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I’ve already professed an admiration for Richard Dawkins’ no-nonsense approach to a studied life. But I’ve got to say that his latest series on Channel4 (The Genius of Charles Darwin) was a let down. In the last episode, it was disappointing to watch Dawkins’ interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams degrade into an imbalanced polemic rather than discussion. I don’t think it was Dawkins fault either, but the producer/editor of the programme. Dawkins would put forward the evidence from biology and genetics; the Archbishop would fend off the science with clearly unconvincing ‘evidence’ from the Bible. But when Dawkins accused Williams of using poetic language to cover up the cracks in his argument, the interview faded to another scene, leaving the Archibishop’s words drifting off, as if to say that his words were not worth listening to. It just appeared that Dawkins needed to have ‘the last word’ and dismissed the Archibishop in a vain manner. The scene would have had much more lasting impact had Dawkins let Williams dig the religious argument into a deeper hole. It wold be good too if Dawkins at least ackowledged the peace and meaning that religion does afford people who are unwilling or unable to study life in all its complexities the way that he has. His arrogant tone in the films just comes across to bold for so many, and if his aim is to convince religious believers in a different, more analytical approach to the Big Questions, then his television outings are failing miserably.

I turned over to watch Dragons Den afterwards, and was gripped with yet more irritation - just how much superficial padding goes into the edits of these programmes so that they can be flogged to Dave for endless reruns. The actual pitches and responses only seem to now account for around 70% of the show; the other 30% consists of preview takes on something you are just about to watch. Can’t the BBC just make a cut for ad-funded stations and another for its own channels?

1 Comment | In: The Bug List | | #

Back in March 2007 Freakonomics author Stephen Dubner wrote this tiny blog post for the NY Times asking a question about why people comment on blogs. Needless to say, it attracted much more than the average comment count for a blog post (4x as many as a successful post according to Dubner’s math.) There are many thoughtful responses to Dubner’s question, but one that got me thinking was this:

Someone should do a study about blog commenters. I think blog commenting is a sociological phenomonen that deserves attention. And the outcome of such a study could be used to dramatically enhance the value of the good blogs. There are the commenters who actually have some facts to add to the subject. There are the commenters who pretend to have some facts to add to the subject. There are the commenters who have only their opinion, and often ill-informed ones at that. There are the commenters who couldn’t care less about the post itself but comment as a form of social interaction. There are the commenters who feel compelled to offer a comment on every else’s comment. And, most common of all, there are the commenters who consider commenting to be a competitive sport and have to have the first and/or last word … I personally would prefer to read only blogs that attract comments from people who have something intelligible (usually facts, but occasionally well-informed opinion) to add to the discussion so that everyone can learn something from the experience of reading the comments..

This puts into perspective a pretty common view, not only of the people who comment frequently on blogs, but of how their intentions are perceived. Which got me wondering about several sources of frustration that users have when browsing blogs - especially popular ones

• Comment streams (also called ‘zones’) are so long that users cannot make sense of the ongoing discussions within them
• There is no easy way to distinguish ‘intelligible’ comments, to borrow the phrase above, from throwaway comments
• There are not enough incentives to provide considered comment using the majority of comment services
• Users find it difficult to both track and respond to ‘multi-threaded’ conversations inline
• Too many websites’ comments area have a legacy of web 1.0 ‘feedback forms’ which were the antithesis of conversation starters

For the past six months we’ve been looking at how we can improve the user experience of social media on the Channel4.com website. By social media, I mean both community features and audience interactions. Whilst I am of course keen to engage with communities around channel4.com’s content, I have been focusing most of my thinking time to the latter group of functionality, and two features in particular - commenting and rating. Two reasons really. One, I am disappointed with the current service of commenting and rating on C4.com enough to want to change it; and two, it’s a tougher problem in my view than setting up a community with a single purpose. Lots of packaged solutions exist out there that can enable any old hack to set up a community around their favourite content. See Kickapps, OneSite, and  Small World Labs for a few front-runners in this field. And granted, there are also vendors who market ’social tools’ as components that you run alongside a traditional CMS, and power the users’ side of the content contract. Pluck and Pringo are the heavyweights in this arena. And then there are specialists, such as Disqus, which offer a SaaS solution primarily aimed at bloggers, and others who want to aggregate their users’ comments and personalise the proposition a little.

