Recently a group of interested parties met up in a Bier Café in Bradford to discuss how we re-boot the Bradford Social Media Surgery. Yes, there were some cold beverages taken but the main topic of discussion of how we make the BDSMS more relevant and tailored to the people of the district. The concept of Social Media Surgeries was based on an idea by @podnosh and they have spread like wildfire ever since, with surgeries taking place as far afield as Amsterdam and Tokyo. Basically it’s all about people giving up their time to answer questions from voluntary, community and third sector organisations about the web and social media. I myself have been along to other surgeries in York, Leeds and Huddersfield and these all had a very distinct, very local flavour of their own.

Nick also came up with a very handy site which acted as a toolkit for people wanting to run their own surgeries and the infrastructure provided by www.socialmediasurgery.com has been invaluable. Check it out for further info.

Success?

The Bradford Social Media Surgery kicked off in early 2010 having been cooked up by Kevin Campbell-Wright and I in the last knockings of 2009. Since it started we have held six events, taking place on a very roughly quarterly basis and with varying degrees of success. It’s been pretty common knowledge that we’ve been experimenting with the format for about the last nine months having held some private, themed and invite only and events. Assuming that the main barometer of success is attendance then it’s been almost impossible to chart. The people turning up have ranged from an unsustainable thirty right down to an equally unsustainable, but rather more worrying, four. More importantly though, we’d helped some fantastic people and great organisations do some really good stuff and helped people connect a little bit more. At a time when budgets in the sector are being squeezed we’ve noticed a real interest in people and organisations communicating more directly and more cheaply over the web.

We’re really committed to the idea of the surgeries but we’re equally, not to mention painfully, aware that they’ve not perhaps been the success they have in other places. We’re also all really proud of, and committed to, making Bradford a better place and central to that is the idea of helping people communicate and organise themselves better.

A Solution?

For the last six months or so I’ve been talking to people involved and taking soundings from them about what we can do better, what success looks like for us and how we can achieve it. The main sticking point seems to be one of regularity, everybody pretty much agreed that we need to do it more regularly. Some said quarterly, some bi-monthly and some said monthly but everyone seems pretty sure that regularity is the key. Personally I feel monthly is a bit hopeful and it’s also a lot to ask of the host venues. This leads us nicely on to the next item…

Location. The venue of the surgeries to date has essentially been The Gumption Centre (Check them out, they are great and have given a lot to this) and failing that it’s been held at the Central Library’s Learning Zone. The Gumption guys have been great, never charged us a penny and been a superb venue but to make it more accessible to more people we need to move it about a bit. We’d like to take the event out around Bradford district, not just the city centre but to Keighley, to Bingley, to anywhere willing to have us really.

The last discussion point has infrastructure. As I mentioned above, socialmediasurgeryplus has provided a fantastic bit of infrastructure to people looking for an out of the box toolkit type solution for setting up a Social Media Surgery. But for our one to work better, and with the increase in regularity and venues, I think we need to develop our own place for people to find out about the next event, ask questions, get answers and to have an open, honest and peer-to-peer discussion away from the event and to ask for help on specific topics. With this in mind we’ll be putting together a dedicated site, most probably using Buddypress, which does all of these things and, most probably, a few things more too.

What can you do to help?

Well firstly we need you to volunteer in whatever way you can. If you’d like to help people use the web better then we’d love to have you involved. If your organisation can do anything to help then we’d love to have you involved. If you can offer a venue with wi-fi then we would love to have you involved. If you have some spare laptops or desktops you could bring along we’d love to have you involved. If you want to offer tea, coffee, cakes, samosas or pakorahs at a surgery we would love to have you involved. If there’s anything you think you can do to help, even if it’s just advice or ideas, then we would, surprisingly enough, love to have you involved. Leave a comment below and we’ll be sure to be in touch.

Also, we’d love your opinions on the discussion points above. How regular do you think the surgeries should be held? Where would you like to see them? Should those who can afford to make a ‘thank you’ payment to the venue? How do we spread the message better? What do you think would be useful to have on the site? Should it still just be for non-profit organisations? Should we even call it a Social Media Surgery any more?

