Great series of posts on Choice Architecture in the Wild…

May 26, 2011 By 2 Comments

I’ve been a bit slack in recommending some of the great articles and posts appearing on other blogs around the internet, which is particularly highlighted by Jonathan MacDonald’s great series on ‘Choice Architecture in the Wild‘, as it’s now up to a 12th installment!

All of them are well worth reading, and the latest post provides some great examples about the way simple decisions in marketing and advertising are sometimes misguided in terms of what people actually believe and do as a result.

Obviously I need to disclose that I’ve happily known Jonathan a while and he may or may not have once bought me a sandwich (Or I might have bought one for him, in which case, he can disclose it, and also buy me lunch sometime!)

Filed Under: Digital Culture Tagged With: , , , , ,

Curation and the paradox of user-generated radio

May 25, 2011 By 3 Comments

I’ve been having a quick play with Turntable.fm since signing up last night and it’s got me thinking about user-generated and user-controlled radio, which is something I was involved with at Absolute Radio with the dabbl project.

Internet radio listening is a pretty small proportion of overall radio listening, and I wouldn’t suggest otherwise in the near future, even if just to escape the wrath of James Cridland. So then you have user-generated radio as a niche within that area, and yet there are a number of services which have been joined by Turntable FM…

Those are the immediate ones which spring to mind, and you could possible include the likes of Spotify (Although the social playlist sharing really takes place outside of it) or mFlow. And there are an increasing number of social sharing music apps for smartphones.

In an age of democratisation of content creation and particularly at the moment, content curation, it seems as if simple and easy user-generated radio is an obvious desire and fit. Make it quick, simple and easy, and you don’t have to worry about on-air talent or programme managers. And at the same time, everyone will love and share the service because they’re involved, engaged and that’s what social networks are all about.

So you’ve got Blip.fm, which has been around for ages, and is in effect a musical microblogging service which produces an effect of crowdsourcing John Peel as you follow a network of users all ‘blipping’ individual tracks.

You’ve got Jelli which has the benefit of pretty quick and simple ways to vote for tracks which may get played with enough votes, and the added incentive of hearing your choices actually play on a number of U.S radio stations. This was also the model for dabbl, although the track selection was more controlled by the Absolute Radio team to enable a more consistent listening experience.

And you’ve got Mixcloud, which is probably my favourite for actually relaxing and listening to great music – particularly the soul and funk mixes of the user HeavySoulBrutha.

Increasingly all of those services are interlinked with Facebook and Twitter, allowing for a high level of integration where the people are.

And yet, something just never quites fit right from a purely consumer point of view (I’m not going to go into the problems of licensing and running a UGC music service).

I’m struggling to define it accurately, but for me it’s almost impossible to find the right sweet spot between involvement and the listening experience.

Blip.fm can be hugely fun for a while, but also massively jarring when random songs are played after each other. Jelli and dabbl both did a reasonable job of allowing you to have an input into station output, but always with caveats over how much impact you have as an individual – and that impact will always lessen the more popular the service becomes, meaning that your aim to be able to play and get respect for the music you love is always slightly at odds with that of the service to become massively popular and afford the server costs.

Mixcloud actually has the best listening experience, and I think that’s because the perceived barrier to entry is higher – you need to actually create a decent mix of tunes and upload it yourself, meaning that a higher level of curation and DJ ability goes on. That compares with Turntable which allows for recognition and point scoring, but the impressive speed of track selection and playing tends to mean that you get a more random listening experience. Turntable is still in limited access at the moment, but unless it gets really popular, it’s still going to be easy for someone to jump onto the decks and play something completely out of kilter with the rest of the room.

The reason I struggle is that open democratisation and curation of text, images and video services has been a great thing. I read a lot of sources I wouldn’t ordinarily discover and the quality ratio is pretty high. The same goes for photos and videos. And in my network, I should benefit from knowing a higher-than-average number of musical experts, but it never seems to play out like that.

So why do you think user-generated and user-curated music services struggle so much in comparison with other art forms? Is it something inherent in music itself? Is it that the skill of curating a selection of music is less attainable?

Or is it the lack of human interactivity which is missing? With a traditional DJ on the radio, you get their opinions and entertainment in between records. With dance and club DJs, you get to see the human behind the turntables or laptop. But with user-generated radio online that element is a lot more subdued, and hasn’t really been brought out by any service yet, without a lot more effort on the part of the listener.

Could it be true that human-generated radio is actually just missing essential elements of humanity?

Filed Under: Crowdsourcing, Digital Audio, radio Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Thoughts from a disconnected weekend…

May 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I got back from a weekend away with my family yesterday, having spent 3 days on the east coast of England with no laptop, no wifi, and limited mobile reception.

