Socially responsible outsourcing

I posted recently about mobile developments in Africa and how they are being used in a number of imaginative ways - many of which which we're yet to see in the 'West'!

As well as being used to organise day labour they're also used by people to do small jobs such as translations. In Kenya, with its many languages, this is how help resources for mobile companies' customer services are being built - word-by-word



Samasource is a fantastic new San Francisco non-profit that partners with small, talented, tech companies and nonprofit training centers in poor and rural communities (currently Kenya, Cameroon, Uganda, rural India, and Nepal) to find them clients.

It derives its name from the word sama, Sanskrit for “equal”.

Their partners must meet stringent social impact criteria - fewer than 20% of applicant firms are selected - and they specialize in services ranging from data entry to advanced software and website development.

It's about giving work, not aid to people in the world's poorest countries.

Socially Responsible Outsourcing 101

View more Microsoft Word documents from Leila Chirayath.

Here's a profile of Ann Wangui, a graduate with honors from Nairobi's Methodist University. She is an example of the sort of person who is struggling to find a job in Nairobi despite her qualifications and who Samasource aims to help.



This is certainly a much better approach than the one being adopted by the world's large tech companies. Erik Hersman recently posted Microsoft vs the Open Source Community in Africa.

If Microsoft developer communities do emerge in Africa, Erik writes, even with the massive hurdle of paying for expensive access to developer tools, "we’re still left with what one person wrote: …they will be formed from programmers who are completely dependent on American software for the livelihood: it’s neo-colonialism, pure and simple."

In Africa organizations have a lot of hurdles to overcome, not least of which is the straight cost of doing business. Where it might be simple for some organizations in the US and Europe to wave off a couple thousand dollars worth of licensing fees, the same is not true in Africa. The margins are lower, so every cent counts.

In a region where cost is so important, it’s amazing then that the most lucrative deals go to the Western organizations that have high costs for ownership and maintenance. These outside organizations use backdoor methods to gain contracts where in-country options are available, usually with less expense and with greater local support.

Hersman also reports that Microsoft are trying to muscle in on the African-developed Ushahidi crisis reporting social software with a new product called Vine. He says "if they really are about creating emergency and disaster software for use by normal people, then I would encourage them to not charge for it and to make it as open as possible for others to work with it."

Fat chance, I suspect.

HT: Owen Barder

How to drive 'take-up'?

Joke, end of e-newsletter story from Government Computing, but there's a grain in there ...

Public sector IT is often about making government more convenient. In Venice, it's about making conveniences more governable.

The city, which is perpetually battling to save itself from rising seas, has launched an online service allowing visitors to buy discounted access to toilets, if they pay in advance.

Outsiders can buy 10 visits over five days for seven euros in high season online, compared with nine euros for a card bought in person, or the one euro pay as you go tariff.

Locals get a preferential rate, of 25 euro cents for each comfort break.

The city has added the facility to its Venice Connected visitor card, which provides services and online reservations, in an attempt to reduce the number of tourists who use the Unesco world heritage site as an open air urinal. Many restaurants and cafes have "no toilet" signs.

You might call it wee-government.

It's called 'incentivisation'.

Scrapbook clips catch up

According to the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM:

More and more German citizens use the Internet to performing authorities courses. 43 percent of Germans in 2007, electronic services of public administration claimed.

And the UK is slipping down the rankings (p. excuse translation).

Putting a spanner in the gears of the drive to council web ads, Accessible banner adverts, from the RNIB.

Jack Pickard says Better Connected: Sigh - Here we go again…

Perchance, I agrees. Forsooth I said ..

There are methods for discovering what terms people use ‘in the street’, that’s how people spend money with search marketing.

One reviewer doesn’t constitute testing best practice, there are well-developed methods used elsewhere which enumerate the issues with this.

The central theme being a disconnection to web best practice.

I am sure that professionals in such areas would find these methods odd.

Webcredible has issued a highly related report 'Local Council Websites: Good, But No Cigar'. PDF download and fairly damning.

Usability will undoubtedly prove to be a key factor in the success of the online channel, particularly when it comes to transactional support for key user services. Compared to last year’s average score of just 45.5%, this year’s sample has performed a lot better against our guidelines. However, there is still significant scope for improvement

Tops for Webcredible? Dan Champion's old stamping ground: Clackmannanshire.

New blog for your Reader: blindaccessjournal.

Business leaders call for accessible technology

"The business case for accessible technology is compelling. IT that is accessible for disabled people is easier for everyone to use and improves everyone's productivity.

"Indeed, it's estimated that over 60 per cent of the workforce would be more efficient were they to use existing accessibility features."

HMRC chief operating officer Steve Lamey said: "We want to raise the profile of the business case for having a disability competent IT sector, not just to suppliers but to every chief information officer in Europe.

Microsoft is lining up Senior PC for the UK. "The PC will come with simplified software for email, word processing as well as managing prescriptions, finances, travel planning and photographs." Age Concern and Help the Aged are the co-conspirators.

HT to Headstar for breaking the walled garden - they have Gerry McGovern starring at an upcoming function.

theconnectedrepublic.org is a new community space, developed by Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group. The aim is to create a space where people with ideas can meet, share their thinking and link up with each other. The site is open to anyone who wants to get involved. They want this to be a user-led, user-dominated space :}

• PDF White paper - The Connected Republic 2.0: New Possibilities & New Value for the Public Sector

The Cabinet Office has set up a competition for people to develop their own mash-ups from public sector information, according to Kable.

Actually it's Minister Watson. Praise where praise due.

Great primer from Jack Aaronson at ClickZ on new developments in ecommerce producing A Widget World?

