Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

Podcast recommendation: Off the Wall Post

Posted by Roo - 25/05/11 at 03:05:09 pm

As you might know, Shift Run Stop (that podcast I used to edit every week) is on holiday at the moment. While we work out when/how/whether to restart, I’ve found myself listening to lots more podcasts. There’s one in particular which I think you might like.

Off the Wallpost (‘a conversation about digital media in the real world’) is put together by an intelligent, funny gang of three that you want to be part of. It only took 15 minutes before there was a Ghostbusters reference. What’s not to like?

They are: Dan Biddle, a social media producer; Kat Sommers, who works in a research team developing new tech for TV and radio and Barry Pilling, a cross-platform producer. Full disclosure: I used to work with these people. I think they’re ace.

Here’s what you’ll find in episode one…

6:00 – Artfinder.com launch. What is it, does it work, would you use it?
13:00 – Mobile + contacts, why can’t Google and Facebook get along?
20:00 – Charlie Sheen being bat-shit crazy on Twitter.
24:00 – Charity and social media (covering Underheard in New York, TwitChange, Pledgehammer, ProcasDonate and more). How is online charity evolving?

And episode two…

8:00 – Jon Bon Jovi and Steve Jobs
10:30 – The trend of using Tumblr to do one single simple but very specific thing, like Kate Middleton For The Win. Kim Jong Il Looking at Things. [I love these so much, I don't know where to start. I have my own collecting internet fridges and I've recently fallen in love with Nick Clegg Looking Sad.]
18:00 – Facebook and Warner Movies deal – will it work?
25:30 – Wanky words.
26:45 – Geo-location. Foursquare, StickyBits, Google Latitude, Glimpse and more. Is Foursquare a dead end? What’s the real opportunity here?

If you’re anything like me, this is exactly the sort of stuff about which you want people to do be funny and irreverent. Why else do I like it?

1. They’re pleasingly cutting about the jargon and bullshit which often surrounds social media experts. The first episode begins with an amnesty on the most offensive, trite and meaningless ‘wanky words from the web’, rooting out terms like ‘side-loading’ and stripping them of their power. This is refreshing, funny and fun.
2. At usually (so far) between 35 and 45 minutes long. That’s the right length; not too long, not too short.
3. It’s presented by British people. Not that I don’t love my friends from the USA, but in an online world where their US voices often seem to dominate it’s lovely to hear some local accents and a UK perspective for a change.
4. It’s like a really good SXSW panel with brilliant panelists talking about things you care about (and all without having to even get in a shuttle bus or queue up).

Like.

Fortnotes 11 & 12

Posted by Roo - 20/05/11 at 09:05:00 pm

[Being the 11th and 12th in a fortnightly series of brain dumps: what I'm working on, wondering and worrying about.]

Bankholapalooza; a week-and-a-bit off work thanks to Easter, a royal wedding and taking the 3 days in between as holiday.
It’s only once I’m on holiday for a few days that I realise how exhausted I was, so I immediately book a 2 week holiday in July.

—

A couple of days in Dublin for the Mash 2011 conference (about which I wrote some notes here).

Working on: Cravendale (evaluating and planning the next bit), Visit Wales (helping formulate an approach), Fairtrade (evaluation), Honda (drafting strategy), Nokia (comms plan and community stuff for an upcoming campaign) plus a really big exciting project which I honestly can’t talk about at all.

Generally aiming to be helpful on everything. Sometimes wondering what I should be doing, and if I’m honest feeling a bit stressed at the moment. Trying to focus on the important stuff, but it’s sometimes hard to know which bits are which. Reminding myself that I really love my job.

Managed to work at home for one day (for the first time since early April and the sixth time this year). It’s not the sort of office where working at home is always easy, but it feels good to avoid the commute when I can manage it.

Trying to set up a week in Portland to meet up with colleagues over there some time in August. That would be useful I think.

Mash 2011

Posted by Roo - 11/05/11 at 06:05:20 pm

I spent a couple of days in Dublin this week for the Mash 2011 conference. 20 speakers (including me), three workshops and a whole lot of really nice people.

Here are some patchy notes from what I saw.

Nathan Hull, Penguin – The future of digital storytelling
Nathan took us through Penguin’s approach to eBooks, enhanced eBooks (EeBooks?) and apps. Examples included Fry Paper, Where’s Spot and many more. [I didn't take notes because at this point I was already sitting on stage waiting to go up and speak.]

Hilary Perkins, Channel 4
Hilary talked about the importance of story-telling and how to use UGC in a way that doesn’t treat users as unpaid labour. [Again, no notes here. Do try to see Hilary present though, she's great.]

