January 18th – The Internet’s Silent Protest

An internet blackout by some of the internet heavyweights is looking much more likely. Mashable, one of the biggest tech websites out there, published an editorial calling for a campaign to inform the masses about the danger posed by SOPA.

Facebook, Google and Wikipedia. You’re the Big Three in this fight. You’ve already publicly affirmed your opposition to SOPA. Now it’s time to really be a part of the fight.

Everyone in the tech community knows about SOPA, but that isn’t enough – the anti-SOPA movement needs the average Joe to understand and protest against the bill.

A blackout of Facebook, Google and Wikipedia would get the world talking. It would be on the frontpage of newspapers (except possibly the SOPA supporting Murdoch press). People will ask ‘what is it about SOPA that causes these internet behemoths to take such drastic action?’

January 18th is the date set by members of online community Reddit for the blackout. Hacktivist collective Anonymous have tweeted that they will embark on radio silence on that day, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has stated that he hopes Wikipedia will be ready to get involved:

I’m all in favor of it [a January 18 blackout of Wikipedia], and I think it would be great if we could act quickly to coordinate with Reddit. I’d like to talk to our government affairs advisor to see if they agree on this as useful timing, but assuming that’s a greenlight, I think that matching what Reddit does (but in our own way of course)[...]

Of course, we really need Google to get involved. After all, ‘Don’t be evil’ is their informal corporate motto. They have stepped up to the mark before by removing Google search capabilities from China, now we have to hope they are prepared to step up again.

The SOPA bill is the desperate bite of a wounded and dying entertainment industry. The internet has liberated artists and content providers. We are seeing the emergence of an organic internet marketplace, free from the layers of middlemen that have exploited artists for so long. They have been creaming money of the work of others for so long that they think what they do is natural.

January 18th is set to be an important day for the internet. How important is up to the big three.

Flattr – Supporting Content Through Micropayments

With the ominous SOPA act looming menacingly over the internet it is more important than ever to seek out and support progressive methods of getting artists and writers the money they deserve.

A stand-out service that I have joined is a social micropayment service called Flattr.  You create an account, choose a monthly amount of money to add to a pot (minimum 2 euros) and then click the Flattr button on webpages you like to share the money with the authors.

Kind of like tipping – the idea is simple, brilliant and completely in line with the ethos of the internet. I’ve recently noticed the Flattr button on a few websites – and I’ve started looking out for it on articles that I have enjoyed reading. It is a great way to reward bloggers for their hard work.

The service was started by Pirate Bay founder and spokesman Peter Sunde as a way to reward content creators for their work. Ambitions involve using the Flattr button to pay music and video creators as well as writers – Flattr has already teamed up with SoundCloud to include a Flattr button on their music player and there is a way to add a button to your Flickr account. YouTube are apparently keeping an interested eye on the project and Facebook are looking into delivering something similar. The service has already been used at conferences, enabling listeners to ‘Flattr’ speakers.

The Flattr team have already developed an app for Chrome that allows you to support Wikipedia by pressing a browser button whenever you have enjoyed or benefited from a Wikipedia article. As it is unofficial – they are keeping hold of the money raised and will deliver it the the Wikimedia foundation when enough money is raised. Also, when PayPal and Mastercard froze Wikileaks account - Flattr provided a way for supporters to send funds.

Flattr is a great project ran by people that really seem to value internet freedom over profit. It is a refreshing idea in an age of pay-walls and dangerous legislation, and it harks back to the democratic and collaborative origins of the internet. Money goes direct to the producer, the consumer decides what they consider a fair amount to pay and the Flattr button integrates snugly next to the Facebook ‘like’ button. It’s an idea I hope spreads – so sign up and start Flattr’ing.

Mobile App’s and the Future of Boycotting

Today offered a glimpse of a truly amazing future for conscientious shoppers that want to boycott products.

A team of anti-SOPA activists (read about the Stop Online Piracy Act here) have created an app that allows you to scan a barcode from a product and see whether the product is made by one of the 800 SOPA supporting companies.

