I have been quiet for a while as my Viva was coming up. It was on the 19th June at 3pm and I passed, with no changes needing to be made – just great.  Post PhD = not v. quiet as five days later I finished the first draft of a book chapter on sociable media theories and creative audiences to be published in the next, 2009 edited collection on public service broadcasting  by Nordicom in December 09.  Once that was out of the way there was also a proposal to finish for the EPSRC  - a pitch to do a feasibility study for a knowledge exchange network between media producers and academics. I hope that will come through as the project would support some of  the aims of the Digital Britain Report. Said report has been criticised for not aiming to deliver fast enough broadband speeds therefore potentially limiting Briton’s individual access to what many feel is a basic tool, and also placing the UK behind such countries as the US, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Korea.

There are other things limiting participatory practices – my doctoral study showed how the BBC has been slow to engage with audiences. Producers are often holding on to established practices which used to work…but that was in a previous ’pure broadcast era’. A comparative study (NPR and the BBC) I have just undertaken for the book shows National Public Radio in the USA shows some similar reluctance to engage wholesale/bring audiences into the frame as media-making colleagues. There are however notable exceptions with particular presenters experimenting and finding ways to include audiences (e.g. Scott Simon). Times are tough for broadcasters but they need to find a new relationship model which will work with an active, participating, public.

There will be older ones, I’m sure,  but the e-mint list has been going since 2000 when four of us UK online communities folk got together at Vircom, an online communities conference in San Franciso. There were only five UK online community managers there and 455 from the USA.  A slightly larger group of six got together a month later in the Mint Bar, St John’s Street in Clerkenwell. ‘Oink’, a friend of the esteemed Howard Reingold, showed us all how to send an email from a mobile phone.

e-mint’s gone on over the years and has grown, had meet-ups and video conferences.  Has met in pubs, empty offices and basements. During one post-meeting drink at the BBC’s Bush House men in space suits burst in looking for Anthrax as we simultanously watched what was happening outside the building on the 9pm BBC News.

The idea to formalise e-mint was accepted,  and then rejected (but the paperwork has all been done). The idea to lose the – between ‘e’ and ‘mint’ was also discussed and rejected. The Drupal platform came and went (sorry Ian!), and the idea of conferences have come and gone (sorry everyone!).  Chairmen came and went (Mr Brake,  Mr Hall and Ms Littleton). Reports were sent into Government which helped keep our industry from having legislation imposed on it in the UK (thanks e-mint!).

People have come and gone…and come back again.  I’ve been gone for the last year or two, but the PhD (on social media) will be handed in next week, hurrah, and not before time. So I hope to be around a bit  more.  There was a meeting last night which I missed, darn. Everywhere you look there are groups forming about social media…but few (IMHO) have the same friendliness, open qualities, and longevity, as e-mint (thanks Beks et al!). It’s about time for a ten year celebration isn’t it? Thanks for the reminder Jen.

Funny how the social media industry  has survived both the dot.com crash and now the global recession. For something which continues to elude a ‘traditional’ economic model, that’s pretty good.

Today is the first day of the Social Media World Forum for which, the organiser’s say, 1,600 people have pre-registered. The website announces it’s the world’s home for discussion about social media, but there are not many posts up there as yet…how long does it take to become world leading? A few days apparently. The event looks interesting and I hope the online presence has elements of the f2f.

Channel 4ip are reinventing public service media for the digital age. Their strategy is the inverse of the BBC’s, they will aggregate engagers around tools, rather than aggregating participating audiences around branded content (BBC).  The 4iP-ers have got off to a good start with a workshop organised by Frank Boyd (ex-BBC) in the NE to brainstorm what forms this will take, working with potential suppliers. 4iP will develop ‘interactive media not TV’ and concentrate on ‘networks not broadcasters’. They have £50 million to play with, but have not said where it has come from…Ofcom?

Things are shifting in the world of public service media. A new team are  in position at Channel 4 (4iP) who will explore what PSM might become in the future. 

Activa Multimedia, a subsidiary of the Catalonian public service media,   contacted me  last week to see if the University would be interested in finding out how 3D media, iPTV and avatars might combine in interesting ways.  But for a great overview of future trends and the bigger picture -  in October last year I went to RIPE the bi-annual conference on public service media, which took place in Mainz in Germany.  One of the most interesting keynote speakers of the day was Professor Karol Jakubowicz who gave this presentation (from this paper). Well worth reading.

Nice to see that the idea of having good hosts and Community Editors is returning to the BBC. A recent BBC internal meeting about the Points of View Message board offered this insight from Rowan Kerek, who hosts the television section of the board, “The community feel they are not listened to by the BBC and want a closer relationship and better feedback. As she put it, they feel like they are sometimes ‘talking in a corner’”.

