There’s a new digital divide, a fissure opening wider and wider as the social web makes encroachment into most forms of information. You may have heard of the ‘darknets’ — unseen networks of computers for filesharing — networks you’re only allowed onto if you’re trusted not to give the game away. What I think I’m seeing the emergence of is almost the exact opposite, but increasingly disconnected.

There are hundreds of websites, lovingly researched and maintained by enthusiastic and knowledgeable people, that it’s becoming almost impossible to find. The sites are built on old technology, and that contributes to their decreasing visibility but it’s not the only reason. The lack of RSS feeds, pinging servers, dynamically generated sitemaps and up-to-date robots.txt files makes it more difficult for other sites to keep in touch with them. That they are often built in HTML by hand makes them more difficult to update, and fresh content is prized by search engines.

The lack of RSS and knowing when updates occur also decreases people’s awareness of the sites, you either have to remember they’re there and how you found them — or bookmark — and check for updates on a regular schedule. Less reminders, less nudges, so less incoming links.

They are often in very niche areas, like local history, local news, and so generate a limited number of hyperlinks from other sites. They often only get links from each other, which is great in a community sense but means the incoming links are low in pagerank (which would push them higher up Google searches).

As more and more sites get better and better at search engine optimisation, as blogs and other social websites link and link again and expand into more areas, and as Google relies on the same sources more and more the sites are getting less and less visible.

And that’s bad because they have a wealth of important content that we need to be able to find.

I’m calling it the ‘hinternet‘.

(From hinterland, in German the part of a country where only few people live and where the infrastructure is underdeveloped.)

Solving the problem is a tricky one: Google’s mission to index the entire World’s information doesn’t always mean that we can find what we’re searching for, the semantic web will only work if the correct metadata is stored with the hinternet sites (and they’re already often “behind” technology-wise).

Search needs to get better, but us on the social-web also need to help. We need not only to link to these sites, but — where we can — help nudge the guardians of the hinternet towards greater visability by becoming “social”.

I spent over 11 hours on the bus on Tuesday, and got off exactly where I got on. It was art, and I live blogged the whole way. I was also twittering and streaming live video to Qik. It was all part of the project I’ve been doing over at elevenbus.co.uk.

I was really surprised with the video blogging, as it’s something I’ve always been sceptical of. I think more down to most video blogs’ lack of content that then technology. It was a really good way to quickly update anyone following (announcements of new video sessions were pushed to twitter) and when there were other people to talk to it was great to be able to quickly widen the sources of information. The quality (over 3G from an N95 mobile) was good enough, the problem came for me of deciding what to show on camera. The N95 has two cameras, one facing the screen one away, but you can’t cut between them in a single stream. This left me offering viewers a choice — my face and no scenery, or scenery and a disembodied voice. I partially solved this by quickly panning by hand from me to the surroundings, but a way to mix both (picture-in-picture style) would be good. If you should want to watch them they’re collected here.

The live blog, using the very good Cover it Live system, was not so successful. For a start you really need a laptop to blog and to answer comments from any readers — which could work a lot better when you don’t need to spend most of the day on a bus. The main problem was my trying to do too much. The content of my tweets and the live blog  obviously overlapped, and there wasn’t the time to do both. Compare my live blog with that of Michael Grimes who forsook twitter for the duration.

The reason twitter won out was the ready made audience. You can see tweets related to the event here — and that’s only ones that used the tags and keywords — there are a lot, and taking the event to people in their own space works really well.

Ideally I would have mereged the two and used a system to aggregate my tweets into a live blog page on the site — allowing non-twiter users to join in. If someone could build a live blogging system that allowed comments and pushed them back to me via twitter I would be sold.

Great experience, I doubt any live internet coverage will be as difficult to do as that from the top deck of a moving bus.

Another site built on Wordpress as a back-end, the Cole-Raine site features brochure pages as well as a fully featured property finder database and article library. The site was built to a design specification supplied and went live in a little under a month from first contact.

The property finder was developed using Wordpress’ existing category structure, a very cost effective solution.

I have a twitter problem. It’s not addiction, despite recently breaking the 3,000 tweet barrier, nor is it that I keep seeing the Fail Whale (not seen him for a while, and miss the old non-fish). It’s the increasing number of gaps in conversations. At times I’m finding it like ambient networking with Norman Collier.

