danielheaf.com

The internet in numbers

According to Kevin Kelly:

• The internet generates 100 billion clicks / day and is composed of 55 trillion links
• There are 1 billion PC chips of the internet
• 1 million IM messages sent every second
• 8 terabytes of traffic / second
• 255 exabytes of magnetic storage
• 2 billion location nodes activated
• 600 billion RFID tags in use

All of this built and deployed in 5,000 days. With the internet we should believe the impossible.

Key points from SXSW

While I wasn't overly impressed with SXSW Interactive as a whole, looking back, as I have been doing for the last few days, there's no question I've taken some important learnings away.

While the launch of new technologies, services and applications appear to be slowing I was struck by just now nascent and underdeveloped some of the products and themes of Web 2.0 are. Instead of wasting our precious time hungrily on the look out for the next meta-theory, the next revolution, we would do well to explore and develop further some of the important memes from the old new web.

Here are some of the things I'll be concentrating on over the next few months:

• From Jenkins, Johnston and McGonical I understood that users will become fuller participants in emerging media culture. This should change the way we think about interactions on sites. Users are becoming more sophisticated faster than we can change our existing sites and services to reflect this. At present, we offer nothing by the simplest form of interaction, participation and community.

• We're entering the era of participation and it's far more important than we [at the BBC] have given it credit for. Both at site level and at browser level we've yet to really provide our users with right tools for participating. This was backed up from talks by Jenkins and Anastasia Goodstein [YPulse]. According to the Pew Internet & American Life project,more than one-half of all teens have created media content,and roughly one-third of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced. Young people have always been the most avid adopters of new technology an they are the next generation of Lonely Planet travellers and BBC TV and Radio Consumers.

• Where you have nascent participation you have nascent collective intelligence. Put simply how can we take advantage of the fact that nobody know everything but everything is known by the community. Today's media, which tends to be strongly authorial, does allow input from the crowd but doesn't help us combine and process all this information together. So for Lonely Planet, endeavouring to put all 400,000 + reviews on this site this year we should be thinking not how we regurgitate this information onto the web but how we process this knowledge into something more meaningful.

• The web is still incredibly silo'd but this is beginning to change and the change will gather pace. While I find it hard to believe that 'app fatigue' is caused solely from friction around multiple sign in I accept that user data locked into single services is seriously limiting the web's potential and the user experience.

• The endless arguments and conversations around single sign on reveal another more deeply disturbing trend. Despite the web being unequivicably mainstream in the western world there is still too much emphasis on what the technology can do rather than what the user wants. For example, much time at conferences like SXSW is given over to discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various authentication protocols and not enough thought to what the users actually want. The same task can be performed with a range of different technologies,and
  the same technology can be deployed toward a variety of different ends. Some tasks may be
  easier with some technologies than with others, and thus the introduction of a new technology
  may inspire certain uses. Yet,these activities become widespread only if the culture also sup-
  ports them,if they fill recurring needs at a particular historical juncture.It matters what tools
  are available to a culture,but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools.

• Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation,we would do better to take an ecological approach,thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies,the cultural communities that grow up around them,and the activities they support.

• It is an inevitability that in the next couple of years we will see portable social networks as  the building blocks already exist [e.g. OpenID, microformats and OAuth]. Echoing the point above this is going to lead to a level of complexity that we haven't thought about. Sure users will not have to re-introduce themselves to friends every time they use a new service but how will portable social networks deal with the complex web of relationships that make up a user's real social graph? For example, what if users that don't want all their friends to follow them from one service to another? They may wish, as some teens on the YPulse panel said, want to make a clean start on a new service. How is this possible if we're building an online meta-reputation were everything is intertwingled? How will the technology deal with what information I want to remain private. Just because information is private doesn't mean it's not portable - it's more a question of permissions. How will permissions based on services be structured? Things we haven't really begun to uncover or think through for the majority of our sites.

• Connected to the momentum behind portable social networks is the exciting / terrifying notion of distributed reputation. No question, reputation will help solve many of the internet's core ills. For example, if a known friend comments on your blog it should perhaps by-pass moderation. However, many of the advantages afforded by relative anonymity. For example, danah boyd, has argued that social networks like MySpace provides a fertile ground for identity development and cultural integration. As youth transition from childhood, they seek out public environments to make sense of culture, social status and how they fit into the world. Interacting with strangers helps them understand who they are and communities of interest allow them to explore ideas and values. With a distributed reputation system young peoples' social experimentation online, under the cloak of anonymity, could be replaced were the mistakes you make when you're younger haunt you for the rest of your life. Clearly, the need of temporal-reputation needs some work. Does the influence of certain events diminish over time and how?

