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  London Riots and Social Media

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/08/10/london-riots-and-social-media

  Slideshare by Graham Brown of mobileYouth investigates the role of social media in the London riots and also the cleanup campaign. The London Riots – wtf? (Graham Brown mobileYouth) View more presentations from Graham Brown (mobileYouth)Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogLondon Riots and Social MediaRelated posts:London social media developmentSocial media and musicians wikiThe Critics and Social Media

  

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  August 10 2011, 1:44pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  When will Google+ allow people to add their own feeds?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/07/when-will-google-allow-rss-feeds

  When if at all, will Google+ allow people to add their own RSS feeds?Friendfeed took off when rooms were added, harnessing the power of the so-called social interest graph, but it started to lose appeal again when they allowed the automated inclusion of rss feeds into those rooms by the room owners, slowly drowning out the interesting and genuine conversations.Facebook allows the automated inclusion of feeds via 3rd party apps, but between the Facebook users and Facebook themselves, they have managed to deprecate content from feeds so that original content and human shares take priority over feeds.Now some Google+ users are clamouring for the ability to be able to add their own streams from elsewhere directly into their own circles, which would amount to the same mistake as Friendfeed made. But Google+ hasn’t even enabled some kind of groups, rooms or interests yet, either because they still don’t understand the dynamics of social networks, or because they are rolling out such features in waves, and this one hasn’t arrived yet.Google’s record with groups isn’t a good one. They bought Dejanews, the web interface for usenet newsgroups, one of the original computer facilitated social networks, and did nothing much with it for nearly a decade. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWhen will Google+ allow people to add their own feeds?Related posts:Friendfeed for microblogging – a screencast videoReclaim your lifestream feeds with SweetCron softwareFriendfeed and Social Objects

  

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  July 7 2011, 1:21pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Google+ for Mobile

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/01/google-for-mobile

  I’m liking what I’ve seen so far of Google+ or Google plus, particularly the mobile version  which seems like a good place to quickly catch up on a lot of stuff all in one place. roll on the iPad app for it. The “nearby” feature should be really interesting on occasion, but not until a few more people are on there in my local area, which ought to be teeming really.The big questions are who what and whyWho is going to settle in at Google+ not just to take a look around but to make it a home page that is checked often? Just the early adopter drive-by users or a more stable community of normal people?What are we going to do or talk about on Google+ that’s innovative and original?Why would anybody try to migrate all of their friends over to Google+ if they are already ensconced at other social networks?The thing is, it’s all going to change anyway.Add me as aroberts@gmail.com or possibly “+Andy Roberts”Photos - Google+Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogGoogle+ for MobileRelated posts:I Declare Google Reader BankruptcyOpen Social Objects?SearchWiki from Google is LIVE

  

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  July 1 2011, 4:47am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/25/jemima-kiss-how-i-kicked-my-digital-habit

  Twitter, Facebook, emails, and voicemail – we are overwhelmed by digital data, is it time to rebel against information overload? I wondered whe Jemima Kiss had gone too. But of course, managing the information overload IS your job.

  This article titled “Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.05 UTC We were brushing through wet grass in the early morning when we saw it – a flash of white drifting behind a small patch of trees, backlit by the sun. Crouching down next to my small son, we watched the unmistakable shape of a barn owl until he disappeared into the wood. The look on my son’s face was part of a brief moment of magic, the kind of memory that we live for. Ordinarily, my next thought would have been to pull out my phone and take a photo, send a tweet or record a video. Connecting is something I do unconsciously now. Tweeting is like breathing and photos and video have documented nearly every day of my 21-month-old son’s life. The meaningful merged with the mundane, all dutifully and habitually recorded – my enjoyment split between that technological impulse and the more delicate human need to be in the moment. This is how we live. That weekend, however, our whole family – my partner, my son and I – were offline. Swallowtail Hill Farm, in Rye, East Sussex, is a pretty soft option when it comes to a digital detox; a charming small farm with a diverting collection of animals and four vintage tractors. Camping was an easy option for an offline experiment, but there wasn’t much choice outside that for a UK break. High-end hotels in the US are now promoting their offline credentials, from boutique luxury to remote donkey trekking, but the UK has some catching up to do. Anyway, blessed with two days of good weather and some delicious local food, I barely even noticed I wasn’t online. What I did notice was my partner, Will. If my worst digital habit is incessant tweeting, his is allowing his phone to be the single most disruptive thing in our relationship. Country walks, dinner, bathing our son – no moment is safe from the seemingly irresistible ringing, vibrating, nagging phone that demands – and wins – his attention when he should be enjoying the moment with us. Any objections of mine are swiftly defended by explaining the importance of dealing with that email/text/voicemail now, though it never seems anything that couldn’t wait half an hour. I take equal responsibility for our connectopia – magnetically drawn, as I am, to any screen that can feed my addiction.

  We handed our phones in at the gate. The only interruption during lunch was from two woodpeckers and the entertainment during dinner by the fire was our own conversation. There was a moment when Will was distracted by a buzzing sensation and reached for his phone, before realising it was a bee. Without our phones, we had no idea what the time was. I reached for my phone when I wondered about local property prices and whether it is normal to see a barn owl during the day. And those moments when Artley, my son, was leaning out of the steam train window, having his bath outdoors under a woodburner-powered shower and being read his bedtime story in front of an open fire, I’ve had to try and commit to my own fallible memory. Breaking away from my connected life, I could feel how the compulsion, the divided attention, the multitasking has permeated my way of being. Early adopters, the heavy technology users who throw themselves at every new device and service, will admit to an uncontrollable impulse to check email, tweets or Facebook. Researchers have called this “variable interval reinforcement schedule”; we have in effect been trained into digital message addiction because the most exciting rewards are unpredictable. We’re no better than slot-machine addicts. The hustle we develop as we struggle to keep up with the pace of digital information has produced a restless, anxious way of engaging with the world. Desperate for efficiency, this seeps into our physical lives; I feel compelled to tidy while on the phone, to fold the washing while brushing my teeth. No single task has my undivided attention. A study by the University of California, San Francisco, last week concluded that constant multi-tasking gradually erodes short-term memory. And interruptions are a massive problem, taking anything up to 20 times the length of the interruption to recover. For those of us compelled to check email every few minutes, that revelation explains where the day goes. As consumer web technologies mature, so too does our desire to understand the impact they are having on our lives. Few books on digital dystopia are more resonant than Hamlet’s BlackBerry, an imaginative and thoughtful book that explores philosophical reaction to new technologies throughout time and the lessons we should have learnt from those. The author, former Washington Post journalist William Powers, is, like me, a true believer in the power and potential of digital technologies, but concludes that we need a little discipline to restore control over our unsettling, hyper-connected lives. “The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward,” he writes. “There’s a preoccupation with what’s going on ‘out there’ in the bustling otherworld, rather than ‘in here’ with yourself and those right around you. What was once exterior and faraway is now easily accessible and this carries a sense of obligation or duty.” That feeling that we should be reaching out, or be available to be reached out to, is tied to the self-affirmation the internet provides. “In less-connected times, human beings were forced to shape their own interior sense of identity and worth.” Powers offers practical solutions, including advocating the use of paper as a more efficient way of organising our thoughts. The theory of “embodied interaction” asserts that physical objects free our minds to think because our hands and fingers can do much of the work, unlike screens where our brains are constantly in demand. The eponymous technology he describes in his book is an intriguing Elizabethan version of a PDA, pocket-sized notebooks with pages coated in an erasable, plaster-like material. “Writing tables”, as they were known, were used for note-taking and checklists. While we can’t be sure Shakespeare used one, we’re shown that Hamlet was a keen user of the latest screen technology. “Yea, from the table of my memory,” Hamlet reflects, after meeting the ghost of his dead father. I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there Hamlet wants to clear his life of all the superficial detritus so that he can focus exclusively on avenging the death of his father. The development of print culture was adding to the tumult of life in Elizabethan England, just as we are overwhelmed with the explosion of always-on digital information today. Exploring Seneca’s “spa of the mind” as a way of escaping the commotion of a busy city, Powers explains that the constant demands of being overwhelmingly connected need to be balanced out by reintroducing a little disconnectedness. That’s exactly what Powers did at home, banning the internet at weekends. It took six months for the family to adjust. “Because we were now away from our connectedness on a regular basis, we grasped its utility and value more fully … There was an atmospheric change in our minds, a shift to a slower, less restless, more relaxed way of thinking. We could just be in one place, doing one particular thing, and enjoy it.”

