David Jennings (combined feed)

Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization

clay — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:13:10 -0800

Last month, the American Booksellers Association published an open letter to the Justice Department, asking Justice to investigate Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon after they lowered prices of best-selling books to under $10. The threat, the ABA says, is dire: “If left unchecked, these predatory pricing policies will devastate not only the book industry, but our collective ability to maintain a society where the widest range of ideas are always made available to the public, and will allow the few remaining mega booksellers to raise prices to consumers unchecked.”

Got that? Lower prices will lead to higher prices, and cheap books threaten to reduce the range of ideas in circulation. And don’t just take the ABA’s word for it. They also quote John Grisham’s agent and the owner of a book store, who both agree that cheap books are a horrible no-good very bad thing. So bad, in fact, that the Department of Justice must get involved, to shield the public from the scourge of affordable reading. (Just for the record, the ABA is also foursquare against ebooks being sold more cheaply than paper books, and thinks maybe Justice should look into that too.)

There may have been some Golden Age of Lobbying, where this kind of hysteria would have had led to public alarm. By now, though, the form is so debauched there’s probably a Word macro for describing competition as a Looming Threat To The Republic. (or The Children, or Civilization Itself. Depends on your audience.)

It’s not surprising that the ABA would write stuff like this — it’s their job to make self-interested claims. What is surprising is that there are members of the urban cognoscenti who still believe these arguments, arguments that made some sense twenty years ago, but have long since stopped doing so.

* * *

Twenty years ago, when we had Barnes and Noble but no Amazon, there was all kinds of literature, from 2600 to Love & Rockets, from Heather Has Two Mommies to Duplex Planet, that survived mainly in the independent ecosystem, but whose host bookstores also needed to sell enough Stephen King or M. Scott Peck to stay open. Fifteen years ago, when use of the web was still a minority pursuit, online bookselling changed this game, but hadn’t yet ended it. Even ten years ago, when more than half of U.S. adults had already become internet users, there were still many book lovers not online. Though the value of bookstores in supporting variety had shrunk, it was still there.

Those days are over. Internet use is as widespread as cable TV, and an internet user in rural Utah has access to more books than a citizen of Greenwich Village had before the web. Millions more books. Like record stores and video rental places, physical bookstores simply can’t compete for breadth of offering and, also like the social changes around music and moving images, the internet is strengthening rather than weakening the ability of niches and sub-cultures to see themselves reflected in long-form writing.

The internet also moderates the competitive threat, because the competition is only a click away. Amazon lists millions of books, but so does eBay, and publishers like O’Reilly or McGraw-Hill or Alyson can sell directly to the reader. If you had to choose between buying books only offline or only online, the choice that maximizes the number of ideas in circulation is unambiguously clear. Even if all but a dozen online booksellers were to vanish, there would still be more places to buy books on the web than there are bookstores in the average American city today.

* * *

Despite the spectacular breadth of available books created by online book sellers, many lovers of bookstores echo the ABA’s “Access to literature is at stake!” argument. In my experience, people make this argument for one of three reasons.

This first is that some people simply dislike change. For this group, the conviction that the world is getting worse merely attaches to whatever seems to be changing. These people will be complaining about kids today and their baggy pants and their online bookstores ’til the day they die.

A second group genuinely believes it’s still the 1990s somewhere. They imagine that the only outlets for books between Midtown and the Mission are Wal-Mart and Barnes and Noble, that few people in Nebraska have ever heard of Amazon, that countless avid readers have money for books but don’t own a computer. This group believes, in other words, that book buying is a widespread activity while internet access is for elites, the opposite of the actual case.

A third group, though, is making the ‘access to literature’ argument without much real commitment to its truth or falsehood, because they aren’t actually worried about access to literature, they are worried about bookstores in and of themselves. This is a form of Burkean conservatism, in which the value built up over centuries in the existence of bookstores should be preserved, even though their previous function as the principal link between writers and readers is being displaced.

This sort of commitment to bookstores is a normative argument, an argument about how things ought to be. It is also an argument that might succeed, as long as it re-imagines what bookstores are for and how they are supported, rather than merely hoping that if enough nice people seem really concerned, the flow of time will reverse.

* * *

The local bookstore creates all kinds of value for its community, whether its providing community bulletin boards, putting rocking chairs in the kids section, hosting book readings, or putting benches out in front of the store. Local writers, harried parents, couples on dates, all get value from a store’s existence as a inviting physical location, value separate from its existence as a transactional warehouse for books.

The store doesn’t get paid for this value. It gets paid for selling books. That ecosystem works — when it works — as long as the people sitting in those rocking chairs buy enough books, on average, to cover the added cost of having the chairs in the first place. The blows to that model have been coming for some time, from big box retailers stocking best sellers to online sales (especially second-hand sales) to the spread of ebooks to, now, price wars.

Online bookselling improves on many of the core functions of a bookstore, not just price and breadth of available books, but ways of searching for books, and of getting recommendations and context. On the other hand, the functions least readily replicated on the internet — providing real space in a physical location occupied by living, breathing people — have always been treated as side effects, value created by the stores and captured by the community, but not priced directly into the transactions.

If the money from selling books falls below a certain threshold, the stores will cut back on something — hours, staff, rocking chairs — and their overall value will fall, meaning marginally fewer patrons and sales, threatening still more cutbacks. There may be a future in which they offer less value and make less money in some new and stable equilibrium, but beneath a certain threshold, the only remaining equilibrium is Everything Must Go. Given the margins, many local bookstores are near that threshold today.

All of this makes it clear what those bookstores will have to do if the profits or revenues of the core transaction fall too far: collect revenue for the side-effects.

The most famous version of this is bookstore-as-coffeeshop, where the revenues from coffee subsidize the lingering over books and vice-versa, but other ways of generating revenue are possible. Reservable space for book clubs, writers rooms, or study carrels; membership with buy-back options for a second-hand book market run out of the same space; certain shopping hours reserved for members or donors; use of volunteer labor, like a food coop; sponsorships from the people or businesses in the neighborhood most interested in the social value of the store and most interested in being known as local machers.

The core idea is to appeal to that small subset of customers who think of bookstores as their “third place”, alongside home and work. These people care about the store’s existence in physical (and therefore social) space; the goal would be to generate enough revenue from them to make the difference between red and black ink, and to make the new bargain not just acceptable but desirable for all parties. A small collection of patron saints who helped keep a local bookstore open could be cheaply smothered in appreciation by the culture they help support.

* * *

Treating the old side-effects as the new core value would in many cases require non-profit status. This would push small stores who tried it towards the NPR model, with a mix of endowment, sponsorship, and donations, a choice that might be anathema to the current owners. However, the history of businesses that traffic in physical delivery of media has been grim these last few years. (This is the story of your local record store, RIP.)

Any change from a commercial to a cooperative model of support would also probably have to be accompanied by a renegotiation of commercial leases. Street level commerce seems to be undergoing some of the same changes urban warehouses and lofts went through in the 1960s and waterfront property went through in the 1990s, where the muscular old jobs of making, storing, and transporting goods receded, leaving those spaces open for colonization as dwellings.

In the current case, the spread of electronic commerce for everything from music to groceries is part of the increase in empty store fronts on shopping streets, leaving a series of Citi branches, ATT outlets, and Starbucks that repeat at regular intervals, like scenery in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Even when the current recession ends, it’s hard to imagine vibrant re-population of most of the empty commercial spaces, and it’s easy to imagine scenarios in which commercial districts suffer more: consolidation among pharmacy chains, an uptick in electronic banking, the end of our love affair with frozen yogurt, any of these could keep many street level spaces empty, whatever happens to the larger economy.

If commercial space does follow the warehouse-and-loft pattern, then we’ll need to find ways to re-purpose those spaces. Unlike lofts, however, street level living has never been a big draw, but turning those spaces into mixed commercial-and-communal use may offer a viable alternative.

This also comes with the standard disclaimer that it may not work. The gap between the money needed to stave off foreclosure and the money available from local beneficiaries may not match up in any configuration. Vehement declarations of support for local bookstores may turn out be mere snobbishness masquerading as commitment. The transition of revenue from “transactional warehouse” to “social hub” may be too fitful to create the needed continuity. Landlords may prefer to hold empty spaces at nominally high rents than re-price. And so on.

All of which is to say that trying to save local bookstores from otherwise predictably fatal competition by turning some customers into members, patrons, or donors is an observably crazy idea. However, if the sober-minded alternative is waiting for the Justice Department to anoint the American Booksellers Association as a kind of OPEC for ink, even crazy ideas may be worth a try.

Band Metrics on NPR

(author unknown) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:52:00 -0800

Shared by David Jennings
If you're interested in how metrics have to change to keep up with new indices of interest and engagement, then the music charts are a fascinating case study. This twelve-minute podcast gives a brief account of how the US charts evolved to capture sales and airplay comprehensively, how they might capture new measures like YouTube plays and why that might not be desirable (cf. OK Go). Via Paul Lamere - again - thanks, Paul.

If you were listening to NPR this weekend, you may have caught a fantastic segment of On the Media called "Charting the Charts" by Mark Phillips, airing on over 100 U.S. radio stations yesterday and Saturday. It's a must listen for anyone interested in music charts like Billboard's Hot 100, as Mark eloquently explores how the art of ranking artists has evolved, and where the evolution is headed from industry leaders like Robert Levine of Billboard, Chicago Tribune music critic and author Greg Kot, Chris Molanphy of Idolator, Eric Garland and myself. If you missed the show, you can listen to it here or below if you have Flash enabled, and many thanks to Mark for his excellent research and production - it was an honor to be a part of it.

Google’s new music search

(author unknown) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:43:58 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Paul Lamere has some astute things to say about Google's new music search service (launched in the US only yesterday) -- also some interesting discussion in the comments. Note, as Paul says -- and this can't be emphasised enough -- search is not discovery. However, being able to share songs is a key currency in discovery. Good sharers will love to be able to pass on a song as easily as a URL (which you can do with Spotify or We7 in the UK, and probably with Rhapsody, LaLa and other services in the US). However, lazy or forgetful sharers often don't get round to providing the URL. For those cases, being able to punch the track title into Google and hear it is the next best thing for the recipient. (I'm assuming that's how this OneBox works from the screengrab -- can't actually use it myself as I'm not in the US.)

The news wires are abuzz with Google’s new music search feature. The new Google feature will allow users to search for an artist, song, album or lyric and get a music result that will include album art and a ‘play’ button that will let you listen to the music. MySpace and Lala will be serving up the music and you’ll be able to play any song in full just once. The music results will also include links to Pandora, imeem and Rhapsody. Lyrics search is provided by Gracenote.

Here’s the video announcement:

It’s about time that Google starts to include the ability to listen to search results – this will help. It’s pretty cool, but I don’t think it changes the music discovery game too much. Search is not discovery.

Update: The Register is particularly unimpressed: “Trying to forcefeed punters a lousy service is a bad idea, amplified by the assumption that if Facebook and Google are the feeding tube, we’ll suck it up.”

Counterculture, Cyberculture and Innovation: the strange case of Stewart Brand

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:50:22 -0700

A couple of years ago, at the end of this post on the crossover between Web 2.0 and anarchism, I wrote that I'd started reading Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and suggested I might be blogging about some of the ideas in it. Time passed; I soon forgot the ideas the book had triggered; things moved on. Then, when Nico Macdonald told me the book was up for discussion at his Innovation Reading Circle, that gave me a reason to re-engage with the book. Nico already had Joanne Jacobs lined up to give an introduction to the book, but kindly created a support slot for me to give a response to Joanne's critique. What follows is that response, plus some brief and partial notes of the discussion that followed at the Reading Circle last night.

It makes sense to read Joanne's review in full first. To try and summarise it in a nutshell, Joanne is saying that Turner's radically overstates the countercultural significance of Stewart Brand and his circle of tech-visionary associates — much of their work and ideas actually has more in common with the dominant culture than with anything genuinely subversive. And to summarise my response in a nutshell, I ask, "So what if they weren't and aren't revolutionaries? Does it take anything away from their importance?" Then I try and answer the So What question in my own way. That's enough prefacing; on with the show.

1 Counterculture? What counterculture?

1.1 Counter to what?

I'm not convinced that Fred Turner is making any claims for Brand and his associates as revolutionaries. The book is called "from Counterculture to Cyberculture" and its main narrative is one of how a bunch of ideas from the fringes of society became mainstream — through the agency or the catalyst of Brand and his eco-filofax of contacts. It's the same narrative of innovation — corporate enterprises being prepared to think out of the box to be creative and competitive — that has become orthodoxy in many circles not too far from here.

This idea of boundary objects that "both inhabit several intersecting social worlds and satisfy the informational requirements of each" has been around for a while, and I think Turner's application to Brand's story is at least plausible.

What's remarkable about this story (and Brand's thinking) is the way he combines things that we usually think of as 'counter' to each other:

being an engineer and an ecologist, mixing mechanistic and 'organic' models of change;
hanging out with Ken Kesey and at Davos, talking about radical ideas under the guise of very conservative planning as a Global Business Network associate puts it (quoted on page 188);
crossing between virtual and real space, abstract computation and raw physical material;
combining libertarian individualism and Allan Watts mysticism that he got from the Beats

1.2 Who cares whether it's counter or not, if it works and it's good?

Does Stewart Brand position himself as a subversive, a guru or a counterculture figure? With one proviso that I'll come to in a moment, I don't think he does. His own self-description is as a journalist, a small business entrepreneur and, through the Global Business Network, a consultant. (In this combination of roles, he probably has a lot in common with many in the Innovation Reading Circle.)

The proviso is that he may have traded on his colourful experiences and friendships with counterculture figures when promoting his ideas and marketing his business. Paradoxically this kind of 'wacky creative' profile plays very well in some corners of 'straight corporate' culture, especially if you're selling scenario planning (it helps the straights feel better about themselves; they feel more rounded and less straight for hanging out with the creatives). Turner is also complicit in this presentation of the Brand persona, because it makes his book more interesting if his central character is colourful and creative.

So, as a journalist and a businessman, my feeling is that Brand is more interested in being close to the action and being competitive through innovation than any wider political purpose. If we're trying to pin down where he's coming from culturally and politically, I think the best clue is from his non-profit venture, the Long Now Foundation, an incubator for projects that, in Brand's words, seek to "hack civilisation" to encourage more long-term thinking. Have a look at his TED talk on one of these projects, the Clock of Long Now, where Brand describes the exploration of a remote Nevadan mountain and the experiences that his mates like Jeff Bezos had there. When I watch it, I can't help being reminded of the opening section of Keroac's Dharma Bums, a bunch of guys finding themselves in the wilds of nature, bonding and blending with the oneness of the cosmos. Brand is the WASP kid who, via hanging out with Ken Kesey and dropping acid in 1962 (at a cost, according to Turner, page 61, of $500, which would have bought you a luxury car back then) got swept up in a lifelong search for Beatnik satori. This "all encompassing now" as Turner describes it (page 67) was surely a forerunner of the Long Now.

2 Legacy

Counterculturalist or not, Stewart Brand has been associated, mostly indirectly, with several of the innovations that we count as cornerstones of our 21st century creative, innovative, digital environment. [In the discussion — see Section 5 below — we asked to what degree Brand & friends had been agents, catalysts, vessels or just nearby bystanders in relation to the developments mentioned in the book. The non-committal conclusion was probably a bit of all of these. With the exception of the WELL, this list is of developments not connected to Brand but reflecting his approach or influence.]

There's the WELL, probably not the first, but certainly the best known and documented, early model of how to build community online.
The digital values that geek culture holds dear — principles like net neutrality and Jonathan Zittrain's generative machines — are very much in keeping with the autonomous-but-connected individual that the Whole Earth Catalog was aimed at.
Ditto the values of open innovation, BarCamp, Social Innovation Camp and so on — while they may not have originated with Brand and his circle, the latter have certainly been practising them for 40 years.
Today's MIT Fab Lab, which enables geeks in Jalalabad to build public Wi-Fi networks out of chicken wire, feels like a Whole Earth descendent of the Rad Lab that Turner praises — in that it brings together different crafts and expertise with powerful tech in the hands of a small group.
The One Laptop Per Child initiative, while not without its critics, feels like an attempt to hack education in the developing world with an appropriate-tech engineering solution.
And I'm sure you can think of more.

