twopointouch

A report in the recent McKinsey Quarterly highlights some rather interesting figures for believers in social media. You’ll recall the one percent rule - that only 1% of the visitors to social media sites actually contribute original content, and only 10% contribute anything whatsoever.

According to research conducted across a number of projects, one percent is a lot lower than the truth, though these figures vary quite considerably depending on the nature of the site, as you’d expect:

What does this graph mean? It means that on flickr, for example, 95% of the photos are uploaded by 2% of the users. On del.icio.us, that figure rises to 62% of the content being created by 10% of the users (NB: www.delicious.com works equally well, fellow mis-spellers). A site that was very participative would be in the right side of the graph. One that was more inclined towards the creation of content by the few and consumed by the many would be in the top left. Since the horizontal scale only goes up to 12%, and the highest-scoring sites only get 10%, it suggests that for all these sites, the idea of co-creation between all the members of those communities is a myth.

Good. If I go onto flickr to look at photos, then I don’t want to be assailed by holiday snaps or stag-do’s. I want to see work created by people who are passionate about and very good at photography. The sort of people who carry around a camera all the time, and upload dozens a week. The trouble is that the leading photographers are self-appointed, but it appears to be the case that on flickr, the people with the passion and commitment to contribute on a very regular basis also happen to be quite talented.

There’s also another point to be made about volume. I use flickr a bit: but I only take about 50 photos a year, though, so I’m most certainly not part of that 2%. However, I would consider myself a contributing flickr user - the graph sort of suggests that you have to be in the 2% to count. And I don’t think you do. If I produced one article for Wikipedia, then I wouldn’t be part of the 2.2% shown as the data point on the graph, but I’d still be a Wikipedia contributor. Volume isn’t the same thing as engagement or identification with a site or service.

So this one percent rule. It’s more or less true, if you’ll allow that the difference between 1% and 10% is fairly academic. But the thing is that it’s not actually as important as it seems at first sight. If the one percent suddenly left to go to a different site, then the 99th percentile would simply become the new one percent. They’re all using the sites, with a long-tail decline in most cases when it comes to the volume of their contributions. Where a developer or publisher makes their money would determine where they put their effort. If they charge for publishing, like flickr, then making it easier/faster/better for those people, the two percent, to upload and work with their photos would be important. On an advertising model, keeping the other 98% percent coming back would be more important: that might actually entail making sure the two percent are happy and contributing away, of course.

The other thing is that the one percenters are changing all the time. Good blog entries with original thought that appeals to my tastes and interests probably account for about 10% of whatever is in my feedreader at any one time. Unfortunately, it’s never the same 10%, so I can’t just unsubscribe from the crap blogs. The likes of digg and delicious and other media aggregators can do a rough job of separating the wheat from the chaff, but because ‘the average digg user’ has different tastes to me, it doesn’t really work. Other apps such as thoof, particls and rootly claim to be able to edit the news depending on what you actually read, but they haven’t won my trust not to miss really interesting items - often, an item is really interesting because it’s unlike everything else you’ve read recently.

By complete coincidence, I came across two new visualisation tools in my morning reading today.

The first is TouchGraph, a Java application that creates a graph showing the relationships between any web address and the rest of the Web. It does this by grabbing the list of related sites from Google - the same list you’d get by typing in ‘related: www.address.com’. But then it creates a bubble map showing the strength and importance of those links. It doesn’t work especially well for this blog, I’m afraid to say, since there are a lot of internal links which don’t make for very interesting viewing. However, type in the name of a large public site and the results can be fascinating.

The other one is Socialistics, a Facebook app that analyses your friends. It can slice them up in lots of different ways. Very sinister - but really that kind of voyeurism is one of the site’s real joys. One of the most interesting is the tag cloud that supposedly shows how close you are to your friends. I find it fascinating, though I’m a tad sceptical of the results, since I’m supposedly closer to Hugh MacLeod than I am to my wife (sorry, Hugh, I was meaning to tell you).

Joshua Porter has published slides from a presentation reminding us that there is over a hundred years of research into behavioural psychology waiting to inform the way in which social web applications are designed. Through the links, I found Peter Kollock’s 1996 essay, Design Principles for Online Communities, which collects together some key points from work done over the previous twelve years. The first two of the studies it covers predate the web, and at the time the latest appeared, 1994, there wasn’t a lot of the web as we’d recognise it today - no Google, for one thing.