At channel4.com we have a tricky situation. It’s not news that we’re in the process of redefining how we produce our programme information pages. There’s a team beavering away right now, trying to nail both a consistent user experience and a well-wrought product that can claim to be the authoritative source for all things around a given C4 programme. It’s no small effort, as the BBC have recently found with the launch of their own /programmes pages.

Of course we’d like to offer our audience the ability to both discuss our content where the content sits, and also be able to pass some judgment over others’ commentary (and our own!). In short - to facilitate a dialogue between the channel’s content producers and its online audience. It was one of the core goals of the project from the inception: engage with the wider web community.

However, we’ve got at least four distinct types of programme, and the kinds of feedback that we expect and receive for each type varies as much as the linear content. I define the four types of comment we most often receive as:

1. Shout Out: user makes a short, typically singular statement that is of a more ‘throwaway’ nature than your average email, say. These comments can most often be found on entertainment programmes such as Skins and Big Brother. What the user expects when commenting in this way is like the experience of a Facebook user’s wall or indeed the Shout Box on Last.fm. These folks aren’t going to be reading others’ comments too often, and certainly don’t need to ‘rate’ each other’s input. However, they are often signed up to at least one social network and as such appreciate the ability to ’stamp’ their comments with something more visual than a handle - either an image or a video.
2. Review: user actively reviews a piece of content. See Film’s user reviews or the 4Car site’s owner reports. These comments are usually more focused, but still unlikely to be dialogue. It’s a case of broadcasting one’s opinion of a non-contentious subject or product, and so rarely warrants either an editorial oversight or indeed the functionality to allow users to respond directly to other users.
3. Debate Opener: user offers a clear opinion, and has taken the time to consider their comment. You might normally find their comments in a message board setting, or on A-list blogs. This can be, as in the case of the TV Show’s commenting system, instantiated by the C4 editorial team, and ‘hosted’ with some degree of mediation. See this page for a good example, albeit brief. Factual programmes, unsurprisingly, tend to garner the most debates. They are currently housed in forums, such as this one for a recent documentary on Muslims in the UK. Though I value message boards for their no-nonsense approach to chat and conversation, I think it’s a bit of a shame that these debates are held ‘off site’ in that people cannot comment at the source of content.
4. Debate Response: user sets their stake in the sand on one side of an argument, and if not on a message board, gets around the lack of a threading system (usually found in forums) by simple stating a ‘responding to X’ at the beginning of their comment.

So how do you design a commenting system that addresses the goals of each type of commenter? I was curious as to whether there were some companies out there that were facilitating conversation and response a little differently, so I thought I’d do a quick polar map of the online conversation landscape for my research. There are two axes - visually-enriched to text-only, and interactive to passive. On the more innovative end were the self-moderating UGC sites, particularly with a video focus. Viddler, YouTube and Seesmic all had replying functionality along with the ability to send a video response. In two of the three you can also rate a fellow commenter, always with a thumbs-up/down idiom. On the more traditional side of things were the papers, broadcasters and most popular blogs (note, for instance, that whilst Flickr encourages commenting on its photo pages, there are no comments on its blog). Somewhere in the middle are most blogs.

The Guardian has just signed up to the Pluck service, and as such benefits from its rating tool which allows users to ‘dig’ a comment. However, that’s as far as the functionality goes. One of the advantages, surely, of being able to rate a user’s comment is to have that data collected and used elsewhere, either collated somewhere as the ‘top rated voice’ of the public somewhere, or simply allowing your profile to aggregate what others’ have thought about your comments. But unfortunately the Guardian’s service doesn’t do either, rendering the ability to rate or slate someone’s view rather meaningless.

There’s another observation that one can’t help but notice occurring naturally on sites with long comment streams without threading: people use the @ symbol to address a comment to another user. However, there’s another problem with the experience at this level, too. Whilst this ad hod emergent, user-generated system works well for the first few ‘responses’, when more data is delivered, the model breaks down - suddenly there’s no way of determining whether @someuser is talking about someuser’s first comment or sixteenth. Try making sense, for instance, of this comment stream on Big Brother.