  At home, my concern about our digital addiction is most acute when I catch my son looking at me while I’m checking a screen. It’s reinforcing how much more important the screen is than him, as if I’m teaching him that obeying these machines is what he needs to do. Our fireside conversation that night, against a backdrop of a moonlit wood, was about Hamlet’s BlackBerry and what Powers calls the “vanishing family trick”, when a seemingly sociable family would gradually dissolve away to screens in different corners of the house. It’s a familiar story. “What’s lost in the process is so valuable, it can’t be quantified,” Powers despairs. “Isn’t this what we live for – time spent with other people, those moments that can’t be translated into ones and zeros and replicated on a screen? I sometimes felt as if love itself, or the acts of the heart and mind that constitute love, were being leached out of the house by our screens.” As we left the farm, the real work began, trying to resolve our new promise of balancing work and home life by introducing phone-free zones and offline days. Best of all, when the farmer handed back our phones, we didn’t have a missed call or message between us.

  Jemima, Will & Artley stayed at Swallowtail Hill Farm, 01275 395447; canopyandstars.co.uk

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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  Related posts:Teaching Assistants Community Now That’s What I Call Music goes digital Digital love: Manuelle Gautrand and the Gaîté Lyrique

  

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  April 25 2011, 10:45am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/12/30-new-music-apps-for-iphone-android-and-ipad

  New iphone iPad and Android apps range from popular artists to social location services aimed at music gig-goers.

  This article titled “30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 12th April 2011 09.15 UTC There’s something of an explosion in music apps happening on iPhone and Android at the moment, from official artist apps that look to go beyond pure news and audio samples, through to social location services aimed at gig-goers. Here’s a list of 30 apps that have launched in the past few months, from big stars and startup developers alike. It offers a glimpse at the trends and technologies that make apps as potentially habit-changing for music fans as they are for gamers and TV viewers. Note, this list is focused on apps that involve listening to or interacting around music, rather than actually creating it. Not because the latter isn’t just as interesting – there is a similar boom in innovative music-making apps – but because, well, those apps will sit better in their own list. Meanwhile, the focus on recently launched apps is why the likes of Spotify, Pandora Radio, Last.fm and others are not included. They’re still innovative and important, but this piece is about new contenders in 2011. The History of Jazz This sits alongside The Elements as one of the iPad apps showing that tablet book-apps can be far more than a scanned-in PDF with a bit of extra video. The History of Jazz offers an interactive timeline tracing the chronological history of jazz, with music samples, videos and curated playlists to dive into featured artists’ catalogues. Discovr This is less of a timeline, and more of a flowchart plotting connections between artists whose music is broadly similar. Discovr gets you to type in an artist, then tap your way through the chart of related bands, double-tapping to bring up biographies, videos and blogposts. MusicDrop and BoxyTunes Two apps that both have the same aim – to turn online storage service DropBox into a fully functioning cloud music service. Both MusicDrop and BoxyTunes stream music from your DropBox account, pulling in cover artwork and other information. They will increasingly face competition from pure cloud music services in 2011, but for existing DropBox users they may be a good stopgap. Decoded by Jay-Z This universal app for iPhone and iPad is based on a physical book collecting together rapper Jay-Z’s lyrics, and adding in video interviews. People paying $4.99 for the app can choose 10 of the 36 featured songs to unlock, or pay another $9.99 to unlock all 36. The actual music is not included – the app focuses on lyrics – but if the songs are already on the user’s device, they can be played in sync with the words. BEP360 will.i.am likes apps so much, he started his own development studio to make them. BEP360 was the first app to emerge. It’s described as a ’360 mobile music video’, which gets fans to hold up their iPhone and spin around for a 360-degree view of the video for the Peas’ The Time (Dirty Bit) single. Augmented reality features and photo-sharing are also included, making this an app worth admiring even if you’re not so keen on the music itself. Mike Scanner Part of the promotional effort around the final album by the Streets, Mike Scanner is one of the first artist apps to use the kind of barcode-scanning technology that’s been seen in numerous mobile shopping apps. The idea here: fans scan household items to unlock exclusive music, videos and ticket offers. Erykah Badu As we reported in February, soul singer Badu is the first artist to use the platform of startup FanTrail to try to connect with her fans – although she’s since been followed by the Roots and Quiet Company. The Erykah Badu app brings gamification to music fandom, with users filling up their ‘LoveMeter’ by sharing news with friends, buying music and checking in at gigs. The more full the meter gets, the more personal the recorded voice messages from Badu accessed through the app will be. Lykke Li Scandinavian pop artist Lykke Li’s app uses another platform, from Steam Republic. Here, the innovation is less about gamified rewards, and more about linking the app with her existing website, so fans can create profiles and share content across both. That includes blogposts and photos, while the app also has the now-obligatory gig check-ins feature too. Pocket Hipster We covered this app in February too: it’s a collaboration between two music technology startups, The Echo Nest and We Are Hunted. Pocket Hipster includes two avatar hipsters, who sneer at your music collection and suggest alternatives to listen to. The hipster aspect is for fun, but the recommendation technology is very serious – it uses The Echo Nest’s API, which is being licensed to a range of app and service companies in 2011. we7 Radio Plus Personalised radio is all the rage in the US thanks to Pandora Radio, but licensing arguments led to the company pulling out of the UK a few years ago. That’s left the way clear for Last.fm, and now we7 to see how the concept flies among British music fans. Released for Android this year, we7 Radio Plus creates radio stations on the fly based on specific artists and genres. SoundTracking Released by developer Schematic Labs in time for SXSW this year, SoundTracking lets people share details of the song they’re listening to there and then, including photos and comments. Other users of the app will be able to listen to 30-second samples courtesy of iTunes, and it integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Roxette Singbox Who knew Roxette would be the subject of an innovative music game in 2011? That said, who knew the Smurfs would be the subject of one of the most lucrative iPhone social games in 2010… Roxette Singbox brings the SingStar karaoke game model to iOS, using in-app purchases to download individual songs, with email and Facebook challenges for a social spin. Spin Play US music magazine Spin launched an iPad app in March this year, but it went beyond simply reproducing the print edition’s articles. Each $1.99 issue includes a playlist of 60 streaming songs and 30 streaming videos, chosen by the Spin team to complement the editorial content for that issue. The aim is for readers to listen to bands while reading about them. Play by AOL Music Launched for Android smartphones in March, Play by AOL Music is another music discovery app, released by the newly-editorial focused US internet giant. It’s a music player app with social features baked in, enabling people to easily tweet or Facebook share the song that’s currently playing. Friends’ posts and comments are pulled into a real-time feed. Tune Drop and Pioneer Air Jam Everyone’s a wannabe DJ at house parties nowadays, but usually whoever controls the device gets to choose the tunes. Apps are emerging to make the process more collaborative, though. Tune Drop is an iPad app that lets party guests cue up requests from your iPod music library, while Pioneer Air Jam handles the process wirelessly – albeit only for Pioneer hi-fis. Kling Klang Machine Techno pioneers Kraftwerk were similarly innovative with their first iOS application this year, billing Kling Klang Machine as an ‘interactive 24-hour music generator’. Fans can browse a music map of the world divided into timezones, and mix Kraftwerk loops and samples together – overseen by wireframe models of the group itself. DJ Rivals US startup Booyah has had success with its Nightclub City Facebook game and MyTown iPhone social location game. DJ Rivals brings the two ideas together, as players build up their virtual DJ through rhythm mini-games and location-based DJ battles. Roqbot Roqbot won this year’s SXSW Music Accelerator contest, and is another collaborative playlist app, except this time designed to be used in bars and restaurants rather than the home. The iPhone and Android app lets users vote for the songs they’d like to hear, making it an app-centric incarnation of the traditional jukebox. Nirvana Classic Album: Nevermind In itself, this app isn’t technically innovative: it’s basically an existing documentary film ported to iPad, with bonus material and social commenting. However, it’s a sign that labels – Universal Music Group in this case – are keen to see how much demand there is for tablet apps focused on their back catalogues, as well as newer bands. McFly Live – Above The Noise Punk-pop band McFly teamed up with UK firm LoveLive recently, to release an app for a specific gig, rather than the band as a whole. It let fans watch a live stream of their concert at Wembley Arena in early April, while entering a contest and chatting to other fans on a forum. Swedish House Mafia – Until One iPad Edition Scandinavian dance supergroup Swedish House Mafia are already exploring multiplatform content, having released their own book and video documentary around latest album Until One. Now there’s an iPad app too, based on the book and videos, but with all nine tracks of the album streamable from within the app. Impressive technically, but also for the ability of label EMI to get the necessary publishing licensing signed off to include the full tracks. Owl City Galaxy While fans await new material from Owl City, they can dive into his US-only Galaxy application, which offers similar gamification to the Erykah Badu app – points for ‘future Owl City bonuses’. Social is the key feature, with fans invited to ‘customise your own planet and connect with other fans’, with an exclusive track dangled as the reward for doing so. Eavesdrop, MyStream and PairShare These three apps all launched around the same time, aiming to provide a modern-day equivalent of the two headphone sockets found on vintage Walkmans. All three allow people to listen to music at the same time, using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth streaming in the case of Eavesdrop and MyStream, and just Bluetooth for PairShare. AudioVroom Originally developed as part of a Music Hack Day event, AudioVroom styles itself as a ‘multi-user internet radio station’, where people earn points for recommending the app to friends, which can then be spent on listening to ad-free personal radio stations. Foursquare-style badges are thrown into the mix, while the sharing happens using the Bump app’s API, requiring people to physically knock their iPhones together to connect. US-only for now. The National Mall This ‘hyperlocal’ app isn’t much use to fans who don’t live in Washington DC, where US duo BlueBrain reside. The National Mall is an interactive album designed to be listened to on a walk around the National Mall in DC, with the rhythms and beats changing as they go. The app is due out imminently. iheartradio for iPad US radio group Clear Channel’s iheartradio apps have racked up millions of downloads on iPhone and other smartphones, but the newly-released iPad app shows what can be added for larger screens. Listeners can see related tweets when listening to one of the 750 US radio stations streaming within the app, while also perusing videos and photo galleries. That’s our selection, so what do you think? Which of these apps has most potential, and which will sink without a trace? And have we missed anything out that’s been released in 2011? Post a comment to let us know your feedback.