Nonetheless, it’s quite astonishing the degree to which these principles might help with what sometimes seem like very modern issues: wikipedia vandalism and blog bullying come to mind easily. That’s quite a trite point, of course, but the simple idea that co-operation requires sustained interaction with stable, visible identities (1984) sometimes seems to be beyond the architects of some of the biggest products in Web 2.0. The sort of scandals revealed by the launch of the recent Wikiscanner utility, for example, wouldn’t have been a possibility if these ideas were built into the design of the system.

Here are the key points. It might be fun to measure your favourite rising star in the Web 2.0 world against these criteria:

• Axelrod’s (1984) requirements for the possibility of cooperation:
  • Arrange that individuals will meet each other again
  • They must be able to recognize each other
  • They must have information about how the other has behaved until now

• Ostrom’s (1990) design principles of successful communities:
  • Group boundaries are clearly defined
  • Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions
  • Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules
  • The right of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities
  • A system for monitoring members’ behavior exists; this monitoring is undertaken by the community members themselves
  • A graduated system of sanctions is used
  • Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms

• Godwin’s (1994) principles for making virtual communities work:
  • Use software that promotes good discussion
  • Don’t impose a length limitation on postings
  • Front-load your system with talkative, diverse people
  • Let the users resolve their own disputes
  • Provide institutional memory
  • Promote continuity
  • Be host to a particular interest group
  • Provide places for children
  • Confront the users with a crisis

Drew asks - once again - ‘which social web tools we couldn’t live without?’

Last year, apparently, my answers were Bloglines, BlinkList, and the Opera RSS reader.

Eh? Blink what?

A year down the line, it’s:

Bookmarks - del.icio.us - remains simple and feature-light, and all the better for it. I’ve flirted with almost every other social bookmark site there is, but keep coming back.

RSS - Google Reader - I also like Vienna on the Mac, but the lack of synchronisation between work and home means time wasted clicking through posts I’ve already read elsewhere. I wish Bloglines worked just a little better, because I feel guilty dumping it for a Google product.

Social Network - Facebook - well, everyone else is there. Eagerly awaiting the next big thing, though: something that offers open access, levels of intimacy and which is designed for grown-ups.

Blogging - Blogdesk - offline blog editing without (a) silly proprietary mark-up elements, (b) complexity or (c) the need to spend any money.

Other - Google Docs seems like the best way to share documents; TripAdvisor is fantastic for holiday information; Amazon for music, book and videogame suggestions; YouTube for fun; Tumblr collates my various activities into one page that’s of no use to anyone but me. Plus the obligatory brief flirtation with some new thing every day.

NB: This post is also an unfinished review of LouderVoice, which collates reviews published on blogs. Apparently, around 30% of blogs contain review-style content. I don’t get any money or anything for it, just wider exposure, I suppose. The rather un-bloglike layout above means that it follows the hReview format and pings their server for collation. I’ll let you know if this leads to hordes of new readers. If it doesn’t, I probably won’t.

PPS. Once I have all my machines connected to the new version of Plaxo, I will be running the update service, just to clear out the dead wood, if anything. Curse me now in the comments

The other very good - but slightly scary - thing about last night was bumping into Duncan Gough. Duncan and I go way back. I was his English teacher at college. Now, it seems, he’s a proper grown-up with a wife and child and everything. How old does that make me?

He’s not just a grown-up, however. He’s also a pretty accomplished developer working for Cominded and he was telling me about a private project he’s working on called PMOG - passively multiplayer online gaming. The idea struck me as incredibly zeitgeisty.

This is the deal. You install a Firefox extension that records everything you visit on the web. It uses this to create a roleplaying game character. If you visit blogs a lot, then you might become a Seer. If you use a lot of aggregators, then you’re a Hoarder, etc. You get experience points and build up levels and skills depending on which sites you visit. So basically, you end up with a profile of yourself as a web citizen done in a tongue-in-cheek, Dungeons and Dragons-ey way.

Earning ‘datapoints’, the game’s currency, allows you to buy items - which might include a way to suggest that fellow players visit another site. I went to digg with the extension installed, and there was a suggestion that I visit dotherightthing (interesting site, btw). It’s possible to create quests - a trail of clues to sites you need to visit in order to complete the quest and earn more experience and datapoints. These will probably have a learning objective in the most part, but this is also the main opportunity at the moment to monetise the project. There’s the possibility of sponsored quests whereby - and I’m making this example up - visiting boots.com might earn you a special elixir of healing.

