Only Dead Fish

Journalism In The Age Of Data

"The ability to take data - to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it - that's going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades...Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it."       Hal Varian, Google

One of the quotes I seem to be using most these days is that one from Eric Schmidt about how five exabytes of information were created between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, and yet the same amount of data is now being created every two days (and that rate of growth is accelerating).

Making sense of data is one of the biggest challenges faced by content producers of all kinds. During a journalism fellowship at Stanford, Geoff McGhee interviewed practitioners and trendsetters in data visualisation about how creative and publishing businesses "retool their staff and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium". The result is an outstanding film which is as insightful as it is inspirational.

Vision is the biggest band width we have in terms of sensory information. So this film talks about how visualisation of data can communicate both the context and the narrative elements of a story, and how (in a familiar refrain) value comes from completeness of data combined with the kind of judgement, interpretation and understanding of context and story that only human brains can bring.

It travels through the different narrative structures that can be used to help communicate complex stories (like the 'Martini Glass' - having led people through a more strictly scripted story you then open up the visualisation for more exploration), how good visualisation recognises that data cannot work in isolation, but combines it with different narrative formats like motion graphics (like the well-known but brilliant Crisis Of Credit Visualised), how visualisation is rapidly becoming a new expressive language, a discipline that is evolving and growing, and the beginnings perhaps of a real movement.

Along the way we learn about the value of rapid iteration (another familiar refrain), the challenge of live data (imagine breaking news stories appearing in a live visualisation), and we end where we began, with the increasing democratisation of visualisation through initiatives such as IBM's Many Eyes, sites like Swivel, and applications like Google charts.

Absolutely fascinating.

Journalism in the Age of Data from geoff mcghee on Vimeo.

HT to flowingdata

Ten Years Of Awesome

I think there's a huge difference between businesses that set out to 'do' crowdsourcing and those that genuinely have community at the heart of what they do. With the former, it's all too easy for the corporate motivation and execution to be somewhat suspect. With the latter, if the community didn't exist, neither would the business. Big difference.

It's a point that is echoed again and again when you read this charming new book about the first decade of Threadless by founder Jake Nickell. I loved it. It's full of great nuggets on the origins and story of an accidental business and more than a few awesome T-Shirt designs. But it is the thought that Threadless is a business driven by a community first, and a T-Shirt company second that is most powerful. As Scott Belsky writes in the book:

"The word 'community' is thrown around all too often these days. Every business, school, and interest group proclaims to 'own' or 'run' a community. The fact is that most of them are missing the point. Threadless doesn't own a community. Threadless participates in a community that is much bigger than Threadless."

It's a real lesson in the future.

The Future Of Content Curation

Image courtesy

So the good people at Mediatel asked me to write another piece for them (thankfully they weren't put off by the list post that I wrote for them last time), and so I decided to pen something on curation. Partly because there's been a number interesting pieces I've read about the subject recently, and partly because I think it is yet another area where traditional practices are being disrupted but we certainly don't yet have all answers. Anyway, they've kindly let me reproduce it here, so here it is:

One of the most remarkable quotes of the last couple of weeks came from Christopher Bailey, CCO of Burberry, who said: "We are now as much a media-content company as we are a design company, because it's all part of the overall experience."  Seems like everyone's in the content game now.

I saw the quote on twitter first, of course, like much that is new and of consequence among the advertising and media community that I'm a part of - a community that, through the links that are shared and amplified, provides it's own form of content curation (social curation if you like) which, when combined with RSS acts as a kind of mash-up between personal and community based selection that is consistently the highest quality content stream I have access to.

With an explosion in the amount of content vying for our attention, quality content curation of all kinds has a high value. It's a function long owned by magazine and newspaper publishers through the role of the Editor, but now for some at least, one performed by the networks that we're a part of, or by technology through social bookmarking services like Delicious, or Apps like Instapaper, or social content aggregators like Paper.li that collect together the most popular links shared by the people you follow on Twitter or around a particular hashtag.

