Chances are though, if you really liked a blog you’d pay a small amount – maybe £5 per month? That’s £60 (82 USD) per year.

Now, how about if your favourite blog said that as of two weeks’ time it would be charging £12,000 (16500 USD) per year? Popular UK-based blog Mobile Industry Review stunned its readership today by announcing it was doing just that.

In a global economic downturn the move might sound like madness, but there is some method in there too.  The blog was started in 2006, initially under the name SMS Text News, by entrepreneur and mobile enthusiast Ewan MacLeod. In the past three years it has grown to serve a reported 250,000 unique visitors per month. Mobile Industry Review is certainly no average blog. Beyond news and analysis of the UK mobile industry, high quality HD video reports and some of the most informed and entertaining ranting (in a good way) in the industry all form part of the mix that keeps its visitors coming back.

Running a site like this can’t be easy. Few people have the time, money and resources to run a site like MIR full time off their own back like Ewan has. Several small blogging operations have sold out to bigger corporations over the years; Paid Content was bought by The Guardian Media Group last year for example. In MIR’s case an un-named company has bought the blog and is turning into a private resource aimed squarely at corporate subscribers.

Will corporations pay £12,000? They can get the news elsewhere so the value is in the opinions and videos the site offers. In addition Ewan is promising “Exclusive video research with end-users of mobile technologies — and the ability for client/subscribers to direct research”. Corporations may well see value in this although presumably all research will be available to all subscribers meaning there would be no competitive edge to gain from it.

As a reader of Mobile Industry Review who certainly can’t afford to pay £12,000 per year I’m feeling quite sad that it’s soon to be taken away from me. I’m not alone; the comments underneath the announcement on the site feature a string of people wishing Ewan and his team well but expressing their sadness.

It’s telling that, of the comments posted so far below the announcement, virtually all are from regular commenters won’t be able to access the site soon. Blogs are built around their community of readers. I’ve always felt that while MIR has influence in the UK mobile industry it’s the community of “geeks” who comment and contribute (such as myself) that help make it such a vibrant blog. Will it lose some of that vibrancy over time? I don’t know and chances are neither will you as you probably won’t be reading it.

Then there’s all the small, independent mobile developers who won’t be able to justify the expense. David Carrington launched Dabr, the best Twitter interface for (non-Apple) mobile phones, as a direct result of comments he read on Mobile Industry Review. Public access to a site like this helps the industry grow in ways it won’t when it’s private.

Someone else could launch their own alternative, but Ewan and his team have resources and contacts far beyond the average mobile phone geek. Which is why, I suppose, they’ve been able to sell out. They may well have had to sell out eventually. Running such a busy site is an expensive business and MIR is hardly overflowing with advertising.

This all said, I’d certainly like to wish the site well for the future and fingers crossed they’ve made the right descision.

Alex Kapranos patched things up with an unhappy blogger

Bloggers have something of a reputation for being sad losers who post their opinions into an online echo chamber when they could be outside in the fresh air kicking a football around with the other kids. Yes, many of the blogs out there have more value to the author than they do to any audience they might attract, but bloggers have a secret.

What the critics don’t realise is that bloggers are listened to. When you sit in the pub and complain about poor service by your phone company, the CEO of the company isn’t going to come down and apologise to you and offer to make amends. Your complaint goes nowhere and nothing gets done. However, bloggers know that when they click ‘Publish’ on that 500 word rant complaining about the same problem it’s only a matter of time before someone at the company sees it. Chances are, they might get in touch too.

Remember Peter Askins and his video complaining about BT a couple of years ago? It got him listened to and his problem was dealt with. Similar things happen to bloggers all the time because companies know that bloggers have influence. Even the smallest of blogs can turn up in Google search results so if there’s a problem it’s in the company’s best interests to sort it out.

One of the most interesting recent examples of this in action involved not a brand, but a band. Mindy Gofton is a Manchester-based blogger who writes over at The Indie Credential. On Friday night she went to see Franz Ferdinand at Manchester Academy and was shocked at how poor the sound system appeared to be. She could barely identify any of the songs. On Saturday she posted a review of the gig that was scathing to say the least.