This absolutely ties in with my thesis findings, that more listening to and acknowledging of audiences needs to  happen in the participatory media hosted by the BBC. Public service media organisations are likely to need to have a different relationship with audiences from the commercial media, in interactive content.

The hoo-hah about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s comments on BBC Radio 2 are interesting. Not because of the incident itself but because it is saying something important about the relationship between the BBC and its audiences. The audience are assuming much greater ownership of the BBC, therefore they are beginning to want greater transparency from BBC managers. They appear to also feel that the salary Jonathan Ross receives is too high, as the public servant with the highest salary in the UK (6 Million pounds Sterling), the return on investment must be very great indeed.

Audiences are beginning to colonise the BBC, on the BBC’s invitation to have a deeper two-way relationship, an interactive relationship. There are ‘islands’ of audience-generated content laced between the professional content produced by BBC staff. The BBC is framing itself as being interactive, therefore offering a reaction for every action, or enough – and good-enough - reactions to qualify as having an interactive relationship. But how much listening is going on and how much responding?

Russell Brand’s Radio 2 show was recorded on Tuesday 16th October and broadcast two days later, after the nine o’clock watershed, between 2100 and 2300 GMT. On Saturday 25th October Brand apologised, but it was not until the end of the first week of November (nearly three week’s later) that an ‘official’ apology is made. In addition, it takes the agency of The BBC Trust and Ofcom to unravel what ‘really happened’ for the public, not the BBC. And it was The BBC Trust who asked the BBC to make a formal apology.

What this is about is the BBC being open to its shareholders, the public; being much more responsive, faster. The BBC is often compared to that great liner The Queen Mary; it takes a long time to turn it around. The BBC must listen, acknowledge and respond more to audiences, and in different ways. An official announcement is also incredibly old-style. If someone from Radio 2 management had responded instantly, via the website, for example, in real time, would this have reduced the amount of complaints received  from the public?

Interestingly most of the complaints came from older members of the audience, suggesting Brand was out of step with his audience (who are mainly over 35 years of age). However there were also a huge number of complaints from people who hadn’t even heard the show. So I suggest this is not about the show at all, it’s about the BBC’s audience wanting the BBC to reply, in a timely manner, appropriately…oh and it’s also about salaries.

I was speaking with others at a NESTA event tonight, ‘Youth-led Innovation at Channel 4 and the BBC’. Geoffrey Goodwin, who runs Slink, the new BBC site for Teens, and Matt Locke, who commissions content for Channel Four talked about how they are led by the youth audience when creating content. I spoke about how BBC Children’s and the University of Westminster had used children as consultants to test the BETA version of Adventure Rock, the BBC’s new virtual world for children.

What came out of the discussion at the end of the session were the old chestnuts:

1. How to involve creative audiences while still being a professional content provider.

2. The cost of facilitating engagement is high i.e. you don’t get this stuff for free, and if you are the publisher, then you have responsibilities to the audience e.g. to provide facilitators or moderators at the very least.

3. How do you maintain the quality of the shared space, through moderation, or governance?

4. Who decides what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ content, the producer or the creative audiences?

As I said, these are just some of the questions all content makers face if the audience are invited to take part, to chat, to upload content and to co-produce. My suggestion is to find some kind of shared governance system, between the audience and the producers. That’s easy to say and hard to do, particularly in the wake of the AOL case…

Nobody has talked about the AOL case for a while. Remember, back in 1995, and again in 1999, AOL was taken to court in the USA by their own Community Leaders (volunteer commuity members) who wanted to be compensated for the free time they lost helping AOL run their social media. I had forgotten about the AOL case until today when I was finishing off the results chapter of my thesis and wanted to cite the case. A brief Google search brought up this report from Wired Magazine, 1999, at the start of the case and this website created by the Lawyers acting for the AOL claimants. You can read for yourself about the whole thing.

The case is still going on, the 7th July 2008 was the deadline for disgruntled ex-AOL Community Leaders to come forward if they wanted to be added to the roll of claimants or plaintiffs. How many claimants is not mentioned on the website run by their Attorneys, but it may be a significant number. When the legal proceedings begin again, as it appears it may do soon, what will the knock-on effect be? If the American courts find against AOL, will that affect Channel 4 and the BBC who are experimenting with the audience as the co-producers of content?

Hmmm tricky….

Nigel Phillips from London South Bank University has just sent me a link to a discussion about the moderation of discussions about Spore.  An unfortunate user was told by a moderator that if he continued to talk about a particular topic to do with Spore, his game would be deactivated…’virtual death’, if you like, in the virtual space. A spokesperson from Electronic Arts has since given an update saying it was an unfortunate communication error.

This illuminates an interesting question, who should be representing your organisation when engaging with users…the moderators, or someone else? My take on it has always been that organisations who run online environments which have some sense of ’shared space’ (i.e. your company + the users/customers/audience), should have some staffers, like the Liaisons in Second Life, who help people around. Moderators are great, but they are doing a different job than liaison people, or ‘hosts’, as I call them.