• On the panel I chaired on stories, brands and games I really started to see that simply increasing the complexity of interactions of the depth of the interactive spectrum is only half the picture when it comes to deepening customer relations with your brand. As Jenkins explains in Convergence Culture, the emerging convergence paradigm assumes that media will interact in ever more complex ways. It is about finding through the interplay of modern media what they can't achieve through isolations. Sadly, there are precious few examples of where this is working well, which is sad because it's where traditional media and in particular public service media companies could have a real advantage over start-ups. Advertising executives struggling to reach a changing market, creative artists wanting new ways to tell stories and educators, trying to tap up informal learning communities should be leading the charge.

• Another panel focused on the relationship between video games and traditional media. Increasingly media moguls see games not simply as a means of stamping the franchise logo on some ancillary product but as a means of expanding the storytelling experience. It still baffles me why the BBC has yet to use games effectively to broaden audiences experiences and explore ideas that couldn't fit in 30 minute show. Where is the Dr Who MMOG?
  

Heros in the web that will be

According to Jane McGonigal there are ten super powers gamers develop. I don't think the super powers vary much from the kind of attributes need by supercolliders:

1. Mobability: the ability to do real time work in very large groups. A talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously - the ability to super collaborate.
2. Cooperation Radar: the ability to sense, almost instinctively, who would make the best collaborators on any given task
3. Ping Quotient: measures your responsiveness to other peoples' requests for engagement. Your propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network.
4. Influency: the ability to be persuasive in diverse social spaces and media platforms. Understanding that each work environment and collaboration space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique.
5. Multi-capitalism: fluency in working with different capitals e.g. natural, intellectual, social and financial.
6. Protovation: fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles. Ability to lower the costs and increase the speeds of failure.
7. Open Authorship: creating content for public consumption and modification
8. Long boarding: thinking in terms of higher level systems, cycles, the big picture.
9. Emergensight: the ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity.
10. Signal / Noise management: filtering out meaningful, info, patterns and commonalities from massively multiple streams of data.

Heros from the web that wasn't

For most of us who work on the Internet, the Web is all we have ever really known. It's almost impossible to imagine a world without browsers, URLs and HTTP. But in the years leading up to Tim Berners-Lee's world-changing invention, a few visionary information scientists were exploring alternative hypertext systems that often bore little resemblance to the Web as we know it today.

Alex Wright, in his presentation entitled The Web That Wasn't and in his book Glut, explores the heritage of these almost-forgotten systems. It's obvious that looking back in the past can provide promising ideas for the present. I love the idea of tracing the heritage of these systems and the solutions they suggest to present day Web quandaries. Finding clues to the future in our recent technological past.

Alex talked at length about the following people:

1. Charles Cutter
2. H.G. Wells
3. Teilhard de Chardin
4. Paul Otlet
5. Vannevar Bush
6. Eugene Garfield
7. Doug Engelbart
8. Ted Nelson
9. Andries Van Dam
10. Tim Berners Lee

While some of these guys really did have a significant influence on the web most had their ideas and manifestos ignored. Pity because the web might be even more powerful had they been listened to. Had they had more influence we may have had a web that:

• married top down classification with bottom up social space
• insisted on two way linking (who's linking to this object)
• delivered visible pathways of users between documents / pages / objects
  
• introduced gradations of links that communicate something about the quality of the information at their destinations
• backed on a cornerstone of identify and reputation management
• users as authors from the beginning

He suggested loads of great reading too:

1. Tim Berners Less - Weaving the Web
2. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - Phenomenon of Man
3. Paul Otlet - Visions of Xanadu
4. Vannevar Bush - As we may think
5. Ted Nelson - Literary Machines
6. Doug Engelbart - Augmenting Human Intelligence
7. Alex Wright - Mastering Information through the ages

Stories, games and your brand

Yesterday's panel on stories, games and brands went really well. Delighted with the feedback after the session and lovely to see so many friendly faces in the room. Clickable Culture and Emergency Weblog both liveblogged the session.

Here are some of the questions I asked the panel:

