OZIA has come and gone for another year. It’s a great conference, not only for excellent selection of interesting speakers, but it was so damn comfortable and friendly. I love love love the round table set up. I know you can’t fit as many people into the room, but I just find that you get so damn tired after two days bundled up into rows balancing a note pad on your knee.

About my presentation
Huge Data, Little Screen is about mobile search. More specifically, assisting users to find content on your site through the browser, using what ever hand set you may have. It doesn’t talk about SEO or much on the more broad challenges of mobile phone development – there is plenty of that information out there. Instead this presentation focuses on the interaction models for search on mobile.

About OZIA

• OZIA09 Program
• Ruth Ellison did a great write up of all the speakers on her blog.
• See photos: Flickr OZIA09.
• What people said about it: #OZIA09 on twitter

]]> http://everyonedeletestom.com/index.php/2009/10/08/ozia09-mobile-search/feed/ 1 http://everyonedeletestom.com/index.php/2009/09/10/great-advice-i-received-today/ http://everyonedeletestom.com/index.php/2009/09/10/great-advice-i-received-today/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:32:22 +0000 melissa http://everyonedeletestom.com/?p=109 Ok, so I’m going to speak at Oz-IA in October… and I’m definitely one of those slightly nervous types. The conference is being held at Star City Casino.

Lunch date advice:
“Oh well if you screw it up you can always drink and gamble afterwards… just don’t drink and gamble before”..

Although, maybe just one shot of tequila?

More advice:
Many have said that it is all in the preparation, just knowing your stuff really well and rehearsing.

Me: “I guess the problem for me is that I really don’t like repetition and revision. It’s a bit boring.”

@tinyavatar : “Well… what don’t you like more – repetition, or…”

Me: “looking like an idiot?”

Refreshing.

A fly by history of information management. Beginning with how tribal cultures created categorical systems for understanding the world around them, through to the use of symbols, the first written word and the evolution of hypertext, a connected web and just who inspired Google’s pagerank.

“Tim would have launched the web in 1984, if he didn’t crash his hard drive… just goes to show you should back up your work. It took him 5 years to re-write it.”

Interesting tid-bits:

• Folk Taxonomy is not the same as a folksonomy.
  The former is the anthropological study of the classification / naming conventions by cultures for understanding the relationships between things such as animals and plants.  The latter is when people collaboratively tag stuff on computers.
• Jewelery was used as an information system by using symbols to indicate social standing and the wearers relationship to others in the community. The use of this system came about when people began living in larger groups than 5 – 15 or so. This occurred during the time Alex describes as the Ice Age Information Explosion, around 30-40,000 years ago.
• The first forms of handwriting we know of emerged around 5000 BC on Bullae, by the Sumerians. (Now the south of Iraq)
• Charles Cutter wrote an essay in 1883 imagining the library of 1983 called “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983” in which he predicted the library would have desks equiped with keyboards and little bits of wire connecting them to a catalog that would call up and display books for the user to read.
• Paul Otlet was the creator of the universal decimal system. He had imagined a sort of paper internet, where not only would a catalog asist people to find a book, but it revealed the content of the book and its relationship to other books as well as the history of the document’s use, who has read, refereneced etc. His work took place in 1934, much of it was lost to to World War 2. A video on his 1934 vision of an internet is below… truely amazing.

• Check out the memex, a large microfilm desk which is considered one of the conceptual precursors to the web from Vannevar Bush’s essay As We May Think (1945)

Vannevar Bush's Memex

• Eugene Garfield inventor of the Science Citation Index, which is a system for acknowledging the weight of links between various documents in the footnotes. It is considered that his work heavily influenced the founders of google and their page rank system.
• Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse also author of an eassy called Augmenting Human Intelect. In 1968 he delivered a presentation often refered to as “The Mother of All Demos.” This demo was the first to demonstrate the mouse, copy and paste, creation of files, folders, links, video conferencing and email etc.

Some of Alex’s references:

Glut, Alex Wright
- Mastering Information Throughout the Ages
- http://www.alexwright.org/glut/

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff
- What categories reveal about the mind.

Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger
- The Power of the New Digital Disorder
- http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/

Facetag
- Working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool
- http://www.facetag.org/

Some references I found:
Alex speaking at Google Masterclass
- The Web That Wasn’t: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8&NR=1

Wikipedia’s Timeline of Hypertext Technology
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_hypertext_technology

Self explains that Obama knew he was never going to raise money for his campaign in the traditional way.

“What Obama did,” Self says “was to gather 10,000 people together at a rally and ask each and every one of them to use their mobile phones to sms a number and pledge five bucks”. Certainly not a big ask but there you have it – $50,000 in 50 seconds.

This sort of activity is a great example of how Obama focused on a grass roots campaign rather than doing the traditional fancy dinner party for maximum donations of $2300.

Self says that once voters consider pledging $5 it is easier for them to consider stepping it up to $10 and $20. By lowering the barrier to entry and asking voters to pledge an amount they could afford, they generated an enormous amount of good will into the campaign. Voters now had a greater vested interest in the candidate they had reached into their pocket to support. These voters were more likely to remain informed, speak about the campaign to friends, neighbors and colleagues.

The focus of any campaign is on money, message and mobilization. By valuing small contributions the Obama campaign knew that this would have an incredible impact on mobilizing their message. During the campaign US$770 million was raised, and 35% of that was online. 68 million Americans door knocked or made phone calls to encourage votes for Obama. The campaign generated 1800 videos online with over some 50 million views and 6 million email subscribers were acquired by promising those people they would be the first to know who Obama elected as Vice President.