3 Critique: power and history

I'm not sure quite where Brand stands on power and influence, and what I think of what he says about it. Given his championing of long term thinking, he seems to have little sensitivity to the history of power and vested interests — the tendency of those interests to protect their own, whatever the cost — despite having interesting things to say about the application of history. Perhaps because he has himself had no difficulty hacking into the corridors of power, he seems blind to the difficulties that others might have. There's a quote of his that I'm sure I read years ago, but have failed to find again, which went something like, "Our society suffers not from too many elites but from too few. If you don't like the existing elites, create your own" as though that were the route to a healthier, participative democracy. Sure, easy, let's create our own elite. Let's invite Jeff Bezos, Mitch Kapor, Brian Eno, Al Gore and (we-need-a-woman-who-can-we-ask?) Esther Dyson to join it — I'm sure they'll say yes.

Mitch Kapor, whose money helped buy the mountain to house the Clock of the Long Now, has a telling quote that might be a rebuff to that notion, "Inside every working anarchy, there's an Old Boy Network". Or, more likely, they're on the same page, for Turner quotes Brand, "Nepotism works so long as the whole system isn't corrupt" (page 189).

As I say, I'm not quite sure what's going on here, or what I make of it — around this point in the book, Turner mentions the influence of G.I. Gurdjieff, and whenever Gurdjieff's name is mentioned I find a kind of Kate Bush/Robert Fripp fog descends… [In discussion at the Innovation Reading Circle, Chris Dymond mentioned Edge, a kind of non-profit sibling of the Global Business Network, with overlapping membership, as an explicit attempt to bring together what Gurdjieff called "remarkable" people, to form an influential elite.] Whatever, it's hard to disagree with Joanne's case that this is no counterculture worthy of the name!

4 Concluding, with a twist

Is there an overarching narrative in these cyberculture values? I think there is: an eco-cyber (GM & nuclear) Enlightenment narrative. Brand is swimming in the same water as people like Ray Kurzweil with his Singularity Theory. When he contemplates our post-human future, it's not a cyberpunk dystopia that he sees, but rather a world where we are, literally, "as gods". When Brand talks of whole systems, he really sees us — humans — as being able to stand outside our ecosystem and manipulate it like an engineering problem: a bit of nuclear energy here, GM crops in the developing world, and geoengineering in the oceans to keep climate change in check.

I don't buy this. To be fair to Fred Turner, he is occasionally sceptical of our "godlike ability to see the world from above" (page 92) and notes Brand's association with Herman Kahn, quoting the latter: "We take God's view. The President's view. Big. Aerial. Global. Galactic. Ethereal. Spatial. Overall. Megalomania is the standard occupational hazard." (page 186). Not to mention hubris and lack of awareness of your own blindspots. Turner notes wryly that Kahn is mainly remembered today as the model for Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove.

I think there's a lesson from Turner's account that he seems to have missed, perhaps because he's too close to it, or because we find it difficult to step outside our present moment and its taken-for-granted 'truths'. Turner doesn't say so explicitly, but seems to believe that Brand has somehow stumbled on a kind of universal recipe for innovation: identify some divergent disciplines, step outside them to see the 'whole system' and then facilitate their open convergence through boundary objects and network forums. Sound familiar? Hello, NESTA!

But I think the lesson from the book is that this recipe is not universal but contingent. Contingent on a set of circumstances that applied in the second half of the 20th century — with the end of the Second World War, the nuclear age, the semiconductor and the rise of the information processing/computational metaphor — and maybe the first part of this one. But there are other ways to innovate as well, and some of them are not open, collaborative, co-designed etc (ask Steve Jobs). [The rest of this section is a rehash of an earlier post.] I was influenced at an impressionable age by the anti-method "anything goes" philosophy of science of the late Paul Feyerabend. Arguing against the likes of Karl Popper's falsificationist account of scientific progress or Thomas Kuhn's model of paradigm shifts, Feyerabend writes,

My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits.
Anything goes… is the only way in which those firmly committed to universal standards and wishing to understand history in their terms can describe my account of traditions and research practices… If this account is correct then all a rationalist can say about science (and about any other interesting activity) is: anything goes.

There are no universals, including Anything goes. How many of our most radical, insightful thinkers are in danger of being not amplified but dulled by social media? This mass visibility of trends and memes may be working subliminally to nudge our ideas so that they go with the grain of contemporary orthodoxy rather than against it. Maybe we need less connected people who can go against the grain without worrying about peer opprobrium.

5 Postscript, from the discussion at the Innovation Reading Circle

We had a very enjoyable two hours of discussing From Counterculture to Cyberculture, during which Joanne and I summarised our points informally. As well as Joanne and me, and Nico as chair, Kathryn Corrick, Becky Hogge, Gordon Joly, Chris Dymond, Louisa Adam and Andrew (didn't register on the Facebook event page, so I don't have surname!) took part. I find it enough of a challenge to listen well and speak at the right moment, so note-taking had to take a back seat, and what follows is very partial indeed.

Joanne and I ended up agreeing that Turner has misread what the counterculture is/was, but conversely that we don't think Brand would describe himself as part of the (genuine) counterculture.
Chris Dymond stressed how influential Brand's libertarian-communitarian circle had been on the development of the Internet. There were two schools of thought about global governance of the net: a narrow view that it's just the 'code' that should be protected; and a broader view that governance should address digital divide and all the social issues around the net. As founding chair of ICANN, Esther Dyson helped the former school win the day. There was a general view from Chris and others that it was a good thing to separate the core technology from all the social issues around it.
Chris also described the Whole Earth Catalog as a "classic silo-busting text", a model for the kind of thing that government is trying (and failing) to emulate to this day.
Becky Hogge wondered aloud if the only influence of this 'counterculture' community on the architecture of computing was at the regulation layer. No one could think of any other significant ones! Nico was keen to explore and test the hypothesis that some 'countercultural' values were baked into computers and their applications in society. I think generally we were unconvinced that there was a strong link beyond the ways in which any technology or artefact reflects the tacit assumptions of the culture that created it i.e. personal computers have something of 1970s California embedded in their nature.
Joanne was angry that Turner made few if any references to cyberculture developments outside West Coast USA, and asked why Project Gutenberg, which was started in 1971, and is a great example of a genuinely countercultural philosophy in action, wasn't mentioned in the book. She referred us to her interview with Michael Hart, founder of the project.
Generally many of us felt frustrated with Turner's apparent assumption that what we perceived as longstanding, generic ideas all originated in California in the '60s. For example on page 157, he seems to say that the gift economy — giving without expectation of immediate reward — originated in Haight Ashbury in 1966, whereas we suspected that it had been around for a few millennia by then.

Live @ Digital Music Forum West: And the Solution to Copyright Chaos? — Digital Music News

(author unknown) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 06:04:16 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Interesting take on the business of music rights and the licensing thereof, which more or less concludes that the system is broken beyond repair. Sometimes bushfires play an important ecological role in clearing out the old and dying flora so that new growth can flourish. Looks like this may be one such case. See also http://digitalmusicnews.com/stories/100809dmfcopyright for more background.

So, what is the solution to a horribly fractured, contentious, and broken music licensing process? A total and complete collap...

[L.A. Times Tech Blog] Facebook digs through user data and graphs U.S. happiness

(author unknown) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:23:44 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
The future of social media metrics: a graph of US 'Gross National Happiness' based on Facebook updates. To begin with I thought, in my smug European way, that it was a sign of how moribund US culture is that Americans were apparently saddest on the days Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson died. Then I realised this is an artefact of the way people present themselves and their emotions in public i.e. most report the news of death with sadness and regret even if they feel little personal impact, while only a few would openly admit that they don't give a toss if another vacuous celeb has popped his clogs (and even if they did, Facebook would probably count that as an expression of sadness too).

Facebook released a graphical breakdown showing the collective happiness of the site's millions of active U.S. users.

The company combed its database of short user-updates and looked for words indicating a theme of happiness or sadness correlating to the day it was posted. The breakdown was released Monday.

What we learned from the analysis of our nation's Web chatter: Holidays make people happy, celebrity deaths make people sad.

As Facebook notes, Thanksgiving and Christmas are some of the happiest days, while the deaths of Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson were among the lowest.

Indeed, the findings are completely obvious, but could become more interesting with years of data collection -- especially when aligned with economic indicators.

But, hey, do we really want Facebook to keep peering into updates meant just for friends and family? The research serves as a good reminder about cybersecurity -- after all, it is National Cybersecurity Month.

If you put something on Facebook, no matter how tight your privacy settings are, Facebook Inc. can still hang onto it, analyze it, remix it and repackage it.

Despite its silly name, the Gross National Happiness indicator is creepy. We're in there.

Mint, a personal finance website similar to (and now owned by) Quicken, also does this sort of data analysis. The company combs through millions of bank and credit card accounts that its users inputted for the purpose of personal finance tracking -- key word being "personal" -- in order to determine "America's most frugal cities" or "global wealth distribution."

We're going to send a link to this post on our Facebook pages along with the words "mad" and "unhappy." Maybe Facebook will notice the graph dip the next time it digs through my profile.

-- Mark Milian

Follow my commentary on technology and social media on Twitter @mmilian.

Image courtesy of Facebook

Web Music Faceoff: Pandora vs. last.fm

(author unknown) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:41:14 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Interesting to see this re-match of Pandora vs. Last.fm, the old music discovery sparring partners from 2005/06. Two years ago, Last.fm was sold for big bucks, while Pandora was in retreat from Europe, blaming punitive licensing costs, and fighting the same corner in the US. Recently Pandora has, it says, moved into profit, while Last.fm has been haemorrhaging leading staff, including all three founders. Assuming a US-weighted vote, I would have expected Pandora to win it -- they've been much more aggressive in recruiting users -- but Last.fm was narrowly ahead when I voted.

It’s time to kick off the third installment in our new weekly Faceoff series, where we pit two web services or applications against each other to duke it out in a reader vote.

In past editions we’ve seen Firefox beat Chrome and Tumblr take a close victory over Posterous, and this week we want to know which streaming music service will emerge victorious from our fantasy cagematch. Read on to cast your vote!

When we asked for your votes for favorite music streaming service in a relatively recent Lunchtime Poll, recommendation engines and music social networks Pandora and last.fm topped the results. Because the votes were so close, we’d love to put these services head to head and find out which is truly the fairest of them all for Mashable readers.

The poll will stay open until this Friday, October 9 at noon PST. Get your vote in now, and feel free to go out canvassing amongst your friends to drum up support for your favorite candidate as well. Happy voting!

Who would win in a fight: Pandora or last.fm?(opinion)

Web Faceoff: Overall Results

Week 1:
- Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome
- WINNER: Firefox, 4600 votes (Chrome: 3310 votes, Tie: 911 votes)

Week 2:
- Tumblr vs. Posterous
- WINNER: Tumblr, 1809 votes (Posterous: 1496 votes, Tie: 256 votes)

Reviews: Chrome, Firefox, Google Chrome, Last.fm, Mashable, Mozilla Firefox, Pandora, Posterous, Tumblr

Tags: Last.FM, music, music streaming, pandora, web faceoff

One nagging thing you still don't understand about yourself

(author unknown) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:26:45 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Nice idea from the British Psychological Society's Research Digest, getting leading psychologists to say what they don't understand. The short responses frequently expose the humility and frustration that is bound up with the reflexive, recursive nature of studying thought, like "why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases".

The email edition of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest has reached the milestone of its 150th issue. That's over 900 quality, peer-reviewed psychology journal articles digested since 2003. To mark the occasion, the Digest editor has invited some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves. Their responses are by turns candid, witty and thought-provoking. Here's what they had to say:

Susan Blackmore: Consciousness
Paul Broks: What should I do?
David Buss: Overcoming irrationality
Robert Cialdini: Over-commitment
Marilyn Davidson: Lost opportunities
Elizabeth Loftus: Nightmares
Paul Ekman: Death and forgiveness
Sue Gardner: Dark places
Alison Gopnik: Parenthood
Jerome Kagan: Methodological flaws
Stephen Kosslyn: Satiators and addicts
Ellen Langer: Optimism
David Lavallee: Sporting rituals
Chris McManus: Beauty
Robert Plomin: Nature, nurture
Mike Posner: Learning difficulties
Stephen Reicher: Who am I?
Steven Rose: The explanatory gap
Paul Rozin: Time management
Norbert Schwarz: Incidental feelings
Martin Seligman: Self-control
Robert Sternberg: Career masochism
Richard Wiseman: Wit

I'd like to extend my sincere thanks to the contributors for baring their psyches and sacrificing their time. Thanks also to The Independent for helping spread the word. Here's to the next 150 issues of the Research Digest!

This special Research Digest feature was brought to you by the the British Psychological Society, the representative body for psychology and psychologists since 1901.

-Join the British Psychological Society.
-Read the latest Psychologist magazine.

Cobweblog: status of this site

DJ — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:27:07 -0700

To confirm what should be readily apparent: I am no longer maintaining this site regularly!

The purpose of the site was to promote the book of the same name. Over the two and a half years for which it was active (rather longer than the publisher's promotional effort), I blogged issues that extended, elaborated, moderated and reviewed what the book covers. Recently, though I've had a list of things I could have written here, I've obviously run out of steam a bit.

However, I'm still going to be writing a fair bit about issues that riff off the discovery themes of Net, Blogs and Rock 'n' Roll. In particular I'm interested in strategies for enjoying, and learning from, the cultural abundance (surplus?) of life online. I'm not quite sure what the best outlet for this writing is going to be, but I don't think it will be this blog. Follow me on my main site or RSS feed if you'd like to keep up with this. (And, in the meantime, I may occasionally cross post pieces here, if they feel connected to the book.)

BBC Radio Waves - exploring what we play

(author unknown) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:12:38 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Interesting time-based visualisation of the music played on BBC radio, which shows, among other things, which radio stations play most music by artists who were popular in the '50s, '60s, '00s etc. When you dig into the detail, it seems to be limited by a simplistic mapping of programmes (a.k.a. brands?!) onto genres. So the visualisations of Folk and Country on Radio 2, for example, are the same because they are both based only on the Mike Harding and Bob Harris shows, ignoring Folk played by Mark Radcliffe, say, or Country played by Mark Lamarr. And the question still remains, What would you actually use this kind of visualisation for? Doesn't everyone already know which stations play oldies?

What kinds of music does BBC radio play? Which bands are played most? Which DJs play 70s music? Radio Waves is a prototype visualisation that takes data about music played recently on BBC Radio and creates a time profile for any individual radio network, musical genre or radio show. The graph shows, year by year, how many albums were released by the artists recently played on BBC Radio.

Click here to explore the visualisation or read on to find out more.

After our recent hackday on music visualisation we ran a quick two week sprint with the R&D Prototyping team to develop a combination of the best and the most feasible of the ideas that came out. Radio Waves is the result of that sprint.

What it does

Initially the visualisation represents all four of the BBC radio stations we are using; BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2, BBC 1Xtra and BBC 6 Music. The graph represents how many albums were released by the bands and artists recently played by shows on that network - so if it has a peak in the 1950s then that network has played artists who were active in the 50s. The visualisation can then be filtered to show the graphs for a particular radio network, a genre or show.

Individual years within the graph can be selected to show a list of artists who released albums in that year and have been most played by the selected radio network or show. Clicking on an artist will show more detail about them and reveal the complete list of albums they released and when.

How it works

We start by collating the data for what music BBC Radio has played over the last few months - from tracklistings like this. Note that this prototype is only using a static data set for now. From this we can link to /music data about these artists, and from there to releases from each artist. From the complete list of releases we try to only use albums, not compilations, EPs or singles, as we believe that albums sufficiently represent an artist’s historical profile (this is arguable). We can then take the release dates of all these albums, and the number of times each artist has been played on that radio network or show, to draw the graph. In total we're using about 300 shows, each with a play count and top artists for every year and a list of about 9000 featured artists.

We have to tidy up the data a bit; not all tracks played have MusicBrainz IDs attached, we have to remove duplicate releases (there are lots of “disc 1” and “disc 2” in the MusicBrainz data) and we also remove any albums from “Various Artists” because that's not particularly helpful for our purposes. And we've left out Radio 3, Asian Network and the regional services because we don’t have that much play data from them at the moment. Radio 3 in particular would be difficult because the "releases" they play don’t represent a composer’s active career in the same way as releases for pop and rock bands do.

It’s a prototype

Radio Waves was built so we could explore the possibilities of visualising our music data and we deliberately constrained ourselves to only use data that we have available right now. We think it has one major but surmountable problem. Our current architecture and data mean we can only go from a show » songs » artists » albums » release dates. So this doesn’t actually represent the release dates of the music that is played on the radio, rather it represents the careers of the artists whose music is played and that’s not completely intuitive. Ideally we would go directly from show » songs » release dates, and at some point, with the help of the MusicBrainz next-generation schema and some dedicated volunteers, we should get this data.