The real value in social curation is relevance. It's no accident that the last ten albums I've bought are ones that have been shared on playlists by like-minded friends through the new socially enabled Spotify (and interestingly I seem to have spent more than I would normally).

Earlier this month, The Guardian decided it wanted to reflect some of the debate and discussion going on in the science community. There's good reason to - according to the Pew Research Centre science accounts for 10% of all stories on blogs but only 1% of the stories in mainstream media. They could, of course, have just asked a journalist to cover it. Instead, they launched The Guardian science blogs network, hosting content from four of the most popular and authoritative science blogs, and a science blog festival (a "celebration of the best writing on the web").

It is at one and the same time a harnessing and a distribution of scientific expertise. And it makes for a rewarding relationship: The Guardian gets expert content and in the process engages a vibrant community of science bloggers; the scientists get a broader and more diverse potential audience for their writing. Rather than competing, they are collaborating to secure a relevant and valuable audience for both. Even the ad revenue secured against the content is split 50/50.

Alok Jha, science and environment correspondent at The Guardian (quoted on the Nieman Journalism Blog), described it as "a completely new model for us", not least because the blogs will be completely unedited and the bloggers will have direct remote access to the Guardian's web publishing tools. "The goal", says Jha, "is less top-down authority, not more".

Blog networks are not new of course, but changes in the media ecosystem like this are a subtle, but important shift, and it represents the latest in a series of initiatives from The Guardian that involve external developers and readers in the content process. Initiatives that are enabled by a collaborative, open-minded approach and a willingness to experiment with new models, and more tangibly powered by their Open Platform.

What The Guardian have clearly realised is that, though important and now expected, the real opportunity for content owners is not just facilitating user-generated content or enabling ease of content sharing, but opening up the whole process of producing, hosting, and curating great content. It's what Alan Rusbridger calls 'mutualisation'. And it is about combining the best of the old with relentless experimentation with the new.

Involving audiences in the editorial process does not mean the end of traditional journalistic skills, it should mean the embracing of new ones. Social curation does not mean the end of editorial curation, it means the opportunity to combine both to make a better product.

Alongside quality, the holy grail of content (and arguably at least one way in which people will pay for it) is context and convenience. Clay Shirky once described media as "less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals, and more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups".

To paraphrase JP Rangaswami, the production, consumption and distribution of information have already been democratised, and it is inevitable that curation will be too.  If we know anything about the future, it is surely that it will likely feature a mash-up of technology, social and professionally driven content curation that to those who are skilled in the art, might just represent the greatest opportunity publishers have to reach that holy grail.

Original column here.

Wiedenisms

Rules we live by:

Advertising is a weapon; be careful where you point it
Creativity comes out both ends
Don't act big
Don't say it, be it
Do something people will love
Fail harder
Find people who make you better
Get rid of the crap.
Hire wrong.
Independence is everything
Let go
No sharp stuff
Patience and progress are f*cking hard
Shut up when someone's talking
Stay foolish.
The work comes first
Walk in stupid
We have to evolve this mother.

Via Faris

Buying Footballs

So, as you're no doubt aware by now, me and seven likely lads (Sam, Willem, Hugh, Matt, Darren, Steve, Thomas) from the advertising and media industry have got together over the blogosphere and decided to go to Tanzania in November and deliver footballs to some of the most disadvantaged kids in the world as part of The Great Football Giveaway. We're now fundraising to buy footballs to take out there. £10 buys a football and spreads a lot of happiness. £20 buys two and spreads even more. So please, come support us and buy some footballs. It will be a great thing that you do.

Design Thinking, Agile Enterprise

Image courtesy

The slow death of Dopplr was a sad thing to read. Whatever the reasons behind it, the atrophy of such an elegantly designed and executed idea is a cheerless thing to behold. But unfortunately it's symptomatic of something of a pattern (MySpace, Bebo, Friends Reunited).

