Innovation in Software

For various reasons I’ve decided to change the comments system on this blog to use Disqus. That means there is much more social media cohesion within the comments, and hopefully we’re going to be able to have a better 2-way discussion here.

Let’s get started: It seems twitter traffic might be peaking right now. So, I posit that all people who have access to the Internet today who want a twitter account (or indeed any other social media account), has one. There are few new users who are likely to sign up. Therefore the only growth available for such sites, is new Internet markets where access is limited (e.g. Africa). Discuss.

One of my clients has hinted he wants me to talk about blogging to his team.

This surprised me.

Sure, I’ve blogged for years. Right now I have publish rights to about half a dozen blogs, the majority not created by me. I’ve got into some great events courtesy of my writing for MEN, won clients because of this blog, thousands of people read my words every month and I love writing and I want to continue doing it for the rest of my life.

However, I’m a developer, entrepreneur, analyst, systems administrator, systems architect, training guy and occasional blogger. I’m not one of the new breed of social media consultants who spend their days analysing how to grow blog and twitter audiences.

Can I tell anybody else how to blog? I’ve been thinking about where I’d start if I suddenly decided I was going to be a SMC, and came up with some questions I’d ask a client who wants to try and get into blogging.

1. What are your favourite blogs? If you don’t have any, that’s because you’re not reading any blogs. If you’re not reading material in the genre you’re writing for, you can’t understand how to write for it. It is evident that many bloggers do not read blogs just by reading the awful material they pour out..

   In a past life as an occasional freelance writer I had gigs writing speeches, editorials, in-flight magazine articles, essays, short stories and – yes, they really are made up by a staff writer in some cases – “Readers letters” for a top-shelf magazine. I have written novels for NaNoWriMo, attempted a screen play and I intend to write more just for the joy of writing in those genres. I researched each genre (the top-shelf research frankly left me disturbed), before I started writing for them. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known what I was doing and the finished result would have been inadequate..

   If you aren’t up to speed, go and get a Google Reader account, learn about RSS and read some blogs in the area you’re writing for as well as blogs that interest you personally. Learn the styles, what works, what doesn’t, and ask around for other people’s favourites. An RSS reader like Google’s may allow you to skim through 30+ blogs a day in less than 10 minutes. If it takes too long, mark all as read and try again tomorrow.

2. What’s the style you’re aiming for? Do you need to remain formal and distant, or are you going to be more personable and “chatty”? It’s possible to be chatty *and* professional (I hope this blog proves that), but many new blogs seem to go too far into the extremes: they become stilted, boring diatribes in the style of press releases, or you discover an intellectual property lawyer going on about his cat three times a day. Both are wrong, and will fail quickly for good reason.

3. Do you actually care about what you’re writing about? If not, change it. You may need to write something in a particular area because your boss told you to, and you’d rather write about chocolate or your favourite football team, but you have to find the bit that excites you. If you can’t find something in there that excites you, maybe it’s time to consider whether you’re working for the right boss..

   It is nearly always possible however to find something that sings to you individually as well as is of appeal to the audience you’re aiming for – it’s only when you find that angle that the writing will flow and it’ll be enjoyable.

4. Who is your audience? This is critical. You need to think about your audience, why they should be interested in you, and how to make the most of their time. In the new information economy if somebody gives you their attention it should be considered a gift, so don’t waste it. Think about their needs, wants and expectations then try and work out how to meet them. In fact, no, exceed them..

   Interestingly, the audiences I’ve chased never arrived, and the audiences I have are people who just find something about me and my thoughts I didn’t know was there myself. That might be my bad execution, it could be a general lesson to learn. However not aiming at all is just going to result in a shambles.

5. Do you know what the basic blog article templates are? All writing is based on a template of some sort: boy meets girl movie scripts; best man’s speeches that leave the room laughing; murder mysteries littered with red herrings; etc. Blogging is no different..

   Here are some basic ones to get you going linked to articles I’ve written in template: response to news item or report; top tips for something (like this post); announcement of new product or service even if it’s quite small; link to article you liked with editorial (see below); rants dressed as analysis – even angry rants – seeking reaction or change; live-blogging of an event or conference.

   Mix up that lot within a niche, and you’re going to start building a brand.

6. You know it’s a conversation, right? I’m a hypocrite on this one as I link lightly, but blogging is a conversation. You link to articles you like by other bloggers, and they might link back to you. If your audiences are related, you both win. The link is like currency in the blogosphere as it greases the wheels of growing an audience.

   Some people have comments on their blogs. I do on some of mine. On this one, I don’t [edit: I now do] - that needs to change soon, but the Vagueware blog section is about to undergo a major re-jigging so it’ll wait until then. The conversation though is how you go from broadcast to social. If you’re not linking, you’re not commenting on other people’s blogs and you’re not open to people linking and commenting on your material, you’re not getting it. You’re just doing press releases in Wordpress.

7. Can you actually write? I don’t mean can you hold a pen, I mean can you hold an audience? Some can, some can’t..

   If you struggle to let writing flow, read more and think about what you’re reading. Roll nice sentences around in your head and think about how they work. Style guides might help, but only if you’re a robot. Read, read, read…

8. There are no forumlas, so why are you sticking to them? Everything I’ve just said could be wrong. It probably is. You need to experiment and listen to your own audience. I was on the panel at Speak To A Geek and when one audience member pointed out few in her target audience had access to a computer, I suggested she print things out and hands it to them – the blogosphere is not Neverland where all your communications problems are solved. Think. Act. Enjoy. See what happens.