“I can’t tell you if they played a decent show or not because the sound system was so woefully inadequate that all I could hear for most of the gig was drums and a little bass. I honestly may as well have stood in a crowd of people in my front room and listened to their albums through the wall on a blown speaker“.

She also accused the band of ripping off fans “to save a few quid”.

Well, who’d have thought it, just a few hours later Franz Ferdinand’s frontman Alex Kapranos had posted a reply! He apologied for Mindy’s disappointment and gave a well reasoned argument for the band’s choice of sound system. He even returned the next day to further clarify a few points. Mindy wrote up a full account of what happened over at the I-Com blog.

Seriously, this is why blogging is not a ’sad’ activity to be mocked. It’s a ‘direct line’ to the people who matter, the people in power. It’s a cliché to say that the internet is “The Great Leveler” but it’s true. Unless you have the right connections you could never expect to have a direct conversation with the lead singer of an internationally successful rock band about the sound quality at their gig. The internet makes that possible.

It’s not just blogs that have influence online. Brands (and even some bands, as we’ve seen!) are listening to the wider ‘conversation’ going on through everything from Twitter to Facebook. Techcrunch today asks Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere? Blogs are still important but they’re part of a wider patchwork of services and outlets for information and conversation.

It’s a brave new world of ground-level empowerment and it’s exciting. You can’t expect everything you post to get a response “from the top” but when it happens it can have a powerful effect. So, what are you waiting for? Dive in and get your voice heard!

[Image credit: Gussifer on Flickr]

Another celebrity who has benefited from blogging is Stephen Fry. His ‘Blessays‘ (as he calls his blogged essays), along with their associated podcasts (’Podgrams‘) and his recently established Twitter presence have helped rescue him from becoming just another aging actor hosting panel shows and BBC travelogues. Becoming a middle-aged posterboy for Social Media has helped re-establish him as someone on the cutting edge, something he’s lost over the years since his comedy heyday in the 80s.

Celebrity’s blogs can help their fans feel closer to them. That closer bond makes them more likely to spend money supporting them in the future. Part of that closer bond is down to the blog being a personal account of what’s on the star’s mind, unfiltered by the usual sanitised PR spin.

That doesn’t mean that every celebrity should necessarily publish their thoughts online without getting them checked over first. Just see the example of Kanye West. The Inquisitr has flagged up just why he should at least get his posts proofread before publishing. Written entirely with Capslock on, Kanye’s latest post complains about his treatment by the paparazzi.

“HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED…WHEN I LEFT THE CLUB, I WAS ENCOUNTERED BY A THIRSTY PAPARAZZI AS USUAL. HE FELT HE HAD MORE RIGHTS TO MY SPACE THAN ME, SO I PUT MY HAND UP TO PREVENT HIM FROM TAKING MY IMAGE. I DIDN’T ASSAULT HIM BUT MERELY PUTTING MY HAND UP TO COVER HIS LENS. MY SECURITY YELLED, “GET THE CAMERA OFF HIM.” I GUESS IN ALL THE COMMOTION THE CAMERA SCRAPED HIS NOSE.”

While there’s nothing wrong with the anti-pap sentiment he’s expressing, the way he does it makes him seem a lot less intelligent than I ever imagined him to be. For a start the capslock makes him seem like a shouty teenager. Although he’s writing in sentences, the caps make them hard to pick out making the post as a whole harder to read.

Whether you agree with Kanye’s point about press invasion in his life of not (after all he’s happy to use the press when he needs them) you can’t deny that looking like a semi-illiterate teenager is not the best way to express it. I always thought of Kanye as a peg or two above the Snoop Doggs and 50 Cents of this world. His lyrics have always seemed a bit smarter.

Maybe I was wrong about him or maybe he was just incredibly angry when he hammered out that post. Either way, he really should get someone to read over his posts in future before he hits ‘Publish’. I don’t think I’m being snobby here, it’s just that one of the basics of internet communication is Lay Off The Caps!