We’re aiming to kick off the new events in September so we need your input right now. Please leave comment below, or if you are shy you can drop me an email. If you want to be contacted when things are live then just leave a comment with the word ‘contact’ in the box.

Steve Jobs shortly after the last time he said sorry

The past year has been a bit of a strange one in the tech world. In many ways this should have been the year that web technology “broke”, this was true in more than one sense with Facebook becoming the subject of a Hollywood blockbuster and Apple – generally thought of as invincibly slick – managing to bodge the launch of iPhone4 so badly that #antenna trended for weeks on end. The crisis pitch got to such an incessant whine that Steve Jobs, a man not known for any prior acquaintance with penitence, was forced to offer people spending hundreds on Apple’s faulty product a quite frankly derisory phone case as compensation.

Given the race to grab early market share has hotted up to such an extent that companies are releasing products onto the market that clearly aren’t ready to go it does begin to call into question the advantage of being “bleeding edge”. Sure you look…..um…grrrrreat in the unboxing videos and all of your friends are jealous that you have the latest bit of tech fetish kit but spending all night queuing up has never been anything other then the behaviour of  a fanatic – meant in the worst sense of the word – and the subsequent days spent in the stygian hinterlands of teething problem tech support are hardly worth the time spent. It’s never been truer than now that the only way to receive tech hot off the press is as a tech journalist, nothing incentivises good support like the possibility of a negative review.

In many ways 2010 should’ve been Apple’s year and with April’s release of the iPad it looked like it was going to be. There’s no getting past the fact that the iPad is an incredible little bit of kit and more than “just a big iPhone” as some people rather uncharitably called it on release. From my point of view the really interesting thing about it is the fact that it opens up a whole new market for games and apps that simply wasn’t there before.

Not "Just a big iPhone"...apparently

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Apple’s new baby is the love affair between it and publishing, time will tell whether it’s entirely mutual or whether it’s more of an unrequited thing but the initial blossoming of the relationship certainly looks promising for both parties. The Times launched their paywall at more or less the same time as the Times iPad app was launched and the Guardian’s excellent iPhone app was also scaled up for the new technology. Time will tell whether this is an unlikely revival for the flagging newspaper industry but with developments like Murdoch announcing an “iPad only” newspaper it certainly looks more positive than it had before. If I had to make a call though I’d imagine that this new dawn is more of an opportunity for more niche publishers like Marvel, their excellent iPad app has brought many a lapsed nerd back to the comic book fold.

Sadly what should’ve been a stellar year for Apple was sullied by the launch of the iPhone4, which clearly wasn’t ready for market at the time of launch and was beset by all sorts of antenna and signal problems. It also didn’t help that the phone appeared to many to be uglier and more delicate than it’s predecessors. What could’ve been just a momentary slip from Apple was made all the more serious by the presence for the first time of high quality alternatives like HTC’s Desire and Google’s Nexus. And, with that, Apple’s domination of the “Smartphone” market was over.

Check in here, please check in here

Twenty Ten was also a bit of a big year for Facebook who are fast rivalling Google as the company looking to take over Microsoft’s trophy as the web’s bad guy, not only did they burst through the five and six hundred million user marks but they also launched Facebook Places, their take on location, in June. The take up of this has by all accounts been rather slow – especially given Facebook’s massive captive audience – leading some commentators to rethink their previous proclamations that “geo is the future”. My thoughts are that the whole geolocation issue is that it’s still a very nascent space with occasional early adopters continuing to check in via foursquare and gowalla.  The mass market, perhaps a little worried about privacy given the amount of info attached to their Facebook account; have yet to really embrace the feature. One feature that Facebook did introduce that seems to be working is “Groups”. Not to be confused with the Fan Pages groups, though of course it will be in the nomenclature challenged world of Facebook, these allow you to manage and segment your friends down into contextual bunches. Very useful and, for those lucky people with enough friends, an important development I’m sure.

