“We see things as we are, not as they are…” Isaac Asmiov
Hat tip to my old colleagues at ntl.
The new ntlworld site has gone live. One of the last things I worked on within the Internet Product Development team 20 months ago (before I moved to a new role) It metamorphed a few times, from an internal project to using outside contractors to outsourcing, however it was always something I have a soft spot for… strange that I am. So congrats to Peter, Steve, Chris and anyone else working on the project. You’ve got it out there!
David Wilcox offers a view on storytelling and how it can be used in any community to increase understanding in terms of research and develop a programme by getting the community to build its own stories:
…and prefer doing projects that lead to action and not just another report on the shelf… so we suggested something entirely different. As I’ve written before, we proposed that we run workshops at which residents invented fictional characters and told their life stories, so we could analyse the issues that surfaced. To our surprise, we got the job - and pressed ahead with a storytelling kit developed by Drew that we could use and also hand on to local groups to use. It’s the sort of thing that could fall flat, lead to pieces in the paper about wasting money on tale-spinning focus groups, or at best a polite thank you for the report but no follow-through.
In fact it all turned out really well, thanks to the enthusiasm of those taking part…
I’ve worked very briefly with stroytelling in the past and am a great advocate. Stuart however has taken this a lot further.
I’ve always found qualitative research more rewarding and it certainly opened lots of doors when using an unstructured interview technique, however the story model seems to achieve so much more. I especially see this with my children and how it impacts them - stories change their world and its how they interpret it.
My favourite story about ntl is how my then manager described the comapny as Anglo-Saxon Britain, full of fiefdoms, petty kings and battles being fought over nothing. One of those petty kings eventually took him out. Vital information for any new manager there I feel. When I use to tell that story, so many of the people working there would agree and bemoan the fact. I regret not trying to get their stories to take it further.
Seem to be having a problem with my tags - although they show up nicely on the entry (see below). And I think they are showing up in my feeds. However neither Technorati nor Tag Clouds seem to be picking them up.
Does any one have any ideas?
Thanks in advance!
Lloyd now has the audio of the conference up on his wiki page. Fantastic job Lloyd - Thanks!!!!
Perhaps more importantly, his articulate response to Johnnie’s anarchy has been blogged here:
I blog because I want to understand who I am and make better choices about who I want to be. I see life as an endless process of self-discovery and self-definition. When I blog, I say “This is who I am today, this is what I’ve done and this is what I think about it”. I then invite you to reflect on that and to add your experience. Both these acts, of me expressing myself and then seeing what comes back help me to remember better who I really am and how I wish to present myself to the world.
Beautiful - go read the rest…
I just realised I can look at a satellite image of where I live.
Very cool - probably only for 15 mins but coooooollllll.
Sometimes I really want to be a geek…
Oh I live here: Betaroad
Following up on some thoughts from last night.
I notice Suw has published her mindmap notes from last nights talk and her own notes on the event at Strange Attractor.
Suw takes issue with Johnnie’s view on speakers:
I disagree, however, with Johnnie’s dislike of having speakers. Yes, having speakers stand up in front of an audience does create an us-them dichotomy which is especially false when you are in a room full of your peers, but in an ideal world that’s because the speaker knows something the audience doesn’t, and the audience wants to find out what. As a speaker, I don’t feel that I seize the authority to stand up in front of people talk about the stuff I talk about, I feel that I am granted grace to do so by the audience and that I had better damn well say something interesting.
On this point I agree with Suw that a speaker doesn’t seize authority and I also agree with Johnnie that engagement and involvement are what more speakers should try and do. Its difficult when you are brought up on a diet on lectures and yet move into a world of blogging. Perhaps when I get up next to do a talk I should remind myself of this.
The aspect of authority itself though is most telling. The different definitions of authority being traded with both Johnnie and Adriana using the same dictionary.com reference to multiple meanings of the same word - just like blogging offers you multiple views of the world. Authority comes when we allow it to, whether internally from being the author of your own life to giving legitimacy to speakers, bowing to greater experience.
The emergence of this authority in blogging and of etiquette and behaviour modes is fascinating - at one point someone (apologies as to who) said that we have a means of dealing with other people, its called politeness. Well yes but then as James pointed out subversion is fun too.
So is questioning and so is storytelling. Right now blogging is interesting and fun and cool and disrupting and as Alastair Shrimpton and others suggested, going to be so not cool when it hits the real mainstream and yet still full of authority because we will give it to ourselves as affirmation and to others as little dances, with passion and with enthusiaism.
The blogtrain is running, some have seats, some will stand, but we are all going to get there, because the network and linkages are king.
It reminds me of the old adage ‘content is king’ - is it more so now that personality with content and linkages are king? Or is it interativity - the ability to have somenthing to do when you get to the endof that link i.e. post comments in a blogging context?
