Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?

Online drama

Posted by Roo - 17/07/09 at 08:07:08 am

I’ve been thinking about online drama recently.

There are traditional online video productions, which are essentially video made for the web. Good examples are Dr Horrible and The Remnants. Both high quality videos made to be distributed online, both created during the writers strike last year. (No coincidence there I think).

Then you’ve got your Alternate Reality Games. I’m going to assume you already know (or will quickly learn) about The Beast, Majestic, Starlight Travel, World Without Oil, Why So Serious, The Lost Ring etc. Three specifically interesting examples…

‘I Love Bees‘ (2004) was ostensibly a radio drama, but one distributed using payphones around the world which the ‘audience’ became players of a game in order to follow the story. Implausibly difficult for anyone to follow alone, it worked as a community experience with players working together to find, record and share the fragments of story being played through payphone around the world. It was commissioned as a viral campaign for the Halo 2 game.
Hear the story from start to finish here, and read more about the background from 42 Entertainment or the predictably detailed Wikipedia entry.

‘Perplex City‘ (2004 – 2007) was
“A city obsessed with puzzles and ciphers. A game that blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality.” An ambitious treasure-hunt ARG project, supported by the sale of collectable puzzle cards. Though not necessary to play the bigger game, the cards did provide some of the clues and integrated with the imaginary universe of Perlex City. Particularly of note is the fan-run wiki which the developers ended up relying on as the canonical record of what had happened in the story.

‘We Tell Stories‘ (March 2008) was ‘Digital fiction from Penguin’ built by Six To Start.
“Penguin UK is launching its most ambitious digital writing project to date. In collaboration with fêted alternate reality game designers Six to Start, Penguin has challenged some of its top authors to create new forms of story – designed specially for the internet. … But somewhere on the internet is a secret seventh story, a mysterious tale involving a vaguely familiar girl who has a habit of getting herself lost. Readers who follow this story will discover clues that will shape her journey and help her on her way. These clues will appear online and in the real world and will direct readers to the other six stories. The secret seventh story will also offer the chance to win some wonderful prizes…”. This was most interesting

Incidentally, there’s a long history of Alternate Reality Games being used to extend and enhance TV experiences too.

Online drama using social networks are an ever growing field. Here are a few that have caught my eye:

‘lonelygirl15‘ (June 2006 – August 2008) was “the first of many shows within the fictional LG15 Universe, tells the ongoing story of a group of young adults fighting against a mysterious secret society called, The Order. … On the LG15 website, community members can interact with the characters and each other in the forums, chat rooms and comment boards, and can create their own community generated videos and storylines that add to the ever expanding LG15 universe.” (If you’ve always wondered what it was about, there’s a 300 word plot summary you might enjoy. Also worth knowing that in its early stages it was a perfectly believable story of a normal girl, and there was a fair bit of controversy and discussion when it was discovered that she was an actress. Easy to miss, when looking at the story now, but it was controversial at the time). LG15 also involved a small amount of product placement (sorry, product integration), though this was taken a lot further in later spin-offs…

‘Kate Modern‘ (July 2007 – June 2008) was “an interactive online drama which ran from July 2007 – June 2008 and was produced by the creators of lonelygirl15 – EQAL. During it’s highly successful year long run it was nominated for two TV Craft BAFTA awards, a Webby Award and won the Broadcast Press Guild Award for Innovation 2008″. A spin-off from lonelygirl15, Kate Modern ran for two seasons. (Review). Product integration apparently allowed Kate Modern to turn a healthy profit. (Season 1, 2007, was supported by MSN, Tampax, Pantene, Gillette, Orange, Paramount Pictures UK and Buena Vista International UK. Season 2, 2008, by Toyota Aygo Platinum, Cadbury Creme Egg, Warner Bros & Skittles.)

‘Sofia’s Diary‘ (March 2008 – June 2009) has run for three seasons on Bebo, was broadcast for about a year on ‘Fiver’ but recently dropped Sponsors have included Sure Girl and Transport for London. (More info)

‘The Gap Year‘ (May 2008 – August 2009) “The brand new daily reality show, from the makers of Big Brother”
(another Bebo production, this one in conjunction with Endemol. Sponsors include Sony PSP, Trident and Doritos).
Freak A Freemantle co-production with MySpace. ‘The first UK online drama from MySpace’. Launch date: 20th July. Brand partners include Tampax and Red Bull.