After a few stellar years of growth this was also the year Twitter’s trajectory began to slow. Although, for my money at least, still the best community on the net, we really started to see Twitter grow up with the introduction of lists at the back end of 2009. In this post I talked about the possibility that lists were the first strike against clients and throughout 2010 this started to look more and more likely. September finally saw the launch of “New Twitter”, as announced by their CEO Evan Williams, predictably in a tweet. New Twitter, coupled with the increasingly severe API throttling, did finally spell the death knell for the Twitter Client Eco-system which is a shame of quite epic proportions as, whilst clients are still out there providing a great user experience, the need to use them will tail off in favour of the web experience. Twenty ten also saw the introduction of the rather tawdry “Promoted Tweet” which looks like a good frontrunner for the Most Annoying Thing on the Web in 2011 Award. You cant, or at least shouldn’t, blame Twitter for this though. They need to start, just like Facebook has, identifying and safeguarding the revenue streams that are going to keep the company afloat when the next hot, new social thing comes along. I think it was Warren Buffett that said it best when he said “It’s not until the tide goes out that you know who is swimming without trunks” and, much like Fred Savage in The Wonder Years, child stars are more often than not much less cute when they grow up.

Perhaps one of the strangest stories from the web in 2010 was the demise of huge chunks of Yahoo who had previously employed a google-esque strategy of buying up every web property who took their fancy. Apart from the decidedly old school, almost portal like homepage and email service, Yahoo’s stars are undoubtedly the web’s premier photography site Flickr and their social bookmarking service, Delicious. For the moment at least it looks like the self-sufficient Flickr is staying within the Yahoo stable but Delicious looks to not have been as lucky and will possibly be either sold or cut-adrift completely despite their protestations to the contrary. To help save Delicious click here and if you haven’t already tried it please give it a whirl, I’m a big fan and it’d be a shame to see it go.

This *is* the droid you are looking for

So who was the big winner in the web in 2010? You might expect that, given the stellar success of the iPad it’d be Apple or, with a 600m strong user base, it’d be Facebook but for me the real winner from this year is Android. It wasn’t just the iPhone4 antenna debacle which let them in to win it, just like Android wasn’t the only technology that could’ve prospered from it but this was the year that Android really came alive as a viable mass-market platform for Smartphones. Those with longer memories will have already recognised that this situation has more than a few parallels with the Mac vs. PC battle of the 80s where Apple made the technological early running before being overtaken by the cheaper and more generic PCs running a common OS most people would recognise is a poor relation to the original. Apple’s proprietary approach to their hardware and, in this case more importantly their apps, has again created a market gap for an entity which Android has ably filled and the lines in the Smartphone wars have been largely drawn along the lines of Apple vs. Everyone else.

I love Apple products but I don’t see it being a battle they can win and in 2010 it looks like Android has landed the first blow.

So, with a few client calls to make and some artwork sign-offs still outstanding, I ambled into the seat at the back of the balcony of York’s beautiful Theatre Royal one last time and, almost completely out of charge in every conceivable way, settled in for the last talk.

The talk was from Jonathan Harris of Number27.org. Jonathan describes himself as “an artist working with complex datasets”, as you probably will have gathered from the tone of the piece so far that’s a bit like Caravaggio describing himself as “a bloke who paints Jesus and that”. Looking back on a lot of my past posts this year it seems I’ve been quite consumed by the idea of presenting information, and lots of it, in particularly beautiful ways and Jonathan certainly ticks that box in a big, fat way. Rather than hyperbolise much more about the man, he possesses the sort of profound, beat-poet Americana of Keroac, Dylan or early Woolf but manages to uniquely fuse it all with the sort of Bay Area timbre and vulnerability of a very modern geek. He is, in short, a pretty engaging guy. Personality cults aside though it was Jonathan’s work that I found the most interesting thing about him. You can see all of his projects on his website here but I’m going to just pick out a few highlights below.

We Feel Fine was the first thing of Jonathan’s that I happened across. It trawls the Social Web for mentions of the words “feel” or “feeling” to analyse and present fantastic infographics of the content. The really fantastic thing about We Feel Fine is that it presents its information back in such lovely ways, the realisations and the interfaces – of which there are many – are actually tagged back to human emotions. The database entries are also visually represented in a way which mimics the emotion they represent, so the “fear” entries act scared andthe happy ones group together. It even goes so far as to reference the weather in the person’s area at the time, mind blowing.