As an end note, we probably also need to tidy up which album releases we use. If you look at the graph for Elvis you can see his original career (he reportedly died in 1977) and then a resurgence in popularity (and therefore re-releases, sessions, best-ofs…) in the last decade. So maybe we should limit the data to releases within the artist’s (or bands) lifetime.

Behaviour Change and Conformity

(author unknown) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:59:58 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Love this idea that creativity can emerge from copying because our attempts to copy so often fail

Neil and Johnnie have great posts on the negative role that conformity can have on our attempts to engineer organisational change and innovation. While what they say is fair e...

University of the People

(author unknown) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:11:50 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
One more initiative aspiring to sweep away some of the hidebound baggage of traditional learning institutions (though note that this one appears to be tuition-free)

Power to the people.power to the people right on...... people of a certain age will know that tune. We’ve had the Open University and the School of Everything, (let’s ignore t...

A day at the museum - how much do children actually remember?

(author unknown) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:18:32 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Interesting piece of research showing the value of museum visits for children, who are found to remember significant amounts from these visits. However, it needs to be put in a wider context: museums aren't just another machine for "filling children up" with "information"; there's an emotional, situational and hopefully inspirational response as well, whose pay-off is new perspectives that are hard to measure.

Museum corridors are often populated by clipboard-bearing school children enjoying a day away from the classroom. These museum trips seem like a good idea, but how much do children really learn from their day out? According to Julien Gross and colleagues, young children actually remember a great deal, especially if they are given the chance to draw as they recount their museum experience.

Fifty-eight lucky New Zealand school children, aged approximately six years, were taken for a day visit to the Royal Albatross Centre and Historic Fort in Dunedin. One to two days later, the amount of information recalled by the children depended to a large degree on how they were tested. Asked to freely recall the visit, the children remembered a significant amount of factual and trivial, "narrative" information, uttering an average of ten factual clauses. Crucially, this amount of factual recall doubled when they were allowed to draw at the same time as they recounted the day's events. By contrast, the children performed relatively poorly when given a traditional comprehension test in the form of 12 questions.

A second study largely replicated these findings with a second group of children who were tested on their memory for the museum visit after seven months. The amount of information they recalled remained substantial but was reduced, as you'd expect after a longer delay. Also, the benefit of drawing now only affected recall of narrative information, not facts.

Why the difference in performance between free recall and the comprehension test? Analysis of the content of the children's free recall revealed that they tended to remember facts that were not tapped by the traditional comprehension test, which had of course been devised by adults. This tallies with previous research showing that children and adults tend to focus on different aspects of the same events.

Gross's team said the results "demonstrated that children learned and remembered an extraordinary amount of information about a school trip to a museum" even after a lengthy delay. The findings also showed that giving the children the opportunity to draw, significantly increased the amount of accurate information they recalled. This is consistent with previous, forensically motivated research showing that drawing facilitates children's verbal reports of their experiences.

An earlier theory for why drawing aids children's recall is that, rather than improving their memory for an actual event, it helps them tap their general knowledge for material that's relevant to the topic. However, Gross's team said their new findings showed there must be more to it than this, because drawing helped the children recall specific facts they could only have learned at the museum. Other possible explanations include the idea that drawing aids motivation and attention, provides memory cues, and that adult interviewers make more encouraging noises when children draw. This latter explanation was borne out by the current study, with interviewers in the drawing condition making twice as many encouraging noises like "uh huh" and "wow".

Our coverage of this research precedes the Campaign for Drawing's Big Draw series of events running throughout October, and coincides with the Independent on Sunday's Drawing for Britain competition.
_________________________________

Gross, J., Hayne, H., & Drury, T. (2009). Drawing facilitates children's reports of factual and narrative information: implications for educational contexts. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23 (7), 953-971 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1518

The temptation of stories

davidw — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:32:29 -0700

Journalism at its best is a way to uncover and communicate the truth, subject to all the usual human limitations. But journalism’s fundamental form, the story itself, brings a special temptation to manipulate the truth for economic or aesthetic reasons. The temptation is resistible to varying degrees, depending on the type of story (the temptations are greater for feature stories than for hard-core reportage of the day’s events), the nature of the journal, and the standing of journalist. Nevertheless, the temptation is there, built into the form itself.

The very idea that there’s a story is itself a temptation. Maybe the story is on Facebook addiction or the rise in incivility. A journalist who goes back to her editor and says, “Nope, no story there” has disappointed the editor who now has to find another story to fill the hole in the paper newspaper or to feed the maw of the online publication. Not a big deal; it happens all the time. But if it’s fifth consecutive time that the reporter says there was no story there, it’s getting to be a problem. If it’s the reporter who has suggested the stories in the first place, as is often the case at many publications, she will be judged a failure because she’s wasted her time and gummed up the editor’s planning.

It’s not like it’s supposed to be in science, where a failed hypothesis is as valuable as a proved one, even though of course every scientist would rather discover that a new compound cures cancer than that it doesn’t. A failed hypothesis in the world of journalism is a story that won’t run, that won’t bring in readers, that won’t give businesses a page on which to place an ad. There are real prices to stories failing to pan out. Reporters are thus tempted to make the story work.

Even when the hypothesis of a story is true, journalists almost always reach a place in the story where they know what they want their interviewees to say. An interview is requested of a particular person to provide the “some experts disagree” statement or the “the implications of this are vast” verbiage. If that person doesn’t provide it, someone else will. Depending on the stage of the story, the interviewee may spark interest in a side issue or an approach the reporter hadn’t considered…resulting in someone else being called to provide the other side or the amplification.

This happens at some of stage of the story even when the topic is interesting no matter what storyline it takes. For example, the death of Pat Tillman is interesting because it is instantly symbolic: Football star turns down a life of fame and wealth in order to defend his country, and dies a soldier’s death in Afghanistan. Beyond the basic reportage the day that it happened, it was bound to inspire journalistic stories. A reporter could enter with an open mind. Even so, she’ll enter with an open mind looking for an angle, which is to say, looking for a story. Is it a relatively simple narrative of an inspiring patriot who gave his life to support his ideals? Or was there “more” to it? That search for the “more” isn’t simply a hunt for unknown truths. It’s a search for a narrative that reveals the simple surface to be a veneer from which we will learn something unexpected. The reporter may have no idea what the more is, but once she gets a hint of it, she’ll be on it, and the narrative itself — if not personal ambition — will carry her forward. Maybe Tillman wasn’t as virtuous as we thought. Maybe his death wasn’t as straightforward as we were told. Maybe his story was of a life fulfilled or of a life wasted or of a life more complex than we’d thought. Maybe it’s about the government’s cynical use of him, or of the media’s own eagerness to find a hero. But something will emerge. And as it emerges, it gathers its story around it, and the reporter is off looking for the voices who will play certain roles in the story. Why? Because the story demands it.

At the very least, the temptation journalistic stories is that of all story-telling, the basic way we humans make sense of our world. Stories, not just in journalism, are about the gradual revealing of truth. The surface wasn’t as it seemed. The ending was contained, hidden, in the beginning. What looked continuous was in fact disruptive. Stories have a shape, and story-tellers fit the pieces into that shape. There’s nothing wrong with that, except in an environment where there’s economic and social pressure to produce a story. Then the temptation is to get the pieces to fit. And that can corrode the truth.

So can the simple fact that stories tend towards closure. They end. They’re done. Some circle of understanding has been drawn and closed, tip to tip. The story says, simply by ending. “This is what you needed to know.” There can often be truth in that, but there is always falsity in it. The world, its events, and its people escape even the best of stories.

Stories are not going away from journalism, just as they’re not going away from history, biography, or how we talk about our day over dinner. They’re fundamental. Stories are how we understand, but they also inevitably are constructions, incomplete, and organized around a point of view. All stories are temptations. Journalistic stories have their own special and strong temptations because of their economics and because of the nature of the medium in which they’ve been embodied. Now those economics and that medium are changing, diminishing the old temptations but creating new ones:

::: Because we are increasingly turning to publications that explicitly take a stand, the temptation to include false views for “balance” is diminished. But, the preference for partisan media creates a new temptation: To over-state, in order to attract attention. [Guilty as charged!]

::: The old medium limited the length of stories, forcing unnecessary trimming except in very special circumstances. The new medium has infinite space so that stories can be right-sized. But it turns out that prolixity discourages on-line readers, so the new temptation is toward brevity. It’s not clear if that’s an expression of an impatience that’s always been with us or if the new medium constitutes a new temptation.

::: The old medium’s inability to embed links encouraged journalists to try to encapsulate the world in a single column of text. The new hyperlinked medium can tempt authors to gloss over points and contradictions because they’ve put in some links, putting the burden on readers who are (usually) lazier than the writers.

::: The economics of the old medium tempted publications to appear valuable by being a reliable source of the single truth. While they of course have encouraged discourse on controversial topics, their bread and butter have been stories that “get it right” and thus serve as a stopping point for belief. Stories are the bulwark of authority, and authority is the currency of the old journalistic economics. The new medium now can include as many stories as we want, from as many different points of view, connected by curators above the stories and by hyperlinks within the stories. The story no longer has to tell the whole truth. It’s just one of the stories. But, while that’s true of the ecosystem as a whole, the old temptation to be a single-source truth shop exists for individual online publications, whether they’re commercial or personal.

Now, the form I’ve adopted for this essay, which is itself a type of story-telling, is one of balance: Old temptations matched by new temptations. It’s a form that aims at inspiring trust: “See, I’m presenting both sides!” And that itself can be corrosive. Indeed, in this case it is. While the old temptations are being replaced by new ones, the locus of truth is moving decisively from individual stories and publications to the network of stories and publications. The balancing of temptations misses this most important change. The hyperlinked context of stories creates not only new temptations to go wrong, but a greater possibility for going right.

More on self-organised learning

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:35:21 -0700

Here's the next instalment in a 'slow conversation' with Seb Schmoller, which kicked off with my post Progressive austerity and self-organised learning, followed by a response from Seb. I think it's fair to say Seb is more cautious than me so far. He splashes a little cold water on my enthusiasm for things "lightweight" — pointing out that the institutional and technical infrastructure underpinning informal learning is far from lightweight — and worries that I underestimate the importance of accreditation. He's probably right. I'll come back to those points in a roundabout way in a bit.

But in this instalment, I want to bump the conversation along to the question of how the professional practice of people like me and Seb should change to respond to the "progressive austerity" environment. Leaving aside whether the right term is "collapse", I think we agree that business-as-usual is not an option.

Ten years ago, I was part of the team that built the original infrastructure for learndirect. The total contract value ran into eight figures. More recently, clients have been seeking to update their web portals (yes, some still use that term) and gateways rather than build from new, but there's still an implicit expectation that the cost will run comfortably into six figures.

In parallel, agile start-ups and community projects have been stitching together learning materials and peer discussion using whatever was cheap and ready-to-hand. (The Living IT project that Seb and I worked on in the '90s used listservers running on my Mac Performa, though we also had the advantage of a software partner who contributed a prototype Virtual Learning Environment.) Now the online learning ecosystem has matured, and the scope of what's cheap and ready-to-hand includes heavyweight resources like iTunes U learning materials in your pocket and MIT Open Courseware, plus tools for organising like Facebook, meetup.com and (if you need a full-scale VLE) Moodle — not to mention (still) good old email listservers. With these at your disposal, and a bit of imagination, it's possible to offer some pretty impressive learning experiences.

Large-scale, build-your-own-infrastructure learning environments are going to look like vanity projects that are hard to defend in the face of a tight squeeze on spending (arguably this lesson should have been learnt five years ago from the failures of UKeU and NHSU). Imaginative application of existing resources and infrastructure has always offered more bang for your buck. In an austere climate, that's irresistible. How can we make sure it's progressive as well? How do we retain the elements that make learning in online environments inspiring and liberating, cut away unnecessary bloat and barriers to learning, and perhaps even reform the ancillary practices around learning — including accreditation?

Needless to say, I don't have all the answers to this. But I've had the chance to explore some possibilities through discussions at recent School of Everything meet-ups (highly recommended if you're in the London area), with people like Dougald Hine and Julia Shalet.

One of the things Julia and I talked about over lunch the other day was doing a review of tools and techniques that groups can use to organise their own learning — along the lines of what the Whole Earth Review did for groups organising their own sustainable living decades ago. This is not a particularly original or novel idea: Jay Cross & friends have done something similar for the corporate learning sector in the Learnscaping un-book and almost certainly on a wiki somewhere (such is the speed of evolution of Jay's sites that I can't find it now).

It might still be a good idea. On further reflection, I can't help wondering if something like it doesn't already exist, albeit probably organised in a way that might not suit all learning contexts. Things have moved on from the days of the Whole Earth Review: in place of scarcity of information, we have abundance. The trick is how, in all that abundance, to find something that's directly relevant to your context of learning (prior knowledge and experience, co-learners, preferred location and medium, teaching and support needs, purpose/goal, and the interactions of all these).

So does the world need another wiki that maps learning tools and resources onto the contexts where they work best?

That's a genuine question for me right now, not a rhetorical one. My hunch is that the answer lies in providing a manageable 'way in' to deal with what seems like an unmanageable range of paths and options you could take.

Seb is right to pull me up on my use of "lightweight" and point out that the technical infrastructure that sits behind and supports the information environment, from libraries to Google, is anything but lightweight. But one of the secrets of success of Google — and of Amazon recommendations, Spotify and Pandora — is that they provide what feels like a lightweight interface to a distinctly heavyweight set of stuff.

There are hazards with doing this, of course. Librarians, teachers and information professionals of all stripes caution that things that look lightweight may actually be lightweight: superficial, unsupported and untested.

Is that where we come in? Seb points to the importance of supporting learning at critical points, making sure learners receive the right formative feedback, and worries that self-organised learning may not be sufficient for this. Let me correct one possible misunderstanding here: self-organised learning is not necessarily unsupported or self-supported; it's not wholly self-service. There is certainly space in self-organised learning for teachers, but possibly with the tables turned. Instead of the teachers setting the parameters of the learning and containing it within a space that they run and own, a group of learners with common interests may come together, agree their parameters and preferred learning environments, and then hire in a teacher to help them achieve their goals.

So I see School of Everything, which styles itself as a kind of eBay-for-learning-opportunities, helping you find someone to teach you what you want, as an enabler of self-organised learning. As it stands, I think it could provide more sensitivity to different contexts of learning. To take one example (not intended to be a representative one), I'm interested in learning French, but, perhaps atypically, not because I want to be a fluent conversationalist with French people; I want to be able to read French crime fiction at some other literature in the original, and I want to be able to watch French films without needing subtitles. So I'd like to be able to hook up with the niche minority who share these aims, perhaps have someone curate a set of texts and video resources that lead us to greater mastery, get help when I'm stuck, and share experiences. What new features or additional learning tools could I use in conjunction with School of Everything to make it easy to organise this?

I've gone on too long already, but briefly to come back to the question of accreditation, and throw a challenge back to Seb. If I concede that I may undervalue accreditation, I wonder if, after decades in the professional culture of further education, he might perhaps overvalue it. A full critique of current approaches to accreditation should have its own post, but in a nutshell I worry that they put too much emphasis on abstract metrics rather than more situational ones. And there's always a risk that the tail ends up wagging the dog, just as the first generation of Virtual Learning Environments focused more on tracking learner than on teaching them (because they were sold into institutions that were paid on tracking measures). I think if we're serious about progressive austerity, we should look critically at accreditation practices.

Anyway, just as self-organised learning does not preclude teaching, it doesn't preclude accreditation either. The self-organisers should be able to buy it in. Then we'll find out how much they value it.

Happy for anyone else to join in the conversation, here or elsewhere, should you wish to!

Longest piece of music goes live

(author unknown) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 09:56:53 -0700

Reflections on Longplayer Live

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 09:50:55 -0700

I wasn't going to blog about today's first live performance of Longplayer, since I go on about Longplayer fairly regularly already.

But Christian Payne recorded an Audioboo interview with me, and the combination of vanity with minimal effort created a path of very low resistance, so here we are. I refer a couple of times in the interview to Jem Finer, and should probably have explained that he is the composer of the 1,000-year composition, of which today's performance is a 1,000-minute excerpt — still playing as I write (until 1am British Summer Time, tomorrow). Many more Longplayer interviews, including one with Jem, on Audioboo; photos on Flickr; and the inevitable Twitter search with its very short time-horizon.
Listen!

Don't seek refuge in scarcity.

(author unknown) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:52:12 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
"Every era is marked by the wealth of those who figure out what the new scarcity is... But far greater wealth will be made [in the network economy] by exploiting the plentitude." Interesting little thought-atom from Kevin Kelly, relating to what I think of cultural surplus...