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

  Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad

  Related posts:Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble? Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers Justin.tv boss: ‘We want to replace the camera app on the phone’

  

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  April 12 2011, 4:54am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Facebook answers green critics with data centre design disclosure

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/11/facebook-answers-green-critics-with-data-centre-design-disclosure

  Facebook the social network is to make energy efficient design secrets freely available, by open sourcing the information, in answer to green critics.

  This article titled “Facebook answers green critics with data centre design disclosure” was written by By Iain Tomson and James Murray, Business Green for the Guardian Sustainable Business Network, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 11th April 2011 17.04 UTC Facebook has launched a major new initiative designed to share its server and data centre designs with rivals, in a move that the company claims could save enough energy to power over 100,000 homes. The Open Compute Project (OCP) will allow the wider IT industry to access the design secrets behind the social network’s new data centre in Prineville, Oregon, which the company says uses 38 per cent less power than existing server farms. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that engineers have been working for the past 18 months on new designs that would fit large-scale computing needs while significantly enhancing energy efficiency. “We want to share that knowledge with the industry and make server and data centre design open,” he said. “We’re trying to foster ecosystems for the development of business startups. It’s really cool. We’re not the only ones who need this hardware and by sharing there will be more demand for the stuff we need, which makes it cost effective.” Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, said that central to its strategy was power usage effectiveness (PUE), which is the ratio of power spent on computing versus that used to run and cool the facility. The ideal PUE is a rating of 1.0 – meaning 100 per cent of power went to computing – but data centres typically operate at a PUE of 1.5. Facebook’s new data centre operates at a PUE of 1.07. “A typical data centre consumes about $1m per MW each year, so this design would cut the annual power budget for an average site from $10m to $6m,” said Graham Weston, chairman at data centre provider Rackspace, which has worked on the OCP initiative. “We had [been] developing our own intellectual property around this issue, but will be flushing that to go with this open source design, because we believe in open source.” Facebook has deployed several customised designs and technologies at the new facility, including stripping out non-essential parts from servers and other systems, such as paint and logos – a move the company says has saved six pounds of materials per server. Switching just one quarter of US data centres to the specifications released by the OCP would save enough power for more than 160,000 homes, according to Facebook. The move follows a campaign orchestrated by Greenpeace called ‘Facebook: Unfriend Coal’ which has protested against the company’s reliance on coal power for its data centres. “If Facebook wants to be a truly green company, it needs to reduce its gas emissions,” Casey Harrell, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace, told the BBC. “The way to do that is decouple its growth from its emissions footprint by using clean, renewable energy to power its business instead of dirty coal and dangerous nuclear power.”

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  Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogFacebook answers green critics with data centre design disclosure

  Related posts:SocialSoftwareWiki – Design Patterns of Social Computing Blog Friends app on Facebook SXSW 2011: Can Facebook photos be used commercially?

