Something very interesting happened on Channel 4 last Wednesday. About half-way through the latest episode of Seven Days, one of the characters, Cassie, took out her laptop and started talking about how people were talking about her on the show’s website. Sitting at home, monitoring the performance of the site on my laptop, I saw a huge spike in traffic as thousands of other people logged onto the site to see what all the fuss was about. This spike was higher than we’d seen the week before, when the rush of people coming to the site on launch night crashed the servers, and even higher than the biggest peak we saw in the final series of Big Brother earlier this year. We’d clearly hit on something, but what was it?

For the last 11 years, Big Brother has been the poster-child for cross-platform projects – a show which was inextricably bound up in the interaction between the format, the audience and the ripples it caused in the outside world. But those ripples never made it back inside the house – we never saw BB contestants pull out a laptop and see what people were saying about them outside those high Elstree fences. The spike in traffic we saw in the middle of Seven Days was something new – it was an audience realising that they could become part of the conversation, part of the story, part of the lives of the people they were seeing on television. Cassie and the rest of the Seven Days cast were recognisably people living their own lives –in cafes, living rooms and bars – not the artificial tasks and traumas of Big Brother.

Seven Days has demonstrated that we’re living in a new world – a place where our audiences see their own lives broadcast to friends across networks like Facebook and Twitter, and where jokes, arguments and love affairs are conducted through comments and responses, likes and retweets, friending and tagging. Broadcasters have probably been a bit slow to create formats fast enough and open-ended enough to reflect the way we live our lives now. Seven Days feels likes it’s starting to explore what this might look like. It’s an exhausting, messy and complicated project to be working on, with a constant cycle of chatter going on between contributors, commissioners, producers and web teams. It’s hard, two weeks in, to get a grasp on what the show is, what it might be, and how we can best harness the intense spikes of attention we’re seeing around every episode.

I sat at home last Wednesday, watching my TV with my laptop, watching someone else reading about themselves on a laptop, whilst thousands of other people were doing the same. This is the world we’re in now, and Seven Days is an innovative and ambitious attempt to represent this world. Like Big Brother 10 years ago, it’s probably not right yet, but it does feel like the first step on a very interesting journey.

We’ve had a couple of projects this year – like Yeardot and Battlefront - that run live for 9 months to a year. It’s incredibly hard to keep hold of people’s attention over such a long period of time, and to be honest, we didn’t expect to. The web is a smorgasbord of distraction, so you have to be realistic about how often people will come back to your project. This poses real problems for an ongoing narrative project – do you start a project with a big bang to capture attention? How do you deal with people coming late to the project? What if people drift away for weeks and then come back to the project again?

Designing a narrative structure that can cope with such diverse patterns of attention is really tough. Its probably easier for factual projects than fiction, partly because we’re used to drifting in and out of our friends’ online streams, so its simple to replicate this in factual/documentary projects. Its no accident that the first popular fiction projects – like Lonelygirl15 and its early precursor Online Caroline – used self-authored video and text to tell the story from the protagonists’ point of view.

Most users now carry with them a strong conceptual expectation about how stories are ‘read’ online, developed from their experience of following their friends’ lifestreams on Facebook et al. So it makes sense to follow a few simple principles to take advantage of these  assumptions, rather than working against them and confusing your users:

Keep it simple, and signpost clearly
We massively overdesigned some of our projects when we first launched them. We tried to create too much atmosphere through strong designs, and the general response from user groups was “this looks great, but what *is* it?”. Through many iterations, we ended up simplifying all our sites a lot, with clear explanations of what the project was, who was speaking there, what you could do, and what was new. You probably have only a few seconds to engage someone before they move on – don’t risk being enigmatic, unless you’re dealing with a brand or project that the audience already knows and loves. If its a completely new thing, explain the project clearly and keep the navigation simple and consistent – most users will probably not come through the main site/home page, so the project’s purpose needs to ring clear from every possible interaction.

Have a clear voice for the project
Erika Hall’s Copy As Interface rightly points out that most navigation of the web relies on text, not images or video. For social media sites, this text is not the neutral voice of a machine or nameless authority, but vernacular, oral speech, written as if it were a conversation with a friend. As Erika puts it – “we’re not writing, we’re speaking with text”. Again, this is inherited from the fact that most of our interactions on the web now are with friends, not ‘sites’, meaning that we respond better to projects that use vernacular language. We find such language more engaging, approachable and interesting -  as Erika Hall quotes Walter J Ong – “Orality knits persons together into community”. The single most effective thing you can do to engage your users and keep their attention is to have a clearly identified, oral, vernacular voice for the project. Ideally, this would be a named person, real or fictitious. On Battlefront, we have the excellent Orsi, who blogs for us on Bebo and generally gives the site a sense of idenitity. Incidentally, I think Battlefront’s tag line - ‘You’re Already Involved’ – is one of the best bits of copywriting on any of our projects.