The Whale Hunt is a fascinating, if a little gruesome, project which uses tagged and Categorised photos to chart Jonathan’s nine day expedition with Inuit Whale Hunters using tagged variables like “blood” and “heart rate” to track the excitement – and also boredom – of the experience. It splits down in a number of ways like by cast member and chapter and you can also see a mosaic of all the images which really hits home the colourlessness of the ice and the gore of the blood when they actually catch the whale.

Lovelines works in similar territory to the We Feel Fine project, concentrating this time on the rawest of human conditions of Love and Hate. It uses the same data collector to harvest mentions of the words “Love” and “Hate” from blogs every few minutes, it then also collects the name, age, geolocation and any other data it can about the blogger and factors that into the presentation too. It’s formed through the three different themes of Words, Pictures and Superlatives and gives you an odd experience of being a detached voyeur.

Update: It would seem that the massive amounts of traffic my blog has sent to We Feel Fine has melted the servers. *cough* I’m sure it’ll be back up soon.

In the new political landscape of budget cuts and tight financial margins organisations are coming under increasing pressure to communicate more effectively with the people who use their services. The web contains some fantastic tools to help you both stay close to the people who use your services and publicise what you do to new people. Social Media can also be a fantastic tool for campaigners looking to get publicity for their cause without having the budget to launch a traditional media campaign.

The people involved in the Bradford event are all seasoned digital communications professionals who have given their time for free and will be more than happy to pass on their knowledge of how to get started in using the Social Web. Come along to The Gumption Centre on the 20th July, 5:30pm – 8pm. Click here to book your place.

Google Infographgraphic

Pingdom have pulled together this fantastic visual from all of the information on Google they have been able to scrape out from down the back of the internet’s sofa. And yes, it really has gone from a geek’s daydream to the biggest media organisation in the world in fifteen years.

Click for the full graphic

Social Media Landscape

This one is absolutely lovely, it distills a good few hours of client contact into about ten minutes of chartsurfing. Some of the info I would have to take issue with but it’s largely spot on and about as close to a ‘one size fits all’ solution as you are likely to get. It’s been commissioned by the guys over at CMO and really nicely done by the pixel pushers at 97th Floor.

Click for the full graphic

More to follow tomorrow, if you have any to add please stick them in the comments section below.

That’s right, the single biggest threat faced today by the Social Web is – dun, dun, duunnnnnnnn – Internet Explorer 6. This isn’t a hatchet job and I’m not a hater of Micro$oft by any means which, given the fact that I own a machine running Windows Vista, surprises even me sometimes. Even Microsoft themselves would suggest you download the later versions of IE and they made the thing! So, it’s probably best then, that I explain what I mean when I say it’s the Osama Bin Laden of browsers. IE6 was first shipped in August 2001, yes that’s before most of us even knew who Bin Laden was, which by anyone’s reckoning is nearly a full eight and a half years ago. Now, I am not a neophile, my car is older than that and – I’ll be honest with you here – so are some of my clothes but just imagine how long a time that is in the world of the internet.

Back in 2001 you could almost name your price for any business with a domain name attached to it, almost nobody used google, we were all allowed to download anything we wanted from Napster for free and without fear of legal recourse from our ISPs and the closest thing to the Social Web were sites like FARK, Slashdot and technology like ICQ and MSN Messenger. It’s safe to say that nowdays the web is a very, very different place. So why, even now when the web has moved on immesurably, do roughly 20% of users still browse the web using IE6? I guess the short answer would be the good old fashioned combination of laziness/ignorance. It’s actually different in some Third World countries where web usage is more likely to be via mobile web where it’s actually factory shipped but lets skip over that, it’s fairly safe to say that you aren’t very likely to be reading this from Thailand. So, in an effort to spread the word, here’s why you should upgrade post-post-post-haste if you are using IE6.