Originally posted in New Rules

Every era is marked by the wealth of those who figure out what the new scarcity is. There will certainly be scarcities in the network economy. But far greater wealth will be made by exploiting the plentitude. To make sure you are not seeking refuge in scarcity, ask yourself this question: Will your creation thrive if it becomes ubiquitous? If its value depends on only a few using it, you should reconsider it in light of the new rules.

Exclusive: ExperienceLab report on digital music services

(author unknown) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:56:27 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Comparison of user experience with iTunes, Spotify, Last.fm and Nokia Music by Serco ExperienceLab. Covers discovery and recommendations, albeit only superficially.

UK design and usability agency ExperienceLab recently completed a piece of independent research into online music services, rating four of the key players in the UK for downloading, streaming, organising, discovering and sharing music.

Assistant consultant David Loughlin shared a topline summary with Music Ally, including some of ExperienceLab’s tips for best practice when running a music service. We thought you might find it of interest, so it’s reproduced below.

“ONLINE MUSIC SERVICES USER EXPERIENCE – AUGUST 2009

Introduction

The growth of online music services has changed the way that people discover, buy, organise and listen to music. The way that services support these activities plays a key role in their success. At ExperienceLab, we carry out experience design and usability research to help clients produce simple and satisfying products and services.

With Virgin, Sky and BT set to launch online music services in the coming months, we decided to take a look at the user experience of some of the key players in the UK market. This article presents a summary of what we found and offers some usability tips for designers and developers working in this competitive market.

We looked at four of the leading suppliers of online music services in the UK: iTunes, Spotify, Last.fm, and Nokia Music. The following sections look at some of the activities they support.

SEARCHING FOR MUSIC

Users should be able to scan and sort search results quickly
Effective search and browse functions are essential for a successful download service. One of the main issues we found was that if a search returned many results, it was sometimes difficult to find a target item within them. The Nokia Music Store for example, presents each result beside a thumbnail and it is not possible to sort them. This means that results are spread over many pages and the only way to look through them is to click through each page. iTunes and Spotify present results in lists that can be sorted by artist, genre etc. This makes it much easier to find items within the search results.

DISCOVERING MUSIC

Being able to monitor and learn about users’ listening habits puts online music services in a great position to recommend music. Recommendations can be based on a single song or on more general information about a user’s library or listening habits.

If a recommendation area is provided, populate it where possible
We found that for song specific recommendations, an appropriate suggestion was not always available. In Nokia Music, this results in a blank recommendation area which can be frustrating but also means that the area may be checked less frequently – if it’s often blank, why check it?. iTunes Genius uses other tags in the songs meta data (e.g., genre) to generate suggestions.

Make sure recommendations are appropriate
Recommendations based on libraries and listening habits are only as good as the information they collect. This can lead to poor quality recommendations, particularly for new users which could make them less likely to stick around. A quick glance at the forums finds a few bemused Spotify users discussing their Hip-Hop recommendations. Last.fm deals with this by importing listening histories from other media players making its recommendations helpful and appropriate from the start.

DOWNLOADING MUSIC

It should be clear to users when they can download a song and how it can be done
In some services the download option is difficult to find. Spotify does offer a download option (supported through 3rd party suppliers) but it is located in a right click context menu where it is unlikely to be used. This might cause problems if they aim to generate traffic to 3rd party sites as part of their business model. Nokia Music and iTunes provide a clear call to action in the form of a Download or Buy Song button.

If a preview is available, this should also be clear
In the iTunes Store it is not clear that a preview is available, nor is it clear how to start a preview. Nokia Music provides a clearly labelled 30sec button which is more effective.

Display the current balance
Displaying a user’s current balance also helps them to know when they can download songs. If a user has unlimited access to downloads, this should also be made clear.

STREAMING MUSIC

We found two styles of streaming on offer in the services we looked at: queue style (where songs are selected and queued by the user) and radio style (where seeds, genres and tags are used to generate an appropriate stream of songs). Each style presents its own challenges in terms of user experience.

Song queues are best presented with the currently playing song at the top
In Nokia Music, the song queue is treated as a playlist: new songs are added to the bottom of the queue (usually off-screen) and the currently playing song moves down the queue… and off the screen. This makes it difficult to keep track of what’s coming next and what has been added. The Spotify queue is much clearer; the currently playing song is at the top of the list and songs move up the queue.

Users should be warned if an action is likely to end playback unexpectedly
An interesting issue arose with the Last.fm radio stream; when played from within the website, it is easy to navigate away from the page and end the stream.

Never cross the streams!
The Spotify service supports both styles of streaming and we found that the interaction between the two streams can also be confusing. Manually queued songs take priority over upcoming songs in the radio stream even when the user is in the radio environment.

ORGANISING MUSIC

Some of the most severe issues we found were in the way that services allow users to organise their libraries.

A few well implemented sorting and grouping options work best
The Nokia Music library manager offers many options for sorting and grouping items: grouping changes dynamically depending on which sorting options are selected and sorting options vary depending on which view is selected. It all adds up to a confusing and frustrating experience. iTunes’ sorting and grouping options are fairly limited, but much less confusing as a result.

Provide quick access to playlist functions
Playlists are a key feature of organising a digital library. All of the services we looked at support playlists, and we identified some useful conventions. Quick links work well for creating new playlists and should be available throughout the environment. Context menus work well for adding songs to existing playlists. Last.fm has implemented an effective web based context menu that’s worth a look for those looking to implement playlist functionality on a web platform.

SHARING MUSIC

The last activity we looked at was how online music services allow users to share music and musical tastes with each other.

Users should be able to find and share music with people they already know
Last.fm relies heavily on a sense of community amongst its users: each user is part of a Neighbourhood. Where the Last.fm offering really falls down is in helping users find people they know in the real world. Spotify supports this type of sharing much more effectively by allowing any item (e.g., playlist, album, or song) to be dropped as a link into an email. Users can also build up collaborative playlists.

CONCLUSION

This article has presented a brief overview of some of the key findings of our independent research into online music services. Effectively deciding which activities to support and how to support them ensures that a music service meet its users’ requirements. For a copy of the full report, visit www.serco.com/experiencelab.

There are aspects of online music service user experience that we haven’t explored here. Many services for example support direct streaming to mobile devices. Mobile applications that Scrobble songs to Last.fm are common and much has been said about Spotify’s forthcoming Android and iPhone Apps.

To hear more about these and other user experiences, keep an eye on our blog at www.experiencelab.info.”

[Music Machinery] Finding music with pictures

(author unknown) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:47:47 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
New blog on music visualisation from Paul Lamere and Justin Donaldson (linked to a tutorial they're offering). These are two smart, serious research guys, and the blog shows ever sign of developing the same features.

As part of the collateral information for our upcoming ISMIR tutorial (Using Visualizations for Music Discovery), Justin and I have created a new blog: Visualizing Music. This blog, inspired by our favorite InfoVis blogs like Information Aesthetics and Visual Complexity, will be be a place where we catalog and critique visualizations that help people explore and understand music.

There are hundreds of music visualizations out there – so it may take us a little while to get them all cataloged, but we’ve already added some of our favorites. Help us fill out the whole catalog by sending us links to interesting music visualizations.

Check out the new blog: Visualizing Music

How to play music that lasts 1,000 years

(author unknown) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 16:55:14 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Latest on the live, human implementation of Longplayer, the 1,000-year piece of music that I blog about each New Year.

Jem Finer's Longplayer began at the millennium and will finish in 3000. But don't worry if you can't wait that long, he's about to perform a 1,000-minute 'snippet'

You have to admire Jem Finer's pluck. Not literally, of course, although as the banjo-pickin' founder member of the Pogues he co-wrote perhaps the best Christmas song ever. No, it's the brave laugh-in-the-face-of-obstacles kind of pluck I'm talking about, the kind that fuels a musician to attempt crazily ambitious musical projects (as if working with Shane MacGowan wasn't demanding enough).

In the late 1990s Finer started writing a piece of music that was 1,000-years long. I wrote about it just before Longplayer's first notes sounded at the dawn of the new millennium. It's been playing away continuously ever since in a lighthouse near Canary Wharf, and at various other listening posts around the world. It's a beautiful piece of ambient music that uses the chimes and harmonics of a series of standing bells played back in a changing sequence by a group of Apple computers. It takes 1,000 years to complete itself.

By my reckoning Longplayer must be the most epic piece of music ever. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it beats everything in terms of length that I can think of. It trumps John Cage's 639-year-long organ piece currently playing in the church of St Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany; it dwarfs Wagner's Ring Cycle (a mere 15 hours of playing time); and it laughs in the face of Pink Floyd's 23-and-half-minute-long Echoes on side two of Meddle, which, before I opened my iTunes to Longplayer's streaming audio, was the longest piece in my record collection.

In keeping with the concept of the project, Finer is preparing to perform a 1,000-minute section of Longplayer live. On a purpose-built stage he will assemble an orchestra of 26 players, including J Maizlish Mole of the wonderful Marseille Figs, art musician hermit Ansuman Biswas and music guru David Toop. All will be playing what has been dubbed by Finer as a "giant synthesiser built of bronze-age technology". It should also prove that the piece can sit beyond a digital hard drive, as it was always meant to do.

When I chatted to Jem about going live with the project he was upbeat. "I always meant for Longplayer not to be bound to the computer or any other technological form. Right from the start I wanted alternative methods of performance, including mechanical, non-electrical and human-operated versions. At last we're getting a chance to do that."

If you want to listen to the piece before it takes the stage try one of the streaming links. It's not available to download in its entirety – not until the year 3000 anyway. By which time, no doubt, there'll be enough disc space on your iPhone to accommodate it.

Pop and rock

Mark Espiner

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Unlearning

Derek Sivers — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 09:32:10 -0700

When I would speak on panels at music conferences, I’d always find it funny how all of the panelists’ opinions were completely tainted by their own self-interest.

Someone would always ask us, “What’s the future of the music business?”

The guy whose company sells MP3s would say, “MP3s are the future. No DRM. Unencumbered. The public has spoken and they want MP3s.”

The guy whose company sells subscriptions would say, “Subscription services are the future. Anything, anytime, anywhere. No need to keep a huge music collection.”

The guy whose company sells CDs would say, “People still want something tangible they can hold in their hand. CDs are going to be around a long time.”

I would just say, “Nobody knows the future. Anyone who pretends to is full of shit and not to be trusted.” (Which would of course get a weird look from my fellow panelists, but oh well.)

I still get asked to talk about the future of the music industry, but I just can’t. My answer to everything is, “I don’t know.”

For the last 11 years, I spent most waking hours thinking about how to sell and distribute music. I’m completely unobjective. I don’t have fresh eyes about it anymore. I know my opinion is not to be trusted.

You’d be better off to ask a young music fan or musician, unencumbered by too much knowledge of the past.

I love musicians. I love the creative process. I love the art and craft of learning, writing and playing music.

But the “industry” around it? Eh. No interest. Sorry. I’m burnt-out on that subject. I need to spend a couple years unlearning before I can think about it again.

“The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”- Alvin Toffler

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” - John Cage

Progressive austerity and self-organised learning

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:13:16 -0700

A month or so ago, my friend Guy, whose children are educated at home, treated me to one his occasional rants. "People know there's an Arms Lobby," he said, "so they're very wary about calls for more spending on Defence and question whose interests these serve. But there's an Education Lobby too, and it always wants more spent on educational initiatives and new technologies. Because it frames its proposals as Public Goods," he went on, "middle-class liberals find it harder to see through this hucksterism."

I don't think Guy was having a go at me specifically — I neither support nor participate in any formal lobbying activities in education. But I couldn't escape the fact that a good slice of my consulting income comes from public funding for educational initiatives and new technologies.

And there's no escaping the fact that that funding will not be sustained in coming years as it has been for the last decade. Earlier this year I did some work for the Learning and Skills Improvement Service. Via Seb Schmoller comes a quote from the head of a think tank under the heading of Progressive Austerity, "Any agency with the word 'improvement' in its title could probably disappear without discernible negative effects." Hmmm.

We're all programmed to learn

We all need to take responsibility for finding ways to do more with less. I'm with Guy and many in the growing Collapsonomics wing in thinking that the silver lining to this particular cloud may be not just quite substantial but also very necessary.

What's more, some of the ideas to help us achieve this have been around for a while. Sure, we could do with fresh and original ones as well, but let's also see if it might be time to invite some of those voices-in-the-wilderness in from the cold. Here's a short account of how many long-held sustainable-futures mantras may be building in currency in the light of belt-tightening and decline in the 'diseases' of affluence.

Radical voices in learning also take on new relevance. For recent generations of home educators, Ivan Illich's 1971 Deschooling Society is pretty much a creed. "This Education Lobby," argued Guy, "want to make learning seem so complicated, as a justification for their complex and expensive solutions." Gulp, maybe he was having a go at me. "But it's not, learning is simple; it's one of the few things we can't help ourselves from doing. We're all programmed to learn, before we're born."

So, the argument goes, perhaps this Progressive Austerity can clear the decks of over-complicated processes, technology, accreditation and regulation, and in the process make learning work better, not worse.

And if that were possible, what might it look like? As if by magic, Deschooling Society (1971, remember) imagines "learning webs" where people learn from each other through advanced technology and communications. Sounds familiar? A couple of years ago I wrote about how some anarchist ideas pre-figured Web 2.0 models, and this seems like it could be another example.

But careful as we go. It would be a mistake to take this as a glib endorsement of recent trends. On the one hand, if the radical critiques and bold prescriptions have any value, it is in distinguishing 'convivial', liberating arrangements of people and communications from those that threaten to knot our learning muscles into cramps. On the other, these prescriptions are not beyond criticism themselves: if they're so wonderful, how come their successes have been local and contingent? How come they've never seen widespread adoption without being compromised?

I can't answer all those questions, sadly, but the rest of this post is me feeling my way towards identifying some ingredients — with the aim of enabling lightweight learning techniques that don't require continuous interventions and maintenance from consultants like me.

Let's call this self-organised learning. The first ingredients I start with are technology and people.

Lightweight use of learning tools

Is it time to admit the limitations of the grand multi-million-pound infrastructure IT platforms? I've worked on two with budgets of eight figures: one for Training and Enterprise Councils in 1990 (the largets cost was hardware), which was a barely-mitigated failure — many users ended up resorting to Excel, which did the main jobs better — and one for learndirect a decade later (the largest cost was communications infrastructure), which was a mitigated success (probably the best you can hope with a project at this scale). Even in the latter case users ended up devising their own secondary systems to enable them to serve the big beast at the centre, such were its demands for data and its inflexibilities.

After more than fifteen years of developing collaboration tools on the net — starting in my case with things like BSCW — email listserver are still the most widespread and foolproof (actually they're not foolproof, but you know what I mean) means that groups of people use to share and coordinate with each other. It's what home educators use.

Email lists are not going away, but can we improve on them in some circumstances? The number of Ning networks I'm a member of has gradually crept up to 20, and I hear talk of 'Ning fatigue' from people trying to keep up with proliferating associations. (Don't even mention Facebook groups.) Ning networks have become de rigeur for anyone trying to build some momentum behind an idea, helped by the fact that they are free. However, being free encourages a mindset where people set up Ning networks more or less on a whim, without the disciplines and commitment that self-organising needs to make it work.

So, as with old school (pardon the pun) bulletin boards, the challenge is maintaining momentum. And when I spoke last year to Steve Hargadon, who set up Classroom 2.0, the largest, most active Ning network I belong to, he said that in his view it was Ning's discussion forum facilities — not the more '2.0' features like 'friending' and blogs — that generated most of the benefits of the network. Again simple, tried and trusted solutions seem to carry the day.

But there are always exciting new possibilities on the horizon. And this season's is Google Wave. I may come across as cynical, and frequently I am, but the advance information about Wave has got me genuinely excited. Is it a document? Is it a message? Is it a real-time multimedia conversation? Whatever it is, it won't be simple, tried and trusted. But it may ultimately have a role in some instances of self-organised informal learning — and hopefully not just for geeks.

I think there is a role here in working with groups who are organising themselves to help each other learn something: a lightweight intervention to help decide what mix of free collaboration tools has the best chances of success with a particular set of people and a specific set of goals. The infrastructure behind Google offerings isn't lightweight, of course — it's orders of magnitude more heavy duty than the multi-million-pound platforms I mentioned before — but the practices that use this infrastructure can still be nimble on their toes.

The other side of the coin is the competences, attitude and capacities of the people doing the learning. It's true that we're all programmed to learn, but, along with the large, inflexible ICT systems, some of us have got used to the support of having others feed new material to us when they think we need it. Just as some of us are better than others at improvising workarounds for inflexible systems, so some of us are better at organising and pursuing our own learning.

