Only Dead Fish

Fraggl Update

As you'll know, I'm working with the smart folk at Adaptive Lab to build a Twitter curation app called Fraggl. We've been a little quiet for a couple of weeks but things have been happening. First up, we have a logo (yay!).

We've also been working through (and incorporating some of the feedback we've had) for some of the options for developing the algorithm. This has confirmed our thinking that using Twitter lists could be a useful way to combine human and algorithmic curation. I really like the idea of enabling the option to plug the algorithm into your whole feed, or into self-curated lists and even into suggested pre-curated lists to see the most popular tweets/content shared by particular groups of people. The challenge here is balancing quantity and quality (too many or too few people/content/links impacts the ability to surface the 'good' stuff). An added dimension here is the frequency that you get updates. The advantage of daily updates of popular links is that the content is fresh and as long as the quality is good enough, higher frequency could work well, but it would need a larger daily input of content to scrape. So the question is whether lists would be enough for that. The advantage of weekly updates is the ability to take in more data, and so in theory to surface better links, but then you may get well shared links that everyone's seen or just old news. 

So, in short, we're going to do some experimenting with a week's worth of data from one list, and analyse it based on two or three combinations/weightings of signals including number of favourites, retweets, numbers of followers for that tweeter and so on. We also have some thoughts around some more interesting ways of surfacing great content beyond this but we'll start with what we've got and see where that gets us. Once we have some results well share some thoughts on what next. In the meantime, my thanks to Adaptive Lab, and if you'd like to be kept in the loop with (infrequent) updates and to be a tester when he have a live product, you can sign up here.

Digital Shift

I've been doing a fair bit of work with the smart folk at Econsultancy of late. Our latest venture together is the launch of a new trends service we're calling Digital Shift.

As we all know the pace of change that digital marketers face is relentless. Every day it seems that there are reams of articles, blog posts, product announcements and tweets about things we feel we need to keep up to date with but find it difficult to find the time.

At the same time, many existing ‘trends’ services are focused on relatively intangible and/or longer-term consumer trends. So the idea behind Digital Shift is to curate the real need-to-know changes, and combine it with an interpretation in order to deliver actionable insight into upcoming trends and developments in digital. We're not going to be attempting to talk about everything, but once a quarter to focus on the larger and more significant trends that are impacting, and will impact, on digital marketing.

Our first webinars are tomorrow, at 9.00am and 4.00pm GMT, with me and Ashley Friedlein (CEO of Econsultancy) at the helm. Amongst other things we'll be talking about vertical stacks, embedded social and Facebook Home, new developments in content aggregation and curation, social TV planning and collaborative consumption.

Digital Shift will be a service available to enterprise level subscribers to Econsultancy (Econsultancy has a membership of over 180,000 digital marketers worldwide so there must be a few of those reading this blog), but for this first webinar we're opening it up to enable readers of this blog to sample it. So if you'd like to be part of it, you can find out more here.

Post Of The Month - March 2013 - The Winner

Happy to say that the winner of Post Of The Month for March is the excellent Digital Isn't Working (Yet) paper from Ian Fitzpatrick and Eric Pelletier. Well done to Eric and Ian, who are entered into the Hall of Fame. And thanks to everyone for taking part. 

Post Of The Month - March 2013 - The Vote

A smaller number of nominations this month so a shorter but perfectly formed shortlist for your reading pleasure. Our vote this month is between:

What You Know, What You Do, and What You Own by Matt Locke

Are Brands Fracking the Social Web? from John Willshire

No to No UI by Timo Arnall

The No UI Debate is Rubbish by Scott Berkun

Digital Isn't Working (Yet) by Ian Fitzpatrick and Eric Pelletier

And you can vote below:

Managing by Anarchy

I've done a fair bit of work over the past couple of years on how organisations can adapt structures and resourcing to better equip themselves for the world in which we find ourselves, and so I'm always interested to read about approaches that challenge the norm. James said I should look at the way Github work, so I found and read this piece by Ryan Tomayko, Github's 'Director of Engineering' which describes a non-hierarchical, self-organising approach to resourcing and working that many would call anarchic, yet one that has some clear themes.

