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I had been looking for a way into discussing what is defined as ‘social media’ when I encountered this funny post in which the author alludes to its panoptical nature. It provoked a lot of rattling of cell bars in the comments though no one recognised that the problem lies in the definition itself.

In this shared reality people ‘go and do stuff on the web’. In the parallel world of marketing these people may or may not be described as ‘participating in social media’. It has been defined as:

“… a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues into dialogues… the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content or consumer-generated media.”

Similar to this argument that the web is neither subject nor object we should question our acceptance of the idea that ‘social’ is part of the fabric of the ‘media’ itself rather than an outcome of the discourse it provokes.

Before the term was used by certain groups of experts, was contributing to forums, newsgroups, using IRC or sending group emails social media? Was participating on Plastic back in the distant days of 2001 social media? How about chatting with friends? Or painting on the wall of a cave?

Here’s my alternate definition:

“The monitoring of comment and opinion on the web by power elites for the purposes of reporting and response with the goal of altering the perception surrounding the interests of the organisation concerned.”

Why the difference? Well, if you consider what the definition is trying to describe then nothing has actually changed apart from the fact that what is loosely called ‘conversation’ can now be interrogated as part of a permanent and ever-expanding dossier of people’s opinions. The evidence is also found in the language used, that these definitions are being created by self-appointed gatekeepers to knowledge who understand that this perception management is geared towards attaining ‘competitive advantage’ for their clients and themselves and that in the main this movement is driven by the profit motive.

Take this chap, a self-described “evangelist of social media”, and his identification of this issue:

“How do these corporations intend to use these vast records of our behavior… corporations whose main motivation is not in service of ‘customer empowerment’ but on the traditional goals of manipulating behavior to grow their share of wallet.”

Customer empowerment is the same as the profit motive in this context. He can’t see beyond this, thinking our defining role in society is as consumers, confused as to which side of the bars he is actually on.

This artificial distinction that is called social media by its proponents could more accurately be seen and described as an attempt to form a social technocracy via the co-option of ideas that define a suitable existing framework, i.e. the web. To further the achieving of this goal it is useful to question the ‘nature of the thing’, not to develop the ‘thing’ per se but to give it a discrete integrity that then allows the testing of the boundaries that presently define it, e.g. referencing The Enlightenment is an attempt to give it both a historicity and a validity for the purposes of advancing the overarching agenda.

Update: I am sobbing quietly. Responsibility rests with this post entitled: Social Media is the New Punk. There is a hideous video with sound and everything. I rest my case.

This is great. I love the fact that this designer has taken a ubiquitous and clunky item and redesigned it to become something svelte and more easily portable. Plugs, with their bulk and three prongs are a pain to pack and transport.

Three-prong folding plug design

(via BoingBoing Gadgets)

At the other end of the scale is this, a winner of an award but really no more than an exercise in futility and graphic design. Unlike the above this project is not a serious attempt to solve a problem through good design as the issue of bike use in the city is more mundane. We already have bikes. We do not need more expensive bikes with transparent solar panels in the wheels. What we do need is more bike lanes, more roads closed to vehicles, more bike racks, bike theft to be taken more seriously by the police, more shared space, vehicle users who respect cyclists right to space, cyclists who respect pedestrians right to space and pedestrians who don’t bumble in front of cyclists.

A solution in search of a problem

(via Wired Gadget Lab)

What do you think of my suggestion?

Hoverboard from ‘Back to the Future Part II’

It too is based on non-existent technology and also solves the problem of urban mobility in a functional space-saving design. Award please.

Terrible article over on The Guardian about the recent protests in London. Not only is it poorly written it reveals the insulting contempt those in power have for the right to protest. No great surprise as any act of protest is, of course, a challenge to their ‘legitimate’ authority. So bad is this article I’ve actually had to pull it apart as there are too many points to easily roll into a neat flowing post.