Companies like Citibank should hop on this bandwagon and create true mini ATM interfaces that allow users to perform various banking transactions via the iPhone. The iPhone interface would need to operate more like an ATM and less like a Web site (which is how existing online banking tools are designed).

Authoritarian Governments Can Lock Up Bloggers, But Not Outwit Them

What do Barbra Streisand and the Tunisian president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, have in common? They both tried to block material they dislike from appearing on the internet. And they were both spectacularly unsuccessful.

CIA collaborates online

Although people do not generally think of the spy agency as an information-sharing organization, that's an important function of the CIA. And like executives of news organizations, [it's] feeling pressure to make content accessible to an audience that now expects to stay connected from any location.

"People don't always sit at their desks," he said. "If we are really going to be successful, we need to get information to our customers whenever, wherever…by whatever means necessary."

Fowler said the WIRe, which has been online in its current form for less than two years, includes several Web 2.0 tools from text and video to social bookmarks and Really Simple Syndication feeds. "We are really trying to push the envelope," Fowler said.

Content is published seven days a week, and Fowler was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit in 2007 for his work on the unique, user-driven format of the publication. The WIRe's newspaper-like interface, which reflects editorial decisions about what should go above the fold, is released six times weekly, he said.

In a sense, Fowler added, the product is like a wire service but more scholarly in style. Reports combine field intelligence, open-source information and analysis.

Fowler said the goal is to use various online tools to make the reports more interlinked for the customer, and there's an opportunity for readers to comment on a particular article and follow links to other, related articles.

The collaborative tools "are a means to an end," he said.

Latest PEW Internet & American Life Project survey says 46% Of Americans Partake In Politics Online. A. Lot.

McCain appears to have, finally, hit a NetNerve with an online appeal for more drilling.

BBC: Supermarket of the future.

It's all about the mobiles. But I find the robot scares me.

Al-Qaeda's Growing Online Offensive

Every three or four days, on average, a new video or audio from one of al-Qaeda's commanders is released online by as-Sahab, the terrorist network's in-house propaganda studio. Even as its masters dodge a global manhunt, as-Sahab produces documentary-quality films, iPod files and cellphone videos. Last year it released 97 original videos, a sixfold increase from 2005.

Jakob has been bizzy:

The 1% of websites that don't suck can be made even better by strengthening exceptional user performance, eliminating miscues, and targeting company-wide use and unmet needs.

Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews.

More wisdom.

It's unfair to blame Google for the facts of information foraging. The easier it is to get around an information space, the earlier people will leave any one location and surf to the next beckoning hit. That's a fact, and Google is just designing the best product it can.

If we didn't have Google, it would be Yahoo and Live Search that were making us stupid, even though maybe they wouldn't make us quite as stupid, because they would make it a little harder to find the next promising place to go, and thus make people dig a bit deeper at each site.

Also, I have observed the same reading behavior in user research since 1997 (the year before Google was founded) so it's definitely not Google's fault that the very nature of the Web makes users treat individual websites contemptuously. Yes, the behavior is stronger now, with more people that ever using search and diving into sites for very short dips, but fundamentally it's the same style of behavior.

After all, I talked about the importance of designing and writing for search long before Google, and the guidelines are pretty much the same. It's simply become more important to follow them.

The guilty party is not Google, it's the Web.

And, from salesforce.com numbers:

Remember that IE7 was released in October 2006: 20 months ago.

Thus, the UPTAKE SPEED is slightly less than 2% per month (in terms of IE users upgrading from the old version to the new one).

Ten years ago, in 1998, I noted that the uptake speed for new browser versions was 1% per week. Thus, users are now twice as conservative as they used to be.

Here's a usability tip: it never ends. ATMs are over 30 years old but they're still up for improvement.

Study Ranks Twenty Best Country Portals: Singapore, Argentina, Costa Rica Take Top Spots

The study is from this guy, but I haven't been able to find the actual study ;[ The portals are great though. Google them.

Personal Democracy Forum 2008.

Absolutely heaps of good stuff. Barely. Scratched. Surface. Also check this tag.

John Edwards' surprise appearance:



Google redefining 'community standards'?

In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

Very neat idea: non-stop trains:



Line of the week from BBC Radio News: "there's been an 18% reduction in the carbon dioxide Prince Charles produces"

And an added extra, from Chris Kelly:

What if Obama spent the next week calling McCain Dracula?

No offense, right?

He wouldn't really be calling him a macabre horny corpse that only sunlight can stop. He'd just be kidding around. About his energy policy.

And to mention that I've been rated "8.0 in the Society category of Blogged.com". Sorry Amy Liu, no link for you. No 'benefit' sold ;{

Google Reader clips catch up

Sneak preview of iplayer 2.0.

The most important change is that we combined TV and Radio in the same iPlayer interface.

Which will be great for introducing a lot of radio comedy to new audiences and entirely appropriate for the viewing circumstance - via computer or via mobile.

There's a stack of other great user-driven new features in it.

Elizabeth Pisani: Washington has more HIV than Nigeria

In part because Congress has until just a few months ago stood in the way of clean needles for injectors in the city, the capital of the world’s largest economy has HIV rates similar to those in many African countries.

Much web 2.0 isn't accessible but this looks set to rapidly change. Accesify reports that Firefox 3 is "a big accessibility enhancement in the form of WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications) support."

And the RNIB’s Web Access Centre Blog says:

This is an exciting time in the browser area as support for the Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) suite gathers pace in the next generation of browsers. Browsers with support, partial support and planned support for WAI-ARIA include Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Opera and Web Kit based browsers including Apple’s Safari.