[Image Credit: Darkroom Demons on Flickr]

Kate Feld interviews Chris Killen at the Manchester Blog Awards

The Manchester Blog Awards took place this week and it led me to have to lift a veil of anonymity I’ve enjoyed for a year.

Of course, if any city in the UK was going to have an awards ceremony for blogs it would be Manchester.  As the pioneering city that gave birth to the modern computer and many groundbreaking bands, it’s never been a city to shy away from embracing the new.  Now in its third year, the awards are run as part of Manchester Literature Festival.

With an obvious interest in the local social media scene, I was keen to be there.  There was also the small matter of my two blogs being shortlisted for prizes.  This blog was on the Best New Blog list, while Manchester Buses was up for the Best Neighbourhood Blog prize.  I don’t mention Manchester Buses to many people.  Let’s face it, when compared to to the technology and the internet that I write about here it sounds incredibly sad.  I enjoy writing it and it’s certainly found its niche with lots of regular readers.  I decided that if I did win I’d just have to forget the anonymity and go public.

The night began with readings from all the nominees for the Best Writing prize and a DJ set from local music bloggers.  Then it was on to the prizes.  14sandwiches didn’t win (Best New Blog went to Follow The Yellowbrick Road) but Manchester Buses did win its category!  Having won I found myself having to come out as a bus blogger.  While most people were surprisingly accepting of my odd hobby, my sister did have a look of amused shame on her face when I told her.

On a side note, I decided to use my new Nokia N82 to capture the event. So how did it fare?  Arriving with a full battery at 7pm, I probably took about ten photos and streamed live video via Qik for about 25 minutes. Within two hours the battery was completely flat.  The moral of this story?  Get a spare Nokia battery!

You can find the full winners’ list from the awards over at The Manchizzle.

The shortlist for this year’s awards have been announced and 14sandwiches has been nominated in the Best New Blog Category.  I’m up against some great blogs in the category.  Dear Kitty is a plain-speaking agony aunt (there should be more of those in this world), Coco LaVerne is a self-styled “fledgling glamour puss” putting the world to rights while Follow The Yellow Brick Road is Katherine Woodfine’s personal blog with an eye on the visual arts.  Interestingly, of the four mine is the only one not hosted by Blogspot.  Google’s Blogger service obviously has a long life in it yet even with strong competition from self-hosted Wordpress and the many other blogging solutions around today.

The winners will be announced on Wednesday 22nd October at an event at Matt & Phred’s Jazz Club in Manchester city centre.

The Manchester Evening News has been the main source of local news in the Greater Manchester for 140 years.  During our tour we heard how homing pigeons used to be charged with the task of carrying the latest score from local football games back to the paper’s offices, while on election night a man would hang off the side of the building updating the latest poll results on a results board for passers-by to see.

Obviously, things move on and with jobcuts and falling circulations across the newspaper industry how is the M.E.N. adapting to these changes?  Probably the smartest move has been to bring Channel M (the local TV channel, also owned by Guardian Media Group) into the same open-plan office as the print and online newsdesks.  This allows the Editors to choose the most effective medium for any particular story.  While a group of Firemen aping around on Youtube might not look that great in print, it’s a fantastic story for TV and online.

Sharing resources also gives print, TV and online the opportunity to time the publication of stories in a way that benefits all three.  If they have a big exclusive, online and TV may wait until the story gets published in the newspaper. This means rival papers can’t poach the story and kill the M.E.N’s morning exclusive.

There are big plans to improve their new media offering in the future.  There’ll be a dedicated Twitter feed for news updates from the Labour Party conference this weekend, bloggers are to be worked with more closely  and there’s talk of using live streaming video from the Nokia N95s that some reporters are now armed with for suitable stories.  Let’s just hope they don’t follow the lead the Rocky Mountain News and go that little bit too far!