It works by automatically checking a product against a database of companies. If the scanned product  comes from a SOPA supporting company, then a big red ‘x’ is displayed on the screen – enabling the shopper to chose not to purchase.

The idea behind the boycott app is brilliant and could be applied to anything. Simply change the list of companies in the database to whoever you want. If, for example, you want to boycott GlaxoSmithKlein after hearing about their exploitative and illegal vaccine tests that killed 14 babies – you could add them to your ‘boycott list’. Don’t like Coca-Cola for any of their irresponsible acts – add them to the list.

In a world where mobile app’s seem to be the domain of marketers – it is refreshing to see mobile technology being used by activists  to empower consumers and help hold corporations accountable.

Ideally this tool should become opensource so that any activists  or consumers can create their own unique database of companies to use with the app. Campaigning groups could make lists for supporters to upload to the boycott app. It could even be used to discover things about products when in a store – e.g. this cereal manufacturer CEO kills baby seals or this fashion designer has links to the far right.

Barcode scanning is something that is set to become more popular among consumers. This app is the latest incarnation of a broader trend of  scanning technology. Amazon recently released a popular mobile ‘Price Check’ app that encourages consumers to scan products they come across in bricks and mortar stores and receive a discount if they buy the product online through the Amazon app.

You could argue that the time it takes to scan every item of a weekly supermarket shop would be a barrier. However, jump a year or so in the future and every item will contain a RFID (radio frequency identification) chip, which is a superior and more efficient method of identifying objects than a normal barcode.

Then the same kind of friction-less technology we are seeing with Facebook will be a part of our shopping experience. Put a product in your shopping basket and your phone will give you a little alert if it is to be boycotted. Check out this ubercool video on the RFID future of shopping to get what I mean.

Google+ and the Growth of the Filter Bubble

You may be under the impression that when you search for something on Google the results you see are the same as anyone else that performs that search. This isn’t the case, and hasn’t been for a long time.

In 2009 Google went full steam ahead with personalized search. The idea was to look through your internet history, your Gmail and all the rest of your Google products and look for signals that would enable Google to tailor a search results to exactly what you are looking for.

As well as looking through your history, Google has always wanted to look at your social network to make your search results more relevant. The only problem with that is it doesn’t own any social network data – a social network like Facebook is a ‘walled garden’ that Google can only peek in from the outside.

The arrival of Google+ allows Google free-rein over your social data and will herald the age of a new buzzword – social search. Social search is the process whereby your social network (or social graph) affects the results of a Google search. By looking at the content that has been created or shared by people in my social graph, the results I get from a Google search will be more personalized than ever before.

I’ve already seen this in action. After searching Google for ‘SOPA’ (the Stop Online Piracy Act) I found myself reading from a website that I had never heard of. I traced how I ended up on this particular page and it turns out that someone I have in my Google Circle network was a writer for this website and had +1′ed the article.

This is great, right? Google search results will become more relevant, based upon people like me and less likely to be manipulated by dirty SEO tactics. Some people have even gone so far as to call this a ‘Socratic Revolution’ – suggesting that the era of personalized search is akin to the philosopher Socrates placing man at the center of the intellectual universe.

There is, however, a dark side to personalized search that has been recognized in a book called  ’The Filter Bubble’ by Eli Pariser. The problem, he argues, is that this personalized ecosystem of knowledge acts as a mirror that reinforces what we believe without allowing the possibility of our views being challenged. Each new layer of personalization strengthens the walls of our own bubble – satisfying us with the information we want to see instead of offering new ideas. Or as he puts it, we are being given ‘too much candy, and not enough carrots.’

Whilst the Filter Bubble emphasizes our uniqueness, it acts as a centrifugal force – it pulls us apart from one another. With enough personalization the front page of Google News will be different for everyone, removing the kind of shared experience we used to have with a newspaper. Also, the Filter Bubble is invisible – we don’t know the maths behind how these algorithms define us. And with the increasing omnipotence of Google – it is difficult to not be a part of it.