Leading industry commentator John Battelle declares that with search It's Over. Google Wins.

MP Tom Harris got roasted in the MSM for comments on his blog and Minister and longtime blogger Tom Watson's points to hypocrisy and lack of MSM coverage of that hypocrisy by one of Harris' tormentors - Tory MP Philip Hammond.

If ever there was a time for British bloggers to pick up on a story that the mainstream press have missed/ignored, this is it.

Steve Dale artfully dismisses a CBI claim that Browsing websites costs billions in lost productivity.

I just hope that managers will not use this report as further ammunition to restrict workers from using the web for anything other than browsing their own company’s web site. Let’s not apply 19th century working practices to 21st century workers!

The BarCamp idea just happened in Nairobi!

• Wiki. Flickr.

Fantastic idea posted by Simon Dickson, The power of postcodes.

Postcodes are the country’s greatest example of the Power Of Information. I believe we would unlock significant power if we enshrined postcodes as our key national geography, asking Royal Mail to bequeath them to the nation. All statistical and political geography should be aligned with postcodes, with a commitment not to change them for 10 years, perhaps coinciding with the Census cycle. I don’t care if there are marginally more meaningful statistical boundaries; a flawed system we all understand beats a perfect system nobody understands. Oh, and it’s cheaper too.

Shane McCracken channeling Steve Webb posts that MPs are only just now being allowed to utilise laptops in HofC committee meetings.

Dave Briggs issues Three cheers for Dylan Jeffrey, a civil servant who took part in the debate about ICELE by commenting on his blog in Jeffrey's official capacity.

Of course, this week saw the publication of the guidance for civil servants engaging with the social web. Of the five main points, three were: be credible, be responsive and be a civil servant. Dylan hit all three of these.

Let’s hope other civil servants take note, and that Dylan’s colleagues at CLG thank him for doing this on their behalf.

The guidance has been the subject of much justified, excited comment within egov. It's genesis behind the scenes should be noted for some future history of this period. The actual movers here know who they are and deserve, unfortunately anonymous, thanks. The guidance just needs extending now beyond Whitehall!

John Edwards for CIO examines how new text analytics technology is being deployed in the US to examine customer comments on surveys and e-mail as well as monitor blogs, text messages, online chats, phone calls (through speech-to-text conversion) and social network profiles.

For content management products, Halper notes, text analytics can be a complementary technology; for example, text analytics can help categorize or enrich content, analyze content in a data repository, or improve workflow.

Also, vertical industries, such as the legal industry, are becoming increasingly intrigued by text analytics' ability to add insight to an array of routine business tasks, she says.

Today, many text analytics users believe that the technology provides a useful bridge to help nontechnical staff members get a handle on complex problems without running high-level searches.

"You can have business users who are not analysts really understand 'What are my top 10 problems?' or 'How is this issue trending over time?'" Bodoh says.

All new and early days though.

But while text analytics can rapidly generate vast amounts of deep customer insight, the technology is still far away from becoming an out-of-the-box solution.

"For our purposes, in order to get full value from the application, we will have to train analysts to use the software, invest in tuning the taxonomy to produce more granular analyses and integrate the output...with our enterprise data warehouse so we can use the combined data for even greater customer insight."

Emma Mulqueeny really likes Hazel Blears work on citizen empowerment.

* I can’t precis Ms Blears’ intro, you need to read it then come back for the rest if you need :)
* Bearing in mind that it is based on the GOB Green Paper, you need to know this bit of it: It aims to give citizens the means of participating in decision-making at every level; to clarify the role of Government, both at central and local level; to rebalance power between Parliament and government and give British people a stronger sense of what it means to be British (FWIW: I do not agree with the importance of the second point but hey ho)
* This paper is an action plan covering three areas:
1. Widening and deepening empowerment opportunities locally
2. Supporting and enabling people to take up empowerment opportunities
3. Strengthening local representative democracy
* In Summer 2008 there will be a review of this action plan, with a further plan set out thereafter (I know, I KNOW… these things take time)

One line which leapt out at me was:

Give citizens a greater role in planning
• Build an e-consultation hub: 2007 link every local authority and 2008 open the hub to the general public.

I wonder if this will replace, duplicate or actually means the much-loved, semi-privatised Planning Portal.

The coming 'tracking' storm

Greg Sterling has an excellent analysis of the coming storm over online tracking by advertisers - prompted by a first legal move in the New York State Assembly:

Here’s where we are today:

• Traditional media are less and less effective because of audience fragmentation
• Agencies are still largely clinging to traditional media because of “inertia” and familiarity
• The Internet is where huge audiences are today but they’re harder to effectively reach
• Arguably search is the most effective online ad medium
• Brands generally don’t want to spend money on search
• Taking the lessons of search to heart, display advertising — where most of the brand advertising is seeking to go online — is tapping behavioral targeting (BT) and other, similar strategies to make display more “relevant”

After reading about how Internet companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo collect information about people online and use it for targeted advertising, one New York assemblyman said there ought to be a law — Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, the sponsor of a New York bill to limit how companies collect data on computer users.

And because it would be extraordinarily difficult for the companies that collect such data to adhere to stricter rules for people in New York alone, these companies would probably have to adjust their rules everywhere, effectively turning the New York legislation into national law.

From a legal standpoint this law wouldn’t survive a court challenge because, assuming it passed, it would violate the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, which doesn’t allow individual states to regulate “interstate commerce.” Of course there are exceptions one can find but this wouldn’t be one of them.

What’s significant here is that it represents a first step in what is sure to be an ongoing legislative and regulatory discussion of consumer privacy. This is analogous to what happened with Click Fraud only more extreme: the search engines failed to “get out in front” of the issue from a PR perspective until they’d been repeatedly hammered in the press.

