mypipeline

I have just completed a third office desk move in just over two years, and it’s prompted a few thoughts about the kinds of environments I thrive in, and which environments kill my spirit.

The office from where I moved most recently was not ideal in any sense, but it had a couple things going for it. Despite its open-plan layout (I don’t know many friends who’ve got the luxury of personal cubicles even, these days) the old office at least had a round table for ad hoc tete-a-tetes, small personal meeting rooms and kitchen areas where you could actually sit down. There were ‘pods’ of six people, and the pods were fairly well spaced. Almost no one had to shout over the phone whenever they took a call. You had the sense at least that people knew what they had to do, and were trying to get a job done. Primarily I suppose, this has to do with the fact that most everyone in the old office is a developer. Developers can’t stand being interrupted; it takes a long time to get back into the mental mode to write code after having something take your mind from its task.

Not so in the new environs. The powers that be have managed to cram four departments into a wing of the building, with two sofas to share amongst the 200 or so employees. The lucky ones staking claim to a corner of the office can lay bits of inspiration up on the windows and the walls unless the Furniture Police come a knockin’, but the rest of us are confined to the trad photos of family and the odd small poster. The desk space I’ve been afforded is right next to an aisle, and I’m sat in front of sales people chasing leads and finishing deals. It’s the ying to the yang of creative calm. And for all the talk of ‘collaborative space’, being jammed right next to six people does not inspire conversation, I have found. It’s too open. Everyone can hear what you’re talking about, which doesn’t promote open conversation about what matters; what it fosters is two things - endless IM conversations (because that’s at least silent) and the unrelenting barrage of meeting requests proffered through Outlook.

And for a supposedly creative company like mine, the office is also markedly devoid of fun. Maybe consign that to those IM sessions too. Anyway, enough of a grumble about workspace; it’s a given, and I can only effect my little corner of it.

On to productivity…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about exactly what amount of work I get accomplished per hour throughout the day, and come to two hard truths.

Truth 1: meetings only count as productive if the following conditions are met:

1. It lasts for one hour or less; preferably only as long as it takes to assign actions
2. There is a self-appointed leader of the discussion
3. Everyone writes something down
4. An agenda is followed, from the most important item to the least, and contains no more than five items
5. Any actions are assigned to the person at the meeting and not in a follow-up email.
6. There are five or fewer people in the room. After that, it’s a conference and you might as well pull up a podium.

Or at least, on casual observation, these are the success factors of meetings which avoid wasting time with the eternal Meeting Curses: drift (’who’s taking notes or leading then?’), distribution of responsibility (oh someone else will take that action) and dithering (’this decision can’t really be made as a group’).

Truth 2: I do my best work on the train.

Oops. That’s 2.5 hours of cramped, sweaty travel a day, and somehow, I get the most thinking and writing and sketching and solving done there, laptop at the ready. Maybe I should just move further afield - say to Manchester, to maximise my productivity…

Update: I just discovered that Tantek Cilik has incorporated a rating sub element into his hReview microformat spec. It doesn’t however, solve the common variation problem on ratings which is that most modern ratings tools prefer the thumbs up-no-opinion-thumbs-down approach. Maybe he’ll add that at a later stage. Here’s some sample hReview code:

<div class="hreview">

 <span class="reviewer vcard">
  <span class="fn">anonymous</span>,
  <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20050418">April 18th, 2005</abbr>

 </span>
 <div class="item">
  <a lang="zh" class="url fn" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299977/">

  Ying Xiong (<span lang="en">HERO</span>)
  </a>
 </div>
 <div>Rating: <span class="rating">4</span> out of 5</div>

 <div class="description"><p>
  This movie has great music and visuals.
 </p></div>
</div>

---

Excuse the bizarre title, but it’ll make sense in a minute I promise.

So today I was meeting with Chris Jackson of MetaBroadcast and George Wright of BBC RAD. We were discussing a few projects in the pipeline, when a thought struck me. Is there a web standard for displaying and accepting ratings data? Would this benefit the Web?

