SimonWaldman.net

Like all the best theories - this one is at best half-baked, and it’s been rushed out in time for Easter. But, I think there’s something there…perhaps.

So this is the question that’s been bugging me. When did we all get so willing to share so much information about ourselves with strangers?

Forget the technology, Ajax, buzzwords and theories, at the heart of so much that is happening on the web is people’s willingness to reveal copious amounts of information about themselves online.

Blogging, myspace profiles, Flickr accounts, twittering, last.fm accounts, del.icio.us bookmarks, videos on youtube - what was once private has become instantly public. Call me all coy and English - but even though I take part in this myself (to an extent) it seems like a remarkable shift. How has that happened? And why? Or has technology just taken the seed of something that already existed in society and blown it up out of all recognisable proportion.

I saw Jimmy Wales speak a while ago at an FT conference - the quote that really stuck in my mind from his presentation was - after he’d pointed out that the technology underlying Wikipedia was actually quite old - ‘this is a social innovation, not just a technological innovation‘.

Rather annoyingly he then skipped on to something else. Annoying, because it begs the question what’s driving this social innovation? What made it happen?

As I mentioned when wittering on about OhMyNews (and as Robb Montgomery followed up in a comment) - that site’s initial success was completely intertwined with the political landscape in South Korea at the time. I sense that like successful magazines capture the mood of the moment (Loaded, Heat and Grazia in the UK) online activity succeeds not because of great programming (that just choses winning implementation from losing) but because it chimes with the mood and needs of the time.

There is a lot written about a sense of community - a general sense of activity for the greater good. I like this idea, but I fear it is what we’d like it to be - rather than what it actually is . It also sidesteps the fact that a lot of what happens in communal spaces online is also destructive, the much vaunted Tragedy of the Commons.

Everything starts with a single selfish act

My general rule of thumb has been that most successful communal activity starts by people making a single selfish act. So, del.icio.us for examples starts out as a way of storing your bookmarks - but when tens and hundreds of thousands of people act in this selfish way, it takes on a new dimension.

Similarly Flickr - here’s a handy way to store your photos online, but as everyone takes part..well we know what happens next.

But that makes it all too functional. I still believe (and call me a cynic) that much communal activity is the result of selfish acts - but I think that selfish act isn’t simply about, say, being able to store your photos online.

I posed this question to my friend Sue, who works in advertising and is generally considered to be quite smart. Her answer (and I paraphrase) was ‘I think that once you scrape below the surface, most people do most things to make up for the lack of attention they got as children‘.

Well - I’ll skip the psychology thing of this - but the idea that what we are seeing unravel before us is millions and millions of people scrabbling for attention, really works for me.

Just as John Lanchester said at the end of his review of Web 2.0 hotshots in Weekend a few months ago

Everybody sitting at a computer screen is alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is at the centre of the world. Everybody sitting at a computer screen, increasingly, wants everything to be all about them.

There has been much talk about ‘The attention economy‘ - where our attention is seen as an increasingly scarce commodity that companies now have to fight for. This (very fine) write up on ReadWriteWeb for example sees The Attention economy as a way of putting the user back in control. It’s a head to head battle between (little old) us and (big bad) them.

But I think there’s another attention economy - and this is based on the attention that we all crave from each other - a peer-to-peer attention economy.

And in this new world, the joyous - or perhaps troubling fact - is that attention, once a ethereal immeasurable thing, has been quantified and hard coded into every element of Web 2.0.

The KPIs of attention seekers

Around blogging a whole litany of services have blossomed that allow bloggers to monitor the attention they receive. You look at your site stats a thousand times a day. You check an RSS feed of a search for your name/ URL on technorati and you monitor the number of links on your technorati cosmos in the same way that Bridget Jones monitors her weight.

Your flickr account tells you how many times each picture has been viewed, lets you see who has commented or favourited your pics.
Your friends list on MySpace/Bebo, the number of ’snogs’ you get on a site like ‘flirtomatic‘, names that feature on your MyBlogLog widget. In the real world these are immeasurable looks, glances and innuendo. Online they are cold hard stats - the KPIs of attention seekers.

And, I’d argue that much that is seen as communal behaviour is in fact attention seeking. Putting comments on people’s blogs; adding them to your blogroll - is a perfect act. It attracts attention to yourself, while also paying attention to your target. Why put your photos on Flickr rather than a more private environment like Box.net? Doh! because if you put them on Flickr, people are going to stumble across and say they’re pretty good..

But, given that attention is a finite commodity - even with a nearly infinite number of people out there - you have to compete for it. So, it’s not enough to have a really boring MySpace profile you have to tart it up - ditch the boring pic and give us one of your six-pack. There is no point having a blog, and just posting once a quarter - you have to post five times a day. And the system works - because the more you put in (or perhaps put out) the more attention you get back. And you can measure it. Hell, you can almost touch it.

