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.

BBC joins OpenID foundation

An article by Jem Stone in the BBC Internet blog explained that the BBC has recently joined the OpenID Foundation. OpenID is a movement from the open source community to try and create a single standard compliant login that can be used across a range of sites rather than having to remember individual logins for each site. There are a number of big corporate players on board such as AOL, Microsoft, Sun, Novell. The BBC is one of the first big media players to sign up to the foundation.



Jem Stone says doesn't mean that they will be offering OpenID logins immediately however are considering it as a replacement for their single sign in application currently in use which is getting pretty out of date.

This move would be in line with other moves by the BBC to open up feeds and API's through their backstage.bbc.co.uk project. Backstage allows non-BBC developers to access data and feeds from the BBC to create their own applications and mash-ups for non commercial purposes. It seems to have an active core of BBC techies and external developers that are involoved in the community. You can submit ideas and protoypes and get help with resources and input.

It makes a lot of sense that a public broadcaster would move into this space and engage with a broader developer community around open standards. This seems to be to me the real starting point for participatory media but is not a space that many broadcasters would feel too comfortable in.

Some people it seems think the BBC are not doing enough in this direction with a recent article in TechCrunch calling for a more open approach to working with developers and particularly start-ups to promote innovation in the industry.

Pageflakes - an aggregators delight, a publishers nightmare

I've been setting up my pageflakes page in the last few days in a effort to try and bring together my social networking and rss feeds into one interface.

The beauty of pageflakes over other tools like the new Google home page that comes with IE7 or MyYahoo which I have used up until now for my RSS feeds is that there are also widgets for your social networking tools like Facebook, MySpace, GMail and Twitter. These widgets integrate with the sites so that you can update your status and check messages from within Pagefakes. There are a few others like LinkedIn and Plaxo I'm not sure if you can integrate. Then you have all the standards widgets like weather, calendar, calculator that you can also choose to have on your home page.

This level of customisation seems to be becoming the norm with web portals and I imagine many sites will follow the lead of the BBC homepage in making home pages more relevant as customised portals where you can choose what content you want to view and position in on the page.

The concept of pagecasts where you aggregate a chosen selection of content via widgets reflects the new way people can now aggregate content from other services. For example if you search for BBC pagecasts there are 12 results of pages using BBC content, only two of these were set up by the BBC the others are set up by Pageflakes users making their own aggregation of BBC content. And this is very early days.

This curatorial role of audiences will begin to challenge more established media in presenting and aggregating content. There is a star rating which gives the BBC establishd page 5 stars. There doesn't seem to be a way to rate pagecasts so perhaps this star rating is some way of establishing 'authorship' if such a thing still exists.

The other interesting thing is that a couple of the pagecasts with BBC content also contain advertising widgets. See this page set up by 8x6 of BBC Sports with ads for skiing holidays. What does this mean in terms of the owners right to content and the revenue created by that content.

The brave new world of aggretation and curating by individuals is here. Publishers and broadcasters beware - if you don't pick up on these new media spaces quickly someone else will do it for you and reap the benefit.

What happened to BBC Action Network?

I was interested to note the fate of the BBC civic actvisim site iCan or Action Network which will close on April 30th 2008.

It seems as if it was always going to be fairly experimental coming out of a brainstorming session at the BBC on how to provide an open social space online to promote active citizenship and launching in 2003. Another suggested motivation was to have a better and quicker understanding of grassrooots local issues for journalists. The site allowed people to set up local campaigns, add media, find followers and build networks.

It was one of the first user-generated websites to embrace online democracy and help people publicise their campaigns and articles online.

The blurb on the site said it closed because the social media landscaped has changed signigicantly since the site was set up five years ago and now the popularity of blogs, social networks and e-democracy tools such as e-petitions. Although none of these tools really play the same role in terms of being a hands on tool for local campaigns with access to networks of local politicians etc.

It would be great to see the BBC publish some sort of evaluation of the site, its successes and challenges to inform other public media type initiatives. These types of sites using UGC are usually fairly resource intensive in terms of moderation with the added risk of being accused of bias. It did however provide a unique space for local activity and networking that seemed to fit very well with the BBC charter of "sustaining citizenship and civil society".

Is there a place for public broadcasters to host hyper-local sites such as EveryBlock or set up local social networks for people to interact on.

David Wilcox has some interesting comments and questions in a recent post on the future of BBC's remit for e-democracy and citizen journalism in his blog Designing for a Civil Society

In closing comments on the Action Network the BBC promise

a wider digital democracy broadband project, ultimately aiming to provide video of debates and speeches from our main institutions, information on your local and national representatives, guides to issues and the institutions, and easy ways for anyone to plug in and take part.

'Public Value' or 'Commercial Value' Test

Having worked in a public brodcaster for some time the BBC 'public value test' seems a curiously political beast. It has been unfortunate to see a very popular project such as the wonderful interactive education site BBC Jam pulled last year because of a perceived conflict in 'public value'. See comments from trust

Surely the test of public value must be reflected in the uptake, popularity and use of a digital service. In reality it is more the conflict with 'commercial value' that is at issue here, perhaps it should be called the 'commercial value test'. Does this mean that the BBC should not put into the digital media space any product that is commercially competitive?

What then does this mean for products such as the iPlayer which having passed the 'public value test' in early 2007 is now out in the market and doing very well?

The public value test itself takes 6 months to complete which would in effect mean the BBC would lose any competitive advantage in a fast moving market place.

The test is described on the BBC website as follows;

'The Public Value Test is a mechanism for weighing public value against market impact.

The BBC Trust uses it to determine the value to the public of, say a proposed new BBC service, and also to calculate its impact on the wider market – say, to other suppliers whose business might be affected by the proposed BBC launch.

Only if the Trust is satisfied that any likely adverse impact on the market is justified by the likely public value of the change, will the proposal go forward for consultation. At the end of the consultation, the BBC Trust will then make its decision.'

Re: Online debates and gauging emotional response

Robin Hamman's blog Cybersoc recently had an interesting reference to a tool called Spectrum being used at the BBC to use data in online debates to reflect the intensity and type of emotional response to an issue in a visual format.

The online debate was based around a recent drama series by the BBC Two called the White Series. I caught one of the episodes called White Girl, which was pretty well written but criticised later for being overly stereotypical of muslim communities. The main premise of the series was the question 'Is white working class Britain becoming invisible?' sure to be a pretty contentious issue.

The interface for the online discussion itself was a little dissapointing using the BBC News site standard 'Have Your Say' funtionality with just a simple guestbook style interaction without option for comment or interaction within the site. The discussion had 7877 contributions with 1001 of these being rejected so sounds like a lively debate.

The interactive visual site using Spectrum provides a much richer visual insight into the debate. You can view the debate by emotional response where each major emotion group displays as a range of coloured bubbles as below from anger and fear to hope and happiness. From here you can see a snippet of the debate or click through to the full comment. It's a much more interactive and fun way to scan a discussion although it doesn't allow the depth of engagement with a topic that a threaded discussion has. You can also look at intensity of feeling, agreement level and a regional break down of responses (perhaps useful for local politicians...)

It is a pretty impressive little application that seems to use keywords to interpret and categorise data for visual display. Would be interested to know if it was developed inhouse or externally. Anyway a good way to engage people in online debates in general.