sinéad's lifestream

If you’re like me, passionate about everything web related but can’t justify spending €100′s on conferences like FOWA or Build then you probably love barcamps as much as I do.

You’ll also love the free web technology conference – the dot conf - being hosted by the National College of Ireland on July 22nd. It’s a fantastic opportunity to go and listen to some industry experts and a great way for NCI to promote their new MSc in Web Technologies course.

There is a diverse list of speakers, from journalists, educators, web professionals and technology advocates – all experts in their fields. As well as some “deep dive” sessions (hands-on workshops).

Personally I’m really looking forward to checking out the National E-learning Laboratory, who recently published some pretty interesting data on what Irish people pay attention to when using Facebook.

Conferences like these are a great networking opportunity (especially if you are self employed or “between projects” at the moment). Bring you business cards and wear your hottest geek tshirt, you just never know who you might bump into.

NCI is based in the IFSC – possibly one of the easiest places to get to in Dublin, so there’s no excuse not to attend.

Back when I was studying for my degree and my masters I always got really excited about any project or essay that allowed me to read and reference the work of Dr. Jennifer Preece. If you have studied interaction design you will no doubt have come across her book “Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction” but the work of Dr. Preece that always completely absorbed me was her perspectives on the relationship between usability and sociability, particularly the impact of usability on the design and management of online communities.

If I could choose any person to be my research mentor it would be Dr. Preece. This woman has a 35 page CV online describing her incredible academic career. As early as 1975 she was working on e-learning initiatives in the UK and after completing her PhD studies in 1985 she pursued research focused on ground-breaking topics such as information systems, computer mediated communication, human?computer interaction, and online communities. She eventually moved to the USA in 1996 to lecture in the University of Maryland Baltimore County, in the Information Systems Department. Today she is the Dean of this department, supporting a long list of PhD students. Her work has taken her all around the globe, she has published hundreds of papers and authored numerous HCI books. She has achieved so much, in what had been a traditionally male dominated field. Her career is certainly something to aspire to.

The Only Real Social Media Expert

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A quick request from a final year MSc Cyberpsychology student, it would be great if you could fill out his quick survey for his post graduate thesis and also forward this on to any Irish Facebook users over the age of 24.

My name is Graham and I am doing a thesis on Facebook usage. The following is a link to a secure survey that I have made, asking basic Facebook usage questions and also incorporating a short personality questionnaire.

Open The Survey In A New Window

The whole survey will take no more than five minutes to do and is completely confidential; I can assure you that it is also anonymous. You need only type your initials. I would really appreciate it if you could find the time to do it, as I am struggling to get the required numbers. The only stipulation is that you are Irish, over 24, and have a facebbok profile. Thanking you in advance.

Graham Gilbert
Final Year MSc Cyberpsychology student at IADT

I’m rather interested in the results of this study and hopefully will be able to share the results of Graham’s study with you next year.

Independent movies have become synonymous with interesting soundtracks, recent favourites like Juno and cult classics like Empire Records benefited from this by being able to promote themselves to music lovers as well as movie lovers. The up coming indie romance movie 500 Days of Summer is no different and is using a wide variety of methods online to engage with both audiences.

The stars of the movie have posted a bizarrely funny little cinemash online, mixing together the new movie with a scene from Sid and Nancy, they’ve also filmed a really cool bank heist/movie musical homage, you can listen to the entire soundtrack streaming online, and there are countless behind the scenes videos available online that you’d usually have to wait to see on the DVD release. Obviously there’s the website and a Facebook page but they’ve also been running some interesting hybrid engagement ads on Facebook and have a widget you can add to your profile. They’ve definitely been attempting to encourage elements of crowdsourcing and tapping into the viral nature of information and social networks online.

It’s not often that an online campaign stands out to me in such a way that it’s worthy of more than just a tweet. The difference between this campaign in comparison to the many others before it is how feature rich it is and it gives the sense that there is an understanding of the behaviour and motivations of the target user – i.e if you want a user to help promote your movie, your brand, whatever, you need to give them something actually worthwhile in return and they will be much more open to reciprocation.