Make it easy for people to leave footprints in the project
There are two good reasons for this – if users contribute to a project, no matter how small, then they’re more likely to remember it and come back. Secondly, a site with lots of user activity looks busy and active for other users – just like restaurants, people are more likely to stick around on a busy site than one that feels like you’re the only visitor. There is a third aim – to get some personal data that means you can regularly communicate with the user, but this can be a real barrier until people have spent a fair bit of time with the project and feel like they’re getting value. You can use promotional competitions as a shortcut to get user data, but I don’t think this is that valuable, as it drives a wave of attention that mostly just drifts out again like a tide once the competition is over. Ideally, you want your users to gradually increase the size of the footprint in the project as they get more immersed. This could mean initially clicking a simple vote or poll, then friending on a social network, subscribing to a newsletter, commenting and finally creating or embedding content in their own social spaces. On the home page of Battlefront, we’ve got a really simple interactive word-cloud with issues that users have uploaded for others to vote on, creating an immediate call for participation to new visitors. In fact, most new visitors seem to come through Facebook, meaning that they’re responding to specific call to action from the individual campaigners. On Yeardot, we deliberately tried to move users through to the individual contributors pages on Myspace, thinking that this is where the real conversation would happen. But we underestimated the complexity of this journey, and also the social barriers many feel in leaving a comment on a total stranger’s Myspace page, so after a few months we redesigned the main hub site to encourage commenting there as well. I don’t think we’ve really explored this yet, though, and we’ll be looking at the entry and exit routes through these projects to understand more about how to gradually encourage and feedback on activity from users – the user journey needs to start from their streams, not our site, and end up back in their streams again.

Or, you could just make games…
If you really want to engage people, get them to participate, and get them to return again and again, you might as well make games. As Aleks Krotoski pointed out in her talk at Dconstruct last year, there has been a baffling lack of communication between web design and game design, although this is now happening, and quickly. My fellow commissioning editor, Alice Taylor, knows far more than me about games, and is commissioning some excellent projects, such as Bow Street Runner, Routesgame, and a project with SixToStart that i’m incredibly excited about that will launch later this year. I hope Alice will write about her experiences commissioning these projects more on her blog in the next few months. But we should all learn from how the best games drag you in without having to read a manual; encourage early, simple interaction which is rewarded out of proportion to your effort; and then sets you iterative challenges that get the balance between effort and reward just right. Amy Jo Kim and Jane McGonigal have both written inspiring accounts of how gaming metaphors can be applied elsewhere on the web, and in real life. Sometimes I think its only a matter of time until gaming becomes the main metaphor for most of our social interactions. And then  sometimes, I think its already happened…

In the next essay, I’ll talk about the holy grail – turning users’ attention into valuable interactions. For many, this will mean getting money out of them, but as I work for a public service broadcaster, I’m going to talk about more intangible things – how you know if people are learning about themselves, their lives, the world around them; and whether they’ve been inspired to act upon and change things as a result. Not too much to aim for, then…

“This is all part of the digital lifestyle, coming at the middle class like a division of Panzer tanks. First they came for the vinyl, and I said nothing. Then for the cassettes, and the CDs, and the VHS tapes. Still I was silent. And now they will come for my books, sad little volumes trembling on their shelves. I look at my friends the books and I think, sorry, fuckers, for the iBrary is only a few dozen failed product launches away. Eventually (waves hands) this will all be stripes on disk.”

The conference helped me pull together some strands of recent thinking about a number of things, such as vernacular media, new forms of craft and the role of artists in technology research. Anyone who has read some of the (rare) posts on this blog will appreciate that these are recurring passions of mine, and so the conference was like a personal wish-list of speakers and topics.