‘Hollyoaks: The Morning After the Night Before‘ (July 2009)
Is an online video drama made by Channel 4 in partnership with the Home Office to promote the Know Your Limits sensible drinking campaign. Character profiles on Bebo and episodes online at E4.com. “Hollyoaks: The Morning After the Night Before is a brand new Hollyoaks drama … It’s all happening here on E4.com. All of the episodes will be online, and you can find out behind the scenes gossip right here too – with exclusive interviews, spoilers, photo galleries, behind the scenes videos and more. Make sure you check out Josh , Sasha and Dave ’s Bebo profiles, keeping you up-to-date with what the gang are getting up to in between episodes… “ (The 12 episodes will be released online every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through July)

What has the BBC been up to? A couple of recent examples:

‘Proper Messy‘ (January 2009) A teen drama from Switch.
“Proper Messy was an exciting new interactive drama where YOU could influence the story … As well as weekly episodes on BBC Two there was loads of stuff on bebo and extra exclusive vids online each week. If you were aged 13-17 you could have also signed up to get texts EVERY DAY from the two main characters Imogen or Jake. … This is where things really got exciting – if their texts stirred you into action you could reply and your comments could have influenced the decisions they made. And, what was even better is that it was all free!” (Review)

‘The Well’ was announced just yesterday. “BBC Switch has commissioned digital production company Conker Media, part of Lime Pictures (whose credits include Hollyoaks), to create and produce an interactive, digital drama thriller for its teen audience. The Well will air in the autumn in the Switch zone on BBC Two (Saturdays 12noon-2.00pm) and extends online at bbc.co.uk/switch where the audience can immerse themselves further in the story, exploring a spookily atmospheric recreation of the main drama location in a multi-level game.”

‘Psychoville’, exploring the possibilities of comedy on the web, have strategically dropped a few website addresses into their episodes and site, and encourage viewers to explore the web looking for answers to a weekly question.
“The mysterious stranger knows what you did: stop your secret going public by answering the messages below. Keep an eye out on TV and scour the internet for character websites you will need to visit. Answer the questions correctly to continue and come back after each episode for a new question.”
So, not quite an ARG (and actually, I notice that I’ve drifted away from Drama too. Maybe I’ll make another post about Comedy soon), but it is a great way of exploring the world of Psychoville and discovering things like Mr Jelly’s homepage. The results are every bit as darkly funny as you might expect.

Going back a bit further, CDX (2006) is an ‘interactive film experience’. (Read an article about it from DigitalArts or a review in Joystiq) hough some thinking about games from the BBC is a post I’ll save for another time.

What else? More BBC online dramas: Signs of Life from 2007 (”Buffy meets Horoscopes“), Wannabes from 2006 (” an interactive web-based soap opera“).  Torchwood did an ARG and Dr Who didn’t (even though a prominently placed phone number made many of us think they might have).

So what about the future? Only time will tell of course. I’m interested to hear of other examples though, and what you think works.

My annual appraisal, my inbox and me

Posted by Roo - 13/07/09 at 08:07:40 am

I’ve just submitted by appraisal for 2008-2009. Based on some great feedback, it says lots of nice nice things about being “a credible expert … working effectively with everyone from producers to channel controllers” and so forth.

The more interesting bits, and what I want to share here, are where I admit failings and suggest fixes. Most importantly, I’ve realised that that I need to prioritise the important stuff:

I need to free up additional time to focus on the more important things. Although I’ve been learning to delegate and escalate, I know that I’ll need to do more of both next year if I want to make a significant impact on the bigger projects

I’ve come to understand that I can’t do everything without going mad and I’m finally ready to admit to myself (and you) that I can’t realistically respond to every email:

I will respond to fewer emails, prioritise more and realise I’ll never reach the very bottom of the pile. I will especially avoid weekend working

For the past few months, I’ve been getting better at managing my inbox using an ‘inbox zero‘ approach, whereby I aim to finish every day with an empty inbox, even if it means a long – and growing – folder full of email to action. It’s better, I’ve found, than suffering from having read and unread email intermingled, or even (and feel free to slap yourself if you do this) marking email as unread in order to be reminded to come back to it later. That way madness lies.