Roo Reynolds, W+K London
That’s me! I somehow managed to show 68 slides (!) in 15 minutes to illustrate how the Cravendale ‘Cats with Thumbs‘ campaign worked as an example of advertising and engagement. I still didn’t cover everything I would have liked, but people were very kind about it afterwards and seemed to enjoy it.

Evan Ratliff, Wired USA
Having long been interested in the phenomenon of people who fake their own death, Evan and Wired set up a challenge. He would attempt to disappear and Wired would give a $5000 prize ($3k from Evan’s own pocket) to the first person who could hunt him down. In assuming a new identity he took the battery out of his mobile phone, rented an office in an fake name, used cash and cash-cards to buy disposable ‘burners’, used Tor to protect web visits and lots more. How to build a realistic looking FB profile? Find people who will friend anyone (people who do multi level marketing). A community of people looking for him quickly coordinated using FB, websites, Twitter (#vanish), chat rooms etc. 26 days later he was tracked down, partly via a Facebook app which logged users details into a database (tracked IP address, profile, number of friends etc) and trawled through lowest number of friends. Brilliant story.

Mark Rock, CEO of Audioboo
Product demo. When asked about monetisation, Mark said there will always be a free version. Possibility in future of paying to subscribe to users, with revenue sharing model.

Burt Herman, CEO of Storify
Storify lets you curate content: search, pick, add text to give context and Burt showed lots of great examples. “Social media makes everyone a reporter” [but not, I could feel the journalists in the room thinking, necessarily a journalist]

Edouard Lambelet, CEO of Paper.li
Paper.li let’s you showcase content based on lists/search/friend networks. Already up to 1.5M regularly active users (5M total). Being used for marketing by Game of Thrones apparently.

Marek Walton, The Mustard Corporation
‘The lessons learned from social games’. Marek shared some great examples of the real world value of virtual goods. Did you know the Entropia space station which sold in 2005 for $100k was sold again in 2009 for the equivalent of $330k?

Nicolas Lovell, Games Brief
Did you know there were 89M Cityville players last month, 11M yesterday? Publishing adds value through content distribution, but Internet has made content distribution easy. Which is great for content creators. Some (v few) people are prepared to pay a LOT of money. People will pay to: Fit in, Stand out, Fit in to a sub-group while standing out from the crowd, Build friendship, Flirt. Micro transactions: you can charge for status, emotion and identity rather than content. ARPU is not enough to know. What % of revenue comes from top 1% of users? SocialGold model of peasants, commoners, knights, lords, kings. Free users are really important; they’re the eyeballs, influencers, gawkers, leads and potential converts. Your job is to grab people with free stuff, and move them up the curve. Bower bird analogy: the Bower bird builds highly decorative nests decorated with blue things they’ve found: “look at how much surplus energy I have”.

Aidan Kelley, Candy
In a gorgeous and refreshingly simple presentation, most remarkable for its visuals, Aidan shared his long-running independent PDF magazine Candy with us. (Also referenced Issuu).

Nora Casey, Harmonia
Couldn’t have been more different from Aidan, and you almost got the impression the two of them are like positively and negatively charged particles; I was anxious they not touch for fear they would annihilate each other. Nora is a Dragon (in the Dragon’s Den sense of the word) and very well known in Ireland. She started off by saying that “My whole future is about digital” but appears confident about printed magazines and very dismissive of anything replacing them. We’ve been reading for 25,000 years [Bill Thompson would later point out it was actually 6,000], “Print will survive because it requires no electricity or machinery”, “Magazine readers will be around for another 20 years at least”, “If online works so well, why are so many tech and games magazines printed on paper?”. Bonus fact: 70% of revenue in womens monthly magazine comes from ads, apparently.

Next up was a panel discussing Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Despite being very happy to never hear that name again, this was a particularly interesting and enjoyable panel because intelligent people were actually discussing and arguing rather than agreeing with each other. Very unusual at conference, and very welcome.

Vaughan Smith, Founder of the Frontline club and associate of Julian Assange
“Julian Assange stays at my farm in Norfolk”. “I remain as committed to Julian as I was in November”. “i saw a man who was courageous, principled and frightened and had not been treated fairly”. Traditional journalists do not like dealing with J.A. because he [like them] is “a strong opinionated character”. Insistent that the rape allegations from Sweden are “a smear” and “a sideshow”. “Most people in Britain believe he is innocent”. How you do know? “I speak to a lot of people.”