The idea struck me from talking with Chris and George about MetaBroadcast’s URIPlay project, which aims to standardise meta data around programmes and their rights policies to facilitate the discovery of content in the brave new semantic world. One of the things that I would like to see implemented on the channel4.com site is a wdget which allows a user to beam up some preference information about the programmes that they have enjoyed watching, or share with a selection of their friends. That’s nothing new, of course - Last.fm has been doing i for a couple years. However, I don’t really see the value of the ratings (or ‘favouriting’) if the results of those ratings are constrained to channel4.com. As people using the widget could only get the benefit of their sharing their preferences on c4.com, few people would use it, in my estimation. So the obvious development of the concept is a cross-broadcaster service that allows the user to rate or hate content on all the big content publishers. That would be worth using. So anyway, that’s a project that’s been on my mind a lot lately.

But it got me thinking that if someone were to produce a shared recommendation API for broadcasters to use, what would stop them for producing a similar API to rate anything, and store all those ratings in a database somewhere for the benefit of the general public? What if Google were to release a Ratings API that standardised how developers implemented popularity-tracking services?

But of course, simply applying a standard set of microformats could go someway towards semantically addressing the problem. If whenever I displayed a rating of something on my site, say, I used some standardised markup like:

<div class="rating">
<span class="rt_object">Video Title</span>
<span class="rt_obj_url" title="http://www.somevideourl.com" ></span>
 <span class="rt_type_out_of_five" title="5">5</span>
  <span class="dt_rating" title="2009-16-01">January 16</span>
  <span class="rt_user" title="username">username</span>
</div>

Then any crawler looking for those standard attributes in the code could grab some valuable data from my site, and store it, analyse it against similar data, and start to build up a nice store of useful information about the popularity of content across the web. Going to do a bit of digging on this and see if anyone’s done something similar already…

Long time coming, this, as RDH tagged me in the summer and my bro recently did too…so here’s a few things about me you might not know.

1. I have a recurring nightmare where I am called on to answer some maths questions in my high school class seven weeks into the course. I have not studied any of the coursework up till then. Sweat pours from under my arms as I fumble at the chalkboard, scribbling equations that would make sense only to a moron. This nightmare is in part based on real events.
2. People with disproportionately small hands or fingers make me tense and uncomfortable. I realise this is a disproportionate reaction, but I can’t help myself. I need to turn away from the fingers or hands when they are talking to me.
3. I have a twin brother who’s twice as smart as me; my only consolation is that I am better looking.
4. Listening to Billy Joel is a secret pleasure. There I said it.
5. The activity I find most difficult is concentration; ironically, my best achievements have almost always occurred when I have been in scatterbrain mode.
6. I once swallowed a Revolutionary War bullet and became convinced that I would die, because I had ‘been shot’. The lead pellet had to work its way out of my system naturally, and I had to check for its exit in the most undignified way for a week. I was six, and this has traumatised me since.
7. I don’t really believe that innovation is about Big Changes. I believe that it is more often about better persuasion of Baby Steps.

OK, that’s 7. They are off the top of my head. Tomorrow I probably will want to replace them with 7 more. Maybe I will.

For now it’s over to Knotty and ArkAngel, who have probably already done this.

Tagged by Richard via Lloyd

The one blog I read that you’ve never heard of? Well, OUseful might be one, though it’s got a loyal following. It’s one of the only ones where I read each word of a post. And the comments.

I know I’m only allowed one, but FlowingData deserves a mention for knocking InformationAesthetics off the top place for data viz keenos.

Over to you blobfisk and Knotty

Next up, 7 things you don’t know about me…when I get a mo.

A quick announcement, as I only have a tiny chunk of time for this right now, but we’ve launched around 150 programme areas into www.channel4.com/programmes a couple nights ago. So far, apart from a few minor technical bugs, it looks like a winner.

Love to know some feedback via comments here. I’ll be setting up a more dedicated feedback location soon, over on the Platform4 blog (also released today).

I’ll update this later with some more details. Favourite Programme Area so far for me is Green Wing. Classic C4.

It’s not every day I wake up a curmudgeon. But when I do, it’s important to let the negativity ebb away with a healing blog post.