Visitors to the website or facebook page have the option of creating an alternative movie poster using their facebook photos (or new uploads) or create a  a highly personalised custom mix tape – features of the campaign which are engaging, and create something worth sharing – they can also access all the free content on the website. They’re also just about to launch a microsite where you can create a Spotify playlist reflecting various stages of the movie romance (with the best playlist wining the creator a ticket to all the UK festivals next summer).

By facilitating an engaging user experience that produces user generated content, you increase your chances of the user reciprocating i.e allowing the application to access their Facebook profile, to promote the movie with a profile update, or auto-tweeting a link to their personal mix tape, or embedding it in a blog post or sidebar etc. I personally spent about 20 minutes creating a mixtape, and quite enjoyed the experience and end result (pity those tracks are only 30min samples though).

This is just a great example of integrated movie marketing that takes a step further than those boresome movie microsites that allow you to distort your face into a Vulcan, a Transformer, a Terminator etc. and I’m hoping to see much more creativity like this in the near future.

A few weeks ago I had my first experience of running a Facebook Page, as we wanted to set one up for Culch.ie.

The primary goals of the Facebook Page were going to be the same as our Twitter account:

1. drive traffic to the site by informing followers/fans that a new blog post had been published,

2. tweet/update-status with exclusive competitions,

3. and interact with followers/fans with a little bit of fun and frolics.

These goals have been easily succeeded on Twitter, but the Facebook Page has been far more difficult and it has been a serious source of frustration for me. All of my Facebook Page energy has been spent trying to achieve the first goal. Something easily achieved on Twitter, thanks to Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed syncs our RSS feed with our Twitter account, so every time  one of our many authors updates the blog, the title and a link to the post  is tweeted. A significant amount of traffic for the site comes from Twitter (this is partially down to followers retweeting links) and we had hoped to achieve same on Facebook.

Facebook offers a number of applications for user profiles, but the majority of these will not work with Facebook Pages, including the Twitter application (and other popular apps like Tweetsync). Initially I discovered that the only solution to goal no.1 was to allow Facebook to import blog posts into their notes functionality, but by having your blog posts imported into Facebook your content is being copied into their walled garden, I’ve discussed before about the negative repercussions of this and have been reluctant to allow this to continue. It also gives rise to privacy and content rights concerns.

After trying and testing numerous Facebook applications I finally stumbled upon one that actually works with Facebook Pages, though it requires a less than direct approach.

The Selective Twitter Status application is designed to allow you to update your Facebook status, but only with a tweet ending/starting with the hashtag “#fb”. This proves quite useful when combined with the Twitterfeed option of adding a piece of text to every autotweet. For example you can set it so the text “New Blog Post…” appears at the beginning of each autotweet (so your followers know the link is to your own blog). However, by setting it to post “#fb” to each autotweet, Selective Twitter Status will then recognise the hashtag and push the tweet to your Facebook status. Also, so as to not pollute our main Twitter account with a hashtag meaningless to our followers, a seperate Twitter account was set up for this rss feed alone.

Now that goal no.1 has been succeeded with the Culch.ie Facebook Page there will be far more time/energy for goals 2 and 3, and I’m hoping the fan numbers will soon rival that of the Twitter account.

This is exactly the kind of problem solving I thrive on, so at least the frustration ended in a solution as well as few lesson about Facebook and Twitter along the way. I hope this is of some help to other frustrated Facebook Page users.

I’ve been a daily user of Google Reader for the past year, using it to keep track of all the blogs I read. Daily use has meant that I’ve been acutely aware of each new feature that has been gradually added over the last few months. Usually these are welcome, but as Google attempts to add more social features I fear they are reducing the ability of authors and readers to follow conversations spawned from blog posts – which is considered a traditional and necessary feature of the blogosphere. That’s not to say that Google are the only ones doing this, both Facebook and Twitter have elements to them that is contributing to this.