1. If it needs a response…
   1. respond immediately if it takes less than two minutes
   2. …or file it as an ‘action’ for later.
2. Delete everything that can be deleted.
3. Archive everything that is needed for later.

The bits I specifically need to get better at are:

• Starting the day with those actions rather than the inbox so I spend more time doing the most important thing rather than the most recent thing.
• Sticking to a routine of processing email at regular intervals (and not at the weekend), rather than constantly checking my inbox as frequently as I can humanly manage. I like what Merlin Mann says about this: “Checking email every 59 seconds is tantamount to washing rice one grain at a time”

Notes from C21 Social Media Forum

Posted by Roo - 22/06/09 at 08:06:18 pm

C21’s Social Media Forum said that the event would provide

a creative workshop that defines and develops how the producers channels and rights owners can work with social media platforms to develop business and extend creativity. And generate new revenue streams today!

Despite not being desperately bothered about generating new revenue streams,  I was sufficiently interested by the rest of the description to book a place. Of course, I wasn’t really expecting it to deliver on its promise of being a ‘creative workshop’, and it didn’t. The event was more of a traditional conference, with speakers and time-for-questions. Overall, it was quite useful though, especially the morning sessions. Here are selected notes from some of the more interesting slots:

Opening keynote: Building brands with social media, Ann Longley (Digital strategy director, Mediaedge:cia)

• how do we use social media, and what it means.
• “You’d have to be living under a rock not to notice Twitter these days”
• “What’s happening in Iran shows the power of social media beyond entertainment|
• “press coverage of Twitter signals the ‘mainstreaming’ of social media”
• What is social media anyway? Quote from MEC Guide to Social Media – “all online activities, tools, platforms and practices that allow users to collaborate, create, …”
• “Traditional broadcasting model is breaking down”
• social media is dominated by UGC: creating, sharing and remixing content
• campaigning – e.g. NUS vs HSCB, M&S bra size cost, 13k on FB. There’s no such thing as local news any more.
• organising protests has never been easier
• finding out what people are saying about your brands online: “Many brands have fans online, even without actively cultivating it. It happens naturally.”
• “smart brands cultivate their fanbase”
• “smart fans influence brands” (or at least, influence brands which listen)
• (while brands can avert crises by listening (Sony Bravia defusing negative story around Paint advert by monitoring online before it turned into a problem)
• “…and invite their customers to help them”
• What makes a good social media strategy? At the heart of any campaign you need a good product or service. Examples: Obama – being everywhere, T-mobile – UGC, Skins – energising their fanbase, Sony Ericsson – pocketTV, Dell – going from Dell hell to Idea Storm
• content, communities and conversations = conversion (to £ or eyeballs)
• social entertainment: social media enriching experiences. creative industries engaging audiences across channels
• some examples of Alternative Reality Games (“it’s kind of a geeky thing, seen as quite left-field and not compelling for a mainstream audience…”, but interesting anyway) – cited McDonalds’ The Lost Ring, Superstruct, Penguin’s We Tell Stories
  A Swarm of Angels….
• earned media: word of mouth from friends and trusted people
• Whuffie: in a post scarcity economy, reputation and social capital rule.

How to work with Joost to extend your entertainment brand, Henrik Werdelin (Chief creative officer, Joost)

• people are increasingly consuming an audience online, but how do people find the stuff to watch?
• social discovery is underdeveloped. The whole internet seems to be centered around Google and SEO
• the web is bad at helping people find stuff they didn’t know they wanted to watch
• new content discovery methods are algorithmic (amazon, joost, iplayer)
  and equivalent to zapping / channel-hopping (i.e stumbleupon)
• “you should watch this show about pandas” vs “28 of your friends really love this show…” – Joost uses FB connect to help with this sort of social discovery
• ‘ behaviour generated content’ AKA ’social triggers’: generating user content without having to do anything. e.g. FB activity feeds from status changes. Going from single to married used to be just a metadata change is now an item of activity in a feed. And an important one.
• personalisation: subscriptions & data visualisation
• realtime-web: co-watching. what are your friends doing right now?
• 2% creators, 8% particpators, 90% lurkers/passive viewers. How do you move the 90 into the 8 and 2?
• Paradox of Choice
• Joost design based on ‘freedom from choice’, i.e. preventing people feeling overwhelmed.

