Elections, social media and sentiment

Over the past few months during the federal election campaign I was working on a project called ABC Campaign Pulse which was looking for interesting ways to visualise trends and sentiment over the period the election campaign.

After seeing the prominence of social media and data visualisation in the UK election in April and May of 2010 we wanted to see what we could do in an Australian context. We wanted to find ways to filter the noise on social media and make it meaningful and interesting through visual tools and analysis. The project was initiated and conceived by Jess Martin (@gourjess) and Ping Lo (@pinglo) and produced by me and Angela Stegel (@angelastengel) all from the Strategic Development team in ABC Innovation. We also worked in collaboration with ABC News and built the modules to be reusable on other sites across the ABC, for example the ABC Local sites ran the Leaders Today module as part of their sites.

Here is are some screen shots and video demo of the site (and embarrassing voice over)

ABC Campaign Pulse demo from Monique Potts on Vimeo.

Some of the more interesting modules were the Twitter Trends and Hot or Not modules. The Twitter Trends module used a tool called Trendsmap licensed from Stateless Systems was tracking real time twitter trends and chat about the election and overlaying it on a map of Australia based on the origin of the tweets. You could drill down into individual tweet streams for each term and also see how trends changed over the period of the campaign.

The Hot or Not module was trying out sentiment analysis on the 3 leaders and coming up with an aggregate sentiment score for each leader every day. We worked with a company called memery in Brisbane who used a tool called Dialogix to review 10,000 comments and streams overnight from online news articles, blogs, forums, Facebook comments and Twitter reviewed sentiment on each one using natural language analysis. From this it came up with an aggregate sentiment score for each leader each day.

The technology seems to be still pretty much in it's infancy and it couldn't pick up on a lot of the sarcasm and irony which Australians tend to like to use in relation to our political representatives, so we had quite a lot of false positives and negatives. That said it was pretty popular with the audience and pulling in some of the most influential (people with the most followers) positive and negative tweets under each leader certainly added an entertaining element to the site. We were hoping to have it dynamic but ended having to pre-moderate for editorial reasons.




Other election sites I liked are BuzzElection site where you can track election issue discussion by time, state, most influential people etc


ElectionWIRe by VibeWire

Mapping archives and local stories

I've been interested lately in ideas or mapping local stories using mashups.

There has been some interesting projects being developed in this space lately. Probably the more accessible ones at the moment are those that use a Google Maps/Flickr Mashup such as these ones

Paul Hogans's proof of concept mashup for the Powerhouse






http://www.paulhagon.com/blog/2008/08/19/powerhouse-street-view-mashup/

Or this one Sepiatown that Seb Chan mentioned in his recent TEDx Sydney Talk

http://www.sepiatown.com/index

While these are great sites I wanted to find some examples where there was more of a User Generated Content approach so people could add their own stories, photos and comments easily.

One project I really loved is this one which is Facebook based but seems to have created some really greal dialogue around the places is by Dan Blank who posted 175 photos and his memories on Facebook after a trip to his hometown in Howell, New Jersey. He had 700 comments then pulled the dialogue back into his blog

http://danblank.com/blog/2010/01/26/how-i-used-facebook-to-unearth-a-towns-history/

And of course the wonderful work of Priscilla Davies from our very own ABC on Black Saturday which mapped stories from the huge bushfires in Victoria in 2009




http://www.abc.net.au/innovation/blacksaturday/default.htm#/timeline/map/chapter/1

ABC Widget

Check out the new ABC Widgets and pull ABC content into your site for free

http://www.abc.net.au/services/widgets/

Connecting Up presentation

Attached is presentation about ABC and social media, web 2.0 given at Connecting Up conference for nonprofit sector in Brighton Le Sands yesterday

Twitter feed is at #cua09

http://www.slideshare.net/moniquep/abc-and-web-20-1427202

Submission to ABC and SBS Digital Futures Review

Just wanted to post my submission to the Dept of Broadband, Communication and Digital Economy

My two cents worth for what it's worth...

1. The Role of National Broadcasting
• The ABC has an important role in promoting digital media literacy across the community; particularly to groups that might not have access to technology and training. The ABC could set up mobile media centres that can travel to different places and communities to teach people digital storytelling techniques, teach people how to use their digital media to create stories that can then be shared across ABC platforms. This would also assist in being able to produce and promote good quality User Generated Content (UGC)

• As a national broadcaster the ABC is in a good position to create a large repository of digital media assets with a strong Australian focus for people to use in their own media productions. The ABC a wealth of media archiving Australian history that could be made available to the public to view and download. It is also well placed to become a platform for collecting media about important events in Australia to create a living social history of these events.

• The ABC can become a digital ‘town square’ where people can communicate with other people in their region or with similar interests in a safe and collaborative environment. This might involve online services such as noticeboards, events guides, media exchanges and forums for discussion of news and public affairs.