And the beauty is it sort of works for everyone who takes part. They used to say that no-one knows you’re a dog on the internet. With photos everywhere, and people putting more and more of themselves online - anonymity is no longer the attraction. Everyone will know you’re a dog - but the thing is, there’s bound to be plenty of canine fanciers out there somewhere looking for you.
And if you can’t be bothered playing it this way - then you get disruptive. And this is why trolls and wreckers are just the flipside of the same attention-seeking coin. It’s simply the quickest route to grab the most attention.

In this economy, then - the real value goes to those who provide the tools and the environments that allow us to secure the attention we need. On a grand scale this can be MySpace or Flickr, but at a more local level, it can be Technorati or a simple stats package.

So to go back to one of my original questions - is there something new here? No - but I do think, as I said, something quite old fashioned - our need for attention - has been exploded into something previously unrecognisable.

Anything is better than being ignored

When the Guardian’s Dorian Lynsky was talking about people commenting on his articles/ reviews and how he dealt with criticism, he concluded

No amount of abuse at the foot of a blog is quite as disheartening as the dread phrase: “Comments (0)”.

In other words - even a journalist used to publishign work on a regular basis feels the need for such measurable levels of attention as the number of comments that follow one of his reviews.

Is it a bad thing? Actually, you could argue the opposite way - if it means that people are getting and feeling the attention they crave and that they might have been deprived of without the net to facilitate it; and they are happier and more capable of dealing with the real world as a result - it can be a fantastic thing. If it means a refuge into cyberspace as the only place where any attention can be found - then, it’s not good - but there’s more going on there. It’s an effect of trouble, not a cause of it.

What is a worry is that in the scrabble for attention we let too much of ourselves out of the bag. There are things that employers, future partners, friends and family simply don’t want to know (and, for that matter, that stalkers groomers shouldn’t be allowed to know).

And what about those who shriek in horror at the thought of self-exposure? Well it’s not that they don’t seek attention - more that they either get it elsewhere, or like Dorian Lynsky their real fear is a most measurable failure.

I will of course be following how much attention this post gets. Incessantly.

Alex at Read/WriteWeb offers a summary of what RSS offers - and more importantly currently lacks - that can be understood even by non-techies (ok, not complete non-techies). He poses the core question of whether RSS could become the common format for a semantic web. If anyone knows the answer…please do tell.

I’m finding myself rather fond of the very un-hyped, Google Notebook as a sort of private mini-del.icio.us (handy to have separate note books for home, and stuff I might get round to blogging about etc).

Richard’s quick aside about offering the sort of analysis that can only be done on the web, has got me thinking.

He points to the pure genius of Gapminder which manages to tell you dozens of stories with graphics, data and animation in seconds, that would take thousands and thousands of words to tell otherwise.

The current frenzy with mash-ups has set everyone off mapping everything to everything. It’s almost always quite smart - but does it actually help? And does it tell a story any better?

Twittervision is rather like twitter itself, strangely compelling but not hugely useful. What’s interesting is the way that putting this on a map, rather than as a constant stream of text (even with a flag or location attached) gives a fantastic sense of scale. For some strange reason I’m much more interesting in watching this collection of random utterances from strangers popping up round the globe than getting text messages from people I actually know telling me they’re about to go on the tube/ feed the cat etc.

I am rather attracted to Platial and if I had the time, I would finish off my ‘There are places I remember map’ and turn it into a spectacular mapped autobiography, rather than a half-arse list of places I’ve lived. That said - I quite like this tale of a mis-spent youth - but I’m not sure a map is the best way to represent it.

I suppose it only works when the spatial difference between two points really matters. Or when you start to see clusters of similar activity. For example, although I doubt it’s comprehensive, this map of Web 2.0 HQs points to a very vibrant European scene.

And Adrian Holovaty’s Chicago crime is a case book example of how a map really can tell a story. One look at this and you know where not to walk after dark. The problem is you have to click pretty carefully to eventually find your story - it’s more a tool for a reporter, rather than a substitute for one.

Nature, has garnered lots of plaudits for it’s Avian Flu/ Google Earth mash up (.kml file here) because the very crux of that story was how it was spreading globally. It’s just a shame that they seem to have given up before it made it on to the UK.

But, Buzztracker - looks gorgeous, and is clearly a work of considerable genius, but is in fact pretty useless. Why? Well, actually - all it would really need to work well is a filter on the news. So, if for example ti was only headlines about global warming related incidents, then both the mapping and the interrelationships would be tremendously useful.

Similarly - Ben O’Neills mash up of Google maps and BBC news doesnt’ really do it for me. Yes, it’s very smart - but unless there is some grading of the different type of stories - the map is actually a pretty weak introductory tool.