He's right. Web companies aren't good with PR. I can see the Panorama 'expose' now ... maybe written by the 'ubiquitous' Nicholas Carr, who goes all paranoid again in this post about a new Google ad-serving patent.

• paulcanning: Nicholas Carr goes ballistic

Show Me The Bunny

I was mentioning today about trying to get my head around the aspect of Social Networking called the Social Graph, known as Facebook's 'secret sauce', and reviewing what's in my Reader I came across this neat summary from Dave McClure on TechCrunch

Here are seven major aspects of Facebook you can use to increase the visibility of your startup, business, product or service:

1. Set Up Your Graph: Profiles & Privacy
2. Make Connections: Networks, Groups & Events
3. The Need for Feed: Your [Shared] Social Activity Stream
4. Share Your Content: Share & People-Tag Your Stories & Media
5. App to the Future: The Facebook Platform, APIs, & Applications
6. Pay to Play: Ad Networks, Sponsored Stories, & Paid Distribution
7. Show Me The Bunny: Gifts, Points, & Virtual Currency

He goes into detail on those aspects. What Dave means when he talks Bunny, though, isn't what you might think — it's something new:

There are 3 major types of virtual goods: decorative, functional, and behavioral. Decorative goods are those primarily geared towards self expression. Functional goods are those that meaningfully alter your user experience. For example, a suit of armor in World of Warcraft that confers a special advantage to you would be a functional virtual good. Behavioral virtual goods are graphical icons that capture some sort of social interaction. This is the type that is most prevalent on Facebook today. Virtual gifts are the best known example of this category of virtual good.

Two of the top 10 Facebook apps, X Me and SuperPoke!, are essentially just interaction tools. In the X Me screenshot above right, each of the icons – whether it be Love, Punch, or Kiss – is an encapsulation of a specific social interaction. Though it may not be purposeful, these types of casual apps are training users to understand how to interact with virtual goods. I can easily see how these apps become platforms that launch broader virtual currency systems. For example, expanding this app to allow users to attach custom graphics to their custom actions would create a new, rare class of virtual objects.

I was just looking at Amnesty's great new web campaign, UnSubscribe (Hat tip: David Wilcox, he has a report of the launch). it's all about attempting to exploit the Social Graph. Really great design and lots of stuff in there. They don't even forget valuable things like email sigs. They have video and sign-up widgets.

Couple of things though:

1. It doesn't actually chart results. What is the impact of web campaigning? What has Amnesty already achieved?

I think the Number Ten web petitions shows some of the limits here, the potential for cynicism, although I'm sure you do have an effect (I know you do from experience) but it would help to show this, to demonstrate the impact somehow.

2. All the widgets are with WidgetBox and they have a very irritating method whereby you can't just get the embed code. You have to select your platform then it does it for you and a post magically appears (which I don't want). YouTube usually gives you the code option.

One very real reason why this is more than annoying is because if you auto-ping that's the post content which will appear in feeds - their headline choice etc. and none of your surrounding context. It reminded me of using MySpace and especially using Bebo, which has loads of walled gardens. This is also more than annoying campaign-wise as well because I then had to look elsewhere for the embed code for this campaign video.



Here's the sign-up widget (not in it's own post!)

Mobile web taking off - slowly

BBC News has an interesting summary of the state of the UK mobile web market. It's healthy, they think;

Figures for February 2007, from the Mobile Data Association show that almost 15 million people use the web via their handsets each month.

New flat rate price plans and much faster speeds are increasing usage but most have download limits and stop Skype or streaming video use.

They have only recently stopped ridiculous restriction to their own portals and content and have seen portal content usage rise and spending within previously walled gardens.

T-Mobile said "Usage is as diverse as the people using it."

"Half of our customers surf the internet on their mobile when they are at home watching TV. They do not need to go to a laptop and fire it up. The mobile is there for them."

"Social networking has rocketed up the charts recently," he said. Sites such as Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and eBay have become very popular destinations for customers."

Said Vodaphone:

"It's different and relevant to the individual. It's the real long tail of relevance."

AdBlock: "not evil"

The always interesting blogger, author and commentator Nicholas Carr has a thing about AdBlock - that's a little plug-in or add-on which around 1-2% of users have installed - to the point that he just asked the question

• 'Adblock Plus: what would Jesus do?'

If that sounds OTT that's because it is .

As I explained before, there is no way that AdBlock, the effort of one geek in Germany, not the Russian mafia, is ever going to seriously challenge ecommerce.

AdBlock somehow representing armageddon for ecommerce, if not capitalism in general, is what Nicholas and most others on this subject have been carrying on about.

And here's why they all need a bex and a good lie down:



This is the faaaabulous Broadway World website trying to flog me Xanadu tickets, finding it's own way around my AdBlock, which is the red circle in the bottom right of the screengrab.

Haaretz and others get some ads round my default AdBlock set-up as well.


(Xanadu? Is this some sort of off-beam behavioural targetting? I Haaaate Xanadu, brings back bad memories .. :{ )

Several industry commentators have written that AdBlock is evil.

Some are arguing that Firefox users be actively blocked, (which just sparks another add-on arms race).

Carr is right on one thing though, that a paid commentator should see the Web the same way as the poor sods who don't use AdBlock. I won't spoil his post by telling you his answer to 'Jesus's' conundrum ...