“Untrained officers must never again be put in the frontline of policing public protests… some inexperienced officers, who were clearly quite scared, used ‘inappropriate force’.”

Define ‘untrained’. Untrained to do what? Deal with members of the public? Deal with a large crowd? This notion of inexperience is a get-out, pure and simple, to put the blame on an understandable human reaction such as fear to explain what were pre-determined police tactics to suppress dissent.

“Their inquiry also calls for the police to seriously consider whether they can continue with the use of tactics such as kettling and the controlled use of force against those who appear hostile…”

What the hell does “seriously consider” mean? Surely the police should be told that the use of kettling against citizens who are exercising their democratic rights is illegal as is the  meting out of pre-meditated beatings to anyone who is thought to deserve it. Unfortunately this segment is not a direct quote and demonstrates the problems with relying on a journalist’s take on what has been said.

“… film footage of those incidents shocked the public and have the potential to undermine trust in the police… the ability of the public… to monitor every single action of the police through… mobile phones and video equipment means they have to take even greater care to ensure that all their actions are justifiable.”

Here’s the nub of the issue. Up until fairly recently it was common for the media to report on protests by quoting the police as saying one thing and the ‘organisers’ saying another, e.g. the often wildly differing accounts of the number of individuals involved in a demo. This makes it easy to obscure the truth of what went on under the weight of tit-for-tat claims. Video footage of stony-faced officers dressed in riot gear using the edges of their shields to smack people in the face who can’t move due to the crush of the crowd doesn’t need a few hundred words of copy from some paid hack to muddy the waters of what actually happened. That said, the ability of the public to watch the watchers shouldn’t be the determining factor in ensuring that the police don’t abuse their power.

“The MPs repeat their belief that there are no circumstances in which it is acceptable for police officers not to wear their identification numbers and urge those who consciously remove them to face the strongest disciplinary action.”

So, how many investigations are in progress regarding such incidents? How many officers have ever been disciplined for removing their numbers? Is it a tactic that a blind-eye is turned towards or are certain officers advised to do so by their superiors? What does “consciously remove” mean anyway; is ‘forgetting’ to wear your numbers therefore an acceptable excuse?

The language used in this article makes it sound suspiciously like this MPs inquiry has precisely no power to get the police to do much of anything.

“He (Commander Bob Broadhurst) said there were 2,500 officers who had only two days of public order training a year and the vast majority of whom had never faced a situation as violent as the G20 protest before.”

Are we to simply accept without challenge his assessment that this was a violent situation and that such violence as occurred was not as a result of police tactics such as kettling? Apparently so.

“Denis O’Connor, the chief inspector of constabulary is considering whether to endorse a ‘human rights-based’ approach to policing advocated by Sir Hugh Orde, the incoming chief of the Association of Chief Police Officers.”

This says it all. Yes, I would consider that the police, who are there to serve the public, should base their approach on the ways it is decent and proper to treat reasonable people who are going about their lawful business. The worst of it is that amid the death of one person and the beating of others the actual issue of that day doesn’t even warrant a mention. Which is all very convenient for MPs who would rather not debate why it is thousands of people are out on the streets demonstrating.

I was going to skip writing about this at it was dull but if nothing else it’s worth putting in a supporting link to Chloe’s excellent assessment of the phenomenon of Malcom Gladwell. I do not use the word lightly. Anyone who can fill Brighton Dome with paying punters and say absolutely nothing for an hour is a phenomenon. Something is going on here that evokes curiosity; possibly leading to a Gladwell-esque observation about the human condition.  I think that it isn’t that he tells anyone anything they don’t know, it’s that he tells them things they already know but makes a certain kind of person feel cleverer for having been told that they know them; in this case through the medium of a spurious and unengaging story.

