Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

Recent Reading

Posted by Roo - 25/01/09 at 05:01:42 pm

January

• Iain M Banks, Matter – oooh, a new Culture book. It’s quite good, too.
• Armando Iannucci, Facts and Fancies – chucklesome but bitty. Slightly inconsistent, but worth it for some moments of Armando Iannucci at his insightful, cutting and random best.
• George Orwell, Animal Farm – I studied this at school, and re-reading it was a good experience. Orwell doesn’t mess around here, he has a point to make and he makes it relentlessly.
• Ian McEwan, Saturday – 24 hours, covered with a fine-toothed comb, as if Jack Bauer were a neurosurgeon living in . McEwan continues to be my favourite author at the moment.
• Adam Roberts, The Snow – meh. Glad I only paid 50p for this. I’ve read worse SF (and I would actually like to read more by Roberts) but this really isn’t great.
• Robert Harris, Archangel – I think this is the first Robert Harris book I’ve read. Nearly gripping, but no masterpiece. Another 50p one.
• Slinkachu, Little People in the City – yay! Now we’re talking. It’s little-people.blogspot.com in glorious paper form.

December

• Nick Hornby, Slam – either I’m getting older and older, or Hornby is writing for a younger and younger reader. Still enjoyable though.
• Russell Brand, My Booky Wook – I don’t read many autobiographies. I fully expected to hate this (even just based on the title) but having read and enjoyed it, I now like Russell Brand quite a lot more than I did before.
• Irvine Welsh, Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance – a handful of short stories. Some of the most bland and forgettable of Welsh’s stuff.
• X, QI: The Book of Animal Ignorance – did you know that female kangaroos have three wombs and three vaginas? You would if you’d read this book, or sat still near me for several days after I’d read it.
• Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans – charming, poignant and thoughtful book about migrant workers and an adorable dog.
• Cory Doctorow, Little Brother – please read this. Here, you can even download it from the author’s website. Enjoy.

November

• Louis Theroux, The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures – Theroux’s guileless voice works as well here as in his documentaries.
• Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones – beautifully moving. Incidentally, it seems Peter Jackson is turning it into film. I think I’ll have to see that.
• Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – as always, Thompson is viscerally funny.
• William Burroughs, Naked Lunch – not so much viscerally funny as viscerally ugly. Hard to stomach, at times. Burroughs dares you to enjoy it.
• Iain Banks, Espedair Street – charming, inventive and slightly wistful exploration of a grown up rock star.
• Mark Stephen Meadows, I, Avatar – Mark was kind enough to send me his new book a few months ago. Well laid out and beautiful whilst also being informative and thought provoking. Still don’t ‘get’ virtual worlds? Read this.

PaperCamp

Posted by Roo - 24/01/09 at 07:01:18 pm

It’s been a whole week since PaperCamp (a fringe event to Jeremy, Russell and James‘ BookCamp) organised by Matt Jones.

I drifted between the two events (meaning I missed a couple of things, including Karsten Schmidt talking about fiducial marker generation and machine readable origami markers). I mostly stayed at PaperCamp though, so here’s a handful of what I did catch…

• Aaron Straup Cope talked about a lot of great stuff including papernet and pocketMMaps.
• Tom Taylor demonstrated his adorable microprinter project, an implementation of something like Matt Webb’s social letterbox idea, which made pretty much everyone in the room drool. I’m making one as we speak.
• Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino got us making things. I made a thing. The first time I’ve used scissors and Prit Stick for ages.
• Chris Heathcote gave a charming talk entitled Pirates and Scalpels about travel guides. He makes me want to cut things up. You know, in a good way.
• Nick O’Leary shared his paper graphs, with a pop-up paper pie chart. I can’t wait for the big pop-up book of statistics and the pop-up topological travel guide to San Francisco.
• Sawa Tanaka shared some lovely projects, including Spot nocturnal animals (a glow in the dark book), The Egg Book (a thermochromic ink book) and a breathtaking book about Hiroshima (with photos from 1945 printed using soy sauce, overlaid with modern photos shot from the same angles).
• Beeker Northam got us thinking about taking and sharing photos of books. There is something about the texture of paper and the uniqueness of an individual copy of a book which LibraryThing (et al) don’t capture. Someone (?) suggested taking and sharing a photo of the front cover when you start reading a book and the back cover when you finish it. Genius.
• Jeremy Keith started a discussion about an idea: a shared social guide book which grows over time. (Incidentally, Jeremy probably made the best notes about PaperCamp).
• Matt Ward wrapped up, coining a new phrase.

A very good time was had by all. I hear that a PaperCamp is happening in New York in a couple of weeks. Whatever you do, don’t miss it if you’re in NYC on 7th and 8th of February.

Advice on using Wikipedia

Posted by Roo - 09/01/09 at 07:01:36 pm

Steve recently wrote that the BBC should engage with Wikipedia. I agree.

[photo credit: Steve Bowbrick]

Here’s some advice for anyone at the BBC wanting to get involved, which includes some things to consider if you’re not already familiar with contributing to Wikipedia. Feel free to ignore it if you don’t work for the Beeb, but perhaps it will be interesting and useful to other people too and of course I’m keen to hear what (presumably many) important things I’ve missed.

First of all, it’s worth knowing that the BBC has editorial guidelines about using open access online encyclopedias.

“…When correcting errors about the BBC, we should be transparent about who we are. We should never remove criticism of the BBC. Instead, we should respond to legitimate criticism. We should not remove derogatory or offensive comments but must report them to the relevant administrators for them to take action.

Before editing an online encyclopedia entry about the BBC, or any entry which might be deemed a conflict of interest, BBC staff should consult the house rules of the site concerned and, if necessary, ask permission from the relevant wikieditor. They may also need to seek advice from their line manager.”

Once you’re comfortable with all of that, the next place to look is Wikipedia’s own documentation.

A good places to being in the guide on contributing to Wikipedia, which says that although you do not have to create an account to edit articles on Wikipedia, there are many good reasons for you to do so. See especially the advice on why create an account. BBC employees should be open and transparent about their BBC status (which will be obvious from their IP addresses anyway, like this well publicised example) and the best way of doing this is by creating and using a user account.

More good places to get started include the Five Pillars, avoiding common mistakes and the perfect article (although it’s worth remembering that perfection is not required).

The policies and guidelines are important. Anyone considering editing Wikipedia you take their time in absorbing and understanding all the policies and guidelines. Here are some highlights. What follows it not a complete list, just a taster to get you started.

Policies

Neutral point of view

“All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing fairly, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources.”…

Verifiability

“The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true.”…

No original research

“Wikipedia does not publish original research or original thought. This includes unpublished facts, arguments, speculation, and ideas; and any unpublished analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position. This means that Wikipedia is not the place to publish your own opinions, experiences, or arguments.”…

What Wikipedia is not

“Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information; merely being true or useful does not automatically make something suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia” …

see particularly the policy on news reports

“Wikipedia considers the historical notability of persons and events. News coverage can be useful source material for encyclopedic topics, but not all events warrant an encyclopedia article of their own. Routine news coverage of such things as announcements, sports, and tabloid journalism are not sufficient basis for an article.”…

Guidelines

Conflicts of interest

“Activities regarded by insiders as simply “getting the word out” may appear promotional or propagandistic to the outside world. If you edit articles while involved with organizations that engage in advocacy in that area, you may have a conflict of interest.”…

see particularly How to avoid COI edits and How to handle conflicts of interest

External Links

“Wikipedia’s purpose is not to include a comprehensive list of external links related to each topic. No page should be linked from a Wikipedia article unless its inclusion is justifiable”…

plus What to link, including What should be linked, Links to be considered and Links normally to be avoided

Reliable sources

“Keep in mind that if the information is worth reporting, an independent source is likely to have done so.”…

Notability

“Within Wikipedia, notability is an inclusion criterion based on encyclopedic suitability of a topic for a Wikipedia article. The topic of an article should be notable, or “worthy of notice.” Notability is distinct from “fame,” “importance,” or “popularity,” although these may positively correlate with it.”…

see particularly General notability guideline and Notability of article content

“Keep in mind that an encyclopedia article is a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject, not a complete exposition of all possible details”…

You’ll want to be careful to follow Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines to ensure that any proposed edits, new pages or external links are worthy of inclusion, and always be open to correction from Wikipedia’s users and editors.

How do you use Twitter?

Posted by Roo - 09/01/09 at 05:01:35 pm

I was recently asked by a colleague to explain how I use Twitter, whether people reply to appeals for help/contributions, what I’ve learned along the way and how the BBC should use Twitter.

I use Twitter quite a bit. I follow a couple of hundred people who I care about enough to want to know what they’re doing and thinking. Many are good friends while some are people I’m interested in getting to know better.

Other people have described this better than I can. In March 2007, Leisa Reichelt wrote about what she terms Ambient Intimacy

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.

More people follow me on Twitter than subscribe to my blog feed (perhaps I’m more interesting when I’m less verbose?) and I mainly use it to share what I’m up to, and sometimes use it to ask for help or advice. Some examples are more serious than others. At the silly end, I once asked Twitter whether any English word rhymes with ‘Gareth’ and got a staggering number of replies, which I collated here. Slightly trivial perhaps but it pleased me no end. More recently, I asked what people thought about O2 as an ISP, because I was considering switching from PlusNet. The results were very useful to me but I was particularly impressed that someone at PlusNet was keeping an eye on people complaining about their service and asked me if I needed help. I’d never have thought to find or follow PlusNet on Twitter but they didn’t need me to; PlusNet keep an eye out for the people they most need to start conversations with directly.

Twitter is, for me, a lot like a highly conversational, lightweight and highly interconnected blog. I don’t think we need additional guidelines or rules for individual BBC employees using it, since the existing ones (here, here and here) are perfectly sufficient.

In terms of how the BBC can use Twitter to support its output, I’d say it only really works when we treat it as a properly conversational tool, not as another place to spew automated feeds. As with blogging, the effective corporate use of Twitter won’t necessarily look very dissimilar to an effective personal use of it. Big Cat Live was done quite well because the team didn’t treat Twitter as a broadcast. They paid attention to people talking back to them and engaged in conversation, answering questions.

This is the year of Twitter going properly mainstream, answering lot of big names have started using it. John Cleese, Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry, Graham Linehan, Robert Llewellyn and Neil Gaiman are all excellent. Even Britney is on Twitter and her team has done much to improve the transparency of their act since they started.

All of this celebrity interest comes at a cost. The press have started paying attention recently, though (as with blogging a few years ago) they still don’t quite ‘get it’ and there’s plenty of scorn. Matt Sandy and Ian Gallagher at the Mail (‘How boring: Celebrities sign up to Twitter to reveal the most mundane aspect of their lives’), Bryony Gordon at the Telegraph (‘Twittering is for twits with nothing better to do’) and Nick Curtis at the Evening Standard (‘Is Twitter the new Facebook?’) have all missed the point in quite a big way. (Paul Carr, writing at the Guardian, made an amusing and constructive response to that last one). Of course Twitter is full of trivia and inanity but when you’re following people you find interesting, sharing the trivia and small moments in their lives is anything but dull.

Eye Eye

Posted by Roo - 07/01/09 at 11:01:53 pm

Thanks to Jem for casually mentioning this morning that I’m in this fortnight’s Private Eye.

It’s taken from last week’s edition of the BBC’s staff newspaper, Ariel, which ran a nice welcome-to-the-machine piece describing my new role. Here’s how the full thing looked.

Birtspeak 2.0 it may have been, but I was only unhappy with one sentence in the whole piece. The sentence I didn’t like, at all, (and told the writer as much) was the parenthesised clause in the article which says

“(He also sits on Smurf, Vision’s social media forum, which he describes as ‘a clearing house for social media projects – it’s not meant to be the control police’.)”

The group it refers to is the Social Media Editorial Forum. Although I might have described the group to Ariel, I was quite careful not to name it, so I didn’t like the reference for four reasons:

1. Nick Reynolds (no relation) has used the cute Smurf acronym in the past, but I don’t like the name and avoid using it. It hasn’t really stuck and it’s in my diary as SMEF. At least it’s not the Social Media Editorial Group.
2. It’s not actually a formal group on which anyone really ‘sits’. It’s just a collection of people with similar jobs around the BBC who regularly get together to share plans and ideas…
3. …which also means it’s not owned by Vision (which happens to be my division).
4. Did I really say ‘control police’? Wow, I do sound like a prat sometimes.

Ah well. Being quoted in Birtspeak is apparently a rite of passage.

This photo shows the local butcher building a pig

Posted by Roo - 06/01/09 at 10:01:10 pm

The awesome Russell Davies has just shared this amazing creation from the equally awesome Max Gadney.

In 2050, the permanent and nomadic residents of Lyddle End use the community Fabricator to build whatever they need. They do their paperwork and receive legal advice in the Tuck Shop, the owner of which can deliver a very personal service. (people still like to go to the shops.)

Nanotech/ Biotech agreements between Asia and Europe mean that creation at the atomic level is now possible. This photo shows the local butcher building a pig. (Those that eat meat still like to have it cut from something previously sentient, rather than the petri-pork that has replaced tofu.)

This is an early model fabricator. It needs to assemble from other matter. Absorbtion rods at the back suck C02 from the air (cleaning the planet) for raw material and re-sculpt this matter on the fab-deck. Other ‘fabs’ resculpt landfill or rock – but recycling the Earth’s mess is obviously the priority. There are no Home fabricators (legally) – the act of creation cannot yet happen in a small or enclosed space.

Each community fabricator is named after the first thing made. This one is called Dodo.

You can learn more about, and how to get involved in, Russell’s delightful Lyddle End 2050 project as well as see the results as they accumulate.

(Update: it’s now on Russell’s blog. Hurrah.)