For a long time Google Reader has allowed users to share blog posts of interest to friends  that were also using GR and slowly but surely I am starting to build up a list of friends that I share with and they reciprocate in kind. This is a form of social bookmarking, but unlike sites like Digg the author of the blog post cannot track how many times their work is shared, or by whom. GR also now features the ability to leave comments on blog posts and – at least from a blog author’s perspective – is unwelcome, because these conversations are kept private. Private social bookmarking and private blog commenting has negative implications because trackbacks and blog comments are an integral part of the blogging experience and can reinforce an author’s motivation and drive to continue writing.

Facebook and Twitter also provide you with the ability to social bookmark and comment, but again without  direct trackback links, so a blog author can never tell who is linking to their work, and misses out on many of the conversations spawned.

The lack of trackbacks and private blog comment conversations on Google Reader, Facebook and Twitter is  completely irresponsible but is in no way the fault of the reader. Google and Facebook especially understand the value of user generated content, today the most prolific of which is the simple conversation – as demonstrated by the rise of Twitter. By poaching blog comments and putting them behind private walls they are of course trying to keep their users within their own walled networks, which in the long run, could discourage bloggers from continuing to write.

Yes some of us write for ourselves, but many write for an audience, and it would be tragic for a blogger to stop writing because their audience had started privately, rather than publically, encouraging them.

Music Marketing on Social Networking Sites

Have you discovered one of your favourite music artists by chance on a social networking site? How do you feel about friend requests from bands you’ve never heard of? Can you recall a really outstanding marketing approach from a music artist on a social networking site? Lots of questions and one survey which is trying to find out the answer:  Fansights 2.0

Fansights 2.0 – The Survey

To introduce myself: My name is Kathrin and like Sinéad I am a master student at IADT and right now running a survey as part of my master thesis. My survey Fansights 2.0 is about music marketing on social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Bebo, Facebook) and the perception of these marketing techniques among music fans. I am still looking for music fans and music promoters who would be willing to take part in my survey. If you could take a few minutes to fill out the survey or pass it on to interested friends I would really appreciate it. You can also drop me a message under www.myspace.com/fansights and you will receive a copy of the results once they are published.

Thanks a mill to Sinéad for posting this and to everybody interested in my research project!

As part of the Darklight Festival over the weekend a number of symposiums were held to discuss and debate various popular topics related to the online world. I was invited to be a member of the audience by the organisers and found the experience to be rather… interesting.

Privacy vs. Publicity in the Virtual World

Daniel Solove, author of “The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor and Privacy on the Internet” (available for free here) opened this discussion with various anecdotes pertaining to the negative effects of personal details being shared online, either on purpose i.e. through your personal blog, or without the person’s consent e.g. the Star Wars Kid. Coming from a background in law, Solove suggests that the only way to curtail personal details being posted online without your consent is by the threat of legal action being more heavily employed.

“Be responsible”

Solove suggests that allowing anonymity online is irresponsible as it removes any control we have over our personal data (e.g. intimate personal details being posted online without consent) and that the law can only do so much to provide protection. For example, while it may be possible for a photographer to have an unapproved photo removed from an unlicensed website, the individual in the photo has no legal standing. This is because copyright law is much more powerful than privacy law.

“Intertwined with the lives of others”

Solove described how we all have expectations of privacy and anonymity in public, despite always being exposed and how this notion of privacy is mistakenly expected online. Claiming that 50% of bloggers were under the age of 19, he described these Internet users as “Generation Google” – individuals that have had their lives chronicled online, leaving behind fragments of their past that are pervasive and destructive to their future.

Opinion

I disagree with Solove’s judgment that anonymity is irresponsible on the part of ISP’s and websites that encourage and allow it. Anonymity online has always provided Internet users with a constructive means for liberal expression and play, without the risk of social impairment. Though anonymity provides users the facility to post lies online without any apparent risk (except in a serious case where your IP address might be used against you), the power of an anonymous message is certainly not as strong as a message coming from a reputable source.