OK, I’m all for social networks. They ‘enable’ everything don’t they? Friendships, both real and imagined. Connections - with ‘participation’ such as commenting, ’statusing’ and ‘nudging’ and ‘poking’ and ‘gifting’ and such. ‘Transparency’ and ‘empowerment’ come up a lot too in the same breath. Because of course they scream your ‘presence’ to whomever is listening. Which is super-handy in today’s multi-gadget world where not emitting your current status from a verifiable geo-tagged location is tantamount to social extinction.

But sometimes people can just get a bit carried away with just how networked this whole phenomenon is. Take, for instance, signing up for a group that discusses social networks or ‘Web 2.0′ from within a social network, and then porting all that conversation between other social networks. This clearly is a case of the Web eating itself and vomiting the non-digestibles up for a second helping. I prefer the MeetUp model: if you say you’re into something, go out and actually meet some other fleshly people and do something. In person, with your mouth and arms and legs. And brain.

The other pet hate that I will vent today is the flatulent mutual admirations that appear all over ‘professional’ social networks (like LinkdIn) as a result of the recommendations features that they offer. I was guilty myself of ‘completing my profile’ by requesting recommendations that I did not need. But, like anything which becomes part and parcel of a network’s ‘currency’ or ‘economy’, these recommendations hold to the law of diminishing returns: the 30th one is mere vapor, and the preceding 29 recommendations have long since become worthless.

Perhaps an inversion of the whole process would be even more transparent, and in many ways, more effective: as well as the gratuitous recommendation service, these networks would also bestow upon its members the ability to detract from the reputation of up to 3 people that they feel do not deserve a recommendation. Anonymity would of course be required. It would turn into a karma system for professional networkers… a red ‘meter’ would take pride of place in the top right of your profile, and keep track of the number of people that have knocked your reputation. Since a member is only allowed one vote, it would be hard to argue against the veracity of such a metric ;0)

Ah, that’s better.

NB: Post resubmitted. Dates a bit wrong.

I submitted my first proposal for 4IP this week. There’s an online form for firing off your idea which reminded me a little bit of some other idea-gathering sites out there; but unlike some other sites, there’s no crowd on the other end of a 4IP idea to refine it, add to it or reject it. There’s just a few commissioners and execs that look through the ideas once a week or so and decide whether yours has got what it takes. And you know what, despite what I said in a previous post, darn it, I think they’ve got no choice. I try to explain why in this post. Recently there have been some successful crowd-sourcing sites set up for products, projects, ideas and policies. Some, like the Starbucks one I blogged about a few months ago, are crass, no-rewards schemes for the users. Other ’suggestion box’ sites have worked though, such as Dell’s Ideastorm. But that site works because it is focused, generous, and active, with both die-hard customer fans and an increasingly responsive employee base. Of course, there are successful product-sourcing sites that have worked, and worked very well, such as RYZ Wear and Threadless. But for the purposes of clarity, I’m not discussing those sites here. I’m talking here specifically of sites whose purpose is to attract and refine ambitious, socially-beneficial ideas. Here’s a list of some other sites and services aiming to do just that:

• Crowdspring
• Ideablob
• FellowForce
• Cambrian House
• Kluster
• Jovoto
• ShowUsABetterWay
• Innocentive

These sites have made a better fist of it than Starbucks, trying to offer both the crowd-sourced contributor and the business incentives that are real - or at least real psychologically. They range from the charitable to the entrepreneurial in nature. 4IP’s system for collecting proposals, if it were designed to engage the public to scrutinise those ideas, would fall into this category too. But as I see it, if these sites were/are to work in the long term, they must solve several real problems:

The I’m Going to Submit A Second Rate Idea And Hold An Ace Up My Sleeve Problem

My utterly non-scientific observations are that online suggestion boxes tend to attract roughly 50 time-wasters to 1 genuine good idea. But you often get the feeling that behind one of those 49 rubbish proposals is a person with a cracking idea that’s hedging their bets and trying to make it big on their own, or with a few trusted colleagues. I suspect that they’ve submitted the mediocre idea either as an attempt to test-drive the proposal system, or simply because they are really hesitant about publishing the good idea to a crowd of people who in theory could nick it, reproduce it and bring it to market more quickly with better resources. Heck, it’s the reason that some of my best ideas aren’t published on mypipeline, heh-heh. So how do you ensure high-quality ideas? Solution? Don’t publish the ideas straight away and subject them to expert scrutiny first. Explicitly define the terms of this process on the site’s homepage. The submitter of the idea must feel comfortable that the ideas that they submit are both secured legally by a set of House Rules, and that they have passed through an initial expert gauntlet. If the ideas haven’t been rinsed through before publishing, then the users of the site will be subjected to a mediocre ideas that instigate the next problem..

The Design By Committee problem

If steps haven’t been put in place to prevent bad ideas from being pushed on to the site early, then there is a good chance that those ideas will be improved by one or more members of the crowd. Of course, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that others contribute to or refine the original idea. That’s one of the reasons to crowd-source, after all. But as any product developer or designer can tell you, once a committee has been formed to design something, that something has a tendency to lose its singular vision. See what I mean in this example from Cambrian House. The more people turn their attention to a problem or an idea, the harder it becomes to keep that idea focused and tight. Before long, the idea morphs into many ideas, each with their own possibilities and problems (including problem 3, below). Solution? Instantiate a system of conceptual evolution, where - at each stage of the process - the idea is reborn with the best ideas from the crowd (as voted on not by the crowd but the experts) folded into the original idea. Mark each iteration of the idea with release numbers, and clearly version the ideas. If ideas spring from the original one and are different enough from the root idea, branch them and get them going on their own paths. Gosh, I’m sounding like a software developer here…

The Who Owns What problem

Of course, once you solve the first two problems - fairly thorny problems for sure - you start to get into the really prickly issues, such as ownership. If so many can contribute to an idea, how do you ensure that both the originator of the idea and the people improving the idea get compensated for their efforts? And how do you split the ownership? What if an improvement is the only reason that the original idea is worth building at all? Many more questions are raised that remain unanswered on the typical FAQ page. Cambrian House (soon to be VenCorps) created a points system that enabled users to contribute improvements to an idea and gain  ‘Cambros’, ‘Royalty’ Points and ‘Glory’ Points. As Cambrian House moves its system to a newly defined one at VenCorps, perhaps this ‘currency’ will try to tackle the Who Owns What problem more directly. As it stands, it’s a half-baked mechanism. You’d need an army of lawyers working round the clock just to sort out the strands if even a 10th of the ideas were investable, which they aren’t. Solution? This is trickier than the first two. Imposing a share-based system is appealing to me, with the governing body assigning the shares to the idea based on an expert assessment of the contributing idea’s value to the overall idea/project. Other market-based analogies could be used to define ‘options’ in a proposed idea/project. Maybe it’s the subject of a future blog post, but I’m not going into detail here. The team of lawyers cost is a problem that I’m not touching with a barge pole here either. In short, I think that crowd-sourcing is working for some lucky brands, but it’s very unresolved as a means of generating high-value commercial or media content propositions. It’s a great way to get instant feedback from customer groups; and given the right incentive (usually money) good ideas can come about from these sites. But no one’s cracked the nut yet, and the technical investment needed to build a system that gives peace-of-mind to all parties involved in such ventures is probably prohibitive. Here’s a telling piece of reporting from Techcrunch when it was first sniffed out that Cambrian House was going into a bit of a ‘restructuring period’:

Many of these ideas didn’t gain traction until they were invested in and championed by Cambrian House itself, which again makes you wonder whether any good ideas can actually grow into full-fledged products from an unaffiliated crowd.

But I’m sure someone somewhere will crack this particular nut in time.

