twopointouch

I spent the day today at the Wealth of Networks II conference, the agenda of which was set out as the next-generation of the Internet.

It was a good event and the organisers managed to bring together some top-rate speakers in a great venue with rock-solid internet, for once. And it was free – yay for the ESPRC which created the funding.

The slight oddness was that all three of the three panel events at the conference, and one keynote, despite their ostensible themes, turned out to be about trust and identity online. I rather suspect that might have been in reaction to the top-down research model described in the first keynote which admitted that E70mn of EU research funding into the next ‘net was being spent without investigating users’ concerns or agendas.

We’re becoming increasingly aware that there’s an issue with the identity and trust thing. What are the headlines? Backlash against StreetView; Facebook’s T’s & C’s; stalking, bullying, frauds and impositions.

There are two poles in this debate that need to recognised and reconciled in whatever the Next Web brings.

Authentication is a good thing. Being able to prove that it’s you buying that DVD and accessing the details of your bank account; you (if you’re a 12-year-old-girl) joining that social network designed for 12-year-old girls; you registering your general election vote, should that come to pass. Tracking down cyberbullies, slanderers and child-porn disseminators also sounds good.

On the other hand, anonymity is also extremely valuable. If you’re in a repressive regime and blogging about that, then it ought to be possible. It should be possible here in the UK, if you stay lawful (I’m already inviting some big questions, to which we have no answer).

You might want to have separate professional and personal online personae – if you join a dating site, for example, you probably don’t want your colleagues finding that profile. Avoiding stalkers without retiring from online would be a good thing. Teens frequently maintain multiple personae to explore different social scenarios and make mistakes without (real) consequences, I understand, and that certainly sounds like a very good thing compared to the horror of my own teenage years.

So we need a way for people to prove their identity if they need to; to protect their identity if they need to. And about a million shades of privacy and open-ness in between.

The internet safety / government services agenda would sway towards everyone having a registered identity with some third-party, let’s say the BBC, who would act as a trust broker.

But how much are you going to trust anyone to be that broker? A panel late in the day highlighted several elements of grey in the word ‘trust’. For example, sometimes, a better word would be ‘confidence’:

• I trust that my bank won’t run off with my salary next month.
• I do not trust my bank to offer me the best financial advice for my individual situation.

So do I trust my bank or not? You see? The first example is better described as confidence. You know that NatWest would probably not be better-off running away to southern Spain with your month’s wages. It’s an informed gamble. But you don’t think they could be trusted with your finances full stop – you don’t think they’re all beautiful people who only care about your interests.

Trust (real trust) depends enormously on context and implies a belief in the moral character of a person/organisation/business. Most likely, a lot of the services we might be described as trusting (Banks, Amazon, eBay) would be better described as things we have confidence in.

Added to that, sometimes we have no choice but to sort-of trust. Helen Keegan pointed out that oftentimes we click through acceptance of a service’s terms and conditions, because there’s no real alternative. We either want to do banking online or we don’t – we can’t disagree with point 5 in the t’s & c’s and have them changed. It’s like it or lump it.

I don’t really trust anyone to be the trust-broker of my online identities – or yours, dear reader. Let’s look at the possibilities, currently:

• The Government. Obvious non-starter. I might be a dissident of some sort. (and *what!* 25% of government databases are already illegal)
• Government Organisation: e.g. BBC. Similarly flawed.
• Private Corporate: e.g. Google. Already massively failed in China.
• Private small company: might turn evil; vulnerable to hackers, potentially, eh monster.com. And who the hell are you, anyway?
• The UN: this is a possibility, but once the UN is hacked, then how do I recover my ID?

So this probably leaves the least neat, least integrated, least semantic possibility:

Lots of stuff. Regular password for stuff you don’t care about; unique passwords for stuff you do; OpenID and Facebook Connect and MyBlogLog and Google for social apps; NI number and PIN for government apps; Account Number and PIN for commercial stuff.

Messy. And I think it may be the case that ‘messy’ is the best solution to online identity, trust and anonymity for a long time to come. I can’t really imagine that computer scientists are going to be the people that manage to overcome that.

That is probably not what the ESPRC, or Southampton & Imperial Universities wanted me to walk away thinking today. But thanks again for the thinking.

Yes, I still have a blog, it seems, and I’m still using it to pimp work events.

Next Tuesday, we’re doing What Happens to Radio? And you should book right now, honestly.

Some of you too-cool-for-school nu-media folk might be thinking ‘who gives a shit about radio?’

So this is why I chose radio for our next event.

• *  It’s already proven itself as the most adaptable media. It’s incredibly portable; it can do indoors, outdoors, cars, mobiles, whatever.
• *  It’s also adapted to the Internet era from the start. Almost every radio station has had an internet presence and streaming of some sort from the start (viz. 1995’ish). So we know that they’re great innovators and have been for a long, long time.
• *  At the same time, it’s been very static in terms of presentation and programming. Some disconnect there, surely?
• *  There’s a struggle there. People under-rate radio, again thinking that it’s somehow out-of-date and surpassed by internet services. Check your facts, people. The most meagre local station has hundreds of thousands of listeners. Test that against any internet radio-style service.
• *  There’s tons of innovation: not just DAB but whole new ways of experiencing and interacting with the medium. That’s what we’re going to be talking about!
• *  There’s a massive conundrum factoring the ephemeral and ambient nature of radio with the new demand for interactivity, audience feedback loops and more revenue.
• *  It’s square. Some people think that none of this stuff is happening and I wanted to show how wrong they were.