Literacies for self-organised learning

What are the characteristics of successful self-organised learners? I've been struck recently by the similarity of two accounts of these characteristics, one from Guy Claxton (taken from this talk and this one) and one from Howard Rheingold (taken from this talk). Rheingold uses the term "literacies" to highlight that these features are characteristics of a collective rather than of individuals — and I don't expect Claxton would argue against that for at least some of the characteristics.

Guy Claxton's characteristics of a confident explorer/researcher

Howard Rheingold's social media literacies

Curiosity, inquisitiveness attentiveness (to quirky result, faint pattern)
The ability to be a good source-tester; dose of scepticism: what's your warrant for that?
Determined and observant, maintain focus; the pleasure of being rapt
Patience: ability to tolerate confusion and hang out in the fog, don't rush to closure
Knowing how to be experimental, including tinkering, creating drafts and hands-on construction
Imaginative, good relationship with own intuition
Collaborative and independent
Degree of self-awareness and reflectiveness

Attention: knowing how to focus and how to divide your attention without losing focus
Critical consumption (crap detection)
Participation, particularly the more constructive modes of participation that are useful to others
Collaboration: being ready to organise together, and enable a collective response to emerge
Network awareness: the hybrid connection of reputation, social capital, presentation of self and other sensitivity to individual positioning within the collective

If you accept my case that there's an emerging consensus about the qualities that make good self-organising learners, there's a further question: to what extent can these qualities be nurtured, or even taught?

So what's next?

These are some ideas I've been kicking around with my friend and regular associate, Seb Schmoller (though this particular expression of them is my own) as we think about how we can be useful in changed circumstances. We thought it might be interesting to carry on this discussion in writing and in public, to see if anyone else might be interested in joining in.

I'm making no claim that this approach is a panacea for all kinds of learning: it's evidently not applicable to safety-critical domains or compliance training, for example. And I'm well aware of the large number of people who've been developing closely related ideas for many years. George Siemens, Jay Cross, Stephen Downes, School of Everything are just a few that immediately spring to mind, and you can probably add many names to these.

Wacky ideass are mostly talked about at leading edge conferences, implemented in the experimental margins of large organisations or in new start-ups. I guess what we're wondering is if the time has come to transfer the wacky ideas into the unwacky world occupied, and perhaps soon to be vacated, by those agencies with 'improvement' in their titles. Bluntly, can we fill part of their role with some relatively quick and low-cost interventions, with near-zero permanent head count and near-zero capital expenditure? (There, that should ensure I never work for them again!) Can we integrate freewheeling, free range learning into mainstream 'delivery mechanisms' for education and learning?

Update: some more posts on this theme:-

Seb Schmoller responds, 5th September
More on self-organised learning (this blog), 18th September
Seb links to the idea of cogntive surplus, 26th September

[Photo credit: Gideon Burton, licensed under Creative Commons.]

Round-up of talk and interviews

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:48:33 -0700

In a brisk (?!) follow-up to my last blog entry, I did a talk to teenagers from three Sheffield schools on the subject "Big Brother is Logging You", sharing the platform with Dave Pattern, Library Systems Manager at University of Huddersfield, who also featured in the TILE libraries event. This was part of the Sheffield 14-19 Diplomas initiative. It was also an experiment in speaking to one physical audience and two 'virtual' ones via videolink, with the occasionally sub-optimal results you might expect with remote teenagers. Both my and Dave's presentations are available online, as Powerpoint, Word supporting materials, and Quicktime video of each section of our talks (unfortunately not embeddable, as far as I can see).

Bringing things almost bang up to date, I was at the Reboot Britain yesterday, and recorded a couple of short interviews with Steve Lawson on AudioBoo. In the first one I revisit and update one of my old, old hobby horses, scepticism in the face of hype about games in learning. Then another old chestnut, mentioning how what Tony Ageh said yesterday about opening up the BBC Archives reminded me of similar proposals made almost five years ago.

Listen!

Later Steve got me together with Stan Stalnaker of Hub Culture for a discussion. I'd literally only heard of Hub Culture three minutes before the discussion began, so you can hear me trying to work out whether this is an up-market managed workspace or an invitation-only business network, or some combination of the two. Even after hearing Stan speak later in the day, I wasn't entirely clear. Steve was kind enough to tweet my off-the-record explanation for why I didn't answer his second question.

Listen!

There are plenty more Reboot Britain audio interviews, along with social media of all flavours.

I hesitate before apologising for blogging so infrequently recently. Firstly I've been slowing down for a couple of years now, so it probably comes as no surprise to long-term followers. Secondly, it always seems kind of vain to imagine that people are hanging around waiting for my next bons mots (I know that I personally appreciate those bloggers who discipline themselves to populate my RSS reader only when they have something noteworthy to contribute — which standard you may feel this entry fails to meet!). I've come to the conclusion that it's unwise to create the expectation of being a one-person media channel, because you will find it becomes a rod for your own back — unless your ambition is to build a career with a one-person media channel at its centre.

With that exculpation out of the way, I admit that since I lost the habit of blogging regularly, it has been difficult to get it back. So I probably shouldn't say that I'm planning to blog a bit more in the near future — because I haven't always delivered on such statements in the past — but I am.

Shownar: reflecting online buzz around BBC programmes

(author unknown) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:17:55 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Interesting venture by the BBC to aggregate what's being said about their programmes, and thus create a kind of overview of 'buzz'. Sadly, the few instances that I looked at were dominated by banal tweets with variants on "I watched/listened to this programme; so should you" ad nauseam.

Today sees the launch of Shownar; a new prototype from BBC Vision which aims to track online buzz around BBC TV and radio programmes and reflect it back in useful and interesting ways, aiding programme discovery and providing onward journeys to discussion about those programmes on the wider web.

For as long as the BBC has been making programmes, audiences have been talking about them and we have done our best to showcase some of those conversations on-air, via programmes like Feedback and Points of View. However, it is only with the advent of the internet that those conversations have become accessible to a much wider audience. Here on bbc.co.uk we have a range of blogs, messageboards and other commenting tools, which enable users to talk about our output. However, much of the conversation about BBC programming inevitably happens away from bbc.co.uk on people's personal blogs or microblogging services such as Twitter.

Shownar aims to track the wealth of activity that takes place around BBC progammes online and work out which are currently gaining the most attention. So why do it? To borrow from the site's About pages: "First, it will help you find shows that others have not only watched, but are talking about. Hopefully it'll throw up a few hidden gems. People's interest, attention and engagement with shows are more important to Shownar than viewing figures; the audience size of a documentary on BBC FOUR, for instance, will never approach that of EastEnders, but if that documentary sparks a lot of interest and comment - even discussion - we want to highlight it. And second, when you've found a show of interest, we want to assist your onward journey by generating links to related discussions elsewhere on the web. In the same way news stories are improved by linking out to the same story on other news sites, we believe shows are improved by connecting them to the wider discussion and their audience."

So, how does it work? In the first instance, we decided to focus on tracking in-bound links to programme-related pages on bbc.co.uk, so we could be confident that the discussions were actually about a BBC programme, rather than a different usage of, say, 'archers' or 'apprentice' (although intelligent keyword matching remains a future aspiration). Rather than develop technology to crawl the web ourselves, we decided to partner with data providers who were already doing that, and who could supply us with good, clean data. We took a look at a range of possible suppliers, and for this initial prototype chose data provided by Yahoo! Search BOSS, Nielson Online's BlogPulse (which indexes over 100 million blogs), and Twingly (which searches microblogging services like Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca for links, even when they are shortened using URL shortening services such as TinyURL and bit.ly). We are also ingesting data from LiveStats, the BBC's own real-time indicator of traffic. Once ingested, this data is processed according to a specially created algorithm to calculate the 'buzz measure' for every BBC programme - more detail on the algorithm can be found on Shownar's Technical information page.

The front-end interface offers a range of different ways into the data, from the 'fresh buzz' chart on the homepage, to the schedule heatmap which shades the 'hottest' programmes on each of the BBC's TV channels / radio stations (which also have their own pages). There is also a Catch up on iPlayer page, enabling you to filter programmes available to watch on demand by channel, genre and time of day. The genre cuts are particularly compelling, enabling you to see, for example, which Comedy programmes are generating the most buzz. There's also the blueprint, which provides full access to all of the data, including permalinks, so I can tell you that the most buzzed about factual TV programme at midday on Monday 22nd June was BBC Two's James May on the Moon.

The site has been live as an internal BBC beta for a few weeks now and it's already started to have a real impact on my consumption habits, introducing me to programmes I had missed in the schedules such as Radio 2's Back from the Dead: The Return of Spinal Tap, BBC One's Famous, Rich and Homeless and BBC Two's NASA: Triumph and Tragedy. It's also doing the job I hoped it would do in terms of onward journeys, with particularly rich discussion around Radio 4's The Reith Lectures. To find out how your blog links and microblog updates can end up on Shownar (and for information about moderation) visit the Get involved page.

We're keen to hear your feedback on Shownar, so please leave a comment below or send us your thoughts by email. If the prototype proves successful, we are hoping to integrate the functionality of Shownar into bbc.co.uk. Possible future developments include additional data sources and a full API.

Shownar was designed and built by Schulze & Webb, with input from a small BBC project team: Katherine Sommers, Mark Simpkins, Catherine Wingate, Yuri Kang, Andrew Barron, Chris Sizemore and myself. We hope you enjoy using it.

Dan Taylor is Senior Portfolio Executive, Internet for BBC Vision.

The Pirate Bay and The Pirate Google

(author unknown) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 02:45:11 -0700

Shared by David Jennings
Smart commentary on The Pirate Bay verdict from David Weinberger, being incisive by being funny. "I don’t think it’s a double standard. Intent counts. The difference between the Heimlich maneuver and assault is intent, and that’s as it should be." (That's not the funny bit; but I think it's telling.)

ThePirateBay has links to content hosted elsewhere that’s available for download using the BitTorrent protocol. The site also provides a search engine for finding that content, and a page for each torrent with information about the content. It doesn’t distinguish between content that’s protected by copyright and content that isn’t. The four founders of ThePirateBay were convicted by a Swedish court last week. They were fined a middling amount, and were sentenced to a year in jail. (”What’re you in for?” “Improper use of metadata.”)

Now there is ThePirateGoogle, created by someone to make a point. There you can use the Google search engine to search for content hosted elsewhere, available for download using the BitTorrent protocol. It doesn’t distinguish between content that’s protected by copyright and content that isn’t.

Here’s the text from ThePirateGoogle site:

Bit Torrent Search

Please Note: This site is not affiliated with Google, it simply makes use of Google Custom Search to restrict your searches to Torrent files. You can do this with any regular Google search by appending your query with filetype:torrent. This technique can be used for any type of file supported by Google.

The intention of this site is to demonstrate the double standard that was exemplified in the recent Pirate Bay Trial. Sites such as Google offer much the same functionality as The Pirate Bay and other Bit Torrent sites but are not targeted by media conglomerates such as the IFPI as they have the political and legal clout to defend themselves unlike these small independent sites.

This site is created in support of an open, neutral internet accessible and equitable to all regardless of political or financial standing.

Cheers!

Yes, you can do with Google what you do with ThePirateBay. For example, do the following search at Google:

filetype:torrent “the dark knight”

There’s obviously a difference in intent between ThePirateBay and Google. But there is precious little relevant difference in the service. So, why jail the founders of ThePirateBay but not the founders of Google since either can be used to find copyright-protected torrents? Having the wrong mental attitude? (”What are you in for?” “Intent to improperly use metadata.”)

What to make of this? I find myself in a jumble:

1. I don’t think it’s a double standard. Intent counts. The difference between the Heimlich maneuver and assault is intent, and that’s as it should be. ThePirateBay is intended to enable the sharing of copyrighted works: TPB has facilities designed to help you locate, evaluate, and share files, including a page for each torrent with comments, ratings, descriptions, and the number of seeders and leechers (to see how alive the torrent is). And it’s named The freaking Pirate Bay. There may or may not be a law in Sweden against what TPB does, but it’s disingenuous to say that the site is ethically the same as Google.

3. ThePirateGoogle shows that shutting down ThePirateBay is not going to stop the use of BitTorrent to share copyrighted files. But jailing TPB’s founders may slow sharing down. Torrent site after torrent site has been shut down over the past few years, making it harder to find and download files now. The verdict in TPB case, especially with its jail sentence, will slow down the torrent of torrents, although perhaps not by much.

4. Just in case someone tells you otherwise: The BitTorrent protocol is not the issue here. It’s a brilliant way of sharing large files, and it’s used all over the place for perfectly legal file-sharing.

5. I don’t know what to do about copyright. It’s obviously spun out of control and needs to be pulled back in — lasting 70 years after the death of the creator is absurd — but we need to do far more than just shorten its term. Compensating creators for every use of their works obviously contradicts the maximal open sharing and reuse of works that drives culture forward. Creating a legal and economic environment with incentives for creators does not contradict the open sharing and reuse of works. The question is: Which legal/economic environment would work best? I don’t know — I wish I did — but I suspect it’s one in which copyrighting a work takes a little bit of effort, not all categories of work have the same copyright protections, the terms are way way way shorter than they are now, fair use is greatly extended, infringement only counts if it actually hurts sales (in the way that most mashups do not), compensation does not come from accounting for each and every use of a work, and we start rewarding those who release their works into the public domain by showering them with affection, cultural uptake, and some money.

That’s about seven steps short of an actual copyright reform program. But I find the whole topic headache-making and, frankly, depressing. [Tags: thepiratebay google copyright copyleft ]

1. ThePirateBay posts all the legal letters it gets, plus its replies. Feisty doesn’t begin to describe the replies.

2. The judge in the case seems to have ties to the copyright industry. The lawyer for one of the defendants is calling for a new trial.

Applying the lessons of Last.fm to libraries and learning

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:30:48 -0800

If fans can discover interesting new music by comparing their listening profiles with those of people with similar tastes, why not apply similar principles to students' discovery of books as they explore how to get the most from university libraries. I have an article in the Association of Learning Technology's current newsletter. It's based around a day of talks about the TILE Project (that's Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 & the e-Framework, in case you couldn't guess), and it starts like this:

"You looked at The Complete Essays by Montaigne; you might also consider The Renaissance in Europe: A Reader edited by Whitlock." Most of us are familiar with Amazon’s gently pushy way of suggesting further purchases. If you're a music fan, you may have tried “scrobbling” each song you listen to into the massive Last.fm database of listener behaviour. In return for this gift of your data, you get to explore the habits of others who share some of your tastes, and you get a series of recommendations for other music you might enjoy.

Then it goes on like this. It's kind of surprising that these methods are now fairly well established in retail and entertainment, but not in learning. Perhaps that's because educational institutions remain wary of the ways of informal learning, as though such social propagation of ideas were somehow an unruly and untutored threat (it's not).

This may be starting in university libraries, but my hunch is that it's going to spread through all large-scale learning provision over the next decade. I wonder whether this on learndirect's corporate radar (I'm sure some individuals there will have been thinking seriously about it already).

Support Longplayer Live

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:12:16 -0800

To the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse today for the annual visit to the Longplayer 1,000 year composition by Jem Finer/Artangel. In 02006's post I commented that some of the things we had hoped might happen that year had not come to pass. In this year's photo, evidence that patience was rewarded on at least one count.

The guy in the photo will have his name engraved on bowl number 1.01 in next September's live performance of Longplayer, and I believe I was also the first person to sponsor a (different) bowl and reserve a ticket at the performance. Please consider doing the same via this page. While you're at it,if you're in or near London, you may also want to join the Long Now London meetup group — it's free. Wishing you all the best for 02009.

Social media old and new: two contrasting networks

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 08:59:34 -0800

It's a year since I did a 'compare and contrast' blog post about two initiatives to build networking activity. To recap briefly, the RSA is a 254-year-old membership organisation devoted to art, design, business and the environment, currently with around 28,000 'fellows', which launched a Networks initiative on 22 November 02007 (I didn't go). The Social Media Café (a.k.a. Tuttle Club, named after Harry Tuttle), on the other hand, had its very first meeting on 21 November last year, and I did go. It aims to create spaces where people interested in social media can connect, socially and for business. So far, that has involved a series of weekly café sessions, which are 'prototypes' for something that may be more far-reaching. (The picture on the right shows, Lloyd Davis, Tuttle Club prime mover, making a brief announcement at the first birthday meeting nine days ago.)

One year on, how are they each doing? Where do they converge and diverge?

