Blackbeardblog

It’s certain that Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” will be the Christmas #1. But which version? PR Media Blog reports on a Facebook campaign to put Jeff Buckley’s version at #1 instead of the version by X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke.

The blog post sets up the battle as old v new media, but also as the manipulative hand of S.Cowell vs “the people”. A quick Twitter search for “Hallelujah” seems to back this up. “Stop X-Factor getting to number 1, buy Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah”. “Buckley’s is still my favourite version of Hallelujah and this fact will not do me any favours.” “attention pundits: Stop mis-interpreting “Hallelujah”. It is not about redemption. Nor is it a song of Hope.”

Though other notes are being struck: “Oh I loved the hallelujah song”. “did not follow X-Factor but has just listened to Hallelujah and choked up a bit.” The reactions - whichever version they favour - suggest that the pop critic Mike Barthel was right when, in his excellent 2007 paper on the song, he described its appeal as lying in its intimacy - it’s a song that, however mainstream it becomes, always feels like a personal discovery to its fans. Read the rest of this entry »

Confessions Of A Moderator

FINALLY got around to putting up the MRS paper I did last year.

Richard Millington’s Online Communities Manifesto boils down to “We need to think about how communities work, not just how technology works”. It’s a sensible and useful corrective to the “If you build it they will come” school of community creation.

His blog is smart too - for instance his suggestion that, rather than fighting against the non-scalability of conversations, a community builder should embrace it and build multiple parallel communities, not one big one. As a market researcher used to thinking about multiple sample cells this has a certain appeal.

A conversation with a friend at the weekend made me realise something about the way I use social media: and specifically, why I’ve found using Facebook and Twitter something of a chore.

I have various groups of friends, the bulk of whom have some degree of online presence. Most of the ones I socialise with regularly and see a lot are on an email list, which has run since 2000 or so. A wider circle then are friends with me on LiveJournal, where I’ve been since ‘05. A wider circle still are on Facebook, and then at least half my (very few) Twitter followers are people I barely know at all. Plus I’ve run my website since 1999, and this year I started using tumblr, where again I’m followed by a bunch of people I don’t know plus a few I do - mostly Americans with an interest in music. Read the rest of this entry »

I won the “Best Presentation” award at the MRS Research Awards 2008 last night, which was exciting: I was nominated for three awards but this was not the one I expected to actually get! It’s an enormous confidence boost, especially as it was the first time I’d presented anything in front of a crowd. I was fuelled by Coca-Cola and memories of David Bellamy, Johnny Ball and Magnus Pike and obviously it came out rather well. There’s little point in putting up the presentation, as it was designed to be presented and performed, not read, but as soon as I can I will finally upload a copy of the paper itself, and you can recreate the unique presentational ambience for yourself by putting on Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music in the relevant sections. Read the rest of this entry »

The “Facebook Republican Army” - literalising the broken window metaphor for social networks! (via Infovore)

While we’re linking, here’s a podcast I did (while in my former job) for the excellent people at Research Talk. I was teaming up here with Matt Rhodes of Fresh Networks, whose blog is a good one if you’re looking for some practical and informed advice on setting up research communities.

Frank Kogan had some good comments on yesterday’s post about Broken Window theory, which I’ll try and reply to - the thrust of it, “what if New York in the 70s was better (for some things) than New York today?” is one I agree with (despite never having been to New York) and touches on a big and basic question about online communities, viz. who do you want to contribute? So I’m going to think about that more in another post.

In this one I’m just going to dwell a bit more on the schematic of online behaviour suggested by yesterday’s graffiti comparison.

In the original schema we have behaviour which is self-evidently antisocial (breaking windows) and the implied contrast of behaviour which is self-evidently a social good (helping to create community structures). Online, Kottke says, this breaks down into hate speech and spam email vs creating constructive conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting Kottke post about applying “Broken Windows theory” to online spaces:

Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to “own” their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same. Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior and misbehave themselves. More likely, they’re discouraged from helping with the community moderation process of keeping their peers in line with social pressure. Or they stop visiting the site altogether.

There’s obviously a lot of sense in this, which boils down to “the site owner needs to be a visible presence on their site”: but as long as they own decisions and moderation policy that policy can be a bit more laissez-faire than Kottke’s suggesting. For instance, a better analogy for trolling might be graffiti, not window-breaking - for the most part its an eyesore and a minor menace and it can send the same kind of signals as broken windows sent. But it also can be exciting, artistic, empowering, the sign of a vibrant community not a decaying one.

And now a less metaphysical post…

Online communities are resistant to change: This post from Communityspark offers some good advice, namely to get stuff right early on rather than tinker with it and piss off your regulars. What the post doesn’t say is that online communities change whether they’re resistant to it or not: the cultural changes that come from people knowing one another, getting used to who they like and don’t like; the shortening fuses that come from over-exposure to other regulars’ quirks; the gradual slackening of interest that comes from having had most discussions three or four times before…. Community management is as much about intervening to manage that change as it is about implementing the visible kind.

In Double Trouble, Greil Marcus’ collection of 1990s pieces, there’s an essay from 1994 where he visits an Elvis exhibition. The exhibition itself doesn’t move him much: the visitors’ book, on the other hand…

The book was where the action was: the “Secret Exhibition”… something you could touch, make, unmake, inscribe, deface; people started arguing with each other on the first page, over racism, class, taste, religion, and didn’t let up until the show closed, though for all I know someone broke in after that just to get the last word. Read the rest of this entry »