I promise that my next post will not be quite so promotional.

I have five free tickets for the NMK Behavioural Targeting event, next Tuesday evening. We’ll be looking at the likes of Phorm, Specific Media and so forth and the opportunities they hold for advertisers and publishers, and also the threat to privacy that they may or may not represent.

Leave a comment to get one of the free tickets. First come; first served.

When: November 25th, 2008 18:00 to 21:00

Location: Bath House, 96 Dean Street, Soho, London W1D 3TA

Chair: Guy Phillipson, CEO, IAB. Panel: Nick Barnett, UK Commercial Director, Phorm; Baroness Sue Miller, Liberal Democrat Member, House of Lords; Rupert Staines, VP Europe, Specific Media; Ian Brown, Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute.

So, last week, we organised a conference called i-design 08 and a portfolio clinic session of the same name as part of the London Design Festival.

I thoroughly enjoyed all the content, but I don’t want to talk about that in this post, However, my reports from the event will be published over the next couple of weeks and so extensively linked and republished that you will be physically ill at my gauche-itude. You will feel as though you were there, and are still there.

I wanted to talk about my feelings as the person ultimately responsible for the event budget. We’re a modest sort of organisation with modest sort of budgets, so basically, we’re talking about around £10K – the LDF paid for most of the venue hire costs.

Even though that’s a tiny amount of money in event terms, marketing terms, advertising terms, I have to say that my main feeling until the event was over was one of utter horror. There’s been a sick tightness at the bottom of my stomach for four months.

• Would people book?
• Would they turn up even if they’d booked?
• Would the speakers say anything remotely sensible, let-alone groundbreaking?
• Would people complain about the catering/seating/internet/badging arrangements?

But, of course, it all went fine. We’re professional people. We try the best we can and so it all turns out right. At the end of the day I was positively jubilant. Some people said that it was the best conference they’d been to for ages. But I don’t listen to them.

Is that feeling of horror just something you get used to after a while? And if you don’t, how do you manage those feelings? Would it be a better asset to be totally blase about events? I can see that as an asset in some of my colleagues, who just get on with it while I go off to the toilet to be sick again (not really).

Photo from the BBC’s coverage of the day.

We’re running a Portfolio Clinic as part of the i-design conference on September 17. The idea is for budding interactive designers to come along with a laptop and show their wares the the cream of London’s creative agencies. They’ll tell you where you’re going right and where you’re going wrong – or how you might make your work more saleable, at any rate. They’re giving their time for free, because they’re hoping to find new talent among the people who turn up. So far we’re expecting creative directors from:

o AIG www.aiglondon.com

o Conchango www.conchango.com

o Digit www.digitlondon.com

o Digital Outlook www.digital-outlook.com

o Glue www.gluelondon.com

o Imagination www.imagination.com

o Kin www.kin-design.com

o Lateral www.lateral.net

o Moving Brands www.movingbrands.com

o Poke www.pokelondon.com

o Precendent www.precedent.co.uk

o Smoothe www.smoothe.com

o TribalDDB www.ddblondon.com/tribalddb

o Up the Resolution www.uptheresolution.co.uk

Should be an excellent session. It’s part of the conference package (book now), but you can get into this bit for free. More details here.

Lovely day out last Thursday with Robert Loch’s ‘internet people’ group. I have no idea how I came to be invited. Normally, my lot is a bit more ‘meeja’, but it was great to get out to meet some entrepreneurs actually ‘doing the do’.

The day started at the Boat, Coq D’argent, the East Rooms on Tabernacle St., where it was great to catch up with reprobates like my old friend Simon Prockter, Robert Loch and new media dilletante Paul Carr, who, it seems, has a new book coming out about the Web 2.0 start-up scene in London over the past couple of years. (review soon). Also great to catch up with the people from Crimson, past and present.

Photo credit: Mulquem. More here.

And then off to the Moo Party down at Brick Lane.

And did I learn anything? Mainly, not to mix beer and wine and indiscriminate cocktails (again) but also that there are a host of UK startups on the horizon, which I can’t tell you about. That the London dotcom entrepreneur crew are indefatigable in their desire to create something worthwhile and wonderful, and will not stop until they’ve done it.

And most interestingly, the ones that have done it already are among the hungriest to do it again.

I am obviously speaking in an out of work capacity here. And rather later than is fashionable in the blogging world – Calacanis’ announcement that he’s giving up blogging was nearly two weeks ago.

At work, we paid Jason Calacanis £5000 to come to London and speak at a conference last year. From reading the blog, it seemed he had a lot of interesting opinions and a very interesting background, we figured, so would add a lot of value and interest.

We’re a not-for-profit enterprise within a learning establishment. Budgets are hard, but we hoped his appeal would boost ticket sales considerably. It didn’t, but that was our misjudgement. Hands up. At least we’d get a great presentation, eh?

He came. He gave a sales speech for Mahalo. That was all he talked about – how wonderful it was and how it would save the Internet.

Then he cleared off into town to do interviews for competing media, coming back four hours later to sort-of take part in a closing panel session.

Not blogging any more? Good. He is a greedy, lazy, egotistical bastard who screwed us over.