Using online narrative and social media to drive commercial value, Andrew Piller (Fremantle Media)

• new media strategy: recycle, extend and create
• era of self-expression & the rise of the prosumer
• audience is broader than you think (not just 16-24 year olds) and niche communities are valuable
• rules for content: personalised, participatory and narrative (if there’s no story, how will the audience engage?)
• ingredients: linear narrative (lean back mode), non linear (lean forward / real-time), interactivity, community
• “all of our experiences are underpinned by community”
• Freak (goes live July 20th.) is a Freemantle co-production with MySpace currently in production (story from Broadcast Now) is the first UK online drama from MySpace. “We’d never let the audience decide the story but how they get there, the everyday decisions, can be affected and influenced by the audience”.
• Lead character is a girl gamer. Brand partners include P&G (Tampax) and Red Bull. Brand opportunities for music, fashion, games, …
• producer from Coronation St, director from Hollyoaks, creative prod from serial drama, AP is very young, we have a community manager.
• Brands want new ways to talk to their customer
• Brands (think they) want community “but don’t know how to create it”
• Q: where did the idea come from? A: In house creative team for d
• Q: how do you work with other social networks? A: YouTube platform where you can view the content too, but the experience is bespoke to MySpace. In the dream world you’d hyper-syndicate and use it to drive back to MySpace.
• Q: do you need MySpace? A: Brands are nervous about the space, so it’s easier if you have a distributor on-board. Industry needs a gamechanger to prove the model. Kate Modern & Lonely Girl were good examples, but the scale and production values were not there.
• Q: how does the international model work? A: Not geo-blocked. We’ve cleared the rights internationally, but we’re not going to promote internationally. We think we can take the format to US market or European territories later.
• Q: who owns the content and format? A: Intellectual Property is owned by Freemantle, but the UK series is co-owned by MySpace.
• Q: is a TV series on the agenda? A: It’s not the on the agenda, but it’s talked about.

How Xbox used the social media space at E3, Maurice Wheeler (co-founder and planning director, Digital Outlook)

• Microsoft asked us if we’d go out there and create a social media explosion around Xbox at E3. With 3 weeks notice. Gave us a view of what they’re presenting and announcing at E3.
• we wanted to get the interesting info to social media power users / mavens / connectors
• aggregation: wanted to focus people on our conversations. Listening to what people are saying. Consolidating to a stream of content which comes out of the social media cloud. “Sucking out the interesting and exciting content”. Feedback loop
• providing content to a social media savvy audience in a way that they’re happy with an comfortable with
• flew 5 influential gamer bloggers and 5 social media power users (including Charlie, to E3).
• primary platforms: twitter, youtube, audioboo, kyte, flickr
• secondary platforms: qik, 12 seconds, facebook, seesmic, bambuser, blip.tv, moblog, wordpress.com and many more
• Q: how much of that would have happened without you? A: we can tell from the hashtag we used that we affected it [I'd agree. Just. Compare xboxe3 vs e3]
• tips: create a #tag, have a distribution channel established, pick the right people, understand local technology constraints (e.g. make sure you’ve got wifi coverage), have a plan B, C and D

Inside the brain of Adam Curtis

Posted by Roo - 19/06/09 at 05:06:19 pm

I don’t often talk about work projects, but I cant hold my tongue about this one. I’ve been rather excited about it for a while, and it went live today.

Adam Curtis is the documentary filmmaker behind ‘The Power of Nightmares‘, ‘The Century of the Self‘ and more. Recently, he’s done some pieces for Screenwipe about the rise and fall of the television journalist and another about ‘oh dearism’ in the news for Newswipe.

Well, he’s going to start blogging about his work and ideas on the BBC. In fact, the Adam Curtis blog launched today at bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis. Hurrah.

