Here are a bunch of things I find interesting from the net and tech, with a vague emphasis on innovation.
1. Hash tags are probably the simplest social media tech ever invented – a string of text, usually a word or two combined – preceded by a hash symbol (#). But they turn out to be a hugely powerful way of pulling together a group, surfacing a theme or organising a conversation in noisy social media settings – especially Twitter. Watch your Twitter feed – you’ll see them popping up all the time now. Last week, at Radio 4, we ran a small experiment in using a hash tag (#goodradioclub) to organise a conversation around a radio programme as it went out. Social listening, we’re calling it. A couple of dozen people listened to an Analysis programme about social housing and twittered away as they did so. The resulting conversation was lively and intelligent and seemed like a viable way of expanding the conversation around almost any content. Read about the experiment here, see all the tweets from the experiment here. Next week we’re trying it again, this time with a programme about Charlie Parker.
2. Turned down by 4iP. Channel 4′s 4iP fund is distributing funds to start-ups and social entrepreneurs in various UK regions. So far a dozen or so projects have been commissioned from hundred of applications. Turned down by 4iP aims to provide a home for rejected proposals (so far it’s just a proposal itself!). The logic is inescapable. Although some will be rubbish, many of those hundreds of failed proposals will be full of good ideas that could be reused – many will have been rejected for purely procedural reasons and would work unchanged in another context. Sharing them will keep those ideas in circulation and probably produce more successful applications in the next round. Proper intellectual recycling. I hope it takes off.
3. Music is now officially free. Most people now accept that recorded music is a free good. Even the record industry has inwardly accepted the inescapable logic of free. And now, as if some kind of giant switch had been thrown, it’s all going legal. A rush of services like Spotify, Last.FM and We7 are free and totally legal and everyone’s now wondering “why the hell didn’t the record industry do this five years ago?” Meanwhile, pioneering artists are giving away their music as part of the effort to build a new music economy. Nine Inch Nails, veteran Cleveland industrial rockers, already give away their albums, selling premium editions and concert tickets to make a living. They’ve now gone further, giving away hundreds of Gigabytes of raw High Definition video from a recent tour and encouraging fans and artists to make their own tour film from the material. Several large collaborative editing efforts are now in production and, once complete, they’ll be publicised on the NiN web site. Whether the freeconomy can sustain a viable music industry is still unknown but at least the pointless fighting is coming to an end.
4. Open source is a giant, planetary-scale social and economic experiment, already involving millions of creators and developers and throwing off billions of pounds of revenues for participating businesses. But it’s still young and open source projects are as likely to fail or to stagnate as they are to succeed and grow a sustainable economy around them. Here’s a fascinating study of one very important open source project: Open Office.org (Oo.o), which is a free competitor for Microsoft Office. Michael Meeks, a leading contributor to the project who works at Novell, has run an analysis of the changing patterns in contributions from the project’s developers. He’s used the programmers’ own project management system (called CVS) to do this. His diagnosis is not a good one: “Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.” This is a pretty geeky analysis but the implications for the measurement of success and failure as open source goes mainstream and escapes the software world are large.
5. Etherpad is a simple and fascinating tool (not open source, interestingly, but using the increasingly common freemium model). It’s a collaborative text editor. A bit like a Wiki but with real-time editing. A team creates and edits a text document together, each contributor’s edits visible to everyone as they’re made. People have collaborated on documents since networks were invented (since we learnt to write, I suppose) but a wave of applications like Etherpad exploit the net to make old-fashioned monolithic documents into more fluid, social objects: things we make together. Etherpad is in use in schools and universities already and is catching on in business and media. The implications for teams like Ignite’s are real.