• The ABC could host online portals that curate the best of digital media content on any particular subject and/or content from any particular region in Australia. It could provide a one stop shop for education and research purposes on any given subject with a specialist focus on Australian content. In order to do this the ABC would aggregate and curate content from its own sources as well as a range of other selected sources. It would add value by providing the editorial oversight to give the audience the ‘best of’ information on any given subject.

2. Harnessing New Technologies to Deliver Services
• ABC should be at the forefront of innovation and R&D in digital radio, TV and other platforms.

• The ABC provides a crucial role in promoting the uptake of new digital technologies and well as educating audiences about what these technologies offer and how to use them. The ABC plays an important role in providing quality content on new platforms in order to promote the uptake of these platforms Eg. digital TV, digital radio and multichannel broadband

• The ABC needs to be at the forefront of innovation in broadband content development and delivery. They can also work collaboratively with the independent sector to promote and support development in this new platform. By considering models such as the BBC Innovation Labs (http://open.bbc.co.uk/labs/) the ABC can support and collaborate with the independent production sector to foster talent and promote creative industries.

• National broadcasters should be active in adopting new technologies and program formats in a research and development capacity. Limited investment in a range of technologies and program formats can provide very real gains and position national broadcasters as industry leaders. A good example is the podcast trial by Radio National which quickly became a very popular and successful new method of delivering ABC content.

• The ABC has a rich archive of media documenting Australia’s history in audio, video, photos and text. There should be an archive project which digitises this media and makes it available to the Australian public. The BBC has invested heavily in making their archives available in the Creative Archives project http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/collections.shtml The ABC can also create a living archive of content by collecting and collating User Generated Content around large national events as well as the everyday lives of Australians over time. This project could be a collaboration with holders of state and national archives. The ABC is also well placed to contribute media to Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) initiatives and providing public media in the public arena for non commercial use. One good example of this is the collaborative relationship between cultural institutions such as the Powerhouse and the Australian War Memorial with the Flickr Commons project (http://www.flickr.com/commons?PHPSESSID=ea7b4da468f5935f24b65f41dbfc356f). This collaboration has meant these photo collections have been much more widely viewed and have created a lively dialogue around Australian historical archives.

• The open source software development movement has created a large volume of software and resources that are freely available and developed collaboratively by groups of developers. Increasingly companies and organisations make their data available through feeds and open API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) to this global community of developers to build tools and applications using their platforms and data. The BBC has been innovative as a public broadcaster by engaging with their developer community and creating an online portal BBC Backstage (http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/) to facilitate this engagement. Through doing this they are able to foster talent within the local developer community as well as gain useful prototypes and models that can go into development within the BBC. They are also actively involved in supporting and promoting developer and digital production innovation within the UK through initiatives such as Hacked Day and Innovation Labs (http://open.bbc.co.uk/labs/). The ABC could play a similar role for the industry in Australia. The BBC Future Media and Technology group are researching the future role of the BBC as a Common Platform (http://commonplatform.co.uk/) of tools, content and resources for public use – a public sector equivalent to Google.

3. Information and Entertaining Australians
• The ABC needs to move to providing content to people on the platforms they are using rather than just focusing on ABC delivery platforms such as radio, TV and ABC online. Increasingly young Australians are moving away from consuming media on these traditional mediums and instead and consuming media via social networking sites, games portals and mobile. In order to stay relevant to these younger audience the ABC needs to be providing and tracking it’s content across a range of platforms in the form of widgets and producing content specifically for and in these platforms, for example games and drama on social networking sites and multi-player games for children and young people.

• The charter for public broadcasters should contain broad principles that are not related to specific platforms of delivery. The media landscape and platforms are changing to rapidly and the charter needs to apply to all new and emerging platforms.


4. Education Skills and Productivity
• The ABC could provide a more comprehensive online education portal which reflects and feeds into the national curriculum. This could consist of a multi-channel broadband delivery platform and interactive educational resources. It would work with national educational partners such as education.au to develop such a service. This site could become a clearinghouse for quality education resources and media for teachers and students.

• In terms of lifelong learning ABC online could provide training and tutorial portal on a range of subjects including digital media production. This could include ‘professional’ content and well as user generated content on a wide range of subjects from gardening to DIY.

• The ABC could provide training for communities in digital media production skills and at the same time act as a curator to collect and publish stories form these communities to a broader audience. This would be particularly effective in rural and regional communities where there is not access to other training providers. Well documented formats such as digital storytelling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_storytelling) provide people with the skills and experience to create high quality digital narratives from their own media archives

• A partnership between the ABC and universities to promote research initiatives related to media and communications could foster industry and research development in these fields such as the BBC and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Knowledge Exchange Program (http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundedResearch/CaseStudies/Pages/onlineworlds.aspx)


5. Social Inclusion and Cultural Diversity
• Organisations such as the ABC should become more transparent and open to input from the audience in terms of defining services and priorities. In the new media environment audiences expect a degree of responsiveness from media providers that is not currently reflected in the ABC. This dialogue could be initiated by setting up blogs in a similar way to the BBC Editors blog (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/) and Internet blog (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/) where editors and producers document decisions and new initiatives and the audience can respond and have direct input into this process.