“Generation Google” is something that I myself am a part of, but it is a heavily constructed and thought out self, which is something anyone reading a blog or a social networking profile needs to consider. Using google search results as a basis for a decision on a job or college applicant is something that I would consider irresponsible, and lazy. Nothing we post online is a 100% true reflection of ourselves, imagine a youthful, boastful comment left on a friend’s social networking profile that might actually be sarcastic or part of an in-joke. It’s all about context, and if the context is unknown then the information is invalid. It is lazy to think otherwise.

Panel Discussion

Following this keynote address was a panel discussion chaired by Caroline Campbell, featuring Jim Carroll, Cormac Callanan, Niall Larkin (read his thoughts on this symposium here) and Damien “almost blogs for a living” Mulley. Daithí Mac Sithigh was also in the audience and has written up a great summary of the panel discussion.

“Whatever goes on the Internet stays on the Internet”

The most prevalent message from this one-sided discussion was that everything you do online is being used to build behavioural profiles for marketing and advertising. On Facebook (and probably other social networking websites) your actions are logged and combined with your profile information for contextual marketing and advertising. Sophisticated data mining tools are used in Gmail and other free online services. Law enforcement in the US use these data mining techniques to track down possible terrorists and it was suggested that all of these combined could lead to surveillance and stalking by commercial and non-commercial companies for negative reasons, debt-collection is an example used by a member of the audience.

Privacy in this instance is not about the actual collection of the data, it’s what happens to it afterwards. Suggestions were made that it would be preferable to have access to this profile and to be notified when your data is being accessed and by whom. However, when Mulley asked the audience “Who actually cares?” a minority raised their hands.

Opinion

In my opinion, many of the members of the panel seemed to be scaremongering the audience. It would have been a more interesting discussion if even one of the members of the panel was under 30 (correct me if I’m wrong). All of them seemed quite outraged by the idea that their personal details and behaviour online could be used to help companies make more money. I would argue that there are many positive things about this type of data mining, for example, attempts (unsuccessful so far) at contextualising advertising on websites such as Facebook.

Contextual ads make advertisements entertaining and informative. Personally, I’d rather this than being bombarded with irrelevant ads (like when I watch television). However, this does not mean that the advertising is more successful because of this. Despite the fear of behavioural profiles being sold to marketing and advertising executives, these sets of data are in no way accurate at predicting human behaviour. Behaviour changes on a daily basis and can’t be actualised using selective pieces of information we ourselves post into the likes of social networking websites. Our reactions to advertising and products can change based on far too many variables for a behavioural profile to predict.

Websites like Facebook and Google give us a service and our payment to them is our content. Without our content these websites are completely useless and no-one would be willing to pay for them. It’s naive for anyone to think that you can get something for nothing online and if you’ve nothing to hide, why be so afraid of a little data mining? How does this even affect your every day life? I would argue that it doesn’t. It’s a pity the panel were so strongly of the opinion that it was 100% negative. I do however agree that users signing up to these services might need to be informed more readily of the fact that their data might be used in this manner.

The question is – Do you care? (Take a second to Take the poll or leave a comment below).

I just spotted this rather interesting advertisement on Facebook. I wonder if my own face will be appearing along side the products and services that I am a fan of. I wonder what Tim thinks of his endorsement.

Tim is in my network of friends, so I assume this is why this ad has been targeted towards me. I must admit, it got my attention pretty quick and I’m very impressed. It is neither intrusive nor annoying because I actually care what my friends online might be a fan of, though, for those on FB with 100′s of friends they don’t actually know, this might be a tad annoying, especially if they are incompatible taste wise. Not like Timmy and I!

It’s a pity the ad wasn’t targeted enough to know that I’m already a fan of Phantom.

It’s a real pity that it has come to this, but I’ve decided to set my social networking profiles to private – meaning, you can’t see me ,unless I can see you! Though I’ve never accepted a friend request from someone I didn’t know in one way or another.

The reason? Well, as if this wasn’t scary enough… I have come to the realisation that although I can control what *I* say online, I can NOT control what my friends say (those vile fiends!). I’m quite certain that I don’t want any prospective employers viewing the disturbing genital-based-whiteboard drawings they’ve been known to doodle or the perpetual cock-blocks.