Adam writes: “This is a website expressing my personal views – through a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives.”

All rather exciting. Of course, the rights issues with some of the clips, and especially the music, make it hard to publish them all for an internet-wide audience and sadly some of the content has to be restricted to the UK for right reasons, but the plan is for as much as possible to be globally available as the blog goes forward.

Some related links:

• It Felt Like a Kiss – Adam Curtis and Felix Barrett with Punchdrunk, original music by Damon Albarn – Manchester International Festival, 2nd – 19th July 2009
• Guardian video about ‘It Felt Like a Kiss’
• The Register – inside Adam Curtis’ funhouse
• Update: (Saturday) – Charlie Brooker’s piece in this weekend’s Guide has an interview, and concludes with “TV industry! Here’s a little bombshell for you. From now on, all of Curtis’s work will be produced first and foremost for the internet…”

While I’m pimping BBC blogs, other recent-ish blog launches you might have missed:

• Mark Beaumont Cycling the Americas
• Last Chance To See with Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine
• BBC Comedy
• Being Human
• Mark Kermode (which has been around for a while, but I absolutely love the way he’s responding to comments).

Alternatives to ‘UGC’

Posted by Roo - 07/05/09 at 10:05:32 pm

I’ve started reading the research paper on User Generated Content undertaken by Cardiff University and the BBC. ugc@thebbc: Understanding its impact upon contributors, non-contributors and BBC News.

The study involved 10 weeks of ethnographic shadowing in BBC newsrooms, interviews with 115 journalists and 12 senior managers, analysis of a range of radio and television broadcasts and online content, plus a MORI poll of the British public, an online survey and 12 focus groups. Phew. 63 pages of report means I have not read all of it yet, but Robin Hamman (who was involved in sponsoring the project, has digested it here. Most of it is centered around the use of contributions from users around News, but there are a great many interesting general observations in there, and will give me much to chew over in coming days.

One conclusion instantly caught my eye though:

“The term User Generated Content is inappropriate and inadequate and should be replaced with Audience Material”

And the paper goes on to use ‘Audience Material’ (in preference to ‘UGC’) throughout. Now, I have as many problems with the term UGC as the next person, and it’s not a new discussion, but I don’t really think ‘Audience Material’ is any clearer.

Material? It’s no more specific than content really. Just another general word for stuff.

Audience? If any word is going to make people at the BBC think of its users as content consumers, to whom we must broadcast, that’s probably the one. Please let’s not reinforce the idea that users are an ‘audience’ or, still worse, ‘consumers’ (as in ‘consumer generated media’. Urgh).

I don’t really have a better alternatives, though I’ve always thought that user contributed content was slightly nicer, if only because I like the emphasis on contribution over generation.

Any others?

Apprentice Live Predictor

Posted by Roo - 15/04/09 at 09:04:53 pm

For the next hour I’ll mainly be watching the Apprentice.

Except I won’t. Not just watching anyway. A few weeks ago, I talked about the Apprentice and Twitter and if you’re anything like me, you generally watch TV with a laptop open. This is sometimes known as a ’second screen’ experience (I even recently heard it called, heaven help us, ‘double dipping’).

There are quite a few examples of social telly projects out there, and that list is far from comprehensive. Mac Morrison has been thinking about the web and live TV as an event and reminds us of Tom Coates’ thoughts on social set top boxes from way back in 2005.

Well, now there’s this. You might like it.

The Apprentice live predictor is quite simple really. You predict who you think will get fired, can change your mind at any time, and score points based on how long you were backing (um, what’s the opposite of backing?) the person who finally gets the finger.

It’s not a competition (really), it doesn’t influence the show (it couldn’t possibly, since the show is pre-recorded) and it’s not (really) chat-around-content as some of the social telly examples were, because the messages are pre approved and hand picked by the site editor. That means that a secondary game, which I found myself playing last week, becomes trying to leave a comment witty enough, quickly enough, to get picked by the host/edtior.

The predictor is a nice example of participation around live television which isn’t just about adding open chat around a video stream. Fun, game-like elements interest me a lot more really. I think the best bit is watching how the fickle public prediction changes in response to the candidates doing and saying stupid things.