Other media assets Blue State Digital were responsible for during the campaign were:
Personal fundraising pages:  http://my.barackobama.com/

Fight the Smear – a website dedicated to fighting rumors during the campaign (rather than rely on traditional media to fight the smears for you): http://www.fightthesmears.com/

Seven tips to building relationships online:

1. Don’t ask for too much at once
   Relationships aren’t that different online as offline, Self explains. You wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on the first date, so don’t go for the full hog off the bat online either.
2. Make the best use of timing
   During the campaign the most amount of money was donated the day after Sarah Palin’s first speech in which she flamed community organisations.
3. Be authentic
   For example, emails are personal. Make it real. A real person wrote it, so get them to sign their name.
4. Transparency
   For example, Blue State Digital created hundreds of video journals from Obama, to campaign managers chatting about how it was all going.
5. Lower your barrier to entry
   Give people multiple options for how they want to be involved so that they can elect an activity that is meaningful and accessible to them.
6. Raise your expectations
   Begin with asking users for something simple, like a sign up, then you might ask them to perform an action such as refer a friend. Later, ask them to write a blog post or by a product. You get the idea.
7. Measure everything
   Measurement is really important so that you can know what worked and what didn’t. Test and refine along the way.

And with that, Self ends by explaining how savvy audiences are. He encourages building relationships with your user base from a good, genuine and passionate place. Otherwise, it will not work.

Now is the age of free. People expect not to pay.

Newspapers need to do more than repackage their content for online purposes.

Successful journalism on the web depends on:

1. Multimedia Story telling
   We now have more tools, but that doesn’t mean we should use all of them all the time, ask yourself “What is the best way to tell a story?” It may still be text.
   • Users at the Guardian have shown they will be willing to scroll through 100 photos; even on a slow connection.
   • Little show the broadcast of the plane that crashed into the Hudson as a good example of multimedia story telling.
   • Guardian now has 8 video studios in London. It cost $300,00 per hour for live television, but only $140 for live streaming on the net.
2. Database journalism
   Access public databases for rich statistics. Can be harnessed to add depth to a story or utalised in interactive news media content.
3. Reader engagement
   Post.com was the first to put comments on their articles
4. Distribution
   Learn to think of your self as a curator. What happens to the story after it is published, where else will it appear and how will people share it.

Notes…. on what they had to say

Liz Jackson, Four Corners

• It is no longer a question of traditional media being elite over online as all media have an online presence now.
• Online media adds the capacity for audience to not only watch and read but participate.
• Pressure to simplify messages has always been there – this is not new or unique to online media.
• There is a concern that resources are getting driven into refreshing content constantly rather than investigative journalism.
• Online has opened up the opportunity for a broad range of voices which is a relief. 

Peter Maceroy, former Media Watch

• Isn’t surprised by low brow content like quizzes and weird spots on SMH, Tele etc as it is certainly present in the papers too.
• Concerned that online is stealing advertising revenue from the papers and is concerned about a fall in circulation of papers
• Is concerned about the pressure on traditional media (views it as under threat)
• On the other hand, believes that journalists have only been looking at online as another delivery system for their content and would like to see it being harnessed as a new way of interacting with content.

Dylan Walsh, SMH Online

• Illustrated last weeks most viewed stories, and while the top one was entertainment related, the other four were serious/ hard news stories.
• Not too concerned by Paris and Britney being popular news
• Concern: speed over quality
• Concern: clicks over quality
• Highlights that online readers are new markets and that there is a small cross over in the people who buy paper and those who read online (20%)
• ¼ million papers per day and ½ million unique browsers (during the week)
• In one year smh.com.au grew from ½ million visitors per month to 6 million.
• Big question of how are we going to make consumers pay. New York Times closed its subscription model.
• We make 5 – 10% of revenue in advertising that the newspaper does.
• Worry that click phenomena is precise in its reporting which sends advertising into a frenzy and dictates the importance of content. Content is measured against what is more popular as opposed to what is good work.
• Concern at the high turn over with very little follow up stories. Eg, what if Watergate was a 2 part web story about five guys that got arrested.
• Closed with the sound slide of question time used as an illustration as how an interesting piece in the context of a website, with surrounding content is an opportunity to tell stories in a new way.

Jacqueline Green, http://www.electiontracker.net/

• Vibewire is a by young people for young people model. They run the election tracker which employs four young people to report on the election.
• Thinks that citizen journalism gives room for marginalised and young voiced. Too often adults are writing for other adults.
• Highlighted scenarios where citizen journalism has brought attention to issues that institutions wouldn’t touch. Ie, Matt Drudge (http://www.drudgereport.com/) breaking the Monika Lewinski story where others wouldn’t for fear of political and financial repercussions.
• Thinks that plurality of views is a good thing.
• Thinks that people hold views that are more diverse than what the SMH or Tele would reflect
• Has found a place online where traditional media had given her no space

Catherine Lumby, Uni NSW

• Showed Abu Ghraib prison images and highlighted that it isn’t that the atrocity happened that made these images so impactful it is the fact that ordinary people took these snaps to share with mates. It is that it highlights the possibilities for information now that people have access to the tools (technology) that enables these candid snaps to be distributed. Makes this war less clean looking than the controlled content that came out of the first Gulf War.
• There is a new power in amateur content in that it is less conscious and there is less intervention in its production. (ie, no editors and business agenda)
• Online media is an opportunity not a threat
• Who holds the right to determine what voices matter and where their place is?
• Who determines what serious news journalism is and what is dross?
• View that advertising models among young people will only be successful if you give  them something to entertain them or something that is useful.
• Online media provides an opportunity for new forms of story telling