This is one conference that actually has me thinking more after the event than during it and that’s good. Maybe it engaged me more than I thought, maybe it affirmed and empowered me more than I thought.
The one thing i wanted to say last night and didn’t manage to get it out was that people long to make connections, and last night I made some relationship connects and some intellectual connections.
If I had a moodometer on the blog it would say VBG.
Blogging is all about conversations and it fascinates me the number of conferences about the subject tend to fall back into a broadcast rather than conversational model. BARC (as Lloyd has already acronym-ised it) was set up to be one of these but occasionally morphed into the other. More of that later…
Order of the day was two panels with three speakers each, chaired by Steve Bowbrick of Webmedia, who did a good job of keeping the event flowing.
Of most interest was her quote from a book called Out of Control by Kevin Kelly, which described the behaviour of bees when they find new food sources and how they communicate this back to the hive. The more vigourous and exciting the dance, the more bees visit that location. An excellent analogy for the virtuality that is the blogosphere.
His three points about what journalists thought about the internet (together with his impression of Powerpoint slides) were inciteful (and probably insightful too):
What he would like to see in the future - importance of human aggregators or editorial skills coming to the fore, and the emergence of a subscription model…
Nice little model of conversation - private (email), semi-public (RSS / Nokia lifeblog), Public (web).
Felt that blogging had the potential of huge change and disruption, if enough people are fed up enough to pay attention. In a business sense brands are not listening and need to et better at using the technology.
Things to note:
just back from San Francisco and helping to build Technorati’s Live 8 pages offered a view of objectivity. If anyone has studied social science at all they would of course know this, but it was interesting to lead up to the ideas of subjectivity plus transparency and acknowledged bias somehow being perceived as more worthwhile than so called objectivity.
Words to note: Fairness, Thoroughness, transparency, accuracy
Ideas to float:
Johnnie also offered a unique participatory style which encouraged contribution and was genuinely a conversation.
As I mentioned afterwards in the pub - I took notes for all the other presentations - for this I put down my pen and listened - wish I had contributed too.
Lloyd offered a brilliant reason of why he blogs, which you can hear over at his blog (not up yet) as he recorded the event (Thank you and well done).
Disruption at its best and also fascinating to watch Ceacescue’s (sic) last speech…
of the Big Blog Company was trying to focus on the marketing mix, which was tricky given what had gone before.
Key point: Blogging + transparency = credibility
Markets are conversations - storytelling, crediiblity, personality, permanence NOT advertising.
Marketers think of internet as another channel - really its what punctures the others…
Disruption comes from blogging becuase it bypasses normal channels.
Changes dynamic of interaction - speed, amplification and lack of control.
People’s attention becomes the most expensive commodity.
Quote from Sun microsystems - Andy lark “You’ve got to pay to play but every community has its price”… and that Sun has been authenticated more by blogging than advertising or branding could ever hope to achieve.
Two paths for marketing (promotion?):
- must have fallen asleep here - only thing I wrote down was:
Blogosphere immune system is attuned to deception
That is you can lie for a while but inevitably it will be found out and exposed. If that happens the damage is huge for any company.
Well those are the notes - I’ll put some more comments up later…
Just took the MIT blog survey (at last) - funny little link images. If you have ever met me, I will think you agree I am a bell curve…
Still, Grokster has turned out to be the kind of friend that assures the worst enemies. Among those enemies is a Supremely false distinciton between creativity and technology. I don’t know how we’re going to unf**k this one, but I’m sure it will take a very long time. And that tech can’t do it alone.
The most worrying point I have seen is one made by Cory Doctorow:
…what today’s decision will kill is American innovation. Chinese and European firms can get funding and ship products based on plans that don’t have to comply with this decision’s fuzzy test, while their American counterparts will need to convince everyone from their bankers to the courts that they’ve taken all measures to avoid inducing infringement. This is good news if you’re an American corporate lawyer but not if you’re an inventor creating a new way to enjoy content.
Its not that I don’t support European firms (or Chinese ones for that matter) however innovation breeds innovation. Anything that could slow this down is bad news.
Marc Canter isn’t too happy either:
This totally effects the fuure of DLAs (digital lifestyle aggregators.) I want to store my music, video and photos - the content I BOUGHT and access it from anywhere I go.
We want to provide the tools to do that.
We’ll ask all our users to agree to terms which say “I understand that the copyrights laws forbid me from illegally distributing content I haven’t paid for.”
But we sure as hell will protect our fair use rights!
So to what limits can our customers ’share’ the music they’ve legally purchased?
That’s the question.
Legal and political arguments are all interwoven in this decision, not to mention aspects of the right to intellectual property versus the commons.
I wonder if this decision will ultimately affect blogging and user created content?
If you look good and dress well, you don’t need a purpose in life.
Robert Pante
Well, that will be where I am going wrong 
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