The future of journalism is far from certain.  As the difference between a journalist and blogger increasingly seems to be little more than whether you carry an NUJ card or not, many are disillusioned about the future. Express Newspapers are doing away with as many subeditors as they can and letting journalists input copy directly onto the page, blog style. If written news media just becomes a mass of opinion-led blogs where will the fact-checking and journalistic integrity go?

Just take a look at this email Roy Greenslade has received from someone at the Daily Telegraph for a flavour of the way many are feeling in the industry right now.  Still, I came away from the M.E.N.’s offices last night with a feeling of optimism for the future of those news outlets that can adapt properly to the new landscape.

You can find other bloggers’ posts about the event here, here and here.  More will undoubtedly follow soon.

Recently I posted a message on Twitter that I’d signed up to Qik and was looking forward to using it. Within two hours Jane Fu of Qik’s customer support team had started following me on Twitter. A few days later, again on Twitter, I criticised something that annoyed me about Six Apart’s Typepad blogging service. In no time at all Six Apart’s Twitter account was following me. Then a couple of days ago, once more on Twitter, I commented on how easy it is to build widgets with SproutBuilder. Later that day, Rebecca Benham of Sprout began following me. Spotting a pattern here?

Modern internet-based companies have cottoned on to the fact that these days it’s very easy to have a direct conversation with their customers. Twitter search engines like Tweetscan allow you to discover who’s talking about you and allows you to talk straight back to them. It truly is a fantastic way of getting a proper two-way dialogue going.

Of course, it’s easy to get wrong. If any of the people I’ve mentioned above began spamming their followers with product news every day their follower numbers would dwindle quicker than Fake Richard Dawkins’. The trick to doing this successfully is to offer the occasional bit of gossip (”After such long time of approving users, I still feel same excited when I watch folks doing their first Qik stream, they all like OH !!^_^^” for example) while simply getting on with answering users’ questions.

It’s such an effective model that 10 Downing Street got in on the act earlier this year. Not only do they post updates on what the Prime Minister’s up to, they also answer voters’ questions. If that’s not democracy in action I don’t know what is.

Big business has been quick to embrace Social Media but so often they fail to catch on to how powerful it is. Setting up a Facebook or Myspace page for a brand is fine but that’s just another form of advertising. I’d like to see more companies having an active conversation.

I’m not just talking about lifestyle brands like Nike or Coca-Cola either – let’s see utility companies like British Gas or Powergen getting on Twitter. These are the companies that suffer worst from angry customers. A straight talking representative on Twitter might be just what they need.

They need to get someone in their customer service operations to open an account in their own name (*not* the company name – that keeps up the wall between customer and business). This person can then scan Twitter for mentions of their company and jump in to support the brand. It’s not spamming as the beauty of Twitter is users don’t have to get any information they don’t want, they simply ‘unfollow’ anyone who’s annoying them.

Don’t tell me people won’t want to follow British Gas. Sure, they’re hardly a ‘cool brand’ people want to be associated with, but I think people will be impressed by the proactive customer service. If it’s good enough for 10 Downing Street then it can surely work for other seemingly stuffy organisations. Okay, not all problems can be solved via Twitter. It’s not the right place to be discussing individual customer accounts, but wider issues or complaints could be dealt with in a fantastically efficient way.

It’s not just Twitter either. These companies need to be scanning blogs. When I posted my piece about BBC iPlayer 2.0 someone at the BBC had read it within an hour. Vodafone have a ‘Forum Intervention Team’ who scan internet forums and blogs for customer problems so they can step in and fix them. It’s an impressive operation and if a big company like Vodafone can do it then let’s hope other companies follow suit soon.

One man who’s giving mobile blogging from Glastonbury a go is James Whatley. Not wanting to rely on phones like the one in this picture, he’s got a load of equipment together. His stash includes two Nokia N95s and an E61i as backup, plus a solar charger and lots more. He seems to be quite successful so far. You can find his blog here.

Meanwhile, several charity workers at the festival are using their phones’ GPS to post updates as to what they’re doing around the site. Alfie’s Blog has a map that allows you to follw their movements. As more devices become location-aware in the coming months we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing. Techcrunch has information on an upcoming iPhone application that uses GPS to allow people to gossip about what’s happening in the area directly around them, for example.