I hope that helps somebody, somewhere. Writing it has helped me re-think a few things. And now I’ll see what I can do for that client…

I just left a comment on this post of Hugh Macleod’s:

I think you have to remember that a lot of people are still working Facebook out. We didn’t witness people learning the web for the first time, but with FB we kind of have to. I think it’ll go like this:

1. For a while people will entertain themselves with zombie stuff

2. Then they’ll start looking for more interesting uses of the social graph and a few apps (think sharing useful data with friends, dating, etc.) will start to get traction

3. There on out, app developers will stop cutting their teeth on toy apps and start innovating

It’s going to be painful to get there, but it will happen, and it won’t just be Facebook: it’ll be cross-site so you might be in FB whilst I’m in MySpace or whatever (thanks to the open API efforts of several players, that FB will have to sign up to eventually).

Think back to how bad the web was in the early days. Think how it matured and we started getting useful things out of it eventually.

We’re very early on in the arch of developing social networking applications, but it won’t take 1/10th the time it took for the web to mature.

I think many people who have seen the web develop since the mid-1990’s will understand this and ‘get it’. We’re able to see it from a bigger picture, the arch that the web has taken over the last decade.

Many people new to the web are seeing it (from our point of view) almost at a macro level: they can’t imagine a World before blogs, before wikis, before UGC. I’m not saying Hugh is one of these macro-viewers who doesn’t get the big picture – heck, he gets things most people hadn’t even begun to think about, and he certainly understands the web – but I think he’s wrong on this one.

The most interesting observation from the last few months of Facebook usage for me, is how people manage their online identities: they don’t.

You can have multiple profiles and link them together in Facebook if you want. To my knowledge, nobody I know does this – everything they do just piles into one profile. In fact, I’m not even sure people know you can do this. Being completely open with one profile would traditionally be considered a high-risk strategy when mixing business contacts and personal contacts.

We’ve all heard stories about the graduate applying for a job at a top firm and being the perfect picture of potential leadership until somebody finds their MySpace page, complete with pictures of drug use, snippets from their starring role in a ‘Girls Gone Wild’ video and profanity-filled exchanges with friends. We are told that “They” don’t like this – “we” should be wary.

I think paranoia is more to blame for these warnings than reality.

We are no longer living in a parody of the 1950s. I don’t think that society was ever really as rigid as the films and documentaries make it look – where everybody calls each other by their surname and a tipple too many after dinner left you a social outcast, but even if it was real we’re leaving that mode of thinking about each other and quickly moving into an era where authenticity matters.

As a potential employer, I would rather know a new manager has an “interesting past”. It would help me understand his/her character more than pretending they were conceived a perfect model of professionalism.

I don’t know if the rest of the World is going to see things the way I do, but I know that Facebook and social network apps like it are making more people face up to the reality of dealing with people as they are, not how we’d like them to be.

Whilst social photo sites like Flickr have grown over the last few years, many developers have been asking “now we have the resource, what do we do with it”. The first interesting application was tag clouds – it allowed you to see from the metadata in the system what was there and get an idea of how ‘heavy’ some concepts were. But what to do with the imaging itself? All those photos, and no easy way of making use of all the data they contained.

I’ve been ploughing through TED talks (no surprise that my favourite section is the What’s Next in Tech area), and have been meaning to post up lots of the talks, but one being discussed on a mailing list I’m on this morning is the demo of Photo Synth. Here’s the official video:

There are a couple of interesting things about this. Firstly, whilst the first half of the demo – a demo of Sea Dragon, a resolution independent image library – is interesting, there’s nothing truly novel about it. The only limitation stopping that system from being produced in the past is processing power. Every Computer Science/Software Engineering undergrad I knew had that idea whilst in the labs at University.

The second half though – the demo of Photo Synth – is what really grabs people’s attention. By computing vanishing points and common overlaps in images, it becomes possible to build a 3D representation of the object being photographed (in this case, Notre Dame) that you can take a virtual tour through. The applications are fascinating, not least because it takes mapping to a whole new level, and starts answering questions about what we’re going to start doing with all this social media.

One thing I noticed about that application, is if you upload a photo into a set that this software is processing, the software has to ultimately work out where you were in relation to the object. If just one photo in the set is geo-tagged (and many camera phones coming onto the market have in-built PS), I can work out your precise location. Now, let’s suppose you go on a tour of Paris. You take lots of photos all over the city. I now know your location when you were taking each of them. What’s more, the image will have within its metadata the exact date and time. I can, from that, construct a complete trace of where you spent your day from morning until night, with GPS-accurate location data, even though you didn’t have a GPS unit on you. Intelligence agencies are going to love this stuff…

Another interesting thought, is how this is being called a “Microsoft technology”. It wasn’t developed at Microsoft – they bought it in, and have worked out how to bring it to market. Well, when I say bring it to market, I mean do what Microsoft always do: make it available for Windows machines, but pretend the rest of the World doesn’t exist – the tech preview doesn’t work on Linux and OS X at the moment. This is a typical “flat World mentatility” prevailing at Microsoft I hope they’re going to change soon.

Microsoft are buying in a lot of innovation at the moment. They know they have a shortfall in innovative thinking (that’s what happens when your revenue is made up of sales of operating system software you can’t radically change and Office software everybody hates), but they have a big pile of money in the bank. By buying up the ideas and then pushing it out there, Microsoft are getting a lot of credibility within the geek community, and hopefully the idea-hungry culture will start to infect the rest of the company. I suspect a lot of people at Microsoft got a slight kick in the stomach when they saw Surface all over the web last month, simply because it’s such a radical change in how Microsoft looks at itself and answers the question “what is it we do?”

I have absolutely no respect for Microsoft, its software, or its business practices – I genuinely hope that for the sake of humanity the OSS community gets their act together and puts them out of business – but I’m starting to warm to some of the ideas and their employees.