  

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  April 11 2011, 12:23pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Talk About Local Unconference 2011 gets under way in Cardiff

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/02/talk-about-local-unconference-2011-gets-under-way-in-cardiff

  Tweets and news from the first Talk About Local unconference to take place in Cardiff, Wales – looking at issues around local publishing 2011

  This article titled “Talk About Local Unconference 2011 gets under way in Cardiff” was written by Hannah Waldram, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 2nd April 2011 13.53 UTC Community publishers met in Cardiff today to talk about issues surrounding promoting your local area online. The first Talk About Local Unconference to take place in Wales, roughly 80 people met at the Atrium in Adamsdown for a day of tea, coffee, tweeting and sessions on all issues which affect local bloggers. Sessions, organised ad hoc in an ‘unconference’ style, looked at hyperlocal bloggers and councils, elections, law, issues around content, making money and supporting each other in a community were all discussed throughout the day. Attendees included Twitterers, bloggers, web publishers, photographers and anyone with an interest in producing content online about a place important to them – travelling from Edinburgh, Leeds, Isle of Wight, London and across the UK. Session topics were pitched and then posted onto a day schedule to run throughout the day. Networking and chatting among hyperlocal publishers will continue into the evening at Gwdihw Cafe Bar. The event was supported by Guardian Local and Rightmove. We’ve been tweeting from the event today along with others on Twitter using the hashtag #TAL11. Scroll down this Storify to follow tweets from the beginning of the day. Also see this live blog from Talk About Local here. If you went to the unconference or have any comments about it – feel free to leave them in the comment box below.

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  Related posts:Talk About Local Unconference to take place in Cardiff Pub of the year award goes to a London local for first time Why would councils want to exclude bloggers and tweeters?

  

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  April 2 2011, 3:00pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Tapping into online communities can help councils engage with citizens

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/28/tapping-into-online-communities-can-help-councils-engage-with-citizens

  Be it on Twitter, Facebook or Linked In, online communities are dominating the conversation and government just needs to get out of the way.

  This article titled “Tapping into online communities can help councils engage with citizens” was written by Louise Kidney, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 28th March 2011 08.00 UTC Of all the rumours floating around local government this year, my favourite is that the localism bill introduction in the House of Commons was delayed because nobody could agree on the definition of “community”.   A lot of people are interested in defining community at the moment, not just the coalition. The RSA is currently running a project examining the notion of a connected community in real space within the New Cross Gate area – mapping how people interrelate in their everyday lives whether through membership of special interest groups or in gyms. Facebook recently mapped their entire user base and how they interrelate – creating an image that reveals humanity’s need both to connect but also to migrate in all its global glory.   We are fascinated with community. Mapping existing connections within a community might seem pointless, until you consider that this might be where the proof of the pudding is for a multicultural society. The truth is, until you ask the question and map a community, how it exists currently and came to be that way, you cannot find the reason or motivation for the cohesion that exists within it, nor transfer that anywhere else. Until you identify who goes to which mosque but also the gym next to it, and identify that that person who attends both is a hub and an influencer, how can you know who the people are who you should be targeting to attend your local neighbourhood meetings? If you engage with the influencers, your message will be passed by word of mouth – but you must identify them first.   Even Facebook, a community in a digital space – or rather a collision of a series of friendship circles and communities all interacting and merging – has influencers. Most people, according to research, have about 150 people listed as friends on Facebook – but some have more, and they are the people who we assume cross over groups – the people who link groups, the people who work a room with ease at parties who transfer those networking skills across to the digital world. Again, if you want to get a digital community on board, get them behind your message, or, for example, behind your community clean up – identify the digital influencer in the geographical location you are targeting.   Communities can be enormously useful, and these are just a few examples of how. But how do you identify a community that you can’t see – one which exists in a space which allegedly has no borders? And how do you quantify the value of a digital community, surely it’s just a load of people sitting around chatting?   Not quite. Wikipedia defines a virtual community as ‘a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographic and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals.’ Sometimes it’s obvious that these communities exist online – take a look at any Facebook page on a common interest issue, be that a local issue or a band, and you will see there is a community – a collection of individuals with a commonality. But those links are not always so defined – local government has a community but that community sprawls across many digital networks, from the Communities of Practice to Twitter on the #localgov tag.   There is a small article buried as a reference in the Wikipedia article on virtual community. PBS Teachers, an educators’ community over in the US, published a report on understanding the impact of online communities on civic engagement. The figures speak for themselves. 65% of online community members have involvement in civic affairs since becoming members, 44% are more involved in social activism. Instead of frantic typing and little else, it seems that becoming part of a community empowers and motivates people to transfer the feeling of belonging to a community into the real world to effect real, tangible community driven change.   The lesson here, perhaps, is that just because something is digital does not mean it has no value in real world. It appears to act as an enabler, and for the RSA and others as an identifier, not an inhibitor.   Louise Kidney works in the communications team at Blackburn with Darwen borough council and blogs at ashinyworld.blogspot.com   This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Join the local government network for more like this direct to your inbox.

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  March 28 2011, 4:08pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Aggregators: if we can’t beat them, let’s join them

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/28/aggregators-if-we-cant-beat-them-letsjoin-them

  Arianna Huffington’s sale of her website The Huffington Post to AOL shows there’s still money to be made from content aggregators if you know what you’re doing.

  This article titled “Aggregators: if we can’t beat them, let’s join them” was written by Dan Sabbagh, for The Guardian on Monday 28th March 2011 06.00 UTC Arianna Huffington’s sale of the website that bears her name has not been without controversy; there are plenty who say she made a fortune from the sale to AOL on the back of aggregating other people’s content and exploiting bloggers who contributed for no pay and none of the highly rated equity. It is easy, of course, to argue that it isn’t fair, and, in addition, that life isn’t fair either. But it is also worth bearing in mind that this is the nature of the internet too. Facebook, for example, isn’t offering to share the advertising revenue it generates with the half a billion people who supply profiles (although come to think of it, income from one’s own site might be somewhat disappointing). Why should it? The skill is corralling so many people in one place, not in writing a Facebook profile. Whatever next? ITV paying viewers to watch the final of Dancing on Ice so they can get more advertising revenue? It’s not like there is any skill in watching telly after all. Meanwhile, the open nature of so much web content means that traditional boundaries of authorial ownership – they’re my words not yours – have been pretty much erased. It’s so easy, for example, to scrape a blog’s RSS feed and post the headline and teaser on another site. Newspapers, meanwhile, cheerfully copy tweets wholesale (one of mine on the merits of Rebecca Ferguson once made the Sunday Mirror) – while in the era of the live blog it has become not just possible, but increasingly common for media organisations to cite tweets from reporters employed by rivals. Think about it like that for a second and the scenario looks scary if you are part of an established news organisation – there is nothing to stop two blokes in a bedroom with BBC News and al-Jazeera on, and a fast eye for what else is popping up online, from coming up with their own “Libya live blog”. On this thinking, all that is preventing professional news sites being ripped off is copyright law, which is meant to stop other people copying and pasting sizeable quantities of text. Mind you, there are plenty of celebrity news sites that come perilously close to nicking whatever they see in the morning’s tabloids and running it as their own. Huffington – visiting the Guardian last week – also argued that there is a distinction to be made between professional journalists and bloggers. This isn’t necessarily a distinction of quality (because there are so many good bloggers out there) – rather the difference is between those who are paid to report professionally, and bloggers who are not. A handful of bloggers, of course, generate enough money to make the jump into full-time writing, but most can’t. Which is also the other reason why there aren’t two blokes in every third bedroom running their own Libya live blog – there isn’t enough money for a regular supply of biscuits and whatever else daily life requires. In truth, come to think of it, even those who write for traditional newspapers wouldn’t be able to make a living on the pay-per-click model. As Matt Wells notes in the cover feature, live blogs with no single author account for 9% of traffic to guardian.co.uk in March. The hit-driven nature of internet content means that a handful of stories and subjects dominate rankings, and by implication dominate online revenues. Paying writers on the basis of the traffic they get would turn a newspaper into a record company, where a handful of the artists are rich, and the rest become social workers in three years’ time. Aggregation, in short, is necessary to survive all round. Before the internet, there were generations of newspaper interviewees who were never paid for their contribution. Now the game is different – about providing destinations for people to share and discover news and content. And if Arianna Huffington was good at that, then it is wise not to complain, but probably to try and copy her.