So the arrival of Google+ social search marks a new era of ‘invisible autopropaganda’ that will continue ‘indoctrinating us with our own ideas’. What it will also mark is the start of a new form of marketing and campaigning – especially in the run-up to the 2012 US election. If I tap ‘Healthcare’ into Google I will be presented with the healthcare articles that my network has shared. Both the Democrats and the Republicans will have to fight to ensure that they have the right people inside the voters Google Circles.

Whilst we may still be at the dawn of social search – the correct techniques in this area could eventually make or break a campaign. Could 2012 be the year that Obama leverages Google+ to win the election?

Massive Scale Online Collaboration

What have the Pyramids of Egypt, the space race and Wikipedia all have in common? Apart from being great achievements for humanity they were all accomplished through small contributions by a massive amount of people. But what else can be achieved through massive-scale collaboration?

Luis von Ahn has already begun to answer this question. He is the guy responsible for re-CAPTCHA, the service that stops spam on webforms by forcing the user to enter a distorted sequence of characters. Re-CAPTCHA is different to the original CAPTCHA because it presents two words instead of random characters.

Whilst you have probably filled in a Re-CAPTCHA, what you might not have known is that by filling in the two words, you are helping to digitize the worlds collection of print books – something that computers struggle to do automatically.

How? The trick is that one word in the re-CAPTCHA is the security word that the computer knows, and the other is a digital image from a print book. You get the security word right, you are probably going to get the other word right as well. And if ten other people say that the word is what you have said it is – then we have one accurately digitized word.

Because re-CAPTCHA is so popular on websites, it is managing to digitize 100 million words a day – the equivalant of 2.5 million books a year.

Fascinating stuff! But what is more exciting is his next project – translating the web. Computer translation is not going to be perfect for at least another 10 years, and hiring professionals to translate the the non-Spanish Wikipedia pages into Spanish (only 20% of the English Wikipedia is in Spanish) would apparently cost $50 million – and that’s at almost slave labour wages.

Luis von Ahn has tackled this by connecting this problem with the 1.2 billion people that are learning another language. His website Duolingo offers people the opportunity to learn a language for free (language lessons are notoriously expensive) in exchange for their time in translating the web.

So, if ten people learning a language all translate a sentence the same way then it is going to be correct. And the people taking part are learning by doing! Although it is still only in testing phases – it is apparently a powerful language teacher and a really accurate way to translate content. If the site gets a million active users – it will be able to translate Wikipedia into Spanish in 80 hours.

To hear more check out the TED talk

First Steps with Google+

Google+ seemed to take up the lions share of my predictions for 2012. It is the most interesting and promising social network out there. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have their place, but Google+ is still surrounded by a suggestive veil of mystery. However – despite all my interest, I don’t actually use the service that much. So with a new year starting I thought I would dive in and see what pearls I can find.

Starting Over

A point raised by Ezra Klein over on Quora is that Google+ allows you a fresh  start. Furnished with all the skills you have picked up from four years of Facebook and two years of Twitter,  Google+ gives you the opportunity to ensure that people are correctly grouped and avoid any miscalculations you may have previously made.

Bookmarking

I used to be a massive fan of social bookmarking and I used to religiously save all the interesting links I found to Delicious. This changed this year for reasons that escape me. I think it was a combination of a forgotten password, a broken plugin or fears that Delicious was to close that stopped me bookmarking everything. However Google+ looks set to bring me back into good bookmarking habits.

The G+ button that you see at the top of webpages and next to search results act as a one click bookmarking function that saves the page you are viewing to your public or private +1 page (here’s mine).

The problems are that you cannot tag links like you could in Delicious and you cannot currently perform searches on your list of +1′s. I imagine this will all be changed soon, and you will be able to search your +1 bookmarks from the Google homepage. After all, Google intends your +1 page to be ‘the place you’ll go to personally manage the ever-expanding record of things you love around the web‘.