Let me see if I can build up some dramatic tension here, to make it into a good story. Is the Tuttle Club the 21st century analogue of coffee house meetings that led to the formation of the RSA in 01754? Will the RSA be shown up as a lumbering beast of the 18th century, unable to move quickly or be flexible because of all its baggage, so that the Tuttlers can run rings round it? Or will the Tuttle Club turn out to be a typical Web 2.0 phenomenon, supported by an initial wave of enthusiasm and attention but zero revenue, and at risk from the capricious mood of its freelance participants, who will lose interest when stronger commitments are required of them, or when they (errr, we) finally have to resort to getting proper jobs?

Now let me deflate that tension straight away. In both cases, it's far too soon to say. And anyway, there's no competition here. A small number of us happily frequent both spaces, and symbiotic co-evolution would be an ideal outcome for both initiatives. (Yeah, OK, I know: wouldn't it always?)

So having told you the punchline, here are a few 'compare and contrast' notes to record a snapshot of where things are at the end of the first year. This is a subjective, largely impressionistic and annoyingly London-centric account. I haven't gone back and re-read everything that's been produced — which in the case of RSA is about 40 times what has been written about Tuttle — though I have recently made my way through most of the NESTA-commissioned evalution of the RSA Networks project. To disclose my interests and affiliations, I am a fellow of the RSA and have no official status with the Tuttle Club (but then neither does anyone much). In terms of participation, in both cases I would say I am on the dividing line between centre and periphery, but leaning towards the periphery, as is my wont.

RSA	Tuttle Club (Social Media Cafe)
Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, has nailed his colours to the mast with the Networks project, one of the organisation's major initiatives since he took over two years ago. He's outlined his vision many times over in person and in writing (including, by coincidence, a blog post with exactly the same title as mine of a year ago, posted on the very same day). He's emphasised that this is a long-term commitment. When things are looking good for any group endeavour, everyone believes in collective responsibility; when delays or anxieties creep in, they look for a fall guy.	Lloyd Davis kicked off the Social Media Café concept and remains the main man, with the support of a few volunteers. Lloyd maintains that the sessions so far have been 'prototypes'. He makes arrangements such as the one with the ICA and continues to explore possibilities for leasing some workspace in Central London for club members to use.
The RSA received £100,000 funding from NESTA, probably topped up from the RSA's own funds (particularly for staff salaries) for the Networks project (source). This includes free wine and snacks at several events, which I've enjoyed.	£200 was raised for organisational development/incorporation (source). Apart from that there have been the costs of coffee, croissants and, until the club moved to the ICA a couple of months ago, pub room hire, paid for by sponsors or participants (about £300 per week).
A lot of time, money and effort has gone into building online infrastructure — the networks platform — to help incubate civic innovation projects, and enable fellows to contact and collaborate with each other. This started with some textbook prototyping and piloting with plenty of user involvement, but the danger of evolutionary systems is that they become hard to maintain. A re-engineered system has just been launched.	The tech infrastructure is very lightweight. There is just a wiki for the Social Media Café, a blog, plus an infrequently used email list. All are free hosted services. There's still a Facebook group, though no one uses those any more, right?
Alongside the networks platform, there has been — since the initiative was first mooted and before it launched — a shadow space for commentary and discussion, comprising an unofficial blog, a wiki, an email list and a Facebook group. Each of these has gone for long periods with no action, but while some may have outlived their usefulness, others (the wiki and email list recently) spring back to life at times of activity or debate. A lot has been written by RSA fellows trying to tease out what it is that we want out of the initiative (and to what degree that's the same as what the RSA wants as an institution).	You can never be sure that there aren't lots of conversations you're missing out on — especially as most take place on Twitter — but the Tuttle Club seems much less racked by anxieties about its identity. Participants talk about things it could do, for sure, but these discussions don't turn into soul-searching about who has the legitimacy to do what. In some ways, it's paradoxical that the organisation that's a year old has fewer identity issues than one that's a quarter of a millennium old, but that's baggage for you — and if the Tuttle Club ever has as much money to spend as the RSA, identity issues will surely surface.
There's an ongoing uncertainty about the constitution and ownership of the RSA Networks project [link requires registration]. This is most evident in the mutual perceptions of RSA staff and fellows. Whose job is it to initiate, whose to support and develop what has been initiated? In the face of confusion, each side may look suspiciously at the other… then it emerges that there are probably differences of opinion within each side, and little clusters of association emerge across the divide.	The constitution of the Tuttle Club is a work in progress. In this case it's both transparent — read the ideas and the accounts — and a bit messy.
The scale of active participation in the two initiatives feels, subjectively, similar. (I only see those who are active online or at meetings in London, remember.) For the RSA that amounts to a tiny proportion of the fellowship — but that can't be construed as a sign of failure. We know that in any voluntaristic network complex dynamics are at play between a very small but active core, a mainly reactive minority, and a mainly passive majority. One of the interesting things is that, while the RSA fellowship includes many people in responsible positions in leading public and private sector organisations, the active core seems to comprise almost exclusively independent and freelance professionals like me — again, the ones without proper jobs.	The number of people who've come to at least one Tuttle Club meeting is probably (high) three figures; the number who've come more than three times is (high?) two figures. As a percentage of social media professionals in and around London, those numbers may not be far off the RSA's participation rate. It's a truism to say it, but something like the Tuttle Club lives or dies by the quality and range of people it attracts. Lloyd Davis is not interested in growth for its own sake. Five years ago, I met some great people through the Ecademy network, but now I and all the people I'm still in touch with have abandoned it as it became swamped by life coaches, independent financial advisers and huckster entrepreneurs all pitching 'opportunities' at you. Lloyd writes of the "clueless opportunists [who] come looking for an easy opportunity, ironically there are a multitude of easy opportunities on offer, but they, being clueless, don't see the opportunities for what they are, they go away and leave us to get on with it." Long may this dynamic continue. There are a mix of shared values emerging. Yes, some might start talking about Brand Identity 2.0 at the Tuttle Club, but, if they do, I won't be the only one rolling my eyes (well, I'll be the only one rolling my eyes, but… you get what I mean).
Being a longstanding institution, and part of the Establishment, brings advantages as well as baggage. Powerful, or famous, or aspiring-to-be-powerful-and-famous people think it's the right place to be seen — or at least return calls. So do funding agencies. If you make a mess of things, you probably will get a second chance. Whereas a start-up like the Tuttle Club would be cast aside and replaced by someone else starting from scratch. The social capital may not be have much liquidity, but it's there. It's no wonder that progress seems to come in fits and starts, and will probably continue that way.	My hunch is that the Tuttle Club is quite delicately poised right now. It has registered on the radar of more established organisations like the ICA and NESTA, but it's a sensitive moment when one of these beckons to a fresh, young, still-to-be-incorporated venture, "come, let us take you under our wing…" Thankfully they appear to have the good sense to avoid any explicit quid pro quo or other meddling

I told you my conclusion before I started writing these comparisons. The writing turned out longer than I expected: turning these points over hasn't fundamentally changed how I thing, though I've felt both warmth and frustration towards both. One penny that finally dropped was that I've made more good friendships with people in, and adjoining, my fields of interest over the past year than at any time since I moved to London — and all are involved in one or other or both of these networks. The enjoyable conversations I've had with them have informed almost all of what I've written, though I take responsibility for the quirky opinions and any misrepresentations (hoping that friends may correct me).

I hope the next year is as fertile and as much fun. I'll let you know.

My five mind apples

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 09:59:07 -0800

Mindapples is a social movement to promote individual self-management of mental wellbeing. The original “5-a-day” campaign encouraged people to take care of their physical health through simple daily activities, and we want to do the same thing for mental health. We aim to create a stigma-free public debate about mental wellbeing, simply by asking everybody the question: “What’s your five-a-day?” [source]

Mindapples was conceived by the very smart Andy Gibson (also one of the School Of Everything team), and he has cheekily blogtagged me to get me to publish my five-a-day.

This comes with the warning that my mind feels fairly badly inspissated at the moment, but that may be because I've not been getting all five sufficiently regularly.

Meditation, or bathing a baby. Best to get the most embarrassing out of the way first. I've tried different types of meditation, guided either by tapes of Alan Watts or by the Meditation Trust. However, there are other methods if you don't want to come on like a new age hippy. In his Autobiographical Statement, John Cage wrote of his practice of zen buddhism, "I have never practiced sitting cross-legged nor do I meditate. My work is what I do and always involves writing materials, chairs, and tables. Before I get to it, I do some exercises for my back and I water the plants, of which I have around two hundred." A film shown at the John Cage Uncaged weekend documents this enormous array of plants above 6th Avenue, and the intricate instructions for watering them — you wouldn't have wanted to apartment-sit for him. Since I became a dad, finding time to meditate has been harder, but in its place I have the evening bath, feed and bedtime of my four-month-old son: the arrangements of bath water and thermometer, sleep suit and dummy, hot water bottle and towel, feeding bottle and LP cued up on turntable, not to mention the actual washing routine, are almost on a par with Cage's plants.

Daily rituals. Every day, I take a picture — the same picture — of our garden. You can see 503 (and counting) of them on Flickr. I know others do a similar thing with photos of themselves, but this intended to be an antidote to worrying about my self-image; to help me lose myself in my environment. Another ritual, though this may be more of a mind cigarette (alternately thrilling and sickening) than a mind apple, is listening to a different item in my music collection and writing something about it. Mark McGuinness has written insightfully about rituals (and avoiding the mundane) recently.
Trying to absorb something from someone who seems to have a more alert mind than me. Mark McGuinness is a good example of this, too, as I discovered his blogs at Lateral Action and Wishful Thinking a couple of months, and pick up lots of ideas and tips there. I rotate my current favourites every now and then — though I have a few perennials such as Tom Phillips, whose work teeters on the brink of tipping over from inspiring into intimidating.
Being prepared to zone out. Which might sound the same as #1, but in this case it's not planned; it's accepting the opportunity to take a little cognitive time out when it presents itself. Yesterday afternoon, for example, I ate a rather dense, home-baked muffin, and initially regretted it as I felt the blood drain from my brain to my stomach to work on my digestion. Next I had to catch a train into central London, where the combination of my light-headedness, a sunset in the south west shedding light on dark rainclouds overhead, and the swoonsome first album by The Clientele on my headphones, swept me away. I didn't do the reading I meant to do, but I arrived refreshed and alert to new possibilities.
Exercise. I'll end with a no-brainer (whoops, sorry). "Exercise promotes new cell growth in old brains by increasing their blood volume, and cell growth improves memory," says a recent book on memory research. This most obvious mindapple is the one I fall down on most often, since I now live in a part of London where the only way to get anywhere interesting is by train.

Andy invites me to pass on the invitation to five 'blog friends' to do the same. If you're a blog friend of mine… consider yourself spared, because I'm almost as sceptical about these tagging 'memes' as I am of emails that exhort me to forward them on to everyone in my address book. And by refusing to tag others, I retain the right the ignore being tagged if I choose.

Links for 2008-11-26 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:00 PST

Steve Lawson on social media for independent musicians
An album and some social media advice from independent jazz musician Steve Lawson

Steve Lawson on social media for independent musicians

DJ — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:47:03 -0800

I went to London's Vortex Jazz Club on Monday to catch the launch gig for the new Lawson/Dodds/Wood album, Numbers (pictured left, with guest sax player, Mark Lockheart). The thing is, I'd already had the album in digital form for a month or two — and not (a) because I nabbed a leaked copy off the net, or (b) because band member Steve Lawson (centre of photo) is a friend of mine. I paid the advertised price.

In a move reminiscent of the recent David Byrne & Brian Eno album, a digital download version was available in advance of the CD release. Advance buyers of the download were also entitled to the CD — I picked up mine at the Vortex — and got a further 45 minutes of exclusive material (the unedited improvisations from which the album was constructed) into the bargain. Anyone who's just curious can stream the album in full on Steve's site (via Last.fm).

Byrne & Eno got support from Topspin Media, one of the new wave of net-savvy, post-label music intermediaries, in managing the album release. Steve Lawson, however, adds the roles of label owner, social media man-about-town, and bass teacher to that of musician. I think I'm right in saying he's never put out an album other than on his own label, and generally aims to break even, at least, by the release date. He's put more thought into the uses of Twitter for building an audience than anyone I know: follow him @solobasssteve. In fact his ideas are so good that he once, after drinking a few beers in a famous producer's studio, claimed that I'd plagiarised them. Judge for yourself by checking his Social Media Principles for Musicians Parts 1, 2 and (I think?) 3 (hint: check the dates on these posts).

Lest anyone worry that, following in the wake of this album plug, this blog is turning into backslapping promos, the 'good' news is that I only have two friends who are career musicians.

[Update 30 November 2008: #1 Ouch! I knew that was a dangerous thing to say. I forgot Ben Walker. Ben, Ben, I'm sorry — I definitely owe you a plug, now!

#2 And I forgot about the tearable web, so below are the Lawson/Dodds/Wood album and one of my favourite of Ben's songs.]

Fighting cultural surplus: a review of Bill Drummond's 17

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:39:30 -0800

When Brian Eno released his Generative Music 1 album — music that is created 'on the fly' by a computer following a set of rules that Eno programmed, released on floppy disk, and now virtually unplayable on any current hardware — he wrote "I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: 'you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?'".

If you were feeling mean, you might classify a strand of Bill Drummond's musical output as an agitprop popularisation of some of Eno's ideas. 17 fits that profile, as Drummond wants to play his part in getting rid of recorded music and perhaps not just recorded music. "Imagine waking up tomorrow, all music has disappeared," begins one of his many manifestos. He declares Year Zero in the history of music, razing what has gone before and starting again — and all of this single-handedly, or with a bit of help from some travelling companions and some yet-to-be-convinced schoolchildren.

What's interesting about the campaign Drummond conjures in 17 is that it re-interprets the current state of the recording industry not as a commercial crisis, but as a cultural one.

recorded music has run its course, it has been mined out. It is so 20th century, like paper money and fossil fuels… all (or should that be 99.99 percent?) of music being written, composed, created [is] done to be recorded, and once recorded, to be experienced in a very limited way.

The first hundred or so pages are carried by Drummond's commitment to asking the basic-but-necessary questions and articulating his discontent:

What is music for? And why do we listen to it in the way that we do? And what would it be like if…? But the big questions seemed to be 'Why am I so frustrated with it?' and 'Why do I want it to be something other than it is?' and 'Why do I want it to exist in some other sort of way than it already does?'

One of the causes of the frustration is the simple ubiquity, the super-abundance of recorded music in the 21st century. This is something I've touched on intermittently on this blog over the last four years: the diseases of affluence that mean that we throw away more recorded music than we used to own a generation ago; the other critics who have reported feelings close to nausea from over-listening, and the research indicating that "accessibility and choice has arguably led to a rather passive attitude towards music heard in everyday life"; and one of Drummond's own antidotes in the form of No Music Day (which is coming around for the fourth time next week).

17 goes into more detail about No Music Day, but the main strategy he explores and documents in the book is the one that provides its title. Drummond writes a number of poster scores to be performed by ensembles of 17 people, who mostly have not met before, in different configurations, using only their voices. These performances are recorded and played just once, and then the recording is destroyed.

The first third of the book also explains what's behind these scores, for example in terms of Drummond's love of choral music (like Arvo Pärt's), and clarifies that, no, really, he'd never heard of Cornelius Cardew, Fluxus or Stockhausen before other people pointed out the similarities between his work and theirs — but since this has now been drawn to his attention, he's looked into their work, and it is indeed good stuff.

Drummond loves to tease with this kind of self-mythologising, slyly putting his work in the context of avant-garde pioneers while claiming to arrived at the same place independently, and daring us to accuse him of stretching the truth (I know art colleges did little traditional teaching of art history in the '70s, but don't you pick this stuff up through osmosis and natural curiosity? As a science student, I'm sure I knew about all those people by the age of 22).

This is quite fun (if not quite in the same class as the personal stories in Drummond's wonderful 45) but the mythologising is really all that carries the last 250 or so pages of the book. It adds spice to the musical autobiography and the diary of different performances of the 17 scores — which is just as well, because the number of new ideas about music tails off dramatically, and these stories would be pretty dry without Drummond's nagging chutzpah (or as the director of a gallery and music festival calls it, "high jinx"). He loves to make a grand claim and then expose his insecurities about it. At times, he can't seem to help himself: expressing a compulsion to graffiti, literally, his 'notices' at the side of major roads; being convicted for driving while banned — and then displaying the brilliant resilience to enjoy his sentence of 60 hours community service digging ditches, described as "good honest hard work… just what you need to get fit and get your head clear for serious thinking."