This is a scenario that Twitter users will be familiar with. One can reply to any tweet from another user, but that reply, when delivered to the stream, is taken out of context - there’s no way to understand what the reply is to. This is acceptable for Twitter chat, because generally the conversation is between friends, and there is a sense of understanding about the context. But not so for casual browsers dipping into a comment stream on, say, the Guardian’s blog posts.

My trawling through various streams looking for ways to improve the user experience of reading comments and being able to send a comment led to a few thoughts about what could work to ease the information overload one feels when faced with a big comment stream. Dunstan Orchard was experiencing similar concerns with his comments stream and took matters into his own hands with this visual guide to navigating comments. Although a good attempt at conveying order to an otherwise chaotic interface, I think it suffers a little from trying to do too much.

One idea that appeals to me is trying to deal with comment replies in a flattened fashion, hiding the thread layers.  I sketched out this early concept to show folks here at C4. The idea is that instead of showing the natural nesting of comment replies, you would instead serve an overlay which aggregated the responses to a comment inline, with the ability to then respond to a respond if needed. Clicking on a reply icon would preload your submission form with a label saying ‘In response to’ or simply @ and the number and author of the comment. In this way, you could quickly scan to see which comments had deserved the most reaction, and it also would mean that wherever your attention was fixed on the comment stream, you could pull in responses inline, without having to skip up and down the page unnecessarily looking for the conversation. It effectively hides a nested experience, and makes the act of replying more accessible.

Hiding the visual complexity of nesting is, for me, a move forward in the evolution of online conversation. Another is to actually use one’s rating service to organise information on the comments stream. As mentioned above, I think there’s an incentive to contribute thoughtful, worthwhile comment if other users’ rating of your comment results in your comment beng selected as the most valuable. Having what I call a ‘Chatter Box’ that shows whose participation in the thread has received the most praise should raise both quality and quantity of submissions.

Being able to define what type of comment a user is making is another way of visualising the data collected from a comments stream. One of the ideas to have come out a brainstorm session recently was a panel of tags ranging from ‘thoughtful’ to ‘revolutionary’ to ‘mainstream’ that users could click to assign a judgment value to a given comment. Granted it’s a bit zany, but it’s tackling the issue of how to use collaborative filtering to let the users decide what bubbles up as ‘good stuff’.

Got any thoughts about how commenting services and ratings online could be improved to facilitate better participation? Let me know.

(By the way, I’m well aware of how basic the commenting service is on this blog, thank you)

No Comments | In: Social Media, UX | tags: channel4, comments, twitter. | #

I wrote a while back about how the BBC’s White Season’s artistic treatment of some user generated data was an innovative step for the future media division Auntie-side. But I didn’t think that the web community’s most recent penchant - to visualise the galaxy of data we now swim in - would be taken so seriously by the programme makers at the BBC.

During an interstitial yesterday I caught a glimpse of this, the trailer for Britain From Above, which sounds like it could be the sequel to the much acclaimed Coast or a World War II biopic. But as it turns out, it’s more like a whodunnit of Britain’s digital footprints. Everywhere we travel, we secrete our tiny wake of 1s and 0s behind us - the phone calls we make, the GPS satellite navigation devices that we have sniffing our every step… I haven’t seen the actual programme yet as it airs next week, but it’s certainly one for my iPlayer viewing. The most important thing for me perhaps about it is that it is attempting to tell a story with that data; and that’s fundamentally what we need to do every time we attempt to make sense of that galaxy of bits.

No Comments | In: Data Visualization, Future Telly | tags: BBC, TV. | #

Disclaimer: my thoughts and words, not those of Channel4.

There are many passages in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody worth reading if you’re in telly, or any media, really. One of my favourite ones follows, and speaks about the superior quality filters which open-source, people-powered systems tend to produce. They do so by allowing 100x as many failures as the traditional corporation. Why? Because failure in this environment is free; and every time you fail at something, you learn how to improve. Not so in Old School Business:

The overall effect of failure is its likelihood times its cost. Most organizations attempt to reduce the effect of failure by reducing its likelihood. Imagine that you are spearheading an effort for a firm that wants to be more innovative. You are given a list of promising but speculative ideas, and you have to choose some subset of them for investment. You thus have to guess the likelihood of success or failure for each project. The obvious problem is that no one knows for certain what will succeed and what will fail.