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  March 28 2011, 5:01am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/24/are-social-photo-apps-trapped-in-a-silicon-valley-bubble

  Some social apps are really cool but it’s unlikely your actual friends are using them

  This article titled “Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 24th March 2011 11.28 UTC Another day, another innovative smartphone app based around photo-sharing. Color is the work of a team assembled by Bill Nguyen, the entrepreneur who previously sold streaming music service Lala to Apple. Backed by $41m (£25.3m) of venture capital, it lets users post photos tagged with a location, browse the latest pics of people around them, and form ad-hoc groups to bundle together shots from a group of friends in the same place. It brings to mind another hotshot photo-sharing app that launched last year: Path. There, the focus was on sharing pictures with just 50 close friends and family members — a deliberately restricted social network. It provoked similar excitement among the big US tech blogs. Here’s my question: are these kinds of apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble? Not in the financial sense — although that $41m for Color may fuel the debate around that too. More of a cultural bubble, where it may be a little too easy to assume that all your friends and family will be quick to catch on to the same cool new apps as you. Put it another way: if I made a list of my 50 closest friends and family members, none of them are using Path already. They won’t know about Color. And judging by my experience trying to tempt them onto Foursquare in recent months, they won’t be interested for a long time either. For now, all these apps only let me connect with other mobile industry geeks like myself. That’s where the suspicion of a bubble comes in: the assumption that if all your friends and colleagues aren’t using these new apps already, they’ll want to when you talk about them. Color may have an additional focus on strangers sharing pics, but while that’s a perfect storm of virality in Silicon Valley, it’s rather more of a lonely cul-de-sac in, say, Bishop’s Stortford. The answer may simply be to wire in Facebook, as Path does already, to widen the distribution to … well, to your real friends. An app like Instagram has its own social network, but I suspect much more social activity around its filtered photos is happening on Facebook and Twitter. Color is an interesting app with lots of money behind it. Investing in features that break it out of that Silicon Valley cultural bubble will be essential if it’s to amount to more than a geo-restricted social plaything.

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  March 24 2011, 10:57am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  SXSW 2011: Can Facebook photos be used commercially?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/14/sxsw-2011-can-facebook-photos-be-used-commercially

  Facebook is asked whether businesses and advertisers could make use of the equivalent to one Flickr‘s worth of photos being uploaded each month. SXSW report

  This article titled “SXSW 2011: Can Facebook photos be used commercially?” was written by Jemima Kiss, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 16.41 UTC Much of the focus of this discussion was inevitably focused on Facebook’s photos product manager, Sam Odio, who disappointingly played the “not my remit’ card when asked the most interested and pertinent questions about Facebook’s use of users’ photos, including facial recognition and how images might be co-opted by advertisers. • Facebook sees “a Flickr’s worth of photos uploaded every month”, said Odio. But it’s worth considering the different values of those two services: Flickr includes some high-quality, well edited photography, while Facebook focuses on storytelling over quality. It doesn’t matter, said Odio, if that first photo of your newborn nephew is blurry: it’s the social context behind the photo. • Odio fielded a question by one delegate about how businesses and advertisers might start appropriating photos for commercial use. “We’re not in the business of selling ads through people’s photos and we want to prevent businesses having free rein over users,” he said. “But businesses are users,” pushed the delegate. Odio said Facebook would want the people in the photos to be telling the story – which means advertising would be there but more subtly, and directed by users. • As for ownership of photos, Odio said that comes down to the need to build the API in such a way that it can access your friends’ photos. If each of those users retained ownership, that would become very complicated. “There are worries we are going to use photos in advertising but it doesn’t really benefit us that much given how sensitive the subject is.” • Yan-David Erlick, a serial entrepreneur who founded Mophot.to, predicted that social photos will become even more integrated with our lives through different sorts of tagging. “Timelines between items will mean that over time, these entities are not viewed as individual pieces of media but will have contextual attributes tying them to other pieces.” • Odio explained how after struggling to keep his startup photo site Divvyshot going in 2009, ploughing in all his own savings, he got a random email one Sunday night. It was from Blake Ross, who later turned out to be co-creator of Firefox, at an address at Facebook. “He said ‘Sam – your site looks interesting. You should come here.’ I was living with six developers at the time and they were all looking over my shoulder to figure out if the email was fake or not.” It was, and Facebook acquired Divvyshot in April 2010. • Feature requests aren’t always the best way to develop a product. Odio said nobody asked for Instagram, which just raised $7m in funding, but now it is taking off. Facebook’s engineers also have a monthly hackathon where they can work on whatever they like; that doesn’t determine product direction but features such as drag-and-drop organisation have come out of that. • On facial recognition, all Odio would say is that Facebook “hasn’t been able to move quickly on it given how sensitive it is”, which does seem to imply it would have liked to do plenty if it could have got away with it. • Odio said a startup should make the product extremely simple; he had got distracted when trying to add too many features and functions. “Focus on one thing and do it extremely well. In early days the product needs to be explained to users in 10 seconds or less.” • One delegate said he was concerned that Facebook is becoming such an important repository for his life, and that photos are the most easily accessible part of that archive compared to status updates or messages. Erlich described the web being used as an external memory for us all, from photos to phone numbers; this ties in with Clay Shirky’s idea of cognitive surplus – if machines can take over the mechanical parts of our brain function, what can we do with the space and energy that frees up?

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  March 14 2011, 6:33am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/14/googles-marissa-mayer-on-the-location-based-fast-fun-and-future

  Marissa Mayer of Google products expounds at SXSW on Google and the proliferation of products. Where will it all go next?