Drummond also takes evident pleasure in quoting, approvingly, an email that concludes by summing up all his work as "raving narcissism". "Well, I suppose it is all about me," is his rejoinder. Elsewhere, the device of having multiple voices commenting, challenging and contradicting the author seems a bit tired and conventional these days, but at the end I found myself nodding in relieved agreement with the critique of the 17 project that is attributed to Drummond's long-time cohort, Dave Balfe; in particular, "if you had been using a modicum of self-discipline you could have got it all down to a 2,000 word essay". Balfe goes on to argue that Drummond's professed desire to "accept the contradictions" in his work is not a sign of great art so much as lack of discipline and rigour.

I say "attributed to" Balfe because, in common with one of the other paratextual commentators in the book, I suspect these criticisms are largely Drummond's own, a reflexive doubling of his acceptance of contradictions.

If so, I'm tempted to reply that you and I have been through that, and this is not our fate, so let us not talk falsely now.

The truth is it's not just music that is suffering the problems of cultural surplus. The palate gets jaded when the stomach is already sated. How much is the world crying out for another blog post about another book about another possible future for music?

At the heart of 17, what binds the ideas to the autobiography is a struggle to break the cycle of just producing more of everything; to make culture new, fresh and strange again. The book seems to concede failure in that grand ambition, but in so doing it reinforces the value of that ambition. No wonder Brian Eno has a copy on his shelf.

Links for 2008-10-09 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 PDT

Participation and influence in social media
Reviewing and updating different classifications of user participation in social media, and different models of influence - but most models of complex systems can only be tentative

Participation and influence in social media

DJ — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:01:35 -0700

This post is a little update on one of themes I explored in the book concerning how people are different in the levels of commitment, participation and influence they bring to discovering culture. I started out with some market research about different kinds of music fans: "Savants", "Enthusiasts", "Casuals" and "Indifferents" (see full post about this classification). It doesn't seem far-fetched to imagine that some similar gradation of interest occurs in most, if not all, other fields. But then I speculated that this classification might map onto the different kinds of participation in social media proposed by Bradley Horowitz, where he distinguised

Creators — 1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
Synthesisers — 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
Consumers — 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

And then I went further and speculated about mapping that onto the distinction that some marketers make between advocates/influencers, 'brand adorers' and 'brand adopters'.

I mentioned in the book that it was questionable whether a pyramid is always the right way to represent these classifications. It implies a very top-down, one-way dynamic of influence. Intuition and everyday experience suggests that life isn't like that, and I gave examples of the most committed music fans being influenced indirectly by the more casual fans (Lord save us from being thought to share mainstream tastes!). But everyone seems to use pyramids to show influence, and that's the bit that stuck, while my nuanced caveats got forgotten. It still haunts me, which is why I have to write blog 'updates' like this…

But what prompted the return of this spectre was a couple of recent blog posts on participation and influence. First, Jay Cross shared the six levels of participation — represented as a ladder this time — identified by Jeremiah Owyang, a Forresters analyst:

Creators
Critics
Collectors
Joiners
Spectators, and
Inactives

Forresters' research leads them to distinguish different distributions of these six types between different age groups and between different continents. But for no population do the Creators count for less than 10%, which shows they're not using the terms the same way as Horowitz (see Jay's post for their definition).

The second post was one of Mark Earls' frequent broadsides about the nature of influence.

We see influence (what folk do to each other on our behalf) where emulation (of what folk around us are doing) is the real mechanic behind the spread of human behaviour.

We've just got the wrong end of the stick: we humans are not a species of "influential" individuals but emulators — Homo Mimickus. Like most social creatures, but more so…

He's right, of course — that's one reason why the pyramid is wrong. But saying there is no elite of massively influential people whom the rest of us follow slavishly is one thing (you'd have to swallow Malcolm Gladwell hook, line and sinker — and rather misguidedly — to believe that). It would be another thing to deny that some people are more influential than others. In Mark's terms, some people inspire emulation more than others.

And just as committed fans can be counter-influenced by the mainstream, as I suggested above, there can also be anti-emulation or counter-mimicry. One reason we haven't all emulated SUV drivers, even when we could, is that we'd like to make it clear that we're a completely different species from them.

Where does all this leave us? We're dealing with complex systems, and patterns of social dynamics that are impossible to visualise accurately. Don't get hung up on the classifications — are there three, four, six or 26? Answer: none of the above. If anyone tells you their research shows the true answer, ignore them, because they've misunderstood the whole field. Is participation and influence in social media properly represented as a pyramid, a ladder, a network or an octopus? Answer: none of the above.

But it can be useful to simplify — as long as you remember that's what you're doing. In sub-atomic physics electrons' position relative to the nucleus is a probability wave. Hardly anyone can visualise a probability wave, so we imagine the electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets orbiting the sun. That's a false picture, but it's satisfying, and sometimes it can even be useful. It gives us just enough confidence to go on.

Links for 2008-10-08 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 PDT

Mufin.com: content-based recommendations
Announcing a new music recommender system that can be embedded in MySpace profiles. It's recommendations are based on automated analysis of acoustic fingerprints of tracks.

Mufin.com: content-based recommendations

DJ — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:00:00 -0700

I get a fair number of people approaching me to tell me that their music recommender system is the best because of [insert special secret sauce here]. Usually this doesn't go much further: after all, the sauce is secret and can't be shared; so I say I'll be interested to keep in touch with their progress, and I bite my lip to resist repeating my sceptical view that any recommender system only has to be good enough to keep people coming back for more recommendations.

In the case of Berlin-based mufin.com, launching in private beta today, the story is slightly different, as they sent me all their publicity release information, and Petar Djekic was willing to talk to me on the record as it were. They even gave me an invite code to give away — that's my disclosure out of the way!

Mufin.com grew out of the Fraunhofer Institute, also the birthplace of the MP3 format, and the technically interesting part of what they're doing builds on that strong research base in audio and acoustics. What mufin.com does is known as content-based filtering rather than collaborative user-based filtering. In other words, rather than saying "people who like this artist/song also like this artist/song", it says "this song is similar in important ways to this song, so if you like one, you may like the other". Or in other words, think more like Pandora than Last.fm.

Mufin.com's secret sauce is that they analyse tracks automatically, and extract 40 characteristics for each one. So whereas Pandora's human-driven analysis is labour-intensive, mufin.com's can quite easily scale up to enormous numbers of tracks, just by throwing more computing power at them. (Other services that use this automated acoustic fingerprinting as the basis for recommendations include the MusicIP Mixer and AMG's Tapestry — see my interview with AMG's Zac Johnson.) [Update, 8 October 2008: Zac corrects me, pointing out that while AMG's LASSO technology does automated song recognition, this is not used for the recommendations in Tapestry, which are informed by human analysis more akin to Pandora.]

Pandora's analysis is based on literally hundreds of attributes, which, according to Wikipedia, make very fine-grained distinctions between, for example, "Lyrics by a Famous Rap Artist", "Lyrics by a Rap Icon" and "Lyrics by a Respected Rap Artist". Petar Djekic explained that mufin.com's characteristics are determined from mathematical, rather than critical/aesthetic, analysis — so while some of the 40 dimensions map clearly onto culturally established terms like vocals, harmony, and tempo, some are 'purely statistical', which means there is no simple way of naming them without inventing new terms.

Petar argues that recommender systems that work just at artist level are often ineffective. If someone says they like David Bowie, what should you recommend to them? Something that sounds like Hunky Dory or Low? Tin Machine?! I tried different starting points for Neil Young recommendations. I started with Young's Southern Man, a guitar-heavy song, which turned out to be a dead end: "Sorry, no tracks similar to Southern man available". So I switched to Young's soft piano ballad, Philadelphia. Startlingly, the majority of the recommendations were piano-led classical lieder. But, yes, I could discern a similarity to Philadelphia, even if these pieces had little or no connection to the rest of Young's oeuvre — and I might even have liked them if I'd had a chance to see more. I tried again on the guitar angle with Rockin' in the Free World. There must be some glitches in mufin.com's metadata because I was recommended a version of the same song by The Alarm, but on listening to the 30-second sample it was evidently Neil Young himself.

Yes, 30-second samples. Petar told me that the mufin.com team is sticking to the competences they know best, and not entering the music licensing minefield at the moment. Which is understandable, and possibly a wise move, but what does it mean for their service? As I've argued before, the user experience of hopping between 30-second samples of multiple tracks is not a satisfying one. You'd have to be a hardcore music forager to put up with it (even with my professional interest, I don't think I've ever lasted more than ten minutes on such a service).

Therefore the most promising applications of mufin.com seem to me to be, first, licensing their recommender technology. Petar told me that their Software Developer Kits work cross-platform (though the downloadable Mufin MusicFinder app is Windows-only for the foreseeable future), and licensing is an avenue they will be exploring actively. The second route is embedding the music recommender application in other sites: Petar talked me through a demo of using Mufin embedded in a MySpace profile, and it was impressive how the full functionality was available while still retaining reasonable usability (in my short experience of it). According to the media release, users can also share new discoveries with friends in their social network.

Links for 2008-10-06 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 PDT

Fan culture and public service: media versus broadcasting
A few comments on some research into fan cultures around radio, commissioned by BBC Radio Labs

Fan culture and public service: media versus broadcasting

DJ — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:21:00 -0700

All through last week the smart people at BBC Radio Labs published a series of research summaries under the heading "fan cultures in radio".

The research projects covered different forms of fan participation around radio, from message boards, listeners to an avuncular breakfast DJ, and a long-running soap opera. The one I was waiting for — and which will possibly be of most interest to readers of this blog — was the relationship between 'specialist' music programmes and fans, by Andrew Dubber and Tim Wall.

The published summary doesn't give us much reporting of the actual behaviour of specialist music fans (any chance of a fuller account being made available, I wonder?), but focuses on the range of orientations of the BBC to meeting the needs of these fans:

Drawing on our examination of the fan activities of specialist music enthusiasts, and the way BBC staff who serve their interests conceive their professional practices, we think such a shift would allow discussion of the difference between a 'one-to-many', centre-to-receptive-audience model and the 'many-to-many' forms of communication that are more typical online. More to the point, the term 'broadcasting' pretty much just means radio and television, when in fact recorded popular music is a media form in itself.

Elsewhere Andrew Dubber expands on the different orientations among BBC staff:

If you're the kind of music radio person with a broadcast orientation, all the internet is to you is a bigger transmitter. Or it’s a kind of a trap that you lay out there in the world, and when people stumble into it, you can grab them and pull them in to your broadcast programming.

If you have more of an online orientation, you may consider the medium on its own terms, but may not be making the most of the music programming which, if your station is doing anything right, is where all the real action is.

The trick is to step outside both of those frames and consider your station as a media organisation in a broader sense.

I'm intrigued as well about the range of orientations of the fans themselves, such as those who create a website for the aforementioned avuncular DJ's listeners. I'd guess that they don't think in media/broadcasting terms at all; their activities and orientation are much more intuitive (not having a 90-year institutional legacy behind them). But relying on intuition does not mean they are all homogeneous in their approach. Usually it means the opposite. So how do they self-organise in support of — and sometimes in conflict with — the country's most embedded media organisation?

Links for 2008-09-26 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:00:00 PDT

The professionalisation of amateur fan production
A scenario from the first draft of my book, which explores the workflow of a team of amateur fans as they build and catalogue resources about their favourite band, and the debates they have about engaging with commercial interests.

Why the net won't turn us all into social isolationists

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:05:26 -0700

Last year Cass Sunstein produced a revised version of his book Republic.com, titled — with crushing inevitability — Republic.com 2.0. In it, he critiqued the impact of the net on democratic discourse and public spaces. His dystopia is one where we all subscribe to the Daily Me, a filter that presents us only with the worldview of people we agree with. What we gain in (temporary) contentedness we lose in critical appraisal and debate — with potentially dire political and social consequences.

I think there are three sets of reasons why Sunstein's dystopia will not come about:

Filtering and recommender systems will always be imperfect; they'll never be as good as their evangelists would have you believe.
Even if perfect filtering did work, people wouldn't like it; they'd quickly get 'perfect' fatigue.
If people did liked perfect filtering, we wouldn't need the blogs that Sunstein argues are the medium of 'echo chamber' opinion: if all you ever have to say is 'me too' in chorus with your like-minded peers, the whole point of blogging (self-casting) disappears.

After my book was reviewed alongside Republic.com 2.0, James Harkin at the ICA invited me to give a response to Professor Sunstein when he was due to speak there last December. Unfortunately Sunstein had to cancel his trip to the UK, and, since he's published several more books since then, the chances of me delivering my response in person are low. So here it is in writing instead.

1

When will perfect personalisation arrive?. It's just round the corner, isn't it? Well, yes, but it always has been. Back in 01994, The Guardian produced a prototype of its personalised 02004 edition. With all the chaff for 'other people' taken out, it was only twelve small pages long. Compare that prototype of what the paper actually looked like in 02004, and you get a sense of how much trust to put in projections of a personalised future.

I'm not saying the scope and application of personalisation technologies and recommender systems won't extend. But I think Sunstein has allowed himself to be gulled by those who — out of either public-spiritedness (they think these technologies would make the world more efficient) or private interest (they're selling the technologies) — paint scenarios where personalisation is much more widespread and powerful than it is ever likely to be.

My prediction is that in 20 years time, we will look at personalisation technologies in much the same way that we see the promises made in 01988 for Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems: as "we're still waiting" mitigated failures. (Recommender systems share some techniques with AI, and it's a safe bet that some AI developers of years gone by now badge their work as personalisation and recommendation.)

2

Do people want perfect filters that feed them only what they like and agree with?. When I do talks about the use of recommender systems to help people discover music they will like, I use this image of what I call the perfect iPod (an idea borrowed from Paul Lamere). It doesn't have a screen so obviously it doesn't do video, but it's perfect for music nevertheless. It doesn't need a screen, because it knows better than you do what you want to hear. It has a comprehensive catalogue of all your likes and dislikes. Building on the Nike + iPod technology, it's connected to sensors in your feet and elsewhere so that it knows whether you're driving, walking, sitting, at the gym and so on. And its single "Play me music I will like" button senses your mood based on the galvanic skin response when you press the button. Taking all these data sources into consideration, the perfect iPod computes the exact sequence of songs to fit your circumstances, with the right mix of familiar and new music.

This is the Holy Grail that personalised media is supposed to be aiming for, but when I express it like this, most people seem to realise that it is (a) faintly ludicrous and (b) not the kind of music experience they want. They want a more organic and social relationship with music. Sometimes they want to share the same musical experience, whether at a gig or via the radio, even though that comes at the cost of losing personalisation. They're interested in what their friends are listening to. And, yes, they may have a few 'gatekeepers' (critics, DJs, bloggers), who they feel are on the same wavelength as them, and to whom they look for tips and recommendations. But the value of these is not to confirm or echo existing tastes, so much as to help them move on and broaden their musical tastes.

I wouldn't pretend that process of discovering new music is identical to that of articulating social and political views. But I suspect some of the dynamics may be similar.

3

One fundamental dynamic is that what motivates blogging, and indeed almost all dialogue, is difference. Occasionally people repeat things that they know their audience already knows and believes, usually as part of some grooming, socialisation or bonding ritual. But mostly we say stuff to other people precisely because we feel we're not identical to them, and we want to engage with the differences between ourselves. So some blog posts do just repeat what someone else said and add a simple "I agree" endorsement. But they're not the interesting ones, and the blogosphere would quickly grind to a rather dull halt if it comprised only such 'dialogue'. What animates blogs are opinions expressed precisely because the blogger suspects that her readers do not share all her views — even if the difference she's articulating is some hair-splitting between the dogma of the Revolutionary Communist Party (Marxist Leninist) and the Communist Party of Revolutionary Marxists.

To use an electrical metaphor, current only flows when there is a difference in 'potential' between two points. Without that, no lights, no heat, no motor of discussion and debate. Cass Sunstein reflects this point himself when discussing the American Constitution: "If everyone agreed, what would people need to talk about?" So widespread adoption of perfect filtering would end up defeating itself: we would be so in tune with the news and opinion media that filtered through to us that there would be no need for those media to say anything any more. And that's why we'd abandon the filters to make life interesting again.

Wrap-up

While Sunstein is a law professor, my professional training is as a psychologist. While he comes from a country with a constitution informed by a clear-eyed vision of democracy, I come from one that has muddled through for much longer with a succession of patched-up, make-do solutions rather than a coherent constitution. The space between these perspectives creates the potential for debate, discussion and argument (and possibly talking past each other!).

The shared ground is that attending to the public space and its function in democracy is clearly important. The net and blogs are having an effect, and we can't expect this effect to be all positive without any negatives. Stay wary, stay critical. But my hunch is that we don't need to get too hung up about the Daily Me and perfect information filters.