1. Who are you and what do you do? What gives you the right to a free gold pass and what makes you think you can go head-to-head with Zuckerberg?
2. Can you give me an example of of where using interactive games, puzzles and stories really helped a brand and how?
3. You talk about a subset of the digital audience engaging in this way. Do you think it's just the same audience moving from one branded experience to another or are they genuinely unique audiences?
4. Can you give me an example of some of the real train wrecks in this genre? Let's hear about when brands really got it wrong?
5. What will it take to get this type of deeper interactive experience into the mainstream. Is there a relationship to be built between the more popular flash based games and the more extreme ARGs?
6. When I've seen these things are done badly it tends to have been marketeers commissioning these type sof interaction. Traditional marketeers tend not only not familiar with the technology but also lacking in any understanding of the types of audience this type of interaction attracts. How could you go about changing this and educating?
7. Some would say that there's nothing new about brands using puzzles, games and stories. That's why soaps are called soaps, that's why the back of cereal packets still hold enormous fascination for me. So is there really anything new and better about stories, puzzles and games in today's web?
8. Jeremy, you're using Penguin's RnD money to commission these experiences. What type of success would you need to have in order to continue this indefinietly?
9. Is there a humane way to kill an ARG? 
10. Are we snobby about of the types of games and interaction we favour at conferences like this. Flash based games are very popular and can bring in a sizeable audience but there considered a bit web 1.0, a bit CDROM and unfashionable. Do you agree and would you ever recommend to a company or brand to invest in this type of gaming now?
11. In your experience, what are the success criteria by which a company measures this type of activity. Are they genuinely trying to reach a new audience, deepening the engagement with their current audience or trying to associate their brand with the cutting edge. In yesterday's session on What Teens Want one kid told of how he visited Tropicana's site purely to collect the XBox points. He didn't seem to have any positive association or grater level of engagement with Tropicana itself.
12. How brands avoid interaction and engagement feeling like a tokenistic add on.
13. Understandably, this panel has focused on commercial brands useage of games and puzzles to engage an audience. However, do you believe that games can help not-for-profits, educators and educational brands, political organisations and political brands find a way to use games and puzzles to engage audiences with some of the more complex and important issues of the day. Is there a game that can help us solve the problems we face around climate change.
14. Have you ever told a brand not to do this type of thing. Have you ever refused a commission based on the fact that it wasn't write for the brand?
15. So, you guys have built the case that games and puzzles can be used effectively by brands. What brand values or what audiences do you think really want to engage with content at this level and these experiences?

ARGs 1 Zuckerberg 0

The Zuckerberg alternative

Today, I'm chairing a panel @ SXSW on Stories, Games and Brands. It's a look at how interactive gaming, storytelling and puzzles can engage users with brand. Movie and TV producers are increasingly using these tactics to promote their entertainment but is it possible for other brands to provide such experiences for their adorers or to attract new customers.

Joining me on stage will be Rachel Clarke, Jeremy Ettinghausen from Penguin Books, Roo Reynolds  from IBM and Dan Hon from Six to Start. So if you don't want to join the masses gawking at Mark Zuckerberg then pop up to Room 8.

The best photo from SXSW... already!

Courtesy of Mr. D. Taylor

The Myth of the Rational Voter

Just got out of a fascinating, if not slightly evangelical talk by Bryan Caplan from Mason University. He believes that the greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad politics winning again and again by popular demand.

With all of the tech conferences I've attended I've noticed how the audiences seem to hold broadly similar convictions. Liberal, progressive, glass half full kinda delegates. The panellists and the keynotes tend to reinforce these beliefs rather than challenge them. Caplan delivered one of the few talks I've attended where his views caused angrily reactions and tut-tutting.

Caplan broadly called into question our most basic assumptions about politics and democracy. He contended that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. He's been busy analysing Americans' voting behaviour and opinions on a range of economic issues. He went on to state that all non-economists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the beliefs of conserving labour and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan came up with some broad but uncomfortable suggestions for policies that would really tackle some of today's thornier issues:

1) Raise the price of driving during peak times
2) Reduce tax on those willing to sign the organ donor register
3) Tax pollution
4) Reduce tax on consumers buying from developing nations
5) Place a surtax on the wages of guest workers

Ultimately, I find it almost impossible to believe anyone who genuinely feels that economics and the market can deliver THE answer but genuinely admired his academic fervour and unflinching look at problems that have dogged us for decades.

Venture Capital Wear

Clothing for the top 2/20% of the population. Genius:

How to bankrupt your start-up

Josh Strebel, Sean Tierney and Andrew Hyde put together a brilliant panel at SXSW on how to really tank if you own a start-up. Between them they've screwed up more companies than you think would be possible:

Developing the habits, culture and finance of failure is not easy. Here are some things you need to know before you start:

1) Start-ups are hard
2) Start-ups fail
3) Start-ups destroy relationships

If you can't be bother to start your own here some tips to find the right company to join:

1) Find a company with no vowels
2) Hired on equity
3) Large team didn't vest
4) CEO demands everything yesterday
5) Non-profits are like start-ups with more paperwork

Here are some ways to ensure you tank, a weapons grade opportunity to fail:

1) Go to loads of interactive festivals and conferences
2) Buy Aeron chairs
3) Give employees cash, equity, bonuses and expense accounts
4) Spam all your customers to death
5) Hand over the reins to someone without a clue
6) Over-engineer everything and build more than you need
7) Seek growth before profitability (big failures are ever worse)
8) Establish culture of subservience
9) Disregard cashflow
10) Show nothing to anyone
11) Have an exit plan
12) NDA
13) Funding should be your exit plan
14) Theme weeks for the office
15) Forget your purpose
16) Launch under funded
17) Micromanage your team. Make your team fearful
18) Be the King. Everyone knows who's in charge
19) Believe the dreamkillers
20) Buy another failing company
21) Focus on 3rd world countries with no internet access

"A way to wallpaper your house with stock options as you are being evicted"

- Steve Jobs

"Something that makes you buy my book"

- Guy Kawasaki

"A fairy tale, but instead of pricesses and ahppily ever after you have smelly developers and 3 years off your life"

- Mark Zuckerberg