medborgarmedier (the thing i’m in sweden for)

medborgarmedier
Originally uploaded by robinhamman.

I’m not exactly sure what the title means, but I’m in Karlstad, Sweden – the self proclaimed, and currently somewhat overcast, “city of sunshine” – where I’ll be giving a presentation tomorrow morning.

I’ll post up the presentation as soon as I figure out how to undo the terrible things I did with custom slide actions in powerpoint. My mac became very unhappy whilst I was reviewing my presentation last night. An automatic login script kicked after I brought it back from sleep mode and crashed the machine. I almost immediately recalled Dan Gillmor’s recent post about always carrying a hard drive with a clone of the mac… and realised how silly I was not to have done the same. Dozens of tries and an hour long call to London at 5am later and all is well again, but I won’t have time to get these slides online now. Apologies for that. I’ll also try to get an Below you’ll find an outline up here tonight in advance of the presentation just in case the venue has wifi and the audience feels like following along and commenting here.

There’s more here in Swedish.

Part 1:

1-2. A bit about my background – I was and early participant (1985) in online communities and was a great believer in them, both from the standpoint of them having a positive impact upon society and individuals and also from a business perspective. Online communities gave people a place to call their own and, like the local pub that maybe didn’t have the best prices, nicest decor, etc, community members would remain loyal, increasing repeat visits.

3-4. But the online community model has costs that people don’t think about before setting them up – client side developers to integrate them into websites, registration systems, applications, application servers, etc. There are also editorial costs – primarily moderation – which don’t scale well: the more active participants there are, the greater the costs.

5. Another model used by mainstream media companies is the “send it to us” approach. Again, this doesn’t scale well: someone has to sift through the flood of content, and fluffy kittens, that arrives when a call to action is made.

6. The Comedy Central iReporter spoof video (they keep removing it from YouTube but you might find it there)

7. One problem that a lot of news and media organisations probably haven’t thought of is that audiences may very well become wary of submitting content that’s never used. The recent phone in vote scandal in the UK highlighted the fact that audiences don’t like it when their participation isn’t counted. Could there be a backlash amongst people who send photos, texts and emails that are never used?

8. Summary – Part 1

a. Vague calls to action often lead to flood of unusable content
– Waste of users’ time, effort and money
– Lack of transparency can destroy trust

b. Owning the platform = owning technical costs and risks
– applications, server side developers, client side developers, designers, project managers, server boxes, bandwidth… it all costs money
– and there’s probably already something better…

c. Owning the content = owning the editorial, legal risks
– the Achilles heal of moderation (safety vs “censorship”)
– user safety (and the tabloids)
– libel, contempt of court, election rules, duty of care (?), copyright

d. SUCCESS DOESN’T SCALE WELL

Part 2:

1. Then along came blogging…

2 – 4. What’s a blog?

5. Money can be a motivating factor but not for most bloggers (I used the Guido “£21k to get out of bed” comment to illustrate – will add link to that post here later when I dig it up)

6 – 12. My 3 models of blogs

Part Three

1 – 10. The BBC Manchester Blog project (very similar to this presentation from the EBU conference in Geneva)

Part Four

1 – 7. Examples from BBC, Guardian, etc where the stuff formerly known as user generated content has been used as a source of contacts, context and content. [Includes Guardian’s Bobbie Johnson quoting from Search Engine Land in piece about Yahoo-Microsoft; Washington Post 1/3 referrers come from blogs; Nick Cohen in the Observer enthusing about mil blogger; Guardian story on 3 year old abducted in Portugal, quoting from mumsnet.com “talkboards”; PostSecret… in the Observer; Iain Dale on BBC News 24; Paul’s Virginia Tech shooting LiveJournal post with ABC News screenshot]

8. Some quotes to reflect upon:

Alice Gould
Emily Bell
Dan Gillmor
Patrick Barkham (see related)
Jeff Jarvis
Jarvis (2)