Links for 2008-09-16 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 PDT

Streaming versus Downloading: What are they good for?
Is it too simplistic to say streaming = discovery = flirting (= the new radio?) while downloading = ownership = commitment (= the new record collection?)

Links for 2008-07-29 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 PDT

The social life of a playlist
My thoughts on online playlists in general and muxtape in particular -- in response to some questions from Austrian journalist, Patrick Dax

On Slow Blogging

Sun, 25 May 2008 16:59:00 -0700

About a month ago, or maybe two, I was on the sofa at London's Social Media Cafe having a chat to David Wilcox. We had no deals to do, and no pressing initiatives to scheme about, but our interests and contacts overlap at several points, and it was a wide-ranging discussion [Update, 30 November 02008: it turns out Lloyd Davis took a photo of this chat.]. I can't remember quite how it came up, but we started to talk about our approaches to blogging, and particularly the tacit pressure to provide more or less instant comment on developments in our respective fields.

Having recently written a book about how people discover music and other media online, I'm sure my publishers would love it if I were to raise my profile as a digital pundit, passing on the latest news and maybe adding my angle to it. For example, they asked me to provide a few words on the Radiohead In Rainbows story last October.

But, as I explained to David, that kind of thing doesn't come naturally to me. I don't think my first thoughts are necessarily my best thoughts, and often it's better to let the dust settle a bit before passing opinion. For example, it was probably a few weeks before it became clear that Radiohead had made a mistake by not providing a streaming version of their album for people to try it out. As a consequence, the only way for non-die-hard fans to judge how much it was worth to them was to download it — which they did for free, rather than paying, precisely because they didn't yet know if it was worth more than that. In hindsight, I could have made a more telling, and controversial suggestion, about the failure of In Rainbows as a discovery case study, just by waiting a bit.

Maybe, said David, we need a Slow Blogging movement. That was a bit of an Aha! moment for me… but I thought I wouldn't rush into writing about it, and sure enough more useful pointers have emerged since…

I knew that the Slow Blogging idea was too good to be completely original, and, indeed, a quick Google search revealed that many had played with the term before.

But it was another pointer from David — arriving, ironically, via Twitter a few days later — that I found most interesting: Joe Kissell's lengthy and thoughtful essay on how different people engage with so-called 'microblogging' services like Twitter (the ones that encourage you to provide updates many times throughout the day).

I've never taken the Myers-Briggs personality test referred to in Kissell's piece, but I know enough about it and related tests to be fairly certain that I am an 'introvert' in its terminology. That terminology isn't quite the same as common usage: being an 'introvert' doesn't automatically mean that I am shy and retiring, but it does mean that my natural instinct is to orient myself more to trains of thought and feeling as they unfold 'internally' than to the flow of 'external' events and messages that come at me. There are strengths and weaknesses to this trait (as there are for extroverts), but it backs up the tendency for me to be less likely to shoot from the hip in response to every new announcement, and more likely to chew over a number of developments, try and synthesise them, and then come out, eventually, with some original or considered reflections.

And then a few weeks later I came across another rather wonderful Slow Blogging site (via Russell Davies' blog) called dawdlr. It uses the tumblr microblogging service, but subverts it, and Twitter, by virtue of its pace. Like Twitter, dawdlr lets you post and share status updates on what you're doing, but you have to send them by postcard. And, after they've been scanned in (see the example dawdlr postcard above), they'll be put on the website, which is updated… every six months.

The simple implication from this is that you need to think about what you're doing 'now' on a different timeframe. That's to say, not so much heading to this evening's meet-up, as composting the relationships, ideas and opportunities that will fertilise next year's growth.

And when I say 'I'm blogging', on a longer timeframe what I mean is that I'm turning over and testing out possible ideas, hoping to sift which are useful to me and to others. Right now I have a list of 27 ideas for blog posts. Over time this list tends to get longer rather than shorter, though at least a third and possibly more than half of those posts will never get written because they'll be overtaken by events, or written by someone else. (Though in a short while, the list will briefly be down to 26.)

Am I kidding myself about this? Is there value in forgoing the rapid-fire, driven-my-news-agenda for something a little more contemplative, or does that fly in the face of what blogging demands? What examples of big successes from this approach are there?

Any answers, or wider ruminations, welcome — in your own time.

[Update, 30 November 02008: at the start of this month, I was contacted by a reporter from the New York Times, asking me what the term 'slow blogging' signified for me. She didn't use my hastily-written response, and you may agree she was not to do so: "For me 'slow blogging' means taking the time to let the pattern of events reveal itself, rather than responding to each happening by shooting from the hip. If you blog about your garden every day, you'll focus on changes over a short timeframe — usually the last few days — but you may miss getting a full perspective on the change of the seasons. And how will you convey climate change year after year in a way that holds your readers' attention. How will they see the wood for the trees?"]

Culture and Learning: response to consultation paper

Thu, 01 May 2008 03:46:24 -0700

A couple of months ago the UK think tank Demos published a consultation paper with the title Culture and Learning: Towards a New Agenda. The paper aims to challenge cultural professionals and educationalists "to provide a new and coherent direction for creative learning and for encouraging creativity through culture", and the consultation period runs until next Tuesday.

I find it a curious intervention, because in some ways it seems to be swimming against the tide. There is a strong emphasis on centralisation and standardisation, the favoured interventions of old-school bureaucrats.

Hat tip to Bridget McKenzie whose own response to this consultation brought it to my attention. And following her lead in making her response public, here is mine, organised according to the six issues that the paper encourages us to address.

1 How best to define cultural learning

The definition of cultural learning on page 11 suffers from comparison with the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) definition on the previous page, and the difference between these definitions highlights issues that run through the rest of the Paper.

I understand (and support) the reasons why the Paper has restricted itself to the 'art' definition of culture rather than the 'ethnographic' definition. But even with this restriction, we cannot get away from the fact that cultural interpretations are a proxy for hammering out who and what we are.

The MLA definition captures this by using terms such as active engagement and making sense of the world. The definition on page 11 goes off the rails as soon as it speaks of acquiring behaviours, knowledge and values. The former represents learning as a fluid and dynamic process of exploration, interpretation, debating of contested meanings and identity formation. The latter represents it as paternalistic transmission of a set of approved and standardised meanings.

As a secondary point, the page 11 definition risks getting mixed up between cart and horse in cultural learning when it refers to enjoyment motivating and enhancing learning, as though culture was somehow the sugar coating on the (bitter?) pill of more serious lessons. Learning should enhance enjoyment as much as vice-versa. There seems to be a hidden agenda between the lines of the document that culture is a means to the end of making us all better citizens. (When culture and politics get into a tussle, politics may win the battle, but culture will win the war — it runs slower and deeper.)

Throughout the Paper I had a sense that what the author really wanted was a 21st century, vaguely interactive version of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation TV series from forty years ago, which could be 'implemented' nationally. Irrespective of how the landscape has changed since then, it's important to remember that the subtitle of that series was A Personal View, not A Standardised (or Canonical) View. Even the patrician strand of cultural education has acknowledged its roots in subjectivity and the possibility of alternative, incommensurate frameworks.

And the landscape has changed. We live in a world where we choose our cultural 'programme' to fit our interests and social relationships, rather than having its parameters set by Reithian overseers. I have written about the new behaviours of cultural discovery that are emerging as a result (in my recent book: see About Me at the end of this letter), which I describe as 'free-range foraging' whereby we group and swarm around common cultural interests. Yes, we still absorb what institutions and mass media put out to interest and entertain us, but we also re-interpret and re-present it to each other in blogs and on social networks. This is good old-fashioned meaning-making, made newly visible — on a grand scale — and durable by digital media.

It's a brave man or woman who goes up against these anarcho-democratic dynamics by seeking to conjure a national framework wherein citizens can reliably acquire the behaviours, knowledge and values that will "equip people for the world of today and tomorrow". I salute your courage in staking out a position that goes against the prevailing intellectual fashion for more 'emergent' and 'participative' approaches. But I have to ask (a) what's driving this return to centralisation and standardisation, with its open disdain for localism and specialisms? and (b) you and whose army? (Hence, I guess, your questions about leadership...)

2 How to embed cultural learning more firmly in the education and learning sectors and in cultural organisations

In its own discussion of possible solutions, the Paper references the National College for School Leadership's network learning communities. With my associate Seb Schmoller, I have recently done a consulting project for NCSL to recommend the design directions for the next iteration of the infrastructure that supports these communities. Without giving away any confidences, the approach aims to define a small 'centre', managed by the College with appropriate controls and standards, but a wider 'penumbra' where the participants have a great deal of autonomy to collaborate on terms that they decide, and using their favoured tools and approaches. The only discipline imposed is that participants are encouraged to make the outcomes from this work readily accessible to the centre, and may be rewarded for doing so.

The relevance of this model to embedding cultural learning in education and learning sectors and in cultural organisation is this: embedding doesn't have to mean whipping organisations into line to create a whole new strand of activity on top of what they've already been whipped into submission to do. If you create a minimalist framework - or just an enabling platform - for organisations to make visible and share widely their existing cultural learning, there is a good chance that more sustainable standards and voluntary frameworks will emerge. Create the conditions that make it easy and rewarding for organisations to collaborate, share and develop cultural learning practices, and they will do so.

Organisations in the cultural and education sectors could also adopt a similar approach, creating a permeable membrane between what they do as part of their core mission as an institution and the many activities that go on beyond their control, beyond their intervention and without their sanction, yet which have potential relevance to its aims. Significant numbers of students and audiences are motivated to learn about, and from, culture. Too often they do so on their own terms because they feel the terms of cultural and education organisations are too constraining.

Those organisations can thrive by positioning themselves as cultural exchanges where people communicate and share their interpretations. At the moment Bebo is probably doing this better than most libraries and public collections.

3 How to identify the most effective leaders to drive improvement in cultural learning

Put simply: create the conditions for these leaders to identify themselves.

Create a platform that helps cultural learning practitioners discover the projects, people and resources that might be relevant to their own aims, and that supports them making entrepreneurial connections. With the right channels and information infrastructure in place, leaders will soon make themselves known.

4 What the leadership role in cultural learning should comprise

I'm not sure that they're any different from leadership in other areas, but here are a few traits that spring to mind:

the ability to spot the seed of a good idea, or a good implementation of an idea, even when it's hidden in a lot of extraneous rubbish and noise;
the ability to enrol the people with promising ideas in an ambitious vision, to influence and engage in circumstances where you can't control;
the ability to work across boundaries, recognise the value of formal and informal interventions in cultural learning, and manage the ecosystem so that both kinds support and feed off each other.

5 How to develop a set of shared standards, and a definition of excellence relating to cultural learning

Page 23 of the Paper suggests adapting the MLA's Inspiring Learning for All framework for wider use. This seems to me one sound foundation on which to build: the framework has the benefit of several years of experience, and is sufficiently generic to be adaptable to specific contexts without being so generic as to be lacking in substance.

Having said that, with regard to the process for developing shared standards, I would recommend starting at the point of aggregating existing practice in the cycle of standards development:

If you start with analysis or specification, you risk missing potentially important practices in cultural learning.

I confess I have little time for the idea of 'defining excellence', possibly as a result of the experience of ever-sprouting Centres of Excellence that serve mainly to accelerate the cycle of fads and generally seem to peddle mediocrity with a short shelf-life. At the same time, I concede this not an argument against assessment or judgements of quality. The range of things we can measure is growing significantly, particularly in the digital world, but it's not clear which of these metrics are going to be the most valuable.

I'd recommend that the first stage should be to benchmark several cultural learning initiatives on several different measures at each stage in their lifecycle (recognising that individual initiatives go through a lifecycle of conception, growth and death, even as the collective 'river' of learning continues to flow).

6 How to improve the profile, scale and effectiveness of cultural learning

I hope my answers above have gone some way to addressing this point.

To address the effectiveness point, we need to agree what cultural learning is for. The Paper doesn't discuss this at length, and refers just to "how to equip people for the world of today and tomorrow".

There is no doubt that cultural learning can play a role in building social bridges and deepening trust and cohesion. Much of what goes on in social networks (broadly defined, online and offline) is driven by a desire to connect with culture through people and to connect with people through culture. The culture we choose to explore makes us who we are.

I worry that the Paper may underestimate the amount of self-motivated and informal cultural learning that takes place off the radar of governments, schools and cultural institutions. Activity that takes place without institutional sanction or support inevitably ends up having low status within institutions. Frequently they dismiss its non-institutional nature as 'fragmented', missing the point that its diversity, flexibility and high degree of personalisation are precisely its strength. It will be a big challenge to change this. And I am wary that the solution to this should not be to institutionalise spontaneous behaviour, but to capture its essence, accelerate its momentum, and make links to related activities.

7 About me

I am independent consultant, working through my company DJ Alchemi Ltd. I help organisations tackle any issues they may have with online learning and discovery. Recent clients include NESTA, the Association for Learning Technology, unionlearn and the National College for School Leadership. I am the author of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll: How Digital Discovery Works and What it Means for Consumers, Creators and Culture (published 2007). For more details, please see http://alchemi.co.uk/about/ or http://alchemi.typepad.com/about.html .

I hope this response is useful, and wish you well with your final report.

Yours sincerely

David Jennings

Against Method in Innovation

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:57:17 -0700

I've signed up for NESTA's Innovation Edge conference in a few weeks. Though I'm looking forward to what promises to be a stimulating day, I'm kind of surprised that the abstract concept of innovation remains so popular with policy makers and agencies.

Using innovation as a catch-all term to cover a wide range of changes in products, services and organising creates the expectation that these changes share important characteristics and, critically, may share similar solutions. But do they, should they, or could they? To take the relatively narrow domain of integrated IT, on the one hand you have the Apple approach; on the other open source. How much do they have in common? Not an awful lot.

Perhaps my wariness and scepticism comes from being exposed, at an impressionable age, to Paul Feyerabend's "anything goes" approach to scientific method. Feyerabend didn't deny the value of method; he was arguing against hidebound adherence to any particular set of rules and methods. He argued for a more laissez-faire approach to combining multiple approaches, and being prepared to bend the rules when circumstances encouraged it.

If you want to wind people up, you refer to this way of thinking as epistemological anarchism. If you want to calm and reassure, you're better off talking of methodological pluralism. I'm hoping to hear both at Innovation Edge, which takes place in London on 20 May this year, and is free to attend (but places are limited and require registration).

The Age of the Free MP3 Player

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 03:35:50 -0800

This is the season where many bloggers are providing their predictions for the year ahead. I tend to opt out of these because a year is both too long and too short to foresee many types of change, which are like rainstorms or earthquakes: you know one's coming, but you don't know quite when or where until the early warning signs appear. I'm more of a Long Bets man, so today I'm going to revisit something I've touched on occasionally in the past, most recently nearly two years ago: the falling price of MP3 players and the possible implications for listening/buying experiences.

In the last year or so there's been a growing wave of music being distributed on USB sticks — the picture is of Radiohead's 6-album "boxed set" in its USB version, which, at $160 or £79.99, somehow cost twice as much as the CD version of the same albums. The problem with these products is that, once you've copied the data off the stick, the stick is just… a stick. You can keep it on a shelf, back-up your homework or your novel on it, forget about it in the glove compartment or loan it to a friend who forgets it in his glove compartment. It's a piece of plastic with some data on it.

But add a player to it, and it has a different kind of value. Now you just have to bring your own headphones (or powered speakers) and you've got all you need to keep you entertained for as long as six Radiohead albums turn you on (about 15 minutes in my case, but these people may differ).

In February 02006 I was quoting £39.99 for an MP3 player, but now iPromo are offering 1GB MP3 players for £10 if you buy in bulk. Tzomé are offering MP3 players with your band's music preloaded for the same price. How long before branded versions of these, packed with maybe the latest album plus a recording of tonight's performance, appear at the merchandise table at gigs? They could cost less than the hooded sweatshirts and still be profitable.

Buy the music and the player comes with it. I think this could be part of a wider building of momentum for tools that exploit the increasingly marginal costs of basic, high-volume technology components. (The OLPC laptop could be seen as another example.)

Quite when this will grow into a full-blown 'wave' of products that reach beyond niche markets is hard to predict. Within another 2-3 years? Ultimately, of course, the wave may break when we get photos of landfill sites clogged with disposable gadgets that have been disposed of. Then we'll all have one government-registered device, ergonomically made to measure each of us individually, but with a usage life measured in decades, which we have to upgrade and maintain. Just joking — though my turntable is 27 years old and sounding just as good as it ever did (cost of ownership around £5 per year); I hope one day to own something equally as long-lived.