Fintan O’Toole, Deputy Editor of The Irish Times
“Our instinct as journalists has to be in favour of publication of all information unless there’s a very good reason not to” But… “You cannot set yourself up as a force for liberation unless you are personally accountable”

Sarah McInerney, Political Correspondent at The Sunday Times
There is a problem in being too reliant on Julian Assange. He has an agenda, he controls the access. “I think he has too much power for one individual”

Christian Payne, Bill Thompson, Nik Butler
The three chaps (with Nik joining via Skype) conducted an informal and wide-ranging discussion covering closed platforms vs the open web, what happens when bandwidth increases and the possibilities of IPv6.

John Mulholland, Editor of the Observer
John introduced a series of film clips (in what amounted to a documentary and would make a very good one) about ‘the paper’s biggest story’, former Observer editor David Astor who used his position to bring injustices in apartheid era South Africa to light. First paper “to cover africa in a post colonial manner”.

Bill Thompson, head of partnership development for BBC archive development team
We want to believe things won’t change because it’s comfortable. Language is mind, culture is society. We are now living in a digital culture. The world itself is not digital, and the real world has not gone away, but it’s no longer wholly analogue. Digital data is everywhere. Revolutions on this scale are rare (think: writing rather than printing press). Not adapting your thinking will make you functionally illiterate. But we need to ensure we don’t forget the past, and take it with us. Digitising a book doesn’t mean we then shred it afterwards. It can mean visiting the relevant physical book becomes easier. BBC working with institutions to define a ‘Digital Public Space‘.

A day to make your head spin. Wonderful stuff.

My notes barely scratch the surface though. To get a much better idea of what happened at Mash, take a scroll through this collection of photos, video clips, interviews and attendee tweets curated by a team of students using Storify (of course) while the conference was taking place.

Color: why it’s interesting and why it won’t be “the next Twitter”.

Posted by Roo - 04/05/11 at 02:05:24 pm

Color invites you to “creates new, dynamic social networks … wherever you go”. It’s getting a lot of attention at the moment, largely because of $41M VC funding. It’s even being hailed as having ‘a very good chance of becoming a large scale success like Twitter‘.

In case you have not yet heard of Color, here’s how Caroline McCarthy describes it for CNET

In Color, photos taken through the app are shared through proximity, something which amasses a list of your contacts through machine learning; in effect, you’ll be able to see all photos around you that were taken with Color. You’ll be able to see the Color photos of the guy sitting two tables away from you at Starbucks, but when he finishes his caramel macchiato and leaves the coffee shop, you can’t see them anymore. But if you spend a lot of time in proximity to someone–an office-mate, for example–that person’s photos will gradually begin to stay in your contacts list for longer.

Someone asked me this week whether I thought it really would be ‘the next Twitter’. I found it hard to say at first, because my first experience with the app had been so awful that I had to go back and try it again to see what I’d missed. It really is a rather hard app to pick up (and has been heavily slated in the App store reviews, often for being hard to understand) but it’s not hard to see that the idea of physical spaces having an invisible cloud of history and shared photos has potential; being able to see other angles you missed, knowing your friend was here yesterday, … you can imagine lots of fun stuff emerging from an experiment like this.

But no, I don’t think it’s going to be “the next Twitter”. Not at all.

Being based on physical proximity makes for a pretty tough first experience. Unless you happen to install and try it while you’re at a big event with at least a couple of other people using it, you’re left with a pretty unsatisfying starting point. Any app that requires you to be in the same place as other people using the same app at the same time is going to have a difficult bootstrap problem.

Most importantly though, Twitter is a platform with an open API allowing other apps to be built on top of it. Want to write your own Twitter client? Want to integrate Twitter into another app? Want to print out tweets that contain the word ‘snow’? Easy. Not so with Color. Want to make a site showing the most recent Color pictures taken in a particular place? You can’t. Unless you’re the Telegraph and you want to do a joint PR thing around the royal wedding (the sanity of which also raised some eyebrows).

That’s not to say that the situation won’t change. Instagram started closed and opened up an API after a few months. That move made it easier for people to make all sorts of really cool apps like Extragram, GramFrame, Instagrid, Instaprint, Instac.at and many more.

In fact, the most common use I’ve seen of Color so far has been that people will sometimes post a direct link to a picture to Twitter or Facebook. While that’s a useful feature (and in theory leads to more people discovering Color) it does mean that the whole local proximity and physical social discovery aspect of Color becomes optional; people continue to rely on those two tools to maintain their contact networks.

I think in its current incarnation Color is more of a photo sharing service, like Twitpic or Yfrog, with some additional features which might rarely get used. If they open up and offer an API (like Instagram did) they could become a much more interesting thing altogether, but only if it can get – and keep – users. Although I like its innovative approach, I think it’s going to be very tough for this app to become anything like mainstream.

I’ll give Color another chance, but I think I’ll also be looking out for the next next big thing.

Cross-posted to the W+K London blog.