Subscribing

Every so often I need to give my Google RSS reader a clean out. I am constantly following new websites and removing others from my feed. On Facebook – I am careful to follow only a few websites and brands in order to ensure my Facebook news feed doesn’t get clogged.

However, when I am subscribing using Google Circles I am instantly encouraged to categorize each subscription. I can have a tech news circle, a recipe circle and film circle. I can have a circle dedicated to particular thinkers and a circle for particular colleagues. And – I can drop people and websites in and out of circles with ease.

You could argue that this is not much different to Twitter lists. Yet things seem easier and more integrated with Google than it does with Twitter.  It is also easier to have longer and sustained conversations around a post than is possible with Twitter’s 140 character limit. The Google+ feed is also more visual and exciting than with other social networks.

Connecting

Google are search – so it makes sense that searching for people on Google+ should be perfect. There is already a directory that has indexed over 31 million users called FindPeopleonPlus which allows you to restrict a search by the profile information logged by Google. This kind of people search is something lacking in Twitter.

The Google+ profile is also something that will become increasingly important. Unlike Twitter which restricts you to 140 characters – Google lets you create a full profile that will act as your shop window to all of your Google activity.

In conclusion

Google+ is going to be the most public of your social network profiles. It will be fully indexed and come up early on Google search. It is also going to serve as an infrastructure behind all of Google’s applications. It is also going to radically redefine what it means to search the internet – as my next post on the world of social search will explore

Predictions for 2012

These kind of posts are always a bit of a gamble. This time next year I could either be revered as a technological oracle or shamed as a false prophet. So with this in mind I will avoid predicting the Rise of the Robots and have a look at what other people are saying before sticking my neck out.

Google+

Whereas the size of your Facebook network is probably in excessive of 100 people, Tim Bajarin predicts that 2012 will see the rise of social networking tools that allow us to interact with smaller groups of friends.

Perfectly located to embrace this trend of intimate social networking is the Circles feature of Google+. You can easily organize your contacts into friends/colleagues/groups etc and interact with each circle in a unique way. For a brand – this could involve organizing your fans and advocates, or for a company this could be different departments.

I expect 2012 to see major gains for the infant social network. According to one report Google+ already has 650,000 members – and at current growth rate is set to hit the 300 million mark by the end of 2012.  I don’t think 2012 will be the year that Google+ explodes (I think Google are playing the long game) but it will certainly see itself seeping into new areas and opening up new possibilities for social networking.

Integration with other Google services such as Mail, Android and the ever-improving Google Apps Office suite will all offer an incentive for businesses to sign up. American manufacturing giant General Motors have reportedly signed a deal for access to Google App’s for it’s 100,000 strong workforce – I’m sure that the features of Google+ will find an abundance of uses in huge corporations like this.

However, the most important factor of Google+ that will see it grow through 2012 is how the network will effect normal search functions. Google+ brand pages will soon be placed on the first page of Google search results and articles that people in your network ‘+1′ will be given weighting in any search query you find yourself making through Google.

This relationship between search and social will make it an important battleground for the 2012 US presidential elections. A Google search for ‘healthcare’ will present pages that people in your Google+ network have shared – so it is crucial for any political campaign to penetrate peoples Google network.

Facebook

Whilst Google+ will find itself a home, it won’t come close to the king of social networks. Valued at $100 billion, pretty much everyone agrees that Facebook will continue to ascend. Frictionless sharing (when anything you read, watch or listen to on the web is posted to Facebook automatically) will continue to grow – yet it will need to be significantly tweaked as people realize that they don’t want everything posted to the world.

Having acquired location check-in service Gowalla this year it is likely we will see a growth of Facebook location updates. Marketers still don’t know how to deal with check-ins, but 2012 will see that change. One hotel has already offered a discount to people that match a real life check-in with a Facebook one.

My main prediction about Facebook is a change of public consciousness about the network. I think that in 2012 people will realize the implications of a world where every location they check in, every song they listen to, every news article they share and every comment they make is recorded and displayed as part of their Facebook Timeline.

