Living Outside The Paywall

One refugee from The Times paywall is BabyBarista, a fictional account of a junior barrister practising at the English Bar. Author Tim Kevan explained:

"I have today withdrawn the BabyBarista Blog from The Times in reaction to their plans to hide it away behind a paywall along with their other content. Now don’t get me wrong. I have absolutely no problem with the decision to start charging. They can do what they like. But I didn’t start this blog for it to be the exclusive preserve of a limited few subscribers. I wrote it to entertain whosoever wishes to read it. Hence my decision to resign which I made with regret. I remain extremely grateful to The Times for hosting the blog for the last three years and wish them luck with their experiment."

The walled garden of proprietary content is doomed. I won’t link to anything inside a ‘paywall’, not because I'm against publishers making money but because the paywall may interfere with the reader's journey, and the publisher is unlikely to ever link back as part of a meaningful dialogue with those outside its bubble. I will only link to paid-for content when the payment process is seamless and there's a decent chance the publisher may link back. That's how the new media world works. Google and Facebook - about whom the newspapers complain most - succeed by facilitating how we use and generate content, not by bricking themselves in.

Image from EducatedNation

Social Media Icing On Old Media Cake

The social media do appear to be saving old media. For now.

According to the Pew Research Centre's New Media Index, 99% of stories linked to in blogs during the year to January 15, 2010 came from "legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks. And... the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post accounted for fully 80% of all links."

Of course, while you may be reading a blog that links to an 'old media' story, that doesn't necessarily mean you've bothered to read that story. And every minute you spend reading the blog is time you don't spend engaging directly with 'old media'. Yet the social media are a source of both links and evidence of what resonates with readers.

So the old media may still be baking the cake, but the social media are supplying the icing. And who likes cake without icing? [That's enough analogy now. Ed.]

The reason this dynamic may not last is that the old media seem to be ignoring the stories that resonate most amongst the social media. Pew found that "the social media tend to home in on stories that get much less attention in the mainstream press. And there is little evidence, at least [in the year to 15 January 2010] of the traditional press then picking up on those stories in response."

In fact, you might conclude from Pew's table above that the mainstream press ignored the scale of reader demand for news on politics, foreign events, science, technology, the environment, pop culture, 'oddball', gay issues, consumer news and education. And it's worth noting that news related to "gardening, sports or other hobbies" was not tracked.

It would be interesting to see whether this imbalance is rectified in the coming year. But if it is not, I wonder whether old media will find itself permanently losing readership in these areas?

If so, no more cake!

Image from Petit Pois

4891: Orwell Had It Backwards

Thanks to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, and the film adaptation, most of us over 20 have grown up with the threat of an omniscient, totalitarian Big Brother looming over us.

While this is a tragic reality for the residents of a few countries, for most it is not.

Yet many of us are obsessed with our own privacy, imagining it as a defence to control by organised crime lords, governments, a "New World Order" or Facebook. Others relish the illusory voyeurism in the melodramatic Big Brother television series, and the phoney 'privacy battles' conducted between celebrities and the tabloid media by agents and public relations advisors for commercial gain.

But it is actually the overwhelming dislosure of information about ourselves that defies control by any single institution (as does the inherent unpredictability of human behaviour). The Chinese government, in particular, seems to understand this. Sharing our preferences, desires, fears and concerns (if not our birth dates and passwords) via social, retail, political and other facilitators enables us to gain greater personal control of our own lives. That process results in services adapted to our own actual or desired behaviour rather than a service provider's bottom line or a political party's dogmatic manifesto. There are literally millions of examples of this dynamic at work. But consider how:

• The UK recently opted for a coalition government amidst scaremongering by 'big media' and the major political parties.
• Newspapers complain about our 'promiscuity' when it comes to their content, and our refusal to pay for that content online.
• Sharing more personal data often results in better markets, e.g. in consumer credit.
Our networks are always changing, both within platforms and between platforms - we create new networks and still newer ones, and leave old networks very quickly.

Of course, George Orwell was writing a cautionary tale rather than necessarily predicting the future, so we at least have him to thank for a vivid image of how society must not be allowed to develop. In the meantime, we should go on sharing information about ourselves, even if only as a last defence to totalitarian control.

Image from Online Social Networking

Steampunk Mobile

The arrival of mass personal digital communications in previously remote areas might teach us a lot about enabling people everywhere to gain greater control of their lives - particularly as those scenarios have remained free of the top-down institutional constraints imposed by many of our retail brands to solve their own problems rather than ours.

You don't need to be literate or numerate in the true sense to communicate in the mobile world. Even the more literate amongst us need help in deciphering symbols used by young people when text messaging. So, while mobile phone-based literacy and learning programmes are important in themselves, it is more important to understand how mobile phones enable people of low literacy everywhere to seize control of their lives.