Aesthetics:

Aesthetically IE6 is awful, without getting too technical, it’s not really designed to interpret web pages made in the last few years. You know all of those lovely drop shadows, rounded corners, shaded edges and layers? No? Well you must be using IE6. It doesnt even support CSS2! Good designers will factor in workarounds for sites to look passable in IE6 but even the best will sometimes spend hours cursing it, going grey and grinding their teeth. They shouldn’t be doing this though, it’s a waste of everyone’s time that they have to, good designers should be doing better designs and not enslaving theirselves to a technology that, if it were on TV would be in black and white.

Functionality:

An interesting thing has begun to happen around the web, if you use IE6 then some sites will actually implore you to switch or upgrade your browser. Others on the other hand just plain wont work. Twitter, for instance, began doing so around the middle of last year and I virtually jumped out of my chair when they did. Youtube followed suit not long after, and much more brutally too. This isn’t sniffy high mindedness on their part though, it’s for a perfectly valid reason. A lot of the applications that now drive the Social Web actually struggle to work with IE6. Again, without getting too technical, and to use the simplest analogy to hand, it’s like running a car on unleaded petrol when it doesn’t have a catalytic converter. Sure it might work but you’ll be in for a bumpy ride and you’ll more than likely break down pretty quickly. What’s more, you’ll get where you are going terribly slowly.

Security:

If the last two didn’t get you switching then this one will. “As of January 10, 2009, security advisory site Secunia reports 142 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6, 22 of which are unpatched”. Tossing aside the likely hood that, if you are still using IE6, you will more than likely have not updated your security patches for it, that is still 22 security flaws in your browser. 22 Separate ways which nasties can still infiltrate your personal data and do beastly things to all your lovely data. I just hope you don’t bank with it.

So there you have it, switch if you can. If you are in a company using ie6, which my last company were up until last year, picket the IT department, send them this link. If you know someone who uses it shun them like a leper. It’s for the good of the Social Web remember, the less time spent on catering on nearly decade old technology the quicker progress will be.

Bin IE666 people, you know it makes sense.

Though it may only seem like a little change at this point but throughout their meteoric rise Twitter have been almost wilfully ignorant of the user experience through twitter.com barring some recent small, incremental improvements. Twitter’s main tactic has been one of instead opening their API up early and well and this has allowed a healthy ecosystem of third party apps, among them clients, to flourish instead. Now with lists, something that’s obviously outside the core functionality of Twitter, comes the time to ask whether this move is just a user experience upgrade of if this is a concerted effort to regain some of the territory lost to Twitter clients.

I’ve blogged a couple of times before about Twitter clients and the fact that they are absolutely essential to make using Twitter an enjoyable experience. The latest statistics indicate that roughly only 25% of people actually use twitter.com, it’s an incredible statistic if you pause to think about it for a minute. Three quarters of people using your services dont even touch your webpage actually never visit your site, using an API and third party client app. As someone with a fair bit of background in web1.0 (where traffic is king and driving traffic is an art form) it’s just impossible to fully rationalise that stat, at least without a little shake of my head and a roll of my eyes.

From the traffic side alone it would make sense to improve the “in browser” functionality of Twitter but also, even though Twitter is booming the current state of play isnt exactly ideal. People I know have tried Twitter and been turned off by the basic functionality (or lack thereof) and subsequently have not been enthused enough to bother with downloading a client. Could it therefore be the case that Twitter want to up their conversion rates for sign ups? Are they planning to advertise and want to funnel more traffic through the service? Maybe they just want to mature a bit as a service and taking back a little control helps to do that. Either way, a reliable web based client would be great.

It’ll be interested to see where they go next from here.

Slightly ironically for a web-centric conference though, the wi-fi was a real issue. Ryan Carson promised us “Weapons Grade wi-fi” but sadly I could barely get a connection, either on wi-fi or my iPhone, for the whole two days. There were also some grumbles from those who had been before who objected to the slightly heavy-handed presence of some of the title sponsors Microsoft, Vodafone, Sun and Paypal. It was a great conference though and rather than go through speaker by speaker, theme by theme, I thought I’d just quickly run through some of the highlights for you all.