It’s been running for the last three weeks. In case you’ve missed it until now, here’s what it looked like during the closing minutes of boardroom scene last week. I waited for a week before posting this, to reduce the spoiler risk.

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.

Social Telly – a roundup of social viewing stuff

Posted by Roo - 25/11/08 at 10:11:22 pm

Television has always been a social thing. Whether it’s because you’re watching it with family and friends at home, watching football in the pub, chatting at school or work with friends about that programme that you all love the night before, television is about much more than a broadcast.

During the recent US election, I was being rather traditional, tucked up in bed listening to Radio 4 (quite different from my approach in the 2005 UK general election, when Nick and I were even live-blogging the action). While I was being sleepy and passive this year, my friend Jo was being social online. Here’s what her screen looked like, complete with live-streaming BBC News, IM chat and Twitter.

I’ve been building this list for ages, but it’s finally time for a roundup of social viewing tools. Here are some examples of how the web is being used to make different sorts of conversations possible around television:

Curation and communities

• There are a few blogs about television. Watchification is “selecting the really good stuff from the BBC iPlayer…” and other sources. (Disclaimer: I’m the tech geek behind the curtains at Watchification). Curation is interesting. By highlighting Twitter, Delicious and Flickr content, the tag pages are getting (IMHO) more useful too.

• Smashing Telly is “a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web”. Like Watchification, it’s an example of comments around curated programmes rather than live chat.

Social recommendations

• I keep hearing people asking ‘what’s the last.fm of television?’ Dan recently sent me an invite to Boxee, which apparently
  

  “gives you a true entertainment experience to enjoy your movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr.”

  I’ve only just started using it, and although it seems far from perfect it is only an alpha at this stage. The integration with other platforms, the desktop app and the last.fm-like scrobbling looks interesting.

• TIOTI has been around for a bit longer than Boxee. It invites you to:
  

  Find your favorite TV shows and brand new ones you’ll love, Share shows you like with your friends and see what they are watching, Download or stream TV shows from dozens of places online, Get involved and post your thoughts, improve our guide or add pics and vids.

Annotations

• YouTube started offering video annotations after Google acquired Omnisio but only (so far) gives the video uploader a way to add annotations to the video, so it’s not (yet?) a social annotation tool.
• Viddler, on the other hand, offer time-stamped comments and tagging, which are displayed along the video timeline and (by default) pop up at the appropriate time.

Playing the backchannel

• CurrentTV recently partnered with Twitter to display relevant Twitter updates live on-screen. Discuss the presidential debates while watching it (using Twitter tags) and have your comment displayed on TV.

• MTV’s Backchannel takes a different approach to annotating episodes of The Hills, turning the process of ‘tagging’ and ‘clicking’, to endorse a tag, into a game. Playing Backchannel won’t (as far as I can tell) stream the show to you, you just play in the browser while you’re watching the show at the same time.

Live chat

• When I think of live chat around TV, I think of Joost. Joost’s ‘channel chat’ has been overhauled a couple of times since the early days (I seem to remember it being initially based on IRC, then in 2007 they announced a partnership with Meebo) and more recently it seems to have gone away completely since they moved to Flash (or am I missing it?).

• BanterTV combines iPlayer simulcast embeds with real-time chat.

• The Electric Sheep Company’s WebFlock provides features for social viewing including
  

  a visually immersive environment for social interaction, media consumption and game play

• Lycos Cinema is “is Synchronized Movie Watching” (complete with a frankly horrible introductory video) and invites you to
  

  Watch thousands of movies and tv shows with your friends and chat live while you watch.

• What about the BBC? Anthony Rose recently announced some prototype work with Microsoft, in which iPlayer was hooked up to Windows Live Mesh. This was announced recently at Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference and blogged in more detail by Microsoft’s Marc Holmes. Strategic, or experiment? You decide.

Of all of them, I find the asychronous chat using comments in the timeline on Viddler, and the game-playing elements of MTV’s Backchannel to be the most interesting. There must be lots of examples I’ve missed, but it’s an area I’ll continue to watch with interest.