• NB: Here's the real origins of A Bex and a Good Lie Down
• New York Times scare article
  

~~~~~~~~~~~


Postscript: here's Google getting around AdBlock on JackP's blog:



And a comment made me investigate my filters in AdBlock and - ahah! - there is indeed a 'Dr Evil' involved in this conspiracy against capitalism!

[Adblock Plus 0.7.1]

!       Filterliste von Dr. Evil & MonztA (mit Hilfe der Foren-Nutzer auf firefox-browser.de)
!       Zuletzt geändert: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 19:06:37 +0200 wird alle 4 Tage aktualisiert (expires after 4 days).
!       Kommentare (verbleibende Werbung, fälschlicherweise blockierte Inhalte, Danksagungen ;-), ...)


!       bitte per Mail an adblockfilters@mozdev.org oder auf http://www.firefox-browser.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28904 an uns richten

I come back to The Pickards after clicking 'add filter' a few times and - voila! - Jack's Ads disappear :{ Even when I disable AdBlock on Jack's site :@ It must be learning !? Only when AdBlock's entirely disabled do Jack's Ads reappear :~

Odd.

William Gibson: Humanity's curatorial moment

Washington Post interview with William Gibson, inventor of 'cyberspace'. The author's new book, "Spook Country," is set in a shadowy, uncertain 2006 -- a time, he suggests, as strange as the future he created in his bestseller "Neuromancer."

"One of the things I've been doing in the eBay era -- I've become a really keen observer of the rationalization of the world's attic. Every class of human artifact is being sorted and rationalized by this economically driven machine that constantly turns it over and brings it to a higher level of searchability. . . . The tentacles of that operation extend into every flea market and thrift shop and basement and attic in the world. . . .

"Every hair is being numbered -- eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.

"Every toy I had as a child that haunted me, I've been able to see on eBay. The soft squeezy rubber frog with red shorts that made 'eek eek' noise until that part fell out. I found Froggy after some effort on eBay, and I found out that Froggy was made in 1948 and where he was made and what he was made of. I saw his box, which I'd long forgotten. I didn't have to buy Froggy, but I saved the jpegs. So I've got Froggy in my computer.

"This is new. People in really small towns can become world-class connoisseurs of something via eBay and Google. This didn't used to be possible. If you are sufficiently obsessive and diligent, you can be a little kid in some town in the backwoods of Tennessee and the world's premier info-monster about some tiny obscure area of stuff. That used to require a city. It no longer does."

Don Tapscott on Newsnight

Postscript: BBC have added the report/interview to Newsnight video highlights.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Unambiguously positive lead in by Paul Mason on Newsnight to an interview with Don Tapscott about Wikinomics. What a great communicator:

We talk to the author of a new book called 'Wikinomics' who says we've barely begun to see how the internet will effect the way we live and work. Social networking is passé and will be replaced by collaboration in which individuals will be given the opportunity to become the professionals - leading to greater innovation and changing the way business and scientific problems can be solved. Is this a cheap way for businesses to carry out research or are we entering a new era in which the power of the consumer is on a more equal footing with big business?

Newsnight blog with extract and comment

• Newsnight video
  
  

Two thirds of young social networkers would be 'brand advocates' for a discount

UK search agency Tamar has some interesting findings in it's 2007 Social Media for Brands Report.

• 80 per cent of people who use social networks have either chatted about, commented on or reviewed a brand or product on an online forum or social network.
• Two thirds (66 per cent) of 18-35 year olds in the UK are actively engaged in social networking
• Almost two in five (38 per cent) are members of two or more online forums or social networking sites.
• There is a clear correlation between age and social network use, with usage figures increasing amongst younger age groups, peaking with eight out of ten 18-20 year olds actively engaged in social networking.
• 59 per cent of men take negative comments about brands seriously or very seriously as opposed to only 47 per cent of women, with travel brands most at risk from user generated comments followed by consumer electronics, financial services and communications brands such as broadband and telephone providers.
• Nearly 1.5 times as many 18-35 year olds would rather accept a friend request from a brand than have banner adverts on a social networking profile page.
• The best way to get users to accept friend requests was identified as through offering special offers and discounts (60 per cent).
  
• In contrast only 5 per cent said that they would be enticed by previews of forthcoming services, and only 10 per cent by exclusive products or services.
• 18-35 year olds are most receptive with more than half (51 per cent) stating the they would even be willing to act as a brand advocate (e.g. set up groups for brands, encourage friends to join and participate) on social networks in exchange for offers and discounts. This rose to almost two thirds (64 per cent) in the 18-20 age group, who are also the biggest users of social networks.
  

The 2007 Social Media for Brands Report polled the views of a representative sample of 698 UK adults aged 18-35 between 20 June 2007 and 22 June 2007. The research was commissioned by Tamar and conducted online by YouGov.

Nicholas Carr goes ballistic

Adblock Plus: the nuclear plug-in
from Nicholas Carr

Adblock Plus, the Firefox browser plug-in that erases advertisements from web pages, is a killer of a killer app - or at least it would be if it became widely popular. Right now, it sits like a coyote at the edge of the net, quietly eyeing all the businesses it would happily devour. The plug-in, writes Noam Cohen in today's New York Times, has the potential to be an "extreme menace to the online-advertising business...

Yes, potential ... but something in the 90s% of even Firefox users (it's not easy to plug into Internet Explorer) don't use add-ons. Plus, who's going to develop and promote a full-on ad blocker? Symantec?

Carr: If web users decide they don't want to see ads, Google would face an extremely unpleasant dilemma. Either its business or its credibility would end up in tatters.

Flee for the hills! Cash in your options now!

Says Cohen, about similar PVR 'concerns':

(As things turned out, TiVo and a rival, ReplayTV, opted not to include an automatic service to skip ads after vociferous objections by the television industry.)

He also points out that business whingers - for that is what they are - already have an answer, which is

“to serve ads from their own servers.”

Haa'retz do this and I still see internal promotions elsewhere. What I don't see is the full horror, revolving, irritating, smack-me-with-your-BRANDING ads ...

Marketeers have started to get the message about pop-ups, which is not because of AdBlock.

Yes, AdBlock is grrr-eat, but who else but geeks? Seriously? The odds are stacked against it. There's not a version for mobiles - the future mass market - and I'd imagine that's a even harder environment for something like AdBlock.

There have always been these type of developments because anyone can tweak how they receive the Web, that's why there are so many browsers. Things like AdBlock have been around for ages. I s'pose you could also say that things like MySpace have also been around for ages but ... calm down Nicholas! It's only an add-on!

Milton Keynes betrays Keynes

The Guardian reports today that:

An independent website about life in Milton Keynes has failed in an attempt to win access to data on the same terms as the local council's official site. The decision by the government's watchdog on public sector information illustrates the weaknesses of rules supposed to encourage the re-use of official data.

The Milton Keynes case concerns a four-year battle by a web design company, Zero-Now, for access to information about public services held on a council database called the Community Online Information Network. Zero-Now wanted up-to-date information for use on its website miltonkeynes.com. However the council preferred to make the information available through two official websites, run by a contractor partly owned by the council, milton-keynes.gov.uk and mkweb.co.uk.

The (OPSI) [Describing themselves at "at the heart of information policy, setting standards, delivering access and encouraging re-use of public sector information"] failed to uphold the complaint - on the grounds that the contractor with access to the database was performing part of the council's "public task". So, as no re-use of the data beyond the public task was taking place, Zero-Now had no grounds for complaining about unfair terms. However OPSI decided there was "room for improvement" in the way Milton Keynes handled information, and made five recommendations.

These are:

• OPSI suggests that the PSIH [Milton Keynes Council] should implement its draft re-use policy as soon as possible, and encourage the re-use of its information.
• OPSI suggests that the PSIH considers undergoing the IFTS Online assessment process.
• OPSI suggests that the PSIH publishes a standard licence on its website or considers mandating OPSI to license the PSIH’s material through the PSI Click-Use Licence.
• OPSI suggests that the PSIH should publish details of any exclusive licensing and publishing contracts on its website.
• OPSI suggests that the PSIH should publish a statement of what constitutes its public task.

• Report (PDF - 151 KB)

However ...

PSIH would only be under an obligation to allow re-use in circumstances where re-use had already taken place either by the PSIH itself or by a third party.

So, the Council is entitled to deny access just so long as it refuses access to everybody. Great logic there. Plus it is entitled to 'exclusive contracts'. Somehow this 'encourage the re-use of its information'.

Sounds like OPSI needs to stop handing the job of reconciling these two opposites to someone else.

What's interesting is that there is a huge shade of grey here, because Zero-Now are nothing but a commercial enterprise and the Council dominates MK Web traffic.







The 'Official website for Milton Keynes'?!? Ya gotta love the chutzpah.

One look at MKWeb - #1 in Google for 'Milton Keynes' - tells me that it's taking it's community responsibilities online far more seriously. You'd like to hope it would be because it's council- sub-contracted and presumably Zero-Now's management there is suitably managed.



But despite all that, this still doesn't mean that Zero-Now shouldn't have rights to the Community Online Information Network stuff to use elsewhere, as a 'council person' (or OPSI) might think.

As The Guardian explains at length in the Free Our Data Campaign, this is about boosting the economy, amongst other reasons.

If this company - who do have a strong website of their own, marketing-wise - can do interesting things, imaginative stuff taking ideas from other websites, then surely the Council can reuse that elsewhere? Surely that helps the city? Put that in Zero-Now's contract.

It's worth noting that this also supports women in the economy.

There are many ways, through providing widgetised access to edited content, for example, like many a website does, that the Council can deal with them and everyone else. And can also provide access to - say - the local paper. or the local college or the local history buffs.

Even though the Council sites dominates on 'Milton Keynes' local sites thrive because people use them. Increasingly. Hence target the elderly, youth and radio four listeners (I'm characterising). They can have some screens, maybe one can be a (revised) 'PSI Click-Use Licence' - click - and you get a widget ...

I know there's this and there's that with government rules and scales and balances but this is 2007 and the Web is now several years ahead of government, especially slabs of it like the OPSI.

Where's the leadership to drive the changes which are needed? Who in government is doing that job? Gordon Brown? The Millibands? When did you last see a politician make a joke about their web-ignorance in public and be called on it by a MSM journalist, or themselves laughed at like they're an idiot and they need to get with the program? Huh?

One of the reasons I sound annoyed is because I was on a train the other day surrounded by teenagers talking Myspace this and Bebo that. The disconnect between their new world and the land of the OPSI's and most politicians is vast and agencies like OPSI and the COI are letting them down.

Another point which I doubt the Council is considering is that if Zero-Now really are as good at SEO as they claim then maybe they have something to worry about. However, given that a quick Google search reveals 933 incoming links to MKWeb versus 3 for miltonkeynes.com, and given that this represents the standing start trusted sites have, then they shouldn't worry about too much traffic disappearing into a commercialised front-door.

"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones", John Maynard Keynes.

Give them access, manage that access and leverage benefits for yourself. Like other websites do.

Second Life pisstake

Los Angeles Times: Virtual marketers have second thoughts about Second Life
Firms find that avatars created by participants in the online society aren't avid shoppers.

On its website, Second Life says the number of total residents is more than 8 million. But that counts people who signed in once and never returned, as well as multiple avatars for individual residents. Even at peak times, only about 30,000 to 40,000 users are logged on, said Brian Haven, an analyst with Forrester Research.

"You're talking about a much smaller audience than advertisers are used to reaching," Haven said.

Bytes · Chinese searcher? Pause for tea - End of SEO? - Groening: You are The Man

searchengineland.com has Chinese Eye Tracking Study: Baidu Vs Google by Gord Hotchkiss

On Google, users found what they were looking for in literally half the time (30 seconds vs 55) and with half the real estate ... The Baidu results page is a pretty murky prospect. There’s virtually no transparency on what’s sponsored and what’s not. There are “preferred listings” that are paid listings, pushing true organic listings down the page. And the preferred listings are cluttered with affiliates and spam. By North American standards, Baidu would be a horrible search experience. But the fact remains, they’re still the preferred choice for the vast majority of Chinese users.

...

Because Chinese is presented as symbols, where concepts take their final meaning from a group of combined symbols, it’s much more difficult to scan this information quickly. To try to put in a Western conceptual framework, imagine how difficult it would be to scan meaning from this paragraph if our alphabet was extended to 2000 characters, presented in block letters and all the spaces between words were removed. I can’t do anything about extending the alphabet, but I can change it to block letters and remove the spaces:

TOTRYTOPUTINAWESTERNCONCEPTUALFRAMEWORK,IMAGINEHOW DIFFICULTITWOULDBETOSCANMEANINGFROMTHISPARAGRAPHIF OURALPHABETWASEXTENDEDTO2000CHARACTERS,PRESENTEDIN BLOCKLETTERSANDALLTHESPACESBETWEENWORDSWEREREMOVED

So why use Baidu, apart from the obvious?

• Baidu is the primary vehicle to locate and download free MP3 files. This generates a huge amount of traffic, as this is one of China’s most popular online activities.
• Slower connections make Chinese users more patient