Thus, employees work on whatever they want, with autonomy bringing it's own kind of efficiency ('instead of assigning 100% management duties to individuals, the basic role of management is spread between 1) every single employee, and 2) a set of custom in-house tools that serve to keep everyone in the know with regards to other projects'). Leadership is less about authority and more about enabling and inspiration ('lead by example as loud as possible'), which brings another kind of efficiency ('telling people what to do is lazy. Instead, try to convince them with argument...If you can't convince people through argument then maybe you shouldn't be doing it'). The currency of the workplace is trust and contribution ('…go build the thing in your head, show me how you got there, and then sell it to me and all your peers').

There are challenges that come from working in this way, as this post authored by a Github employee acknowledges, but as the post also notes these can be outweighed by some pretty meaningful benefits. Whilst the founders of the company set the vision, having everyone take responsibility for deciding what to work on is a way of both empowering and motivating employees. Ensuring that each person has the responsibility to sell their ideas to the rest of the company means that there is a natural efficiency ('I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company'). If, as Dan Pink suggests, what really motivates people and drives high performance and satisfaction is autonomy, mastery and purpose then this is a structure designed to give employees just that:

'Anarchy works wonderfully in a small group of individuals with a high level of trust. Everyone at GitHub has full access and permission to do whatever they want. Do great things and you earn respect. Abuse that freedom and you violate everyone’s trust.'

I'm not suggesting that such an anarchic way of working would suit every organisation but I often think that there are learnings to be had from engineering driven cultures where everyone feels direct responsibility for the product and the output, a large degree of autonomy is framed within broad strategic objectives or principles, and resourcing for projects incorporates more voluntary working and is focused around small, nimble, self-organising teams. Especially for companies that are working hard to increase agility and address organisational silos (and if you're not trying to that right now you should be). They are learnings that I'd argue should be applied beyond tech teams and into wider organisational practice.

Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk via Compfight cc

Hackers and Casuals

Pats linked to this fascinating piece from Ajay Kulkarni at GroupMe talking about the challenges of designing for different audiences within the Android user base. Android, he says, is the 'Platypus of the mobile world...a complicated beast, a bizarre combination of two very different animals'. Those very different animals being the Hackers (early Android users who invested in the platform because of its open principles), and the Casuals (later immigrants to Android, often upgrading from feature phones because of cheaper, increasingly prolific devices).

This presents a challenge in designing services since each set of users has a very different set of behaviours and expectations:

"Hackers customize. They install their own keyboards, dialers, messaging apps, even home screens. Many are developers. They explore, they tinker. They love settings, settings, and more settings.

Casuals personalize. They like wallpapers and custom ringtones. But they don't tinker. Many are late adopters to smartphones. They use Facebook, Twitter, and other popular apps, but they don't explore new apps or technologies."

So developing for both becomes tricky: you can't just build the app for yourself; each group expects the app to do different things; it makes it harder to test; the former audience loves change, the latter doesn't.

Their solution is insightful:

• Building to reflect both sets of behaviour: "build it for Casuals and let Hackers customize it"
• Viewing the app as a Casual: "You need to get outside yourself...we try to internalize how they think and behave, so that their reactions can become our reactions."
• The importance of beta testing with casuals, not just hackers
• If Casuals sometimes take time to come round to a new feature but might end up loving it, using data to recognise the difference between that and a feature which has simply been poorly executed.

All too easy, I think, to design for one audience and forget the potentially very different behaviours and preferences of another.

Image courtesy

Let's Build Something

Maria Popova once joked that it seemed as though we'd "reached a cultural point at which every time someone uses the word 'curation' in reference to content and publishing, an actual museum curator kills a kitten". Yet it does seem that curation is becoming more important than ever, and that the growing surfeit of content means that the people and tools that help us get to the good stuff quicker and easier are more useful than ever. The challenge is how we do that. For every individual there is a different view on what defines 'good', and that in itself shifts according to context. My own opinion is that combinations of different types of content curation (the three pillars being professional, algorithmic, and social) work best to get us to that place. 