For example, a great Babbage post on how mobile numbers are identities for many in India provides a critical insight into how people left behind by government and other institutions actually use the latest technology - as do M-Pesa and the technology hubs used by Africa's 'cheetah generation'. And EduTech cites a valuable insight that emerged from a study by Matt Kam for MILLEE using gaming apps to enable Indian children to acquire literacy:

"The use of educational games on the mobile phones facilitated new ties between participants across gender, caste and village boundaries, and the new social relationships that developed transferred to real world, non-gaming settings."

In other words, certain online games may improve social mobility.

Meanwhile, Adaptive Path has studied the mobile phone usability and design needs of people in rural India. Those people cited the following features and functionality as the most important to them:

- Calling
- Texting (using voice to text or with assistance)
- Music
- Camera*
- Microphone
- Speaker
- Airtime
- Battery Level
*While most research participants did not have mobile phones with cameras, this was cited as a desired feature.

Saving contact information was the single most challenging task for non-literate users to perform.

To remove the complexity of entering and saving data, Adaptive Design borrowed from industrial tracking processes to suggest enabling users to photograph a QR Code or 'MobilGlyph' that contains the unique data required. Of course, the process of producing accurate and reliable MobilGlyphs would also need to be efficiently administered.

Adaptive Design's approach to the challenge of handset design is even more intriguing. They found "there is a strong culture of reselling, re-purposing, cobbling, and repair throughout India and this is especially true in rural villages". So Adaptive Design turned to Steampunk which, they point out, "...reflects the design and craftsmanship of the Victorian era...

"Similar to the exposed inner workings of a motorcycle, works of art created to reflect the Steampunk genre possess a look of craftsmanship and cobbling. It’s an aesthetic that invites the touch of the human hand and it encourages engagement and fosters curiosity and play.

[This of course echoes with the 'architecture of participation' at the heart of Web 2.0 trend.]

Taking cues from Steampunk’s “hack-able” aesthetic, we made the phone look like an object that can be opened and tinkered with by exaggerating seams and making the mechanisms to open the device obvious... vibrant sound is an important part of Indian culture and ... We chose to emphasize these elements by giving them a larger portion of the phone’s physical real estate .... Gauges are commonly used to convey quantitative information on cars and motorcycles in rural India. We echoed these familiar interface elements to communicate battery level and airtime minutes. Finally, we drastically reduced the feature set of the phone, allowing us to assign each function a single button. We borrowed “stop” and “start” buttons from stereos and placed them on the side of the device. Taking cues from a radio dial, our Steampunk phone contains a scroll wheel — creating a strong and intuitive relationship between the physical interface element, the gesture, and the UI inside the screen."

It seems to me that this design makes the device simple and usable without dumbing it down. As Adaptive Design point out:

"Empathic design is not about forcing conventions and models on users that feel foreign, it’s about empowering users with technology that feels appropriate and familiar. Designers and user experience professionals have a responsibility to avoid viewing illiteracy as a deficiency, but as an important design consideration for a large portion of the world."

This is consistent with the need for investment rather than donations in developing regions, "characterized by mutual dignity and respect", as Kiva puts it.

By taking that approach, we stand to learn how to meet similar challenges on our own doorsteps.

Images from Adaptive Path

Lessons In Waste: Where Do Your Taxes Go?

Too late, we've learned that senior civil servants turned state's evidence on their New Labour masters, marking an audit trail with "letters of direction" for the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. According to Bloomberg:

"On 13 occasions between the start of 2009 and April 2010, civil servants asked ministers for a “letter of direction,” according to figures originally released by the Treasury in April. In the previous four years, only four such letters were requested, according to the Treasury."

The Public Accounts Committee's reports make grim reading for anyone interested in low cost government, tracing waste and ineptitude from early in the New Labour regime. For example, on 8 April it had this to say about an HM Customs & Excise private finance contract:

In 2001 the Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise, now HM Revenue & Customs (the Department), signed a 20-year contract with Mapeley STEPS Contractor Limited, one of several companies in the Mapeley Group, transferring ownership and management of 60% of its estate. At contract signature the Department expected to pay £3.3 billion (2009 prices) over the 20 years of the contract. To date it has paid 20% (£312 million) more than expected, and now expects to pay £3.87 billion over the 20 years. Moreover, signing a contract which involved tax avoidance through an offshore company has been highly damaging to the Department's reputation.

The sale of the public stake in British Energy was also revealed as ham-fisted, as has been the handling of the £1.85bn in overpaid benefits.

The sickening list goes on and on and on. And of course even more waste is featured regularly in Private Eye.

It's a crying shame to be pouring extra taxes into such a leaky bucket as the UK public sector. So, all the more reason to engage with Where Does My Money Go?

Image from the Open Knowledge Foundation