That said, Gladwell did try and distract us by saying he was going to tell us about something we didn’t know anything about which I thought was a tad presumptuous. Even moreso when he launched into a description of the battle of Chancellorsville in which the Yankees and Confederates faced each other led by General Hooker “… and General Lee” said Matt from the seat next to me. It turns out Matt knows a lot about military history. Gladwell’s subsequent asides on the most recent Iraq War based his conclusion on the official reasons for the conflict and his sprinkling of commentary on the financial crisis felt like no more than a nod to keeping up with current events.

I wanted drama, intrigue, a performance! What I got was flat. No fizz. No sparkle. Judging from the queue waiting for the book signing at the end a lot of other people there would disagree. No fuss no muss I guess, except for the fact this kind of pop sociology can lead one to trite conclusions about behaviours that are vastly more complex and do require one to look a little deeper into one’s own motivations.  Ultimately his talk lacked depth and was not about provoking new ideas; it was about flattering the audience’s credulity and his ego just a little more than that. What we all really need is to have our ideas challenged, critically and frequently, but then I suspect that wouldn’t fill so many seats.

Further reading: Is the Tipping Point Toast?, How your friends’ friends can affect your mood, The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell

If reading an 83-page Apple patent application isn’t your bag then at least skim this summary: Apple exploring wireless system for quantifying the unquantifiable over on AppleInsider. The “sprawling patent” talks of “sensing systems” that collect data about what happens to objects as they move through space and time. Although the article doesn’t use this term Apple are essentially applying for patents on a variety of types of spime, one of those technologies that, like the barcode, will have both a sudden ubiquity and a profound effect on how we view the world of manufactured objects that surrounds us.

If you want to indulge in a little further reading on what’s coming next then try When Blobjects Rule the Earth. If your interest is sufficiently piqued follow-up with  Shaping Things; both the speech and the pamphlet are by Bruce Sterling who coined this particular neologism. In fact I believe spimes first appeared, but were not referred to as such, in his 1998 novel Distraction, which is well worth a read.

I start with a clean white Google search page, I have Adblock Plus installed and use Readability to bring the content I find to the fore without any distractions. Add quietube and I’m all set:

“… watch web videos without the comments and crap…”

The excellent Kottke.org has a post on Google’s search dominance. When working on projects we need data to support our conclusions and rely on sources such as Hitwise, Comscore, Nielsen, etc. I often have serious doubts about the accuracy of the information supplied. Kottke references Comscore reporting search breaking down like so:

• 64% Google
• 20% Yahoo!
• 08% Microsoft

His own stats come out as follows:

• 94% Google
• 03% Microsoft
• 01% Yahoo!

It could be that visitors to Kottke.org fit a certain profile, perhaps not the kind of person who defaults to a portal when they open their browser. With this in mind I took a look at the analytics for a few sites I have access to, including blogs and commercial operations. The results came out as follows:

• 91% Google
• 04% Yahoo!
• 04% Microsoft

I’d be very interested to see figures from other people as this makes it look like Comscore’s data is wildly off. I wonder what the explanation could be? From my perspective Google have search completely stitched up and no-one is in much of position to challenge their dominance.

The figures show that recent articles about Wolfram Alpha or bing are either written by people with no understanding of search or who are simply keen on attention-grabbing headlines over substance and inquiry.

Update: Torrentfreak illustrates the point I make above in this post: Nielsen Hugely Underestimates BitTorrent Traffic. The inaccuracy of the data from these measurement companies is highlighted by a recent news story from The Age that quotes Nielsen data for visits by Australians to BitTorrent search engines. Apparently mininova provided their statistics so their data could be checked out. Nielsen data turned out to be wildly inacurate with traffic to mininova alone being 600% higher than Nielsen reported to a number of BitTorrent search engines. In conclusion:

Data from measurement companies isn’t worth much beyond a vague guide to broad trends

I can’t actually find Nielsen saying anything about this directly but my question to them if this is true would be: “Why should we trust any other conclusions you produce if your data is apparently so unreliable?”.

Update: I’m honour-bound to point out these results from Hitwise that show Google taking a 90%+ share of search.