One of the (many) great things about Twitter is that it's such an excellent source of great links and content. But most of us don't have the luxury of sitting on Twitter all day so it's easy to miss the good stuff. Having something that showed me the most interesting links and updates that have been shared whilst I've been away (or shared by people I follow in different time zones) would be wonderfully useful. Lots of people have had a go at this. Twitter itself has it's Discover tab and the 'Tweets for you'. Kottke created Stellar. There's aggregators like Paper.li. I'm sure all of these have their place and inevitably we will use more than one tool, but there is nothing that quite nails it for me. The closest is probably Percolate but that has since pivoted to become a business tool (and seemingly an excellent one at that).

Wouldn't it be fun to have a go at building something to tackle this problem? I was talking to James Haycock who runs Adaptive Lab about this and he thought so too, so we're going to do just that. I'm rather happy to be partnering with Adpative Lab - they are a 'skunkworks for hire', a very smart group of creative technologists, developers and data specialists that collaborate with companies large and small (including ASOS and YouGov) to create innovative new products and services (check them out). It occurred to both James and I that a service such as this would be useful for the readers of this blog so we thought we'd make the process of building it as open as possible, and involve you in helping to shape something that you could then go on to use. It will make the process fun and really interesting, and I was a fan of the way in which MadeByMany blogged the development process of the Picle app. So I'll be blogging updates as we go, and asking for feedback that can help us to create something that is as useful as possible for everyone. I'll also be including updates on my weekly email, so if you want to make sure you don't miss out you can sign up here.

I'm rather excited to see what we might build together. So far, we have a working project title - Fraggl (nothing to do with these definitions of 'Fraggle'), and have defined the problem we are trying to solve thus:

It's impossible to be on Twitter 24 hours a day. Most of us dip in and out when we have a spare few minutes. So how can I make sure that I don't miss out on the great content shared by the people I follow? I want a way to regularly see the most useful, interesting, stimulating, original and links that have been shared amongst the people I like on Twitter. And I'd like those links to be as relevant as possible to my interests.  No existing service does this well enough for me.

A one-sentence elevator pitch is: The service that ensures you never miss the most useful content shared by people who are interested in the same things you are.

We have a few ideas as to how we propose to do this which we'll share, but for now, what we'd really like to know is this:

As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Image courtesy

Post Of The Month - February 2013 - The Winner

Delighted to announce that this month's winner is Martin Weigel, whose excellent post/deck on brands, humility and indifference very narrowly beat James Caig's tale of the bottom half of culture. Well done to Martin, who is on something of a roll having won last month's vote as well. Thanks everyone for taking part.

Post Of The Month - February 2013 - The Vote

Crikey. Yet another great list this month so thanks for the nominations. We also have a double nomination (James Caig) which is a true POTM rarity. So, our vote this month is between:

Big Data - The Comedic Empty Vessel and Animal Spirits by Mark Hancock

A Tale Of Humility and Indifference by Martin Weigel

Keynesian Marketing and the Business of Confidence from Richard Huntingdon

On Writing Post-Fatherhood by Austin Kleon

We've Had The Speaker Pledge, What About The Attendee Pledge? from Will Roissetter

Wisdom of the Dead vs the Living from Helen Edwards

The Bottom Half of Culture by James Caig

Tortuous metaphor #287: Four Lessons Planning can Learn from Building Bridges by James Caig

And you can vote below:

Post Of The Month - February 2013 - Nominations

It's time to nominate the best posts that you've read in the past month for Post Of The Month. If you read a post in February that you thought was particularly great, please leave the link in the comments. I've put up a starting list below, and once I have a few more I'll stick them up for a vote. I've had a few nominations sent to me already so including them, my starting five are:

Big Data - The Comedic Empty Vessel and Animal Spirits by Mark Hancock

A Tale Of Humility and Indifference by Martin Weigel

Keynesian Marketing and the Business of Confidence from Richard Huntingdon

On Writing Post-Fatherhood by Austin Kleon

We've Had The Speaker Pledge, What ABout The Attendee Pledge? from Will Roissetter

And you can nominate your own favourites below.