Francisco Tomalsky, 280North

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications

280North are a fantastic company formed by Francisco Tomalsky and two college friends, all of whome were former employees of Apple and worked on iTunes and iPhone development. You may know 280North’s work, they are the guys responsible for Cappucino, an open source application development framework for developing web applications that look and feel like desktop applications and 280Slides, the presentation software that works in your browser.

Probably one of the stars of the whole show, Tomaskly gave a simultaneous talk and live demo of Atlas, another wonderful Cappuchino tool which makes creating web apps an absolute doddle. Without going into too much detail or giving too much away, if you can resize boxes then you will be able to create web apps in Atlas. The presentation was so well received that they called him back the next day to show everyone more of what Atlas can do.

Bruce Lawson, Opera

The Future of HTML 5

Bruce is a big personality and has a passion for the internet and within seconds of him taking the stage he lets you know it. This was probably the most eagerly anticipated talk of the whole two days with many people staying glued to the good seats through the afternoon interval.

Bruce’s style borders on that of one of my favourite all time comedians, Mark Thomas, and whilst peppered with jokes and witty asides the stuff that he talked us through was pretty mouth watering. HTML 5′s dynamic graphics capabilities alone were worthy of an entire lecture and the demo of the new feature “canvas” took the form of a first person shooter game (ala Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein etc) which impressed the audience. Bruce, claiming claiming he was “not of a militaristic bent” decided to rejig this and instead showed the audience a first person flower giving game instead.  The bad news about canvas is that it isnt yet accessable (for the visually/hearing impared, that is) but it can be worked around if you use .svg graphic formats as the text is still treated as text.

We were told that we should “think of HTML 5 as a broad form, rather like AJAX” rather than like anything that went before. There’s tons and tons of other very cool stuff that HTML5 can do as standard, multiple file uploads, local and session cookie storage, and a wonderful facility to embed (and thus tinker with) video right in the browser window. There will also be no more calling in of javascript libraries to validate forms as they will be automatically validated in 5 and there are also all sorts of nice things like calendar widgets which should make your designer and developer’s lives a lot easier.  Very exciting indeed.

Aza Raskin, Mozilla

How people will use the web in the future

Mozilla are great, firefox is great, all of the add ons are great and rather unsurpisingly Aza’s presentation was great. Rather than talk about specific technology he chose instead to look into the future to see what we should be expecting from our browsing experience. Aza asked us to think of the browser “as a broker of trust, as an insanely smart butler”.

He also intruduced us to Ubiquity, probably the most forward thinking add-on available which acts on an intuitive command system based on wants and requests, Aza took us through the many steps that we go through to do what in reality are small, simple tasks online. Ubiquity is an impressive concept, far too esoteric to describe with any brevity, and Aza probably summed it up best by saying “with google you type what you want to fine, with Ubiquity you type what you want to do”.

Ed Anuff & Mike Malone, Six Apart.

The Future of Social Web Apps

Ed and Mike from Six Apart, the company that brought you Barack Obama’s MyBo social tool, took us through some of the developments around Motion, their new tool for the Movable Type platform and Typepad. Motion promises microblogging features which replicate Pownce, Tumblr or Twitter. Activity streams like FriendFeed and really easy OpenID sign in support for commenters, including both Google Accounts and Facebook Connect. I also attended the product pitch on this and it’s a really great tool that I’ll be fiddling with in the future.

Bonus video section:

Kevin Rose, Digg

How to get your site from 1 to 1,000,000,000 users

Cnet review of FOWA

Anyway, so with my melon twisted and my mind rammed full of the knowledge of those much smarter than me I headed off into the night and back up north to Yorkshire. But first there was one little thing that I had to settle before I could jump on the train, my little girl had asked me – perfectly reasonably for a two year old I suppose – for a pink dinosaur. The only place I could think of that would even possibly have a pink dinosaur would be the Natural History Museum. I was in luck, one pink dinosaur under my arm it was back off to Kings Cross and the train north.

Thanks to the guys at Carsonified for a great few days.