Wholesome Social Media

• I like this one. A "terrorist suspect" decides to put his entire life online to stay out of Guantanamo. I’m sure they’ll still find a way. "You made an anti US remark between the 9:18 espresso and getting on the 325 bus at 9:23. You’re going down."
• Here’s a mighty useful piece of software: Ibackup. Pay a few quid a month, Install it, within 5 minutes it’s backing everything up online, every night. Brilliant. I can finally go to sleep knowing that even if my flat goes up in flames I won’t lose all of last year’s invoices. Phew.
• Cory Doctorow (congrats on the little one by the way!) on why personal data is as scary as nuclear waste.
• And while we’re on the subject of nuclear waste, check out these designs for a system of signs and monuments to let future generations know to steer clear of particularly nasty areas. Beautiful.

Here’s a little nugget which could turn out to be something big. Google have announced their new Social Graph API.

In layman’s terms the social graph is the representation of me and my contacts, and how we relate to each other (the friends list on Facebook is a good example). Problem is, you build one set in Facebook, one in Myspace, another in Twitter, yawn, you get the picture. Google’s API will mean they’re all nicely tied together so you only need to build your contacts up once and any app can use them. (That’s a vast oversimplification but you get the idea).

I’ll let Josh Porter explain better.

I’m wondering what this means for Facebook. When you think about it, Facebook’s major USPs are

1. Everyone’s spent a buckets of time signing up to it and building their social graphs (admit it, that’s the most fun part!)
2. You can run applications on it.
3. You can send each other messages.

But what happens when any online application knows who your friends are? Why are we going to need Facebook any more? What about when your email program links to your social graph - why would I bother using Facebook’s crappy messaging function? As Pete Ashton was ranting today, It doesn’t even let us search messages! Grr.

And then there’s Opensocial. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next year or so.

If you’re to take one thing from this, buy your domain name now (e.g. antoniogould.com). In the future we’re all going to be defined by our URLs.

I had the pleasure of attending the mighty Future of Web Apps late last year on behalf of 4Talent.

The article’s now online (finally!).

Really looking forward to the next one (and hoping I can stay longer next time).

Myself and 4Pioneers partner-in-crime Nick Lockey went to the World Entrepreneurship Summit last week at the invitation of Oli Barrett and Steve Moore (thanks again both).

Some really interesting stuff going on - the two highlights of the day were Kevin Spacey’s fantastic talk on the community centred business model of the Old Vic (apparently it has NO arts funding whatsoever - that’s some achievement) and the brilliant session hosted by Oli on enterprise education. This was really useful for us in the context of 4Pioneers which we’re developing around that exact subject.

Most interestingly for me, almost everything I heard had something to do with social enterprise. I was quite surprised as I don’t think it was a theme for the day. Are we really getting to a point where it’s becoming natural practice for entrepreneurs to create a social benefit in everything they do, as well as making profit?

I’d like to think so but I’m not yet convinced - I still meet people to this day who don’t believe that humans are causing climate change so we’ve got some way to go yet.

It was very encouraging though and has confirmed for me even more strongly that social enterprise is going to be massive in the next 10 years.

Myself and a few of my Midlands digital compadres got a mention in Broadcast Mag this week which was nice.

Pete does a much better job than I can of writing it up so I’ll leave it to him to tell you more.

Wow, apparently half the bestselling works of fiction in Japan were written on mobile phones! It’s all about the "keitai shousetsu" apparently - those guys must be quicker at texting than me. They must also have seriously sore thumbs.

I think there’s something interesting in this. For me, books (and maybe newspapers) were going to be two of the last formats to go digital, mainly because accessing the digital version is so different from accessing the traditional one (unlike music where listening to an Ipod is not really any different from listening to a portable CD player).

Every time I mention ebooks I always get the same response. "But I like reading books - I hate reading screens". I don’t disagree of course, but I think that this area is going to take a huge step forward with items like Amazon’s Kindle, coming to the UK next year. It’s a portable reading device - I haven’t seen one yet but I understand that the screen is designed to mimic ink on paper and is very easy on the eye.

I can see myself using something like this. Not necessarily for novels, but the idea of having all my RSS feeds updated on it for me to read on the bus / tube / in bed is very cool.

I love books, and think I’ll always buy novels in the traditional format. But I like feeds too, and the idea of putting these together is going to be killer.

If you’re interested in keeping up with the ever fascinating minutiae of my life (and Facebook updates just don’t cut the mustard) I now have a Twitter feed at twitter.com/antoniogould.

Enjoy!

I went to a C4 event last week about the legal issues around collaboration and Intellectual Property.

Nothing particularly earthshattering to report; however I must say I was surprised with what seemed to be a rather negative attitude towards Creative Commons (a new set of alternatives to Copyright, some of which allow others a greater freedom to distribute and re-use content).

Maybe it’s because the debate was dominated by a lawyer, but for me the prevailing question seemed to be "why would anyone want to give their rights away?"

Specifically, a number of people seemed to imply that putting any of your content for free devalues everything you do in the future. Excuse me? What?

As far as I’m concerned it’s going to get harder and harder to sell content direct. In fact it’s going to be hard enough just getting noticed in this world where everyone’s producing. Any promotion is good promotion. Getting your stuff out there is totally vital to building a name. 

Creative commons means that, if I choose, I as a producer have a way of legally allowing others to remix, copy and do whatever they want with my work.  If it’s done properly however, I can request that it’s always be attributed to me.

I think.there’s something really important about this. Going back to my last post - remixing, copying and attributing is vital to social media.  We need to have a way of telling people what they can and can’t do with our stuff. Hopefully most of them will take some notice.

Yes, people can exploit Intellectual Property, but they’re going to do that however you license it .

And as MC Paula LeDeau pointed out: "As a creative person you’re at far greater risk of obscurity.". I couldn’t agree more.

I’m making the fifth and final New Media 4Cast  at the moment. This episode will look at social media for creative people. It’ll be a good way of bringing together everything we’ve been discussing over the last year.

For this episode I’ve interviewed two of Brum’s most illustrious social media gurus Pete Ashton and Nick Booth. They both made a similar point which really struck me.

The crux of it was about elements of social media not having to be finished off, complete and polished. Whereas traditional media (newspapers, TV shows, films) rely on being produced in this way, with social media the depth comes from how these individual pieces are linked together, built on and discussed on to create something that is a whole.

The problem is, so many people are scared witless of blogging and spend far too long worrying about whether their posts are right, complete or perfect.

I was delivering a lecture yesterday to a group of creative industry types and this point seemed to hit the button. I think a lot of early stage bloggers become gripped by fear as I did when I first started. "What if people don’t agree with this?" / "What if I change my mind?" / "Will this sound stupid in 3 years".

My advice is simple. Screw it, just start writing.

Thanks to everyone from The Hive at Nottingham Trent Uni who came to the "Social Media Makeover" session yesterday.

Some interesting discussion points around how to get attention and openness vs protection of Intellectual Property. Thanks also to our guinea pig  Will Baxter and his  "Around the World in 80 Handbags".

Do let me know if you take on any of the ideas - even if you just set up an RSS reader!

Some extra links which weren’t in the resources:

• Etsy.com
• Jessica Poundstone post

If you have any further questions, please post them here. It’d be good to get a discussion going.