7. Efficient Delivery of Services
• In order to transition from existing delivery platforms to digital delivery platforms a substantial capital investment is required for public broadcasters. There are significant costs associated with creating systems for digital assets management and distribution. If these assets management systems are set up properly with appropriate metadata and taxonomy management systems it will greatly increase the value of digital content in its ability to be used across a range of productions and output platforms.

• There are significant ongoing costs associated with the delivery of content in a broadband environment which were not there in the case of traditional mediums such as TV and radio.

• Production should be a combination of in-house and outsourced production with a focus on the ABC acting as an incubator and promoter of small independent production houses.

• In the longer term content production might be more efficiently organised around genres (Eg. science, art, education) rather than output platforms and networks (TV, radio) as is currently the case at the ABC. This would consolidate content expertise in one part of the organisation and ensure this content was efficiently delivered across a range of platforms.

BBC plan new £68m local websites revamp

BBC management have put forward a proposal to the BBC Trust to revamp it's local websites with a heavy emphasis on locally produced video content. The proposal would expand the number of local sites from 60 to 65 and would spend £68m up until 2013.

According to the Guardian

Each BBC Local website is planning to offer video, focused mainly on news and sport, as well as weather updates, user-generated content and "knowledge-building" content. The sites will be "produced locally, in and for each of the 60 areas".

The BBC said the new sites would include up to 10 on-demand video stories a day lasting up to 20 minutes in total.

There would also be up to three daily bulletins for news, sport and weather, each lasting up to 90 seconds, while each service would provide a maximum of 10 live streams of local events a year

The BBC Trust has launched a 'public value test' into the proposal. The BBC will have to convince them that they are not treading on the toes of or competing with local media interests. There has already been some controversy over the proposed local plan in January when it was floated by Controller of BBC English Regions Andy Griffee had local media proprieters up in arms.

Ian Davies, development director of Archant, described the plans – which have yet to get the go ahead from the BBC Trust – as an “unprecedented attack”. He goes on to say;

“What a strange approach to public service media. Look at what the community-leading local press is doing in reinventing itself to provide local content and ‘connectivity’ beyond print; then take a huge publicly funded stick and swing hard to cause as much damage as possible to this vital organ of local comment and democracy.

“This is not competition. This is BBC, full-bodied, unfair, damaging to existing emerging services, competition. It seems that attempted demolition is the sincerest form of flattery.”

Should be an interesting debate - final decision is expected in February 2009.

Social media and the changing concept of privacy

The increased use of social media such as blogs, ugc and social networking over the past 5 years have created changes in people's perceptions of what is private and public information. Increasingly online public spaces are used for personal media and personal opinions and musings.

When I told a friend recently that I had 'reworked' my blog and taken out all the more private references to children and 'personal' issues like being a mum and work/life balance (or the impossibility of such as thing) she said she thought I should keep these posts in. I think like a lot of people my first attempt at blogging was fairly autobiographical in some ways but after a period of time I decided I didn't really want too much of my personal information in the public sphere. I decided to give my blog a more 'professional' focus and take out the more personal stuff.

However I'm of a different generation to the now called 'digital natives' who have grown up with instant messaging, chat and social networks. This generation seems to have a more open view of what details of their private lives they are willing to share publicly, although increasingly they are becoming more savvy as to how to protect their privacy as well. Dana Boyd talks about these spaces being 'mediated public' spaces and explores the complexity for teens in negotiating these new public spaces in a paper 'Social Network Sites; Public, Private or What' While there has been a lot of media hype about the danger of these spaces for young people, Dana Boyd encourages educators to learn about these spaces and give young people practicle knowledge of how to use them.

The possible conflict between private opinion and professional practice are reflected in the BBC recently published guidelines for employees who keep blogs and use social networks. Which offer employees advice such as;

staff members who want to start blogging, and wish to say that they work for the BBC should discuss any potential conflicts of interest with their line manager.

If a blog makes it clear that the author works for the BBC, it should include a simple and visible disclaimer such as “these are my personal views and not those of the BBC”.

The advice to managers in the guidelines say

Managers should bear in mind concerns about impartiality, confidentiality, conflicts of interest or commercial sensitivity. In some cases individuals may be dealing with matters which are so sensitive that rules may have to be set on what they can and cannot talk about on their personal blog.

This seems to indicate that employees can blog about their work and opinions about the BBC as long as they state they are personal views and are within the editorial guidelines. If a person does not identify themselves as an employee or discuss the BBC the guidelines don't apply. Still the lines are fairly blurred.

The BBC has in many ways been a leader in publishing blogs that give an insight into the developments, editorial processes and policy decisions through the Editors blog and Internet blog. In this way the inside workings and people of a large organisation can communicate directly with audiences and allow comments and sometimes a dialogue to take place. Although as Alfred Hermida says in his paper 'The BBC goes blogging: Is Aunty finally listening'. The time and resouces to engage in meaningful dialogue on these blogs is not always available.