So what does this bring together? The fact that so many people are attracted to the likes of Twitter - telling people what you’re up to on a microscopic level a lot of the time. People are also talking about putting up online Lifestreams - pulling together your feeds from Twitter, flickr, Upcoming, del.icio.us, your blog and whatever else you do online to create what amounts to a moment-by-moment account of your life. I’ve got something like that on my tumbleblog. Duncan feels that there’s a movement towards ’self-surveillance’ - we’re creating and giving up all this information about ourselves that historically would be very private. Why? At a guess, it’s about alienation in the modern, post-industrialised world, a dysfunctional public culture that places personal achievement above community, a sense in geek culture that our lives are online anyway and that this process is giving that some physicality, plus the sense of our identities otherwise being dissolved into the morass of people doing pretty much exactly the same thing as us.

A variant on this is the talk about attention metadata - the record of what you’ve done and where you’ve been online. If Duncan was evil, he could sell all this data to advertisers. They’ll know exactly what you do and when you do it - the possibility for almost perfect targeting. The other alternative is to give it to the users - they’re already doing this through a widget you can put on your site/profile to show off your in-game avatar. Those users might even be enabled to sell their own data to advertisers. Depending on how accurately PMOG’s profiles for players can be mapped onto existing market segmentation models, this might be very attractive indeed. At the moment, though, PMOG throws away the URLs you visit once they’ve recorded the impact it has on your persona.

Absolutely fascinating. I’m still level 0 on PMOG, though - I’m using Opera as my main browser nowadays. (Oh -and that’s the thing I forgot to say about widgets - apparently, there are currently 25 main platforms for widgets. And they’re all completely different. Eep!)

Anney from Prospect rang me up to ask if I knew anyone who might fit the following role - which I assume is UK-based. I said no, but that I’d ask around:

“My client is a start up social enterprise that uses Web 2.0 and online social networking for a “pro-social” purpose. Through search and profiling the site will allow people to find mentors and be mentored. I’m looking for a Site Editor to undertake the day-to-day management of the site; to create, generate and drive the topics, content and tools that will inspire, motivate and build the community. For a full spec please email Anney@prospectmsl.com“

One of the less controversial ‘good things’ about Web 2.0 is the tag cloud. There’s one on the top-right of this page. In years gone by, that would have been a list of the categories covered on this site. So why is the cloud better than a list? Two things occur to me:

(a) The compactness means it has an immediate visual impact. You can get a good sense in one glance of what this blog is about and whether or not you might want to follow it. While that cloud happens to be in alphabetical order, arguably size order would do an even better job.

(b) It’s a tool as well as a picture. Each of those words leads to a series of articles. Maybe you came here looking for articles about business. You can see I sometimes write on that subject at a glance and with a single click you can bring up all of them. (That is the reason I choose alphabetical order, by the way: so readers can look up topics more easily).

They’ve become ‘part of the furniture’ of Web 2.0 sites, perhaps, appreciated but not really considered. So I was interested to see the topic re-emerge this week on the O’Reilly Radar blog. Andrew Odewahn, director of the O’Reilly network had applied a tag cloud filter to Tim O’Reilly’s ‘What is Web 2.0‘ essay. He ended up with this:

And you can see one definition in a moment’s glance - a pretty reasonable one at that - of Web 2.0. It’s web software applications and services that deal with the links between data and users. You don’t even have to read the essay to get a good idea of the O’Reilly’s point of view of what is important in this sphere.

On the other hand, though, there are some big holes in this picture. It doesn’t mention anything about ‘collective intelligence’ or the ‘wisdom of crowds’, both of which are pretty central to the web 2.0 idea and the essay. Why? Because they are phrases and computers aren’t very good at dealing with language beyond single words. To a computer ‘collective intelligence’ is just two words; the ‘wisdom of crowds’ is three. It’s picked up the word ‘collective’ but it’s in small type. The algorithms used to generate clouds might be tweaked or primed by an intelligent operator to provide a ’seed list’ of terms, but making the creation of clouds automatic - so it can recognise key phrases without help - remains a bit of a holy grail.

So going forward, a few interesting alternatives have emerged through the comments. Mark Woodman is working on a ‘tag constellation‘ that analyses the top one hundred blogs to come up with a cloud representing the current ‘buzz’ across the blogs. This was about a story concerning Fujitsu making a very big hard drive. It’s also very interactive so clicking on the orbiting words would lead to other, connected stories.