It's no accident that strong design thinking played such a part in Dopplr's early attractiveness. One of the founders once said that designing Dopplr was like 'sculpting with data'. It's the kind of approach that can seem anathema to some large incumbent businesses that favour the inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence) championed by business schools over the abductive thinking (imagining what could be possible) emphasised in design (a HT to AG Lafley for that one). Put simply, established businesses get very good at driving incremental gain through incremental efficiencies, a cycle characterised by traditional thinking that is typically convergent - focused on making choices, closing down opportunities, converging on a solution and then implementing it. The problem with this, as Tom Hulme from IDEO points out in this HackFwd talk, is that it is an inherently uncreative process. The alternative is is to expend energy on divergent thinking. Rather than making choices all the time, you spend time creating choices. As many good choices and new options as possible.

Image courtesy

And the way to do that is through Design Thinking. The idea has been around for a while of-course. But I think it shares much common ground with how I would define the principles and practice of a truly agile enterprise. So, pulling together strands from a number of different definitions, most notably that from Tim Brown of IDEO, here's why...

Design thinking is a human-centred approach that puts customer insight and feedback at the heart of everything, and defines the problem through observation (what people really do and want as opposed to what you are told that they do and want), cross-functional insight, immersion, empathy, relentless questioning (of the brief, of the assumptions, of the filters the business typically uses), and involves design thinkers at the earliest possible stage in order to bring an understanding of culture and context (before you even get to the ideas) to help define the right problem in a way that invites creative solutions.

Habit and ritual are powerful forces in businesses. Its easy to fall into the trap of solving different problems in the same way every time. Different perspectives, new combinations, creating and considering many options, collaboration (cross-functional, and with customers) delivers richer results:

"Part of my job is to move (a good idea) around, just to see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people…get different people together to explore different aspects of it" Steve Jobs

And no judgements. At least not early on. Because you want people to really participate, and be motivated, not guarded, or fearful of failure. Pixar (a company that any business that aspires to be creative in any way can learn a lot from) has a culture that doesn't judge ideas, but 'plusses' them - taking someone else's idea as a start point from which to build - looking forwards, not back.

And no Eureka Myths, or belief in lone creative geniuses, or the lightening strike of inspiration. The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance. It's hard graft. It's rapid experimentation and prototyping. Prototyping that is only as complex, time-consuming and expensive as it needs to be to get useful feedback and evolve an idea - agile requirements are barely sufficient. The more time spent perfecting a prototype the less open its creators are to changing it through feedback. Good ideas that show promise are given room to breathe and grow, far away from limited thinking ("Yes, but…"). Stages in the process are looped, repeated. Just as analytical thinking seeks to deconstruct into constituent elements to understand, so design thinking recombines, builds and iterates to understand.

And finally, design thinking dictates that you budget to the pace of innovation, not innovate to the cycle of your budget. It's nonsense to let inflexible, clunky (and often artificially generated) business cycles get in the way of the next innovation that might just save your business a couple of years from now.

It's very easy to talk about being 'Always in Beta'. Far less easy to understand what that really means for the kind of processes and practices that are deeply embedded in many established businesses, and how to change them. As the world around us becomes increasingly digitised, products become services, and services become experiences, the old ways don't cut it anymore. Being agile is not about velocity, it is about responsiveness. Responding to the changing needs of customers who too often get there first. There's no point spending a year crafting a perfect product only to find that when you launch it, your market has moved on. Business needs to move at the speed of culture. Design is often seen in terms of an end-result, but it is the process of design that offers a protocol for staying close to the needs of your customers, and for finding new opportunities. In the parlance of IDEO: don't make a product, solve a problem.

iPad Light Painting

This is way cool. A collaboration between Dentsu London and Berg on Making Future Magic. And Beeker worked on it. And you can read more about it here and here. Lovely.