People will realise that the Timeline will be something they can look back at in 40 years time – a complete record of their own life – and this will have a profound effect on our relationships to social networks. The effects of this are impossible to guess.

The Media

Newspaper print revenues will inevitably continue to plummet, but new models will begin to rise. News organizations will begin creating Facebook apps to follow the success of the Guardian and NY Times.

Citizen journalism will continue to soar as new tools allow for better organisation of contributions and developments of a news story. These new tools are also creating a new breed of journalist – the curator. Content curation, categorization and dissemination will become more crucial  as journalism moves into a ‘decentralized, real-time, collaborative, and curated future‘.

TV 2.0

The humble television set is due an upgrade. Using my Virgin Media box seems archaic when compared to the potential of the internet. Apple will release an astronomically priced TV and create a buzz and then towards the end of the year, Google will release their fair priced version just in time for Christmas.

‘The Battle for the Living Room’ will start in earnest, but games consoles are far better situated than most to win. Having browsed through YouTube on my TV using voice commands and hand gestures with my Kinect (yes, like minority report) – I don’t feel much need to change. And as Matt Roseff says ‘any company who hopes to compete with the Xbox by selling an add-on box that DOESN’T play games is in a deep state of denial’

Opensource social network

The main problem with Facebook is that it is ran for profit. 2012 will see more adverts crammed into the website – and they have just announced a daily sponsored advert that will be placed in your news feed. For people that care about these things, liberation could be in sight!

Joe Brockmeier predicts that Mozilla, the guys behind FireFox, will release an open source, privacy enabled version of Facebook (without adverts). Whilst I hope this is true, and I will certainly be signing up, I doubt that this David and Goliath fight will be won by the little guy.

Digital Identification

The era of the fingerprint is over, suggests Amy Webb. Police forces around the world are using iris scanning iPhone app’s and biometric cameras (which can scan 46,000 data points on a face) to query government databases. The latest update to Google’s mobile Android operating system uses facial recognition to unlock a handset – and I imagine this technology will soon be used to pay for goods. Will we see frictionless check-ins based on face recognition cameras in 2012…

Finally – The Rise of the Robots

I knew I said I wouldn’t talk about robots, but I reckon this year we will see the early stages of the new Robotic Age.  Robotics will take over jobs ranging from the menial to the educational and medical. The sex industry will begin selling shed loads of pleasure robots, voice recognition will become almost perfect and humans will become more cyborg-like as we begin to implant computer chips into our body.

Blekko – Searching with Slashtags

Blekko is a search engine that allows you to narrow down your search in a unique way. After entering a search query, use a ‘/’ followed by a word. So if you search for ‘Global Warming /conservative’ you will only see search results from conservative websites. Add a ‘/tech’ to a search and you will only see technology related websites.

The website offers an extensive list of slashtags available for you to start using, and encourages you to develop your own.

A great additional feature is the ability to delve into the SEO of the site – so if you search for a domain name using the  ’/seo’ slashtag you can see all the relevant information.

The site also allows you to mark anything as spam and remove it from all future search results.

Check out the welcome video for more information

Making Network Diagrams Look Good – Netviz Nirvana

In my last post I described some of the main metrics used in social network analysis graphs. In this post I am going to look at some of the important considerations regarding the look and design of a network diagram.

A social network can be very vast, and a network diagram can quickly become very cluttered and unreadable. Netviz Nirvana has been developed to combat this. It is a set of principles that can guide you in your graphing projects. Your diagram should come as close as possible to matching these requirements:

• Node Visibility – Each node should stand apart and clear from all others – no node should occlude another node.
• Edge Visibility – You should be able to count the amount of edges coming off from every node
• Edge Crossing – The less crossings – the better. The more often an edge crosses over another, the more visually complex the image becomes, and the harder it is to follow paths.
• Edge Tunnels – These are when a node lies on an edge that is not its own. The problem could lie with either the position of the node or the position of the edge.
• Text Readibility – All text should be clear enough for a reader to read.
• Text Distinction – All text should be appropriately truncated (use a key if necessary).
• Clusters and outliers should be clearly visible and distinct.