  This article titled “Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 17.18 UTC Dubbed “the gatekeeper of Google products”, Marissa Mayer knows what she’s talking about. Ultimately, it falls at Mayer’s door to ensure the internet giant remains as agile, innovative and willing to experiment as it was a decade ago. “The challenge is how to stay true to what originally built this big and successful brand, with a lot of experimentation and still moving really fast,” Mayer said on Friday. “Now, when new people come in [to Google] who say their products are ‘not good enough for the Google name’ you have to tell them that the Google name was built on building stuff, throwing it out there, getting feedback, seeing how it works, ramping it up, making it a success and then managing resource afterwards.” What you end up with, then, is a proliferation of products. This is where Google has fallen short, Mayer admitted. “Some of our products should be features, like Latitude and Google Hotpot,” she said. “One of the things we need to do more is merge these products into core technologies, consolidate into Maps or Places. There’s probably more than one product [Latitude and Hotpot could fit into] but we still need to condense somewhat.” Mayer, an upwardly mobile Stanford University graduate who joined the Mountain View company almost 12 years ago, also admitted that Google Maps needs some form of customer support. (Late last year, Nicaragua refused to withdraw troops from a disputed parcel of land along its border with Costa Rica after Google Maps wrongly labelled it Nicaraguan territory.) “We do need to have some support there, and step up our customer service,” Mayer said. About 40% of Google Maps usage is local, according to Mayer, with 150 million people using the mobile Google Maps. (And drivers across the world travel 12bn miles a year using Google Maps navigation – who needs satnav?) Location-based services, including new releases of Maps for mobile, check-ins, deals and augmented reality, are evolving into quintessentially Google products. The world of “contextual discovery” – organising information, reviews and deals around a given location – is the local play on Google’s longest-standing ambition. Asked by the Guardian how Google manages to assuage privacy fears with cutting-edge consumer products, Mayer said that its Street View technology had got “better and better at blurring” licence plates and other opt-outs. Mayer said Google is “transparent” about the data it needs to inform its products, adding: “There are actually a lot of places that have a lot of data about you that people don’t know. I read the other week that credit card companies know with 98% accuracy two years before that you’re going to get divorced – that’s crazy. “But it means that there’s things that you don’t even know about, like changes in your spouse’s buying power. The real question is: because that data’s always been there but now it’s been recorded, the question is how are they handling it?”

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  March 14 2011, 6:28am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Why would councils want to exclude bloggers and tweeters?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/11/why-would-councils-want-to-exclude-bloggers-and-tweeters

  Can you be a blogger and respectable at the same time? I hope not.

  This article titled “Why would councils want to exclude bloggers and tweeters?” was written by Dave Hill, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 11th March 2011 15.00 UTC Local government minister Bob Neill MP (Con) recently wrote to local authorities as follows: “Bloggers, tweeters, residents with their own websites and users of Facebook and YouTube are increasingly a part of the modern world, blurring the lines between professional journalists and the public. There are recent stories about people being ejected from council meetings for blogging, tweeting or filming. This potentially is at odds with the fundamentals of democracy, and I want to encourage all councils to take a welcoming approach to those who want to bring local news stories to a wider audience.” Excellent advice. But some councils have been slow to get the message. These notably include the famous Tory “easyCouncil” of Barnet in north London, whose leader Lynne Hillan told the Barnet Times:   “The current advice according to the constitution does not allow filming in the council chamber … The only thing we will do is consider responsible media requests, and they are the only thing we would allow at this stage … I do not think we would consider a request from bloggers. Only respectable media would be considered.”  The statement raises an array of questions. What defines some parts of the media as “respectable” and “responsible” and others not? Who does the category “blogger” include? Can you be a blogger and respectable at the same time? I’ve a hunch that Councillor Hillan had a certain person in mind. His name is Roger Tichborne, publisher of a blog called Barnet Eye. The Eye campaigns tirelessly against her administration. Its author’s greatest triumph was successfully complaining that a Tory colleague – the quite astounding Brian Coleman – had breached the council’s code of conduct by sending him an abusive email. Tichborne networks with fellow local online citizen journalists – some of theme dissident Barnet Tories – in one of London’s best-blogged boroughs. Following Hillan’s remarks he attended a council committee meeting as a member of the public and filmed it until another Tory councillor ticked him off, unimpressed by the unrespectable blogger’s protesting that he had legal opinion on his side. But the law shouldn’t need to be dragged into this. Neither should those increasingly meaningless distinctions between citizen journalists and the professional media, not least because plenty of the latter are far less “respectable” or “responsible” than plenty of the former. Little love may be lost between Tichborne and the Tories responsible for emptying his bins, but Barnet town hall should still welcome him. It should welcome anyone prepared to sit through deliberations in its democratic chambers and convey these to a wider public either live or later and whether by blogging, tweeting, audio recording, filming or standing on a street corner waving semaphore flags. So should every town hall in the land. In recent weeks public galleries in London and elsewhere have been filled with hecklers ritually denouncing Labour councils in particular for passing on “Tory cuts” in their budgets. Many of the outraged were ignorant, boring and stuffed with cost-free piety, but at least they were there. Mostly, those galleries are close to empty. The same often goes for the press seats. Councils slammed for publishing their own freesheets often plead that their local papers take little notice of what they do. Often, they have a point. Citizen journalists can help to fill the void. Councils wary of licensing the amateur hordes should look to the top tier of local government in the capital. At London’s City Hall, the Thames-side glass bauble that contains London’s mayors, the main debating chamber enshrines in its very seating plan the non-recognition of any amateur-professional distinction. There is no special section for the press. Instead, anyone at all – the Guardian, Mayorwatch, Adam Beinkov, CyberBoris a school student on an educational trip – can liveblog or tweet, and lots of people do. Still photography is discouraged after the first 20 minutes of each session and the use of flash banned, but in both cases the restraints are simply to prevent noise and other distractions. All proceedings are webcast, but if I wanted to point my digicam at Boris Johnson or the assembly members I’d be as free to do so as BBC London’s camera crews so long as I created no disturbance. I’m told a simple principle applies: “It’s a public meeting. It should be public.” Town halls should take Bob Neill’s advice, and do the same. Who knows, the more open their policies, the more numerous, civil, varied and well-informed those in their public galleries might become, to the benefit of the voters they serve. How could they lose?

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  March 11 2011, 9:25am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/06/forget-google-%E2%80%93-its-apple-that-is-turning-into-the-evil-empire

  If Google is the new Microsoft, is Apple the new Google or is it Facebook? Well no, not exactly. Google Apple facebook