~~~~~~~~~~~

Rebecca Lieb blogs about the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto conference on ClickZ. Message? Times are tough because of Google's new search incorporating news/video etc.

According to Seth Godin, echoing Mike Grehan - "It means we've finally reached the point where better marketing counts -- and not H1 tags":

We've now entered into an era he calls the end of SEO. "For the first time in the last six months, the search engines are really winning. They find what they're supposed to find more and more, getting tricked less and less. There might be a different way to go about solving the problem than getting on the front page of Google.

~~~~~~~~~~~

• Eric Meyer has all about very 'hairy' form styling issues with CSS
  
  
• Naomi Klein: Laboratory for a Fortressed World
  
  
• Gee, automatic speech recognition has come a long way.
  
  In 'Speak on the Dotted Line' — which is a line you hear in some systems — Rory Bremner for Radio 4 examined two types of speech technology [MPEG]: speaker recognition and voice verification.
  
  'Can his skill as an impressionist fool the computer systems?' Er, look away now [no]. Very good.
  
  
• Times: Michaek Parsons Facebook, Parsons' Law, and teleportation:
  

  Highly technical people: engineers, scientists, programmers, got bored of something like Facebook many years ago, and now we're all just catching up.

• New York Times: Online Sales Lose Steam as Buyers Grow Web-Weary
  
  · Analysts say it is a turning point and growth will continue to slow through the decade.
  · Retailers have livened up their stores to be more alluring
  · “It’s not like you go onto Amazon and think: ‘I’m a little depressed. I’ll go onto this site and get transported,’ ”
  · A so-called clicks-and-bricks hybrid model is emerging
  
  
• Reuters: Blocked China Web users rage against Great Firewall
  

  Millions of young urban-dwelling professionals are increasingly aware of and fed up with state intrusions into their private life. Privacy, once regarded with suspicion in pre-reform China, has become a sought-after commodity ... "The thirst for information in China is so strong, it is very difficult for the (Communist) Party to stay ahead of the curve."

~~~~~~~~~~~

Funny anecdote from Matt Groening promoing the Simpsons Movie to Radio 4.

Asked about DRM 'as a former alternative cartoonist', he said:

'I've been bootlegged, ripped off, whatever you want to call it. Even my handwriting was converted into a font and downloaded a million times. I went into an shop to buy alcohol and the notice about kids buying booze was in my own handwriting! Oh, man. Now I am 'the man'...'

Bytes · Smart kids - BBC3 satirised - Satisfaction is key

Way too busy to blog much so here's some clips:

• Tom Steinberg's 'Power of Information Review' is available in PDF here.

• Marc Andreessen (Netscape) has popped the idea that we're in another dotcom 'bubble' on his new blog.

• According to The Observer:
  

  Thousands of schoolchildren have made it their mission to break through internet filters in schools meant to stop them surfing 'social network' websites such as Bebo, MySpace and Facebook.

  
  More power to them.
  

• Privacy International says that Google has the worst privacy policies of any Web company. They have a "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy," it's claimed.
  
  The problem I have with this is that privacy campaigners don't seem to ever realise that the foundations of all Web businesses is consumer trust. This is why banks make special efforts. If Google is ever caught out seriously it will pay in lost business.
  

• Google Sightseeing have started a new site — already — for Street View Sightseeing.

• Media types are apparently on the hunt for an anonymous blogger making life hell for BBC3's young Controller, Danny Cohen. Thetvcontroller is great satire.

• ZDNet interviews Sir Tim Berner-Lee [VIDEO], the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium at the MITX (Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange) Technology Awards. He sounds terribly mid-Atlantic and talks about the (drumroll) 'semantic web'. He doesn't like APIs, he wants you to think SPARQL.
  