On twitter you only receive tweets (messages) from people who you are following — almost. In order to make sure you can be alerted to things said directly to you there are what are called “@ replies”. If someone starts a tweet with @bounder (bounder is my username), then I’ll get it no matter if I’m following them or not (the potential of this for SPAM hasn’t quite been used yet).

But what of @ replies sent from your contacts to other people? Twitter offers three settings for this:

• You can get “all @ replies” — every tweet from all the people you’re following.
• You can get “@ replies to the people I’m following” — where you get other people’s @ replies only if you’re following both the person who sent it AND the person who it’s been sent to.
• You can get “no @ replies” — which means you get your own @ replies, but never see anything people you’re following say directly to any other twitter user.

“@ replies to the people I’m following” works well for individual messages (and is the default on twitter). The problem comes when conversations take place between more than one person. Let’s try this scenario:

• Alice is following Bob
• Bob is following Alice and Carl
• Carl is following Alice and Bob

• Alice tweets “I like cats” (Bob and Carl both see this)
• Bob tweets “@Alice I like cats too” (Alice and Carl both see this)
• Carl tweets “@Bob @Alice I prefer dogs” (Only Bob sees this).
• Bob tweets “@Carl @Alice dogs are good too” (Only Carl sees this)

This is a conversation, but because of the way @ replies work (the @username needs to be at the front) Alice is missing a good chunk of it. It’s surely a mistake because if Carl and Bob had tweeted:

• Carl tweets “@Alice @Bob I prefer dogs”
• Bob tweets “@Alice @Bob dogs are good too”

All three people have been involved in all of the conversation.

But why doesn’t Alice just follow Carl? Well maybe Carl tweets about his dog grooming business too much, or maybe he pushes his blog posts automatically to twitter and Alice doesn’t like that, or maybe Alice and Carl just haven’t met yet (even virtually). There’s no easy way for anyone to know that the other people aren’t seeing all that you see.

This could be solved by twitter treating all @usernames contained anywhere in the text of a tweet as an @ reply.

But.

Conversations spiral amongst a number of people and the tendency is just to reply to the last thing someone said. Encouraged, compounded, by the 140 character limit and the length of the usernames — if you attempt to reply to more than one person you quickly run out of characters. It’s not likely that Carl will start his message with “@Bob @Alice @Derek @Earl”.

So what to do?

Twitter or a tool could implement some kind of conversation tracking algorithm — based, say, on friends’ and friends’ of friends tweets. You could get messages containing similar words or subjects that you’ve tweeted, from people who the people you are following are following for a certain time after your last tweet with those words.

Or maybe the ability to quickly create ad-hoc groups — twhirl or a similar desktop service could do that, but it would rely on everyone using the same tool (or a collaboration between tools).

But I’m starting to think that something needs to be done, I’m getting these conversation gaps more and more regularly. As networks expand and you intersect with more people who don’t have similar contact lists to you it will happen more — now’s the time to think about it before twitter does really become what its critics claim it is — people randomly howling stuff at a crowd who can’t cope with everything they hear.

Has anyone got a solution?

Yesterday Stuart Parker and I spent some time doing a little bit of social media training with the media course at Grapevine, a project in Coventry. As part of We Share Stuff, we are trying out our idea that the tools are not what needs to be learnt - it’s more the skills to be able to experiment, the knowledge that there’s something useful and exciting in social media, and the confidence to try it.

The session, with a group of adults with various learning disabilities went well, and it only took a short time to find something everyone was interested to try.

It really brought home to me that desire-based training  has the edge over any task-based system — even if all you think you really desire is to complete the one task. Even if you think you just want to compelete your job and get out, the real understanding comes from a wider engaement with the tools. For example, it’s not enough to learn how to put text up on a blog — you won’t get the best out of it unless you desire to get out amongst other blogs and converse.

I’m looking forward to doing more training with people that are supposedly on the other side of the ‘digital divide’, and hope that every group is as enthused at the end of the session.