Moritz Stefaner is working on another alternative. The colour intensity complements the words to show the extent of the buzz around particular topics. The cloud retains intelligence about what words relate to which topics, but fades them in and out according to whether or not they are hot right now:

Ted Shelton at Personal Bee is working on phrase analysis. Their site is a news aggregator and so identifying hot news stories depends on the recognition of phrases. ‘Big’ shouldn’t be recognised, but add ‘Brother’ and it’s probably part of a story. Add ‘racism row’ and you definitely know it is. Here’s a part of their view of the buzz around the topic of Web 2.0 today:

Of these three alternatives, it’s impossible to say that one is on the right track or that others are wrong. That will depend on the specific application they’re being used for, and the tastes of users. Different demographics will probably like one model more than another. Two things though, I think are absolutely vital for the next generation of any of these news tracker applications:

• Phrase recognition - This can probably happen automatically through language analysis for established stories, but may need to be done by hand for now for breaking news.
• More dimensions - we already have size, but currency and authority could really improve the ability to navigate such clouds.

Don’t know if you have seen the Quintura search application? It creates a mind map around search terms, letting users delve in and refine their topics on the fly. Sadly, it can’t do phrases and its language analysis doesn’t always work well. However, a new, improved Quintura for today’s blog posts from the people I read and the people that they’ve linked to is what I really want.

Technorati: folksonomy, tags, Web 2.0, website

Physorg.com - daily reading in the Delaney household - has posted an interesting piece on how researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have fed their computers a diet of Wikipedia to make them more clever. While Web 2.0 sceptics might have preferred the Britannica, the point of the exercise is to make the machines capable of forming associations, the same way you and I do when we think.

It seems to me like one more step towards the Holy Grail next-gen Google-killer search engine. Google can already do synonyms: when you search for cars, it also returns results that talk about automobiles. What it can’t do is make any associations. If you search for ‘Iraq War’, it won’t return results on ‘axis of evil’, ‘bush foreign policy’ or ‘mutually-assured destruction’. It doesn’t know what topics are associated with your search term. By giving a machine a diet of (mainly) intelligent discussion about as many topics as possible, they’ll be able to find pages that are relevant to your search term, but which aren’t keyword heavy.

The second example given is a spam filter. A simple filter might block anything containing the word ‘vitamin’ that comes from a stranger. A filter which has been taught a little more would know that ‘B12′ is a vitamin and be able to distinguish scientific discussion from a sales pitch.

The method could also apparently be used to improve automated translations. When a simple translator comes across the word ‘mouse’, it doesn’t know if it’s a rodent or a computer peripheral. If it knew enough about the context in which the word appeared, though, it would be able to disambiguate the passage it was working on.

The article doesn’t mention the expression, but this is very much along the lines on which the semantic web is supposed to work. Wikipedia provides an ontology for machines to have some understanding of human text. It isn’t quite artificial intelligence, but it’s quite close: the machines use our intelligence to simulate their own.

N.B. Interestingly, my friend Marc Fawzi described exactly this idea in a piece he posted on the subject last June.

Web 2.0 Mecca Techcrunch has just launched one of those funny old user forum things. Muhammad Saleem reckons digg and Netscape could benefit considerably from their introduction and points out that reddit achieves a quasi forum functionality by allowing posts about itself.

Forums or message boards may seem very nineties. In some respects, they hark back to a day when readers were viewed as a barbarous rabble who needed to be kept firmly in their place. And that place was a far-off corner of your website where their philistine rants could be contained, looked over by a trustee class of volunteer moderators. Woe betide that any of their ill-informed twaddle should sully the golden prose of the professional journalists.

Nowadays, of course, it’s de rigeur that the former audience be able to comment on every item that appears. The concept of the forum might seem outdated because if comments can appear anywhere, then its existence may seem redundant.

Except they are not; not one bit. The reintroduction of the forum marks the next stage of the read/write web. The big difference is that on a message board, the (former) readers set the agenda. On blogs, as you know, the agenda is set by the author. Comments may be plentiful, vociferous and massively intelligent, but the structure of such publications means that they have a lesser status than the posts they annotate. Forums need moderators, sure, but their time is normally spent deleting spam and abuse, not leading the discussion - that isn’t really the point. Your co-editors (also known as readers) are the ones in charge of that job.

Forums also drive traffic like mad, which offers another very reasonable justification for social media sites introducing them. Here’s a true story. When we launched the What Laptop website six years ago, the site was doing something like half-a-million impressions a month in less than six months. On some levels, that made us feel very pleased with ourselves. However, in our heart of hearts, we knew that all those features, reviews and editorials didn’t matter at all. The forum soon accounted for over 90% of the traffic. Most users had bookmarked the forum pages and didn’t even visit the home page on their way. [NB: it's now in new hands and vastly better, so this may not be true any more].

They may be old and quaint, but forums still have a lot of life left in them, I think. After all, if the appeal of blogs is straight opinions, honestly put, then the next best thing is surely lots of opinions even more candidly stated.