More fires are burning over here about whether TV is dead (or dying). There is never going to be a ‘post-TV’ world, in my view. There is simply a multi-screen world that broadcasters and advertisers are coming to terms with. Maybe we should stop talking about the devices as being central to the issue. Content is content, and people will consume it where they like. ‘TV’ studios will need to become ‘content’ studios — slightly less glamourous to the tongue but no less valid. They will need to be adept at furthering conversation alongside their content - as Cory Doctorow says, “Conversation is king. Content is just what we talk about.” And half the time what we talk about when we talk about content now is not the content but the conversation — make of that what you will. There is still a craving for well-produced, meaningful content on any media, precisely because people want to talk about meaningful things. Admittedly it doesn’t help that to dig into this meaningful fare we must first break through the crust of celebrity-obsessed tripe and self-promotional YouTube rubbish. But slowly and surely, content studios are cottoning on to what makes digital output special. Plasma TVs may be the best-selling electronic items, but they’re all coming with IP connections now, and with FreeSat et al gaining spotlight, it simply makes sense to create content that facillitates conversation and contribution. For me, it’s all about the meta data creation at the point of production: get ‘content studios’ to tag product info into their output so that when I watch an episode of Gok’s Fashion Fix I can go and buy his glasses through my device (telly, mobile, whatever); geolocate the discoveries on that episode of Timeteam so that I can discover more about my local area when I am driving in my car; add supporting information about the contributors of Dispatches so that I can can make contact with them, participate in the conversation…. That’s where we should be heading as our media converges. Not splitting hairs about the longevity of a given device.

A colleague pointed me to the excellent iplayerlist a while back, and it inspired me to hack up this Channel4 CatchUpList because I find the current Catch Up interface a little over egged at the moment (don’t worry, we’re working on that).

Anyway, here it is, a list of the TV shows currently available in Catch Up, with links straight to their player and the time left to watch them. There’s also a breakdown of what genre of programming makes up the Catch Up service. This still doesn’t work out the can’t-view-on-a-mac dilemma, which I too suffer from. We’re working on that too… NB: this service is cached every hour.

I had a few ideas about 4IP again today, and there’s one I’d like to share here to see if anyone had any feedback:

If you want public-service new media to serve the public, put it where the public can see it and engage with it: outdoors.

What could this mean? How about an ambient network of public touch-screen interfaces that:

1. Showcase 4iP projects
2. Allow the foot-fall to interact with the concepts and data inside those projects and
3. Take feedback from the public as to what’s working and what’s not.

There are several reasons why this would work well for 4IP:

1. we have a pedigree in public art and displays, and people associate the brand with this activity
2. we are being encouraged to think of a future in which broadcasting is not limited to the front-room, even though that is where our strength lies (linear TV output)
3. The data that could be collected from these public media centres is HUGE: and could be used in so many ways that would not be immediately obvious to the commissioners of the 4iP projects.

An example of what I mean.. Suppose Channel4 commissions a project that employs the publicly available data here at TheyWorkForYou.org and also through ideas such as the Met Police Crime Map. It’s not so hard to imagine a scenario where a large screen interface is displayed in some of the city’s hot spots that aims to solicit both ideas on crime prevention, and also allow members of the local area who wouldn’t normally go to one of these sites online to see relevant data about their area broadcast on the streetcorner. You could make a short clip of yourself (maybe using an API from a video service such as 12seconds) campaigning for a specific action in the area, and other passersby could have the chance to react to what you’d said. It’d be a living document of their area with the ability to showcase the stuff they’re proud of in the area as well as a chance to give direct feedback to their government officials. How about another initiative that uses the public displays for expanding cultural awareness? Maybe using the terminals to broadcast historical televisual content about an area? I would love to be able to pour through some local footage of interesting events whilst waiting for a bus in Berkhamsted; I would also like the opportunity to feedback on what kind of local media content would interest me more… How about using the terminals to display where to buy the lowest cost goods available in the area, with directions to find them? Yes, I realise that this kind of project is a) expensive and b) not about to happen overnight. But it’s not beyond the realms of possibility given the right partnerships: a hardware company keen to get its brand out there and convince people of their touchscreen’s functionality, a software company keen to flex its muscles in the burgeoning gestural programming market, some production companies keen to get into new media in the right ways…you get the picture. I wrote a little while back about how 4iP might employ the thinking that allows open-source models to succeed. I think this may be another way to actually harness the public to create value in public service digital media. What do you think?