• The LibDems put down a motion in the Commons on Friday on the 53rd Anniversary of the death of Alan Turing.
  
  Every programmer or web person should know Turing's name.
  
  I was shamefully corrected (thanks Seb) and, as I've a mo, here's Alan's lifestory from Andrew Hodges tribute website (my emphases):
  
  

  Who was Alan Turing?
  Founder of computer science, mathematician, philosopher,
  codebreaker, strange visionary and a gay man before his time:
  
  1912 (23 June): Birth, Paddington, London
  1926-31: Sherborne School
  1930: Death of friend Christopher Morcom
  1931-34: Undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge University
  1932-35: Quantum mechanics, probability, logic
  1935: Elected fellow of King's College, Cambridge
  1936: The Turing machine, computability, universal machine
  1936-38: Princeton University. Ph.D. Logic, algebra, number theory
  1938-39: Return to Cambridge. Introduced to German Enigma cipher machine
  1939-40: The Bombe, machine for Enigma decryption
  1939-42: Breaking of U-boat Enigma, saving battle of the Atlantic
  1943-45: Chief Anglo-American crypto consultant. Electronic work.
  1945: National Physical Laboratory, London
  1946: Computer and software design leading the world.
  1947-48: Programming, neural nets, and artificial intelligence
  1948: Manchester University
  1949: First serious mathematical use of a computer
  1950: The Turing Test for machine intelligence
  1951: Elected FRS. Non-linear theory of biological growth
  1952: Arrested as a homosexual, loss of security clearance
  1953-54: Unfinished work in biology and physics
  1954 (7 June): Death (suicide) by cyanide poisoning, Wilmslow, Cheshire.
  

  
  

• Worrying statement in a report about a survey on what people want from DirectGov:
  

  "With 60% of respondents saying they want more government services in one place online, all of the insights we gained will be taken into consideration as we plan the future of Directgov."

  
  Sounds like a leading question to me. I hadn't noticed the public clamouring to have their services all just through DirectGov.

• Customer satisfaction is now the most important issue for websites, according to new research by ForeSee Results.
  

  Consumers look at more factors than price, according to the study. Offering the lowest price isn't always the best strategy; it increased overall satisfaction for only 5 percent of the top 100 online retail sites. "Site experience and brand, if improved, will have the biggest payback to retailers," said [Larry] Freed, ForeSee CEO. "On the opposite side we have price, generally the lowest of any other elements."
  
  Retailers that don't allow consumer ratings and reviews, or editorial reviews, on their sites risk letting consumers go elsewhere for the information and transacting with another commerce site, according to Freed. "Those that get reviews are generally more satisfied and apt to purchase than those who did not," he said.
  
  

• SpyBlog seems to be moving around the web (ahem). But it is one of only a few places watching the Government's "vague plans to try to censor the internet".

• New York Times covers Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play
  
  
• Newsnight ran another MSM hit-job on the Web's trustfulness [VIDEO] as a source this week.
  
  First up in their 'argument', Wikipedia. Listen, Newsnight, not only does the MSM NEVER admit it's mistakes but scientific study has demolished many of your arguments. Just look at this Nature story from 2005 comparing Wikipedia with Brittanica (the BBC covered it). Guess who's winning? It's not the MSM.
  
  BBC News job cuts are obviously already affecting Gavin Esler's research assistance.
  
  
• UofC psychology researchers have found another use for Second Life: improving understanding of Schizophrenia. According to The Big Issue, they've set up a Virtual Hallucinations building which will simulate the world as a schizophrenic experiences it. Examples include: voices, changing reflections in a mirror and a bookshop which appears to have fascist literature.
  
  
• For one week only. First (yawnsome) full-length film available on youTube.

Bytes ·$10 laptop? - Malware on websites - last.fm goes MTV

• The One Laptop Per Child Project, recently pushed its price per laptop to $175, from $100.
  
  But India's HRD ministry says it thinks it can push that price down to $10 — the manufacturing cost has already been scaled down to $47, reports the India Times.
  
  It is also Indians who have forced down the costs of HIV/AIDS drugs to a level that developing countries, like Brazil, can afford. Hence prolonging many million of lives.
  
  
• A recent Google study discovered "around 450,000 web pages that launched drive-by downloads of malicious programs. Another 700,000 pages launched downloads of suspicious software."
  

  "We have started an effort to identify all web pages on the Internet that could potentially be malicious ... Web sites that have been identified as malicious, using our verification procedure, are labeled as potentially harmful when returned as a search result."

• The New York Times is performing a SEO trick to get it's archived content seen — everything's been redated.
  

  Each “article” is re-purposed on a clean, CSS-driven text page, clearly dated TODAY and not-co-clearly labeled as “originally published” back in 1997, 1998, or whatever all the way back to 1981 .. Clearly if Google is going to rank “newly published” results as most relevant in a SERP, there is a nice big fat incentive to “re-publish” such archives fairly often.

• YouTube/Google is experimenting with text ads, running directly under videos. They've also announced they'll soon start sharing advertising revenue with content-creating users.
  
  Next stage, user-generated viral advertising?
  
  All of which should send Vivienne Reding, the European Commissioner whose TV Without Frontiers directive includes a ban on "falsely representing oneself as a consumer", back to the drawing board. Unfortunately, it's UK law from the end of the year.
  
  
• last.fm is launching a video service, using a much higher bitrate than YouTube. You could set up your own version of MTV (I'll stick to audio ... ) The eventual aim is to have every music video ever made!
  
  
• VeeSee TV is a new Web TV Station for deaf people, using BSL. Like Current TV, it'll carry user-generated content