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

Update On Tanzania

So, it's been just over a week since I wrote about my odessey to Africa. When I wrote that post, I thought it would be amazing if 2 other people from the industry volunteered, so that we could make up a team of 3 to go and deliver footballs to some of the most disadvantaged kids in the world. The amazing news is that rather than getting two, I got seven. It's no understatement to say that I was quite overwhelmed by the response to that post, and that says a lot I think about people's desire to want to do something to make things better. It is, afer all, no insignificant personal commitment. Anyway, here's the team:

Me
Steve Farrell - creative director, and 'digital maker' from NYC
Sam Ismail - creative strategist and 'international smoothie' (London and NYC)
Darren Robson - Director at Penna (and my business coach)
Matt Kandela - Director at Saatchi's London, gooner
Hugh Garry - who does "interesting digital things with Radio 1"
Willem Van Der Horst - strategist and hippo-fan, London
Thomas Wagner - comms science student from Vienna

The ideal number for the project team is a multiple of 3 since each 4x4 can comfortably take 3 people, a driver, and a load of footballs. So with a team of eight, this means that we have one more space - and Tom has come up with an interesting idea on how we might fill it - so more on that later.

Now begins the hard bit. The organisation, the fundraising, the research, the planning, the jabs. There's a lot to do. And we only have until November. It's likely we'll be heading into South Eastern Tanzania. From what I've read of it so far, it seems to be one of the poorest and remotest regions of the country, and relatively untouched by tourism, so it makes sense to go there. We're intending to try and hook up with a couple of NGO projects based out there if we can, so if you happen to know of any in the region that might be good, let us know. And we're going to see if we can blog the trip (connectivity allowing - any advice on the best way to do this also appreciated) and we'll be taking a bunch of Flip cams to do some filming while we're out there.

The most important bit of-course, is raising the money to buy footballs. And that is going to kick off in earnest very soon.

Lazy End-ism

Yesterday I went to see a film production business that is producing a documentary feature film. They've been putting short-form content up on a You Tube channel for a while now, and using the data from YouTube Insights to track which strands of content, subjects, and interviewees are getting traction with audiences and to inform their production process. Which is smart. But they're combining that insight with the kind of astute editorial judgement that can only come from being an experienced specialist in your field. Which is even smarter.

We are often quick to believe that the dawn of a disruptive new model, or technology, or shift in behaviour, will in short measure mean the death of what was there before (take a look at The Tragic Death Of Practically Everything). When in reality that is rarely the case. It's what Simon Waldman calls 'lazy End-ism'. And it's the kind of thinking that, as Simon points out, becomes dangerous when it starts to become strategic thinking within a business:

"The inference is that the future is somehow pre-determined, when it is anything but. What happens next for any business facing this kind of disruption/upheaval is still very much in management's hands...The challenge is one of re-invention: building on your existing strengths and capabilities, but using every possible new trick in the book to create an offering that can carve out a place in the new world. It is painful work: changing people, processes and products that have stood you in good stead for decades. But it is the only option."

The incumbent businesses that are dealing best with unprecedented levels of disruptive change are doing it through combining the best of the old with relentless experimentation with the new. It's what Alan Rusbridger calls 'mutualisation'. So when The Guardian want to reflect some of the debate and discussion going in in the science community (according to the Pew Research Centre science accounts for 10% of all stories on blogs but only 1% of the stories in mainstream media) instead of just asking a journalist to cover it, they launch The Guardian science blogs network, hosting content from four of the most popular and authoritative science blogs, and a science blog festival (a "celebration of the best writing on the web"), at one and the same time harnessing scientific expertise and diffusing it. In the same spirit, Give Me Something To Read is an editorial selection of the top articles that thousands of people have bookmarked on one of my favourite apps, Instapaper.

Involving audiences in the editorial process does not mean the end of traditional journalistic skills, it should mean the embracing of new ones. Social curation does not mean the end of editorial curation, it means the opportunity to combine them to make an even better product. Using real-time data to supplement more traditional forms of research, and editorial insight is a no brainer. Many media businesses seem to be scratching the surface of this, playing round the edges. Frankly, I fail to see why more aren't embracing the opportunity with open arms.

Post Of The Month - August 2010 - The Winner

The Open Letter To All Of Advertising & Marketing From A Fairly Normal Bloke from The Sell! Sell! Blog made a strong start in this month's voting, but in the end it was Matt Ingwalson's excellent Patten Must Have Worked In Advertising that won through. Well done Matt - you get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the ThinkTank Hall Of Fame. Thanks again to everyone for taking part and don't forget to bookmark your good reads for next months nominations.