The other thing to think about is that once you have launched a shared space environment, you commit your company to some level of democracy; both you and your users have rights and responsibilities. The folks at Garden Party, a new virtual world for children were telling me the other day that the more their staff engage with the children (setting up games, and creating a nice place), the more the children love it…just like the real world then?

I have just come back from Showcommotion, the children’s media conference in Sheffield, UK. One session, which I moderated, (Welcome To My World) was devoted to virtual worlds for children; the hall was packed. On the 22nd May the preliminary research findings from the research project on Adventure Rock were presented at the Children in Virtual Worlds Conference jointly organised by the University of Westminster’s CAMRI research institute and BBC Children’s. 330 delegates attended the conference and the place was, again, buzzing. It seems the future is very bright for those who are getting into this virtual space, or is it?

Some companies, and some CEOs seems to be doing their research and continuing to keep abreast of market changes and how the market works, Michael Smith, the CEO of MindCandy (who have just launched Moshi Monsters) for example. I have been continually impressed by his grip on what’s going on; presenting very detailed analyses of the different functionality and business models coming on stream to support virtual worlds for children (there are over 150 presently in development). But this will not be true of many companies and the market won’t stand the amount of businesses who are launching virtual worlds for children. Adrian Woolard (now Head of Innovation Culture at the BBC) put this very succinctly in his closing address at the Children in Virtual Worlds Conference; “There can’t be a community that can cope with 220 of them.” At the moment many of these new ventures are backed by VC money, but going into a possible recession, how many VCs will stick with it? The revenue streams and business models are going to have to be robust.

The ever reliable and useful The Motley Fool began pumping out articles such as Five Ways to Prepare For A Recession back in September, 2007; they advised cutting back on household expenses by 30%. This means (as we all know) things like trips, holidays and outings as well as everything else.

One thing which came out of the research project I am just completing was how much children enjoyed exploring Adventure Rock and other virtual worlds which provide ‘outside’ virtual landscapes or stimulating and innovative places to visit online. This may be due to the reduction in how far children are allowed to explore the outside world, perhaps this is due to ‘paranoid parenting’ (See Frank Furedi’s Book of the same name) or the fact that children have less free time? If this is true, then the availability of virtual places to play and virtual worlds to explore may prove to be a recession-proof solution to entertaining children. Of course this happy scenario supposes these things:

1. The industry produces great virtual worlds for children with strong narratives and good management of the immersive space.

2. Tanya Byron’s recent report ‘Safer Children in a Digital World’ doesn’t alarm parents, but goes some way to reassure them that there are ways to look after children in virtual worlds.

3. The VCs stick with the producers working in this new industry, giving them time to sort out a robust range of revenue streams (which seems to be happening).

4. Everybody decides to quietly disagree with Professor Susan Greenfield (’Modern Technology is Changing The Ways our Brains Work, says neuroscientist’)

My Moshi Monster is called Mirepoix, if anyone wants to play?

I have been hugely busy (again…) There’s a lot going on, isn’t there, in this line of  work.

A conference then, titled Children In Virtual Worlds, for both those interested in virtual worlds for children and those interested in virtual worlds in toto. The aim is to encourage the development and understanding of virtual worlds for children, in the UK. A second aim is to draw together producers and researchers to share knowledge and experience on this subject. It’s important to have lots of age-suitable social media where children can learn digital social literacy (to coin a phrase) before they venture out from those specialist environments to the social networks for Teens.

Here’s the invitation:

Children in Virtual Worlds, Conference, May 2008

BBC Children’s and the University of Westminster invite you to the first conference in the UK to draw together producers and researchers working on virtual worlds and immersive gaming environments for children aged 7-11 online.
 
Keynote speakers include Richard Deverell, Controller, BBC Children’s and Dr Adrian Woolard, Head of Innovation, BBC Future Media and Technology. Other speakers include representatives from Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters, and Lego Universe; Prof David Gauntlett (University of Westminster), Lizzie Jackson (University of Westminster), Dr Diane Carr (Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media), Marc Goodchild (Head of Interactive and On Demand, BBC Children’s), Aleks Krotoski (Guardian Unlimited), Tamara Littleton (eModeration.com) and Paul Massey (K&L Gates). In addition to the panels and presentations there will be demonstrations of technology to do with virtual worlds and 3D media.
 
The conference will be of interest to academics, producers, online community managers, game creators, teachers, and technologists. It aims to facilitate the exchange of ideas between producers and academics on virtual and immersive media for children and to stimulate the production of high quality, creative, social media content for children in the UK.

When: Thursday 22nd May, 10.00am – 5.30pm

Where: The University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS

To register go to www.ChildrenInVirtualWorlds.org.uk

I hope you can come along.