These are all good points to keep in mind when producing a graph. I would add that you should be careful that all colours used are distinctive from each other, and that they shouldn’t clash (you want your diagram to look good don’t you?)

For a video that goes a bit further into Netviz Nirvana – click here

Quick Guide to Social Network Analysis

The last few years have seen the adoption of social networking increase rapidly. From Facebook to Twitter,  LinkedIn to Flickr – there is a social network for just about anything.

As the revolution of social networking continues unabated, there comes a growing need to explore patterns within the networks – a process called social network analysis (SNA)

Previously, the world of social network analysis could only be accessed with a bit of computing knowledge. However, an open source programme called Nodexl has changed that by bringing some of the important metrics used to understand a network, and the ability to create impressive network graphs, into Excel.

Nodexl makes understanding a social network graph easy for anyone who can navigate around a spreadsheet. Excel is often where the world of computer programmers and the rest of us can meet up and speak the same language. Nodexl also makes it easy to import data from existing social networks such as Twitter, Flickr and Youtube

The people that can begin to make use of network graphs range from marketers to activists – and I imagine they are now a staple of any well equipped social media political campaign. Using a social network graph you can (among other things):

• Spot the trusted influencers in a network
• Find the important people that act as bridges between groups
• Uncover isolated people and groups
• Find the people who seem good at connecting a group
• Plot who is at the centre and who is at the periphery of a network
• Work out the where the weakest points of a network are
• Assess who is best placed to replace a network admin

There are two basic components of a social graph:

• Node: In a social network a node will usually represent a single person – but it can also represent an event, hashtag etc
• Edge: A connection/interaction between two nodes – such as a friendship in Facebook, a follow on Twitter or an attendance at an event or Twitter Hashtag.

One major question that a social network analysis asks is how connected nodes (or people) are. But what determines how connected any person is? What metrics can be used to work it out how influential or powerful any individual player is?

These are some of the major metrics used in Nodexl – and they offer a good way to start thinking about your own networks:

• Centrality – A key term which refers to how ‘in the middle’ a node is in a network.
• Degree centrality – a count of the number of nodes a node is connected to. This could be the number of people that follow you on Twitter, or the amount of people that viewed a YouTube video. It is important to remember that a high degree score isn’t necessarily the most important factor in measuring a nodes importance.
• In Degree and Out Degree – A connection between two nodes can be undirected (we are mutual friends on Facebook) or directed (you follow someone on Twitter that doesn’t follow you back). The In-Degree refers to the number of inbound connections, and Out-Degree refers to the number of outbound connections.
• Geodesic distances – A geodesic distance is the shortest possible distance between two nodes  (popularly known as the degree of separation). In social network analysis, a nodes shortest and longest geodesic distance is recorded (the longest possible distance between a node and another is sometimes refered to as its eccentricity and can be used to work out the diameter of a network). An average geodesic distance of an entire network is worked out to assess how close community members are to each other.
• Closeness centrality – This metric determines how well connected a node is in the overall network. It takes into account a nodes geodesic distance from all other nodes. Using this metric you can find people that don’t have strong connections.
• Betweenness centrality – A score of how often a node is on the shortest path between two other nodes. This can be thought of as a bridge score – how important a node is at bridging other connections. People with a high betweenness centrality are often known as key players. A node could only have a degree centrality of 2, but if those two connections bridge to large unconnected groups, then that node will have a high betweenness centrality.
• Eigenvector centrality – This looks at how well connected the people you are connected to are. It scores how much of a network a node can reach in comparison to the same amount of effort enacted by every other node in the network.

I am going to be exploring social network analysis over the next few weeks and blogging what I find here – if you want to follow along make sure you follow me on twitter or subscribe for updates.