  This article titled “Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Sunday 6th March 2011 00.18 UTC Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry’s mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. “Very nice, Steve,” growled Tramiel. “I guess you’ll sell it in boutiques.” That was a long time ago. Now, with a market capitalisation of just over $331bn, Apple is the second most valuable company in the world – bigger than Microsoft ($220bn), Oracle ($167bn) or Google ($196bn). The quirky little computer company has grown into a giant. But not necessarily a giant of the Big Friendly variety, as the world’s magazine publishers have recently discovered and as the music and software industries have known for some time. For Apple now controls the commanding heights of the online content business and it looks like doing the same to the mobile phone business. At the moment, it looks as though nobody has a good idea of how to stop it. Every year, Fortune magazine polls a sample of US CEOs asking for their opinions of their competitors. The results for 2011 have just been released and they show that Apple is the “most admired” company in America. This is the sixth year in a row that it has held that title. The reasons are obvious. On the product side, Apple creates beautifully designed, highly functional and user-friendly devices that delight customers and provide fat profit margins; it has a corporate culture that reliably delivers these products by specified dates; it’s much more innovative than any of its competitors; and it has a unique mastery of both hardware and software. On the strategic side, the company has displayed a deep understanding of technology and a shrewd appreciation of potential devices and services for which people will pay over the odds. Most CEOs would kill to run a company that possessed a quarter of these competencies. Apple appears to have them all. Its current dominance is built on three big ideas. The first is that design really matters. It’s not something you can outsource to a design consultancy – which is what most companies do – and design is as much about ease of use as it is about aesthetics. The second insight was that the maelstrom of illicit music downloading triggered by Napster couldn’t last and that the first company to offer a simple way of legally purchasing music (and, later, other kinds of content) online would clean up. And third – and most important – there was the insight that mobile phones are really just hand-held computers that happen to make voice calls and that it’s the computing bit that really matters. Most of the media commentary about Apple attributes all of these insights to Steve Jobs, the company’s charismatic co-founder, on the grounds that Apple’s renaissance began when he returned to the company in 1996. This may well be true, though it seems unlikely that such a comprehensive corporate recovery could be the work of a single individual, no matter how charismatic. What’s more plausible is that Apple’s corporate culture took on some of the characteristics of its CEO’s personality, much as Microsoft was once a corporate extension of Bill Gates, with all that implied in terms of aggression and drive. Whatever the explanation, the fact is that Apple now has a dominant position in several key businesses (content distribution and mobile computing) and is having a seriously disruptive impact on the mobile phone industry. In particular, its iTunes Store gives it control of the tollgate through which billions of paid-for music tracks and albums, videos and apps cascade down to millions of customers worldwide. It levies a commission on everything that passes through that gate. And every Apple mobile device sold can only be activated by hooking up to the gate.   This gives Apple unparalleled power. Lots of other organisations offer paid-for downloads, but none has the credit card details of so many internet users who are accustomed to paying for stuff online. This was one reason why proprietors of print magazines began to slaver when the iPad appeared. Here at last was a way of getting people to pay for online content: just make it available on iTunes and let Apple collect the money. Sure, it rankled that Apple took 30%, but – hey – at least it would bring to an end the parasitic free riding that was endemic on the web. Henceforth, the web was dead: publishing magazines as iPad apps was the future. Then Apple abruptly changed the rules, stipulating that any publisher selling a digital subscription on a website must also make the same subscription offer within the app, from which Apple would take a 30% cut. Publishers have been furious about this, but there’s nothing they can do about it. If they want to do business on the iTunes store, then they have to do it Apple’s way. In itself, this was just an example of the Big Unfriendly Giant flexing its muscles, but it could be a harbinger of things to come. Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven. Eco’s metaphor applies with a vengeance to the new generations of Apple iDevices, which are rigidly controlled appliances. You may think you own your lovely, shiny new iPhone or iPad, but in reality an invisible virtual string links it back to Apple HQ at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino. You can’t install anything on it that hasn’t had the prior approval of Mr Jobs and his subordinates. And if you are foolish enough to break the rules and seek your own route to salvation, then you may find when you next try to sync it with iTunes that it has turned into an expensive, beautifully designed paperweight. If that isn’t power, then I don’t know what is.

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  March 5 2011, 6:28pm | Comments »

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  Yusuf Islam on ‘My People’

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/25/yusuf-islam-on-my-people

  Yusuf Islam talks about the production and crowd sourcing of his new song ‘My People’ inspired by the revolution in Egypt and the Arab world.

  Yusuf used facebook to gather peoples voices and mixed them into the production. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogYusuf Islam on ‘My People’

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  February 25 2011, 10:49am | Comments »

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  Libya protests: ‘Now we’ve seen the blood our fears have gone’

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/22/libya-protests-arab-spring-revolution

  This episode of the Arab Spring or Region-Wide Revolution taking place in Libya is a terribly costly one in terms of casualties, but there are signs the people will win. This article titled “Libya protests: ‘Now we’ve seen the blood our fears have gone’” was written by Angelique Chrisafis, for The Guardian on Monday 21st February 2011 21.33 UTC As determined demonstrators against Gaddafi headed to the vast, palm-tree fringed Green Square in central Tripoli on Monday, protesters talked of the gathering as the “new Tahrir Square”. Inspired by Egypt’s revolution, they vowed to sleep out in the centre of Libyan’s Mediterranean port capital there until “the job was done” and the Libyan dictator had fled. With the death toll estimated by Libyan rights groups to be more than 400 in five days, this seemed an almost impossibly dangerous challenge. But shocked by the scale of the violent repression of the protests, many felt they had nothing left to lose, according to exiled activists who described the scene. With phonelines cut off all day, the internet connection patchy, and no foreign journalists allowed in, a news blackout on the ground disorientated residents who couldn’t contact relatives. Reporters had to rely on accounts by human rights networks and exiled opposition activists. But within hours, reports began to filter through about the deafening sound of military aircraft targeting demonstrators in what opposition groups warned was a “massacre”. For the second night running, Gaddafi appeared to have deployed a shoot-to-kill policy to disperse the protests that had spread to the capital from the east of the country. At least three people were killed in Tajura on the Tripoli’s outskirts as military aircraft fired on protesters and bombed residential areas, according to one Libyan activist based in London who was in contact with Tripoli residents. Armed men in 4x4s were reportedly driving around the city amid sustained gun fire. One Libyan activist said: “Gaddafi may be implementing his son’s warning that if the Libyans don’t just abandon their protests and accept his rule again he would give them a bloodbath. Will the world accept such behaviour from a government towards its people?”. The mood in Tripoli and its residential suburbs was tense and chaotic, according to accounts from residents. Some described locals barricading themselves into neighbourhoods or staying inside, afraid of foreign mercenaries paid by Gaddafi to shoot to kill. Since Sunday, some police stations had been set alight, the building where the General People’s Congress, or parliament, meets was on fire on Monday morning, agencies reported. “We can’t trust anyone, there are armed mercenaries around us, ready to shoot us for no reason,” one family told French radio. Some Tunisians who had fled the city described a nightmare atmosphere in Tripoli where shots were heard through Sunday night and again on Monday afternoon and people wouldn’t leave their home for fear of clashes between pro-Gaddafi crowds and demonstrators. Ali Zeidan, a senior member of the Libyan League of Human Rights who is in Munich, pieced together the pattern of violence in the Libyan capital that began early on Monday. “Protesters gathered for very big street demonstrations. Then at 3am, forces came without any warning and started shooting live ammunition into the crowd. Some of the demonstrators ran, others fell. There were about 60 killed and around 130 injured. It wasn’t the police, it wasn’t the army, it was Gaddafi’s elite guard assisted by paid foreign African fighters,” he told the Guardian. “Then this morning Tripoli was eerily quiet. All shops, offices, pharmacies, banks were closed. It was as quiet as a Sunday in London 50 years ago.” He said all morning people had prepared for renewed protests on Monday evening in Green Square, with some people making the journey from outside Tripoli. “Libyans used to be afraid. But after they saw the blood, they aren’t afraid anymore, they are angry. “Everybody knows somebody who has been killed or injured, everyone is very angry. What Gaddafi’s son said made people furious, it’s as if the people can just be treated like trash. Now people don’t want to go back to what they had for the last 42 years [of Gaddafi's rule]. Now they feel no fear, if there are deaths people accept that we must carry on. Protesters will go to the centre again today and keep demonstrating until the job is done.” He added: “This is a new feeling for Libya: people look at their situation where there is no dignity for humans, no respect. The Libyan people are fed up, they are a patient, kind, quiet people, but now there’s a feeling that to the outside world they aren’t being respected as humans. There’s a very strong feeling among young people: what do we have to live for? There’s no life, no education, there’s no jobs, no sport, no internet, no entertainment. What do we have? Nothing.” One demonstrator posted an account to the Alive in Libya website, describing the attacks on the crowd: “Heavy fire, like it was a war. Until you can’t even hear or even see what’s happening. “The demonstrators scattered, and they suddenly brought in their gangs chanting ‘Fatih’ [One of Gaddafi's titles] and they re-entered the square. We took shelter in the neighbouring buildings for a while then retreated. There was also strikes by anti-aircraft missiles, we saw this in front of us. Those that I saw with my own eyes: two wounded, one shot in the head.” One young woman in Tripoli wrote by email to the Guardian: “The general sentiment here is mixed. One of hope, fear and excitement. Fear not of being hurt or shot but of the unknown. Hope for change. Excitement for what’s to come. There is a complete blackout of information. Nothing official, nothing confirmed. Who’s winning, how many are dead. Who’s still here? Who’s left running with their tail between their legs. The only source of information is that between each other.” In the east of Libya, where support for Gaddafi is traditionally weak, the city of Benghazi – where over 200 people are believed to have been killed in five days of violence – was said to have fallen to the protesters after police retreated. Residents were reported to be organising vigilante groups to protect themselves and distribute food. In Paris, the International Federation of Human Rights estimated the death toll at between 300 and 400 by Monday afternoon. The group also reported soldiers in the east had defected and several towns were in the hands of the opposition. Tunisians who had left Libya described to Agence France-Presse how the disturbances had now reached the west of the country. In Zaouia, 35 miles (60km) west of Tripoli, a Tunisian hairdresser described how police had abandoned the town on Sunday after days of confrontation between pro- Gaddafi groups and protesters. Shops were closed, buildings had been attacked and burned and people had stolen police cars. Souhayr Belhassen, head of the International Federation of Human Rights, said she had gathered accounts from Tunisians and others who had left Libya, describing how property belonging to Gaddafi had been attacked and police stations set alight. “The revolt is heading to the capital,” she said. She said senior figures including ambassadors and security forces, were abandoning Gaddafi. “They have jumped ship and the boat is sinking,” she said.