In print - Campaign does this thing where they show a map of the world - with arrows coming off it and stories scattered around the map. I’ve always thought this to be quite a dumb tool - what matter is the relative priority of these stories - normally represented by headline weight etc - rather than their distribution.

However, using a map as a navigation tool for the most popular stories on the BBC news site as part of their live stats package is really rather neat, but it’s not strictly necessary. What makes it both necessary and illuminating is the mix of that and the display of volumes of usage by geographic region.

Elsewhere, I can’t help thinking that this BBC History Interactive map on the slave trade actually makes it harder to follow the story than easier. I suspect that’s because it’s actually telling a story where the defining characteristic is chronological - not geographical.

Anyway - that’s a long ramble. I suspect someone has written a dissertation or two on this, but here’s my concluding thought. Nothing original I suspect: A map works only if the location of events is the key story that you’re trying to get across - and it’s either going to be the similarity or dramatic difference in location of comparable events/ information.

From e-Week Google watch: “Of all the masturbatory ego-fluffers on the Web, nothing chafes me worse than Twitter:.

Agency next: Twittering is for twits

Blogconsultancy: Brits are twitters

Hitwise stats: It’s teeny but growing

I tried it, didn’t like it. Which probably means it’s going to be enormous.

So I thought I should investigate Twitter. Then I found out that I could install a Twicker widget except my old template wasn’t sorted out for widgets. So I thought I really needed a new template…so here we are. The Twitter thing, I’m still not convinced about (I have few twittering friends in the real world), but I’m rather impressed by Scott Wallick’s minimalist Wordpress templates. I’ve ended up with his Blog.txt - perhaps the tidiest thing I’ve ever had anywhere ever.

Would, I think, be linkedin mashed with del.icio.us. Could someone sort this please?

The full Gowers review on intellectual property will probably take a while for me to get through, but a quick skim turns up this gem in a section on Fair usage

Google explain in their response to the call for evidence: “The existence of a general fair use exception that can adapt to new technical environments may explain why the search engines first developed in the USA, where users were able to rely on flexible copyright exceptions, and not in the UK, where such uses would have been considered infringement”.

Oh really? I bet that when they passed this notion around in internal e-mails it was followed by a big ‘;-)‘.

I find it hard to believe they’ve included this quote in the report in all seriousness, without at least the words ‘Chinny Reckon’ in brackets after it.

It’s a nimble bit of debating on Google’s point - but rather defies the sort of empirical logic they have built their business on.

1) If the UK had led the way in all other web development except for search engines, this might have appeared to be the case. I think we know that’s not true.

2) I seem to remember Autonomy launching a consumer facing version of its search engine - it bombed, not for copyright reasons, but because well, there were better ones out there.

Actually - the one case where our law stifles innovation is in the murky world of the liability for community sites for defamation and contempt. But that’s to be discussed another time.

Oh and swapping Silicon Fenn for Silicon Valley might change a few things.

…is launched today. It’s not just a clean lick of paint, but a fundamental change in the way that we deliver content. The result of spectacular efforts by a very gifted team…
You can find out more about some of the back end loveliness from Nik Silver’s blog.

In relationship terms, I think it’s pretty fair to say that GTD and I could best be described as fuckbuddies. We get together every so often and have a great time, then for no apparent reason it all falls apart and we go our separate ways - but the next time I’m feeling a bit confused/ messed up I know I can always count on her it.

Obviously we’ve tried all sorts of aids in our relationship - but none of them seem to last. So, I’m not going to get too excited about the latest: Tracks, which I’ve been using now on and off for a few months.

It’s a very neat Webapp, that lets you clock all your actions by Project and Context. It’s a little too purist GTD for my liking (no sorting by date - or project for that matter), but I can forgive that.

The problem for not particularly technical little old me, is that it’s a ruby app. Now, the options are either that you install it on your hard drive on a server, which as any fule kno is already there with Mac OSX - but you need to use the command line (uh oh!). I looked at the instructions, and was lost within about half a second.

So, I got someone at Textdrive to install it here on simonwaldman.net - which was money well spent. But then I started commuting, which meant I couldn’t use it in my critical ‘doing stuff’ time. So I ditched it, and went to a tweaked list on OmniOutliner (yes, I know about Kinkless, but I only have 10.3.9 on here). Good - but not special enough.

Anyway, one night when I should have been paying more attention to my duties as husband and father, I stumbled across a solution - that meant you could install Tracks on your hard drive without any command line action, thanks to a programme called Locomotive.

So I did it, and it didn’t work. And just as I was about to jack it all in, I upgraded to the latest version of Locomotive (2.0.7) , and guess what, it only went and bleeding worked! Cor lummy, governor…these days I’m running Ruby apps on my local server. And it’s all running off a flash drive! If only my old friends could see me now!