The effect, therefore, is that only the projects deemed less risky, and which fare well in traditional ‘cost/benefit’ analysis, will make the cut. There may be a great desire for innovative projects in one’s company, but you are still putting great trust in the executives who must pass judgment on those potential projects. In other words, you can’t ever count on the wisdom of crowds in a company that has limited funds to dispense on ‘innovation’.

These words were loud in my ears when I last thought about 4IP, Channel4’s ambitious bid to transform public service media. (The name stands for 4 Innovation for the Public.) I know that there have been plenty of kick-off meetings about new ways of working, collaborating and building relationships and so on that will drive the project forward. And there have been lots of debates about what the gelling idea behind the project is. Lots of forward-thinking people on board. Lots of buzz in and around Channel4. But there’s the rub: according to the blog, the Fund “will support up to 30 independent web sites, offering innovative or public service content to audiences.”

There’s that hand-selected subset again…the traditional business model. How will 4IP ensure innovation, if conventional investment procedures tend to short circuit high-risk, but potentially world-changing enterprise? Say 500 ideas come in through 4IP’s golden gates. The commissioners will surely have a hard time selecting which ideas they will go with. The Fund will end up funding less than 10% of the ideas, some of which may not succeed, especially not in the long term.

Sure, it’s a fantastic ambition to support 30 worthwhile online services, but I just wonder whether there’s another way to nurture more ideas. Perhaps engineering a system whereby each of those 500 ideas can receive the ‘light’ of public scrutiny, and more importantly, the public can choose to contribute time, money or thinking to any idea they deem worthy. They might become as much a partner in the project as 4IP. That is the spirit of open-source, and why open-sources projects have progressed faster, and more cheaply, in many ways, than commercial launches. But I can understand the need and desire of the 4IP bods to want to focus on a few high-profile projects, and not spread their efforts too thin; after all, there will only be a few 4IP commissioners…versus nearly 70 million of us in the public.

There’s plenty of public service initiatives out there that promise funding in the UK. One recent find was Show Us a Better Way, which focuses on a more specific question: how to better use publicly available data. That I can sink my teeth into right away; I may even submit an idea tonight…

3 Comments | In: Future Telly, Social Media | tags: business, innovation, TV. | #

I never thought this would happen, but I was duped by the Richard Dawkins-but-not-really-Richard Dawkins caper of recent Twitterfame. Well, I’m not that surprised, actually. It was a classic case of wish fulfilment: I wanted the great man to be ‘down with the kids’ so badly, I was too willing to ignore my suspicions that Dawkins wouldn’t a) have the time to document his thoughts and activities via Twitter, b) actually bother responding to replies to his updates and c) submit to Twitter’s 140-character constraints on his thinking. I signed up to follow him, then within a few messages, realised he was a fraud. So I had to block him, the only form of retaliation I had in my arsenal

But I was duped, and little stung when I realised. Fake Richard Dawkins has since been chastised and his followers dwindled to a few clueless sheep; however, I’m sure it won’t be long before a few more fake celebs begin to send status updates from their fake lives. Luke Hardiman has already kindly posted a few well known parodies. Hell, there’s even a blog purporting to be Twitter, updating us as to its (unstable) status.

I won’t go into the details of Twitterquette here as I had intended to at first, because Scoble already has and inspired a lively debate in his original thread. I also found this video contribution from a particularly articulate youngster (who knew there were such people around) which I thought deserved a mention. I have a great admiration for people such as this who can open up their thoughts via webcam for the world to see and hear - after all, it’s much easier to write your thoughts than to rap off the top of your head about these things.

For me the first and only true commandment of Twitter, and any form of self-publishing for that matter, is to be honest about the self that’s publishing. Parodies are fine, even on Twitter (I used to love the Stephen Colbert updates) - but impersonation for the sake of furthering your own ideas is the Selfish Meme embodied.

No Comments | In: Digital Life, Social Media | tags: richard dawkins, twitter. | #