I’m not going to suggest that everyone should give up technology to go and live in a mud hut by the beach, but I will say that I was really glad of a break from the constant rollercoaster ride of working, blogging, meeting, working, reading,working etc to spend some time concentrating on the two most important people in my life.

We went to a wildlife park, a sealife centre, an old-fashioned English seafront, some deserted beaches, and quite often, the playground where we were staying, and we pretty much ignored the TV with the 4 channel selection I remembered from my childhood until late in the evening.

All extremely enjoyable, but I did miss some elements of internet access – and interestingly, it wasn’t really about access to entertainment. Sure I’d have quite liked to have watched the Formula One race at the weekend on demand, having missed it live, but the main things I missed were:

  • Sharing my thoughts on my blog, and any conversation that occurred.
  • Sharing my thoughts on Facebook and Twitter and any conversation that occurred.
  • Being able to get information on things to do and places to eat quickly and easily.

Yet again I’m reminded that the value of the internet is about what it enables us to do, and not what it enables us to consume and passively accept.

And the more that marketing, publishing and disciplines finally realise that enabling worthwhile endeavours trumps triviality or passive consumption, the better we’ll all be.

OK, so that’s not really news, particularly if you read people like Umair Haque on a frequent basis, but yet it still isn’t happening enough yet.

And I think it’s the duty of those of us who have discovered how active participation not only benefits others, but also ourselves, to find ways to enable others in some way, by helping, sharing, encouraging, inspiring, and most of all, by doing.

(And as a note for the social media measurement fanatics amongst us – most measurement sites didn’t really fluctuate much due to 3 days of inactivity, although I did lose a point on Peerindex, presumably showing that I’m less influential on Tuesday than I was on Friday of last week!)

Filed Under: Digital Culture Tagged With: , , , , ,

Information overload and failure filter are false problems

May 19, 2011 By 2 Comments

The concept of information overload has received a lot of debate, and I completely agree with Clay Shirky that it’s actually ‘filter failure’ which is causing our current obsession with the problems of keeping up with the influx of content which is published and digitally accessible at a far greater rate than any time in human history.

But I think we’ve all been missing the real problem.

The current situation may be detrimental to our thought processes as some have argued, but that situation won’t last. Not only will technology filters improve, but humans are a pretty adaptable species, and the current supposedly harmful adaptions to accomodate skimming and processing lots of data. And I’m not even sure that information paralysis is the real problem, as we can cut down those inputs if we need to – even just by closing a feed reader or Twitter client, or by turning off the PC or TV.

I’m actually more concerned with a problem which has been affecting me to some extent.

‘Opportunity Overload’

WTF is Opportunity Overload?

As a personal example, I recently bought three books which will hopefully help me to make some changes in my lifestyle, and they nicely represent how we traditionally got the information to make changes and create new opportunities.

Buy a book, take a course, hire a professional, these were the ways to make changes and solve problems for the last few hundred years, even if actually the choices we made were the result of our subsconscious decisions and social proof. As a  homeowner, I’d limit the amount of DIY to the amount of information I’d been able to get – and if I wasn’t sufficiently educated, I’d just get a professional in to solve the problem (assuming I had the money available – if not, I’d ignore it and hope it went away).

That’s all changed.

Now I can find videos on plumbing on Youtube, or tips on cutting floor tiles on a blog. Or find better ways to run my businesses. Or learn to programme. Or how to cure the brown spot on my apple trees and improve the vegetable patch.

With internet access, I’m able to access all of these opportunities. To publish my own blog, to record my own music, to shoot my own videos.

Except there are only a finite amount of hours in the day, to be split with sleeping and spending time with my family.

And that’s the real cause of stress – it’s not about the amount of information coming in. It’s about the opportunity overload that information and digital enablement creates, and that I can’t hope to fulfill in the time available. I no longer have the excuse that I’m not a mechanic, plasterer or plumber when I know how much help is available online – and doing it myself theoretically means the cost issue is far less of a reason to avoid doing it.

It means the skills to prioritise tasks is going to be more essential than ever. And so is the ability to accept that not all things will be achievable, and to be able to let go of those opportunities and tasks which I’ll never value quite enough to get around to – even if I’d quite like to be able to say that I’d done it.

And that’s going to be tricky – human nature is ambitious and aspirational. There’s a very, very tiny part of me that still finds it a little hard to accept I’m unlikely to be a professional motorcycle racer, play football for Chelsea, or become a rockstar, even though 99.9% of me has changed to following aspirations to grow my business, support my family, and ride motorcycles and play guitar purely for enjoyment.

So how do we all deal with the knowledge that if we only had enough time, we could Google the way to achieve pretty much any task, but it’s only our human frailty and need for sleep/family/food/friends that are stopping us?

That’s why I feel Information Overload ain’t the problem – Opportunity Overload is.


Filed Under: Digital Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts