Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

Hashtags on programmes – It’s the bat signal!

Posted by Roo - 22/10/10 at 12:10:09 pm

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, writing for ComputerWeekly this week, has picked up on the BBC displaying a hashtag at the start of the new series of Have I Got News For You and said some very nice and insightful things about it:

…when the BBC started broadcasting episode 1 of series 40 of ‘Have I got news for you’ with ‘#bbcHIGNFY’ on screen as the show started, they expected their audience to understand – and follow
…
I think that’s quite a watershed moment for the BBC and for broadcasting in general. In fact, the very term broadcasting starts to become redundant when the broadcast is only one component of the entire entertainment experience.

Yay!

It’s actually not the first time BBC programmes have displayed a hashtag in this way, though it’s arguably the most mainstream so far. Previously, there have been:

#genius for the latest series of Genius, which used it to source contributions to the programme

#laterjools for Later with Jools Holland, which also displayed selected tweets which used that hashtag on their site. Chris Kimber wrote about the thinking behind it, and some feedback, on the BBC Music Blog back in May

And the very first was #bbcrevolution for Virtual Revolution

What all of these have in common is that they appeared silently, with no voice-over or obvious call to action.

It’s a secret bat-signal. A neat solution to a tricky editorial problem.

• It works for all microblogging services, and doesn’t give undue prominence to Twitter.
• People who recognise it as a bit of online grammar will know what to do with it, and it makes them feel like an insider…
• …while coming just at the end of the credits it’s easily ignored by people who don’t.
• It doesn’t jar. The visual appearance is tailored to suit the programme, using a typeface which matches the titles etc.
• It’s not about gaining followers; it’s authentically about pointing to the conversation…
• …but it’s also a conversation that the BBC is part of. People will spot that we’re joining in too (e.g. @bbcGenius is an active part of the conversations around #genius, @bbcHIGNFY uses the #bbcHIGNFY tag, etc).

You’ll also see the same hashtags appearing on the BBC’s Programmes pages too, in the new ‘Buzz’ pages which link to the online conversations around those programmes. e.g. the buzz page for HIGNFY, linked from a new module on the programme page,

The ‘hashtag bat signal’ and the programmes page are not the only way of introducing the idea of a hashtag for the programme (and there are some examples of specific calls to action in programmes which involve hashtags: #askRhod, #bbcFilm2010 etc) but it is an elegant one.

Disclaimer: I’m not exactly a neutral observer here. As always, these are just my thoughts and opinions rather than any sort of official BBC line.

Things I like: three music videos

Posted by Roo - 16/10/10 at 01:10:19 pm

Three things I’ve been enjoying on YouTube recently(ish). All quite different.

Sour – Hibi no Neiro (‘Tone of everyday’)

OK Go – White Knuckles

Lorna Rose – Flightless Bird, American Mouth

[be sure to read the back story too]

Twitter and The Apprentice – some quick observations

Posted by Roo - 12/10/10 at 12:10:19 pm

I wrote last year about the ‘data flood’ that confronts you if you try to watch what everyone on Twitter is saying about the Apprentice. Well, it’s back, and more talked about than ever.

This isn’t surprising of course. Twitter has grown a lot since March last year, and people will always talk about what’s on television. The Apprentice, Big Brother, Seven Days and of course the X Factor are all ‘appointment viewing’ shows that are always widely talked about both online and offline.

This year, the team behind the Apprentice are not running the same live predictor play-along app they used last year, they’re instead joining in with and reflecting the activity that’s happening on Twitter.

Not only is Lord Sugar tweeting personally as @lord_sugar (yes, it really is him), there’s also an official @bbcapprentice account which focuses specifically on the show, doing a good job of sharing news and retweeting interesting stuff while the programme is on and during the week, but also makes use of a often-overlooked Twitter feature, the favourite. The @bbcapprentice account is using favourites to track the funniest and most interesting public tweets they’ve seen, and the official Apprentice site has a little ‘Favourite tweets’ box on the page which showcases them (with deep links to each), with a link back to the full list of their favourites too.

As an experiment, I used Twapper Keeper to create an archive of all public tweets using the #apprentice and #theapprentice hashtags. I’ve downloaded the archives and spent some time extracting basic stats and graphs from the results. There’s a lot of data to play with, so these are some very simple highlights.

Between 2010-10-6 20:30 – 22:30 there were 23,300 tweets hashtagged #apprentice, 19,782 tweets hashtagged #theapprentice and 390 which used both.

Here’s how the two hashtags were used during the evening. The yellow line represents all tweets which contained either #apprentice or #theapprentice (or both). This shows tweets per minute.

Both peaked during the boardroom scene, which was also the only point of the evening where #theapprentice significantly overtook #apprentice.

We can also dig into the data to spot interesting trends and popular terms throughout the evening. (Episode 1 spoilers follow…)

Stuart and Dan were the most talked about characters, with Stuart getting some really clear spikes throughout. You can also see ‘sausages’ doing very well during the task, and the “you’re fired” moment quite clearly just before the end.

More stats….

Continue reading Twitter and The Apprentice – some quick observations…

PaperCamp2

Posted by Roo - 09/10/10 at 11:10:55 pm

PaperCamp2 happened this afternoon. Like the first one, it was excellent.

Ben Terrett has done nice little review and you should check out the rest of his photos of the day too.

Stuart Bannocks (more photos) and his team, who no longer call themselves the fabrats but don’t yet have another name, gave us all a chance to be participate in some hands-on protosynthesis with carboard boxes, stickers, pens and our imaginations. (By the way, if you don’t know Stu, you should utterly take a look at the Badge a day project.)

I was asked me to wrap up the day, so I stood up at the end and rambled a bit about what I’d enjoyed. Below, I present a tidied, expanded and explicated version of the notes I used. Here’s what I wanted to say:

1.) Matt Jones [@moleitau] kicked off the day by saying he had “a new admiration for primary school teachers” and today has reminded me a lot of first school. Everything is creative. Making things is fun and there’s no such thing as a mistake. What a lovely way to spend a day.

2.) Matt Brown [@irvinebrown] started things off by introducing us to
the work of Josef Albers, origamic architecture by Gerry Stormer, curved folds by David Huffman and clumsy but magical self folding origami. (When we wondered out loud how it works, Ben Terrett patiently and accurately explained “it’s got stuff on it”.) Matt’s clearly having a lot of fun at BERG, and I particularly enjoyed the glimpse behind the scenes of making Dimenions, especially the paper-based ‘post digital augmented reality’ of holding a small drawing on a piece of paper in front of your face to get a sense of the pyramids on the horizon or a Spitfire in flight (“It’s smaller than you’d think”). Update: Matt has written up details of his talk, so you can see what post digital augmented reality aka ‘Sticking A Bit Of Paper In Front Of Your Face’ looks like.

3.) At this point I noticed the tea urn in the Conway Hall sounds like applause. Comforting. It’s been there all day, quietly applauding us all.

4.) Jane Audas [@shelfappeal] told us that “nobody wants what I want on ebay”, which surprised everyone who loves what she loves. She introduced us to various paper artists including Su Blackwell. I was especially excited about her examples of different sorts of packaging, including this beautiful 1950s egg box from Sainsbury’s. It gets me thinking about packaging. Remember when the bag-in-the-box which cornflakes came was made of paper rather than plastic, and milk came in glass bottles? We’ll be seeing a lot less plastic and a lot more card and paper packaging in the near future. (In fact, of course, we already are.)

5.) Camille Bozzini [@therealcamille] showed up some interesting and effective examples of paper advertising, including a rather nice ‘Ombro Cinema’ animation technique which is surprising and delighting, something that can’t always be said of adverts in newspapers.

6.) Laura Dickinson [@pbz1912]. I mean honestly, what must her brain be like? She maps mathematical models, constrained by the affordances and dimensions of paper, into 3d space and then back to nets which she cuts our and assembles into amazing shapes. There’s something delightfully pure and neat and accurate about it.

7.) Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino [@iotwatch] told us why she loves postcards, and made us love them a bit more too. I got a shiver from the postcards from the future exhibition at the Museum of London.

8.) Have you heard of Riepl’s law? Wolfgang Riepl, writing about ancient and modern modes of news communications in 1913, hypothesizes that new media never replace the old. Instead, we end up using the older media differently. Television didn’t replace radio, it sits alongside it quite comfortably.

The internet won’t kill off books, or television. Even if circulations of printed newspapers are dropping, newspapers are not going away.

Look at what happened to painting when photography came along. Not dead, just different.

At the end of his talk, Matt Brown summed it up nicely when he said “the pressure is off books for just imparting information”.

Update: bonus thing 9.) just as we were tidying up and getting ready to go to the pub, Basil showed me this amazing paper procedural generator he built. Brilliant.