The fact we may find this unpalatable says more about our modern sensibilities than about our forebears.

“Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them.”

Fernando Rozzi, Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique

Why not? Just because to our eyes Neanderthals look like us is not to say that earlier Homo sapiens didn’t see them as food. If you eat meat you should be prepared to eat any meat, not just the creatures we’ve stupefied for the purpose. Why is the eating of cow or a pig any more acceptable than dolphin or human?

The article refers to the eating of Neanderthals as the socially taboo act of cannibalism. Perhaps we owe the Great Leap Forward that happened around this time to our ancestors eating brains; this act ringing down the millenia in our collective unconscious as our fear of zombies risen to devour us as the Neanderthal was hunted by hungry humans.

Comments on this over on BoingBoing.

Apparently MPs knew this was coming down the pike for a good few years. If I was a third party who, in the public’s eyes and apparently also in their own, don’t stand a chance of getting into power I might have had the foresight to do the honourable thing and not claimed expenses en masse. Then when the two main parties impaled themselves on this issue I’d have made damn sure that being unimpeachable we’d have ridden this all the way to the next election.

Jon Snow posts on his blog that:

“According to one of my well-informed sources, David Cameron’s greatest fear about this continuing crisis is that a credible group of people will come forward and form some sort of party that will contest the next election on the basis of campaigning for one term only, to clear out the current sleaze, institute wholesale parliamentary reform, and then leave the field.”

A credible group of people… the Lib Dems should be kicking themselves that this group isn’t them.  Nick Clegg’s defence of Andrew George looked pretty weak as well it might from someone who was rinsing the system as much as possible.

More of my time is being spent preparing reports on what people are talking about on the web. There are a number of companies offering tools that do this kind of thing. The way they work is by identifying keywords in a dataset and pulling out pertinent information around the word(s) such as date of mention, where it occurred, on a webpage fitting what kind of recognised format, etc. This data is then presented in the form of a ‘dashboard’, i.e. a few charts, possibly with some sort of ’score’ attached. I prefer to work with the actual data retrieved by a crawler for particular keywords rather than use an automated summary as I want to be able to check the accuracy of the underlying information. There doesn’t seem to be an offering out there that doesn’t provide some sort of bell-or-whistle that tracks ‘influencers’ or ‘emerging trends’ or promises the dreaded ability to analyse sentiment… however:

Algorithm-based sentiment analysis doesn’t work accurately

If it were possible then natural language processing would allow me to have a friendly chat with Google when I wanted something and not have to parse my requests into a few pithy search terms. The reason sentiment analysis is a key part of tracking is that most of us who use these tools would like to believe the promise that they can discover when people are saying good or bad things about the topic we’re interested in. Unfortunately this knowledge is not perceived as valuable enough to have a real live human read and assess every mention that has been discovered so inaccurate methods are employed in an attempt to achieve useful results. Conversations on the web are human conversations with all the nuance and multiple meanings afforded by the language used and the context in which the conversation occurs, e.g. correctly identifying sarcasm is at present an impossible challenge for a computer.

If you’re looking into using one of these tools then ask these questions of the supplier:

• Can I export the data to CSV, XML, etc.?
• How do you identify and remove spam?
• On average what percentage of mentions identified constititute spam?
• How accurate is your sentiment analysis?
• Please may I see the human assessed sample of mentions versus machine assessed sentiment that you used to produce that figure?
• Which academic / research papers would you suggest I read to find out more about the fields of natural langauage and sentiment analysis?

Dashboards and scorecards are only as good as the data that lies behind them so if you can’t see the actual data or easily compare ’scores’ across multiple keywords and understand what the differences mean you should run a mile. I’ve been through and am still going through trying to make monitoring work effectively and am currently working on an efficient way of working out sentiment that is not subject to the flaws outlined above. It’s fairly obvious but as far as I’m aware no one is doing it yet, so if you’re interested in monitoring and want help or advice then please get in touch.