Being "sucessful" on a social media service is a bit of a lose term, but this post has some good points to consider especially if you ae thinking of tweeting for an organisation. [link]

It’s not to give to the poor (although that would be nice) nor to forsake trousers for green hose, I’m not thinking about Hood’s actions but the history of the legend itself and how it evolved.

I’ve long been obsessed with the origins of the Robin Hood legend, as well as the continuing theories on who was “the real Robin Hood” and the evolution of the story from the original ballads. I particularly love how it’s permeated through the culture, to the extent that there are pubs and roads named for him throughout the country (there’s a Robin Hood Island near me, a good 100 or so miles from Nottingham).

So, what does this have to do with social media

Of course the stories were altered, changed and augmented though conversation, that’s what we learn from any folk tale. Creating characters likeable enough that they attract other people to continue the story is another one, if people do that it’s free advertising. You have to not to be precious, allow your story to evolve.

But did you know it might have been an advert for the medieval version of C&A?

The original “Gest of Robyn Hode” ballad contains far far more references to clothing and cloth types than any comparable literature (almost all literature, except for the minutiae obsessed American Psycho). As well as Robin being named for his hood there are “coats, breeches, shirts and six different colours of cloth” [The QI Book would you believe]. Robin also poses as a draper, selling the King 123 feet of cloth.

This leads to the suspicion that it was a form of viral marketing for clothmakers guilds (members of the Guilds also wore hoods — an attempt to make them heroes by association?).

It seems a good lesson to learn, that if the story you create is interesting enough — and it can be, there are things to tell about almost any process — you can slip the most unusual stuff through. But that’s only half the point, the original Robin Hood ballad would have been told in person, adapting to their surroundings and taking on clues from those listening. Engagement and using the right methods for the right place (groups or Fan Pages on Facebook rather than profiles, listening and responding personably on twitter, trying to be funny or wow on youtube) are part of the solution.

I’m off to get some green tights.

Bands have been using “street teams” for some time - unpaid fans that spread the word amongst their mates in return for something exclusive (priority tour bookings, the odd badge, that sort of thing). It’s a clever extension of the Fan Club, where the fans get to feel involved and the band get some marketing out if it too (although real fans would be spreading the word anyway perhaps).

The British Red Cross is trying something similar online; 15-25s can sign up to be a “Red Recruit” and spread the message of the charity across their social networks:

“the initiative will establish a community of online youth ambassadors who are endorsed as official Red Cross representatives. Each ‘Red Recruit’ will be entrusted with driving awareness of campaigns across their social networks and helping to plan the future direction of digital activity and youth initiatives.

The scheme is initially being rolled out across Facebook and Bebo, where a number of consultation mechanisms are already in place, including online polls and quizzes, recruitment for an advisory youth board and online discussions with the organisation’s international experts returning from mission.”

It sounds like a win-win situation, a clever move and one to watch with interest.

A free system to create social media in the classroom - available to download - that includes “integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. … curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos.” It’s based on Drupal, which I find difficult to use (setup and customisation expecially) from a techincal point of view, but most of this is done for you here. [link]

October 15th, is Blog Action Day. The concept being to encourage blogs around the world to all write about one issue on the same day - hoping that through the various niches (social media types, big shoes, ZX Spectrum nostalgia) the message will reach as many people as possible. This year the theme is poverty.

Blog Action Day is a fine example of “organising with out organisations” as Clay Shirky puts it, how social media can facilitate a co-ordinated effort without the need for huge hierarchies. Started only last year and by only a couple of committed people (who all have other jobs) and now in its second year there are 8,240 Sites with a total of regular readers 9,203,161. Those nine million plus are subscriber numbers by RSS — demographics-wise I would say that puts those 9 million in the most digitally savvy groups of people that there are.

The web allows ideas to spread quickly, social media helps people to connect quickly, to collaborate on actions. It could usher a new era of awareness, or protesting could become so easy that it ceases to mean anything.

When talking of the internet and poverty the ‘digital divide’ is what is often focused upon. There really a couple of different things that this covers: the first, inescapably, is poverty. Some people are to poor (or too isolated in undeserved areas) to be able to get access to computers. This is where governmental effort or philanthropy is needed — moves like the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) might do it, eventually, but my best guess is that the technology will change faster than any initiative.

Read the rest of this entry »