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  February 21 2011, 6:05pm | Comments »

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  Half of living languages face extinction

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/21/half-of-living-languages-face-extinction

  As world communications improve, the number of local languages is bound to be reduced. But some of those about to be lost could be repositories for specialist knowledge and important cultural heritages, so should we care about the living languages facing extinction? This article titled “Half of living languages face extinction” was written by Lucy Tobin, for The Guardian on Monday 21st February 2011 17.00 UTC You’ll never again hear anyone speaking Laghu, and anyone yearning to communicate in Old Kentish Sign Language is out of luck: it, too, has gone the way of the dodo. But there’s still a chance to track down a conversation in Gamilaraay, or Southern Pomo – if you’re prepared to trek to visit to one the few native Americans still speaking it in California. Of the 6,500 living languages currently being used around the world, around half are expected to be extinct by the end of this century. It was concern about the cultural and historical losses that result from a language disappearing that inspired the World Oral Literature Project, an online collection of some of the 3,500-plus “endangered languages” struggling for survival in the world. The heart of the project, run by Cambridge University, is a large database listing thousands of languages alongside details such as where they are spoken and by whom, plus audio clips. On the site, surfers can discover that Laghu was a language spoken in the Solomon Islands until it disappeared in 1984, Old Kentish Sign Language was a precursor to the modern-day version, and Gamilaraay is still used by the Kamilaroi tribe of New South Wales. The project is the brainchild of Mark Turin, 37, a research associate at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. He grew up in London speaking Dutch and English and had planned to study linguistics at university, but on a gap year in Nepal realised he was interested in “what language unlocked, not just the nuts and bolts of linguistics”, and switched to anthropology. “We know very little about most of the world’s languages, and an incredible amount about the histories and changes of a handful of western European languages,” Turin explains. And he has devoted his academic career to trying to open up little-known languages. “Most endangered languages are primarily oral, and are vehicles for the transmission of a great deal of oral culture,” he says. “That’s at risk of being lost when speakers abandon their languages in favour of regional, national or international tongues.” So the World Oral Literature Project aims to document vanishing languages – and everything about the culture and society they convey – before they disappear. Its database used three major sources to collate the information about the disappearing languages, including Unesco’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. About 150 of its listed languages are in an “extremely critical” condition, where the number of known living speakers has slipped to single figures, or even just one. “As soon as a scholar declares a language to be extinct, you get a phone call from someone furious who says ‘my mother still speaks it’,” Turin says. “But in a way, these corrections are all part of the process of drawing attention to the cause and the sense of urgency involved in careful documentation and description of endangered speech forms the world over.” The project also provides funds for local fieldworkers in countries including Malawi, India, Mongolia and Colombia to collect data and recordings about little-spoken languages. In the past, Turin says, major collections of recordings were lost because they weren’t deemed important. He sees the new site as a “safe haven” for fieldwork on languages that might otherwise be lost. “The vast majority of tapes are just kept in dusty boxes, but to put them on our database we digitise and hopefully future-proof them,” he adds. “All manner of people have been getting in touch to give us their collections, including missionaries, retired scholars and community activists.” One early donor was Reverend John Whitehorn, a former missionary and Cambridge linguist who lived with an indigenous community in Taiwan in the 1950s. “When he came back to England, he walked into Cambridge’s Museum of Anthropology and said, ‘I’ve got books, textiles and tape recordings, are you interested?’ The museum took it all apart from the recordings because they didn’t know what to do with them,” Turin explains. “He went home and stored his collection around the house in plastic carrier bags, where they stayed until he walked into my office with the bags under his arm, and asked, ‘do you want them now?’ The tapes are brilliant, with songs and interviews and linguistic information that might otherwise have disappeared.” The database is currently updated exclusively by academics (though users are encouraged to send in contributions), but Turin hopes that it will ultimately become a Wikipedia-style web 2.0 project “that people want to contribute to”, with user uploads, recordings and discussion to help keep languages alive. To that aim, Turin organises lectures and workshops for linguists, librarians, academics and members of the public to discuss the best strategies for collecting and protecting languages and their research. But he worries that, in academia, funding pressures mean the importance of languages is being overlooked. “These days, students are in a huge rush to finish their PhDs due to time and funding requirements,” he says. “They often don’t have the time to develop a linguistic awareness for the people they’re studying, and have to rely on interpreters and translators. But it’s just not the same.” Turin is used to hearing sceptics dismiss the research. “I get a lot of people saying that they think this work is pointless as all minority languages that have no utility are better off dying off anyway – a kind of social Darwinian position,” he says. “But I usually ask them whether they feel the same about all the old churches and buildings that Heritage Lottery money is helping to restore – or the plight of species around the world. Our work means we’re helping not only endangered languages to stay with us, but all the culture and history that they denote.” http://www.oralliterature.org/database

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  February 21 2011, 11:16am | Comments »

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