When it comes to an events like Glastonbury, mobile blogging and location services can give an extra dimension to the experience for those of us who can’t make it. We can always watch it on TV, but that’s not quite the same. Most of the BBC’s TV coverage centres on the bands, with only occasional ‘look at the freaks’ packages where they show crusties juggling, people falling in mud and Michael Eavis saying “We’re coping better than we did last year”.

As someone who’s never been to Glastonbury (when I was a student I couldn’t afford it, now that I work I can’t get time off to go) seeing frequent updates from the festival makes me feel a little less left out. Let’s just hope all these mobile bloggers have a plan for what to do when their batteries run out!

[Image Credit: whiper on Flickr]

Fake Blogging isn’t always so successful for the real author. Take ‘Fake Richard Dawkins’, for example. I first became of aware of him on Thursday last week when The Guardian’s Technology Editor Charles Arthur sent out a Twitter message saying “ooh, Twitter is officially godless – @Richard_Dawkins in the house. Hope he didn’t listen to Moral Maze last night”. I must point out that at the time he wasn’t calling himself ‘fakeDawkins’ (UPDATE: apparently Twitter have forced him to become ‘RichDawkins’ now), it was ‘Richard_Dawkins’.

Now, I have to confess to never having read any of The World’s Most Famous Atheist’s works, but his arguments in interviews have intrigued me so I thought I’d follow him. I think I also liked the idea of an old man who was still forward-thinking enough to sign up to such a new medium as micro-blogging.

Over the weekend Fake Richard shared tales of having a nice meal with his wife, preparing for the Edinburgh Festival and… well, that was pretty much it. However, by the start of this week he was acting rather oddly. For a start either he was talking about himself in the third person or (gasp!) he wasn’t actually Richard Dawkins at all! Yes, it appears this mysterious impostor was simply a Christian trying to “preach peace” to fans of Dawkins, a man who apparently “wants to divide people more than they already are for some reason, and that sucks”.

Funnily enough, Fake Richard’s 1700 followers (built up in just a few days) quickly either jumped ship (his followers more than halved overnight) or stuck around to argue with him about what he’d done. And he’s still there, arguing pointessly with the people who’ve stuck around.

So, what did Fake Richard do wrong? Well, firstly he lied. If you’re going to pretend to be someone at least be honest about it. Fake Steve Jobs has never claimed to be the actual Steve Jobs. It’s obvious from his writing (and besides, he wrote a book based on the blog – the real Jobs rarely so much as sneezes in public away from offical Apple events). That’s why he’s still doing his thing nearly two years since he began while Fake Richard is simply shouting to the people who stuck around to watch the car crash.

That brings us to his second fault – he carried on once he got found out. Once he’d said his piece did he really think many people would stick around for more? They’d been lied to; some of Real Richard Dawkins’ fans probably felt tricked and hurt. If he’d have got the followers together, preached his little message of peace and then got the hell out it would have been a nice little meme for a week. Instead, he’s decided to keep the account open. What does he expect to get? A book deal?

Third fault – he didn’t even try. If he’d have written in the first person once he began his diatribe then maybe we’d have believed that Richard Dawkins had gone mad and/or completely changed his viewpoint. It might not have worked for long but it might certainly have got a few of Dawkins’ fans questioning their own beliefs. Instead, he suddenly started talking about Dawkins in the third person. Everyone immediately smelt a rat and nothing Fake Richard could do after that would make people take his message seriously.

Finally, Fake Richard’s last fault is that he chose Twitter to get his message across. Yes, the novelty of ‘Richard Dawkins on Twitter’ is a nice idea, but tiny 140-character posts make it difficult to get a long message across. Hence Fake Richard had to…

continue sentences over several…

posts in order to make his…

point.

Which is silly. He should have just started a proper blog.

So, if you’re going to start a fake blog, make sure you’re a little less ‘Richard’ and a lot more ‘Steve’.