I gave a very loose introduction, with my top ten favourite reasons why I love technology (which I’ll try and write up here later) and then summarised the day at the end. After discussing with Matt Webb the various really cool ways to sum up conferences that we’d seen over the years, I did nothing cool at all, and just pulled out four themes that I thought had developed in the various presentations. Here they are, in all their hand-waving glory:

Getting away from the screen
I’ve always thought ambient or Tangible interfaces have been one of the asymptotic futures of tech research, always promised, but never delivered. But we’re in the middle of an exciting bubble of activity in this area, from tiletoys to nabaztags. Information overload is the usual driver for this kind of research, but the real market driver seems to be presence – Matt Webb showed a lovely interface for IM that used a pop-up toy to quickly indicate whether someone on your network was available or away. I think this is linked to the adoption of mobile phones, which has introduced subtle kinds of haptic or tangible interface (vibrations, etc) into the mass market. Tangible presence interfaces might really tip over into the mass-market in the next few years, driven through mobiles and broadband games consoles.

Transferring interaction vocabularies across contexts
Tangible interfaces offer opportunities for untapping lots of learned experiences in users from other contexts. So much of the experience of digital interaction is limited by the WIMP metaphor, or the even more opaque UIs of one-off consumer devices like video recorders. Matt Webb used a term – body thinking – to describe the learned behaviours we have from our experiences with the tangible world (I think Roland Barthes wrote about this as well, but can’t remember in what book).

For me, the opportunity with tangible media is not to try and find perfect physical metaphors for digital interactions, but to think about the learned behaviours people have, and how they might be useful in other contexts. Just as WIMP is a desk-bound metaphor that has been stretched to encompass all sorts of tasks that are not normally associated with desks, tangible interfaces can unlock a new vocabulary of interaction behaviours that aren’t limited to waving vaguely in front of screens – for example – Matt showed his hack of the iBook’s accelerometer so that he could ‘bump’ his laptop to scroll through files hierarchies. My dad’s a carpenter, and has over 40 years of experience in how to hang a door, and the subtle interation of materials and tools. Yet programming a VCR makes him feel like an idiot. Why can’t interaction design tap into his areas of expertise, rather than making him feel stupid? It reminds me a bit of a Steve Job’s quote that Matt Jones linked to:

” There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, People couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.”

Well, that’s one approach to interaction design, I guess. But I think there are whole libraries of experiences that we could use out there, and I’d rather they didn’t die out before interaction designers started using them.

Not trying to be *really* useful
This is a slightly more vague insight, but a lot of the products shown were very playful in their design. Not useless, but playful. The difference is between an interaction design that is ruthless in its efficiency, and therefore tries to second guess you all the time to prove its intelligence (eg Microsoft Clippy) and one that provides clear, simple functions, yet has an openess that encourages further play and discovery. Flickr is the poster child here – its advanced features reveal themselves to you through you interaction with the interface and its social features. You might notices the notes feature on other people pictures, then find out how to use them yourself. Sociability is key to this kind of design – letting users social play unveil new actions and incorporating them into features.

Dan & Tuomo are really keen on this approach with Tile Toy, which is immensly playful, and have open-sourced the hardware and software to let users find what they want to do with it. There is something more sustainable and ‘thing-ness’ about this approach to design – the resulting tools feel like they have been worn-in through use, rather than being hard-wired out of the factory. Its also worth reading Bijker and Pinch’s Social Construction of Technology for a more theoretical understanding of how user’s create and adapt tools – their analysis of how the common chain-driven bicycle design developed through interaction with user-groups is very illuminating. But the key thing here is the balance between playfulness and functionality – purely playful interfaces are fun, but the appeal tails off, but tools that are playful *and* useful will become core parts of the user’s tool-sets.

The changing nature of Play
Linked to the above was the changing nature of play, and what this meant for the role of art in technological development. When I used to be a digital art curator, there were productive collaborations between artists and technology labs, best illustrated by the work Char Davies did with SoftImage. In the late 80′s/early 90′s, when technology was still prohibitively expensive and access was limited, these kind of collaborations allowed tech companies to imagine other uses for their products, and for artists to develop new kinds of aesthetic practise. In Regine’s talk, she showed a lot of tangible and wearable media projects that are examples of this kind of ‘imagineering’.

But things have changed now. Technology is hell of a lot cheaper, much of the core infrastructure has commodified, and digital media users are in the majority, not a tiny artistic elite. There are still projects that are commissioning this kind of purely artistic ‘play’, but I think the research needs of the sector have moved on. Artists no longer need to ‘rehearse’ possible technological futures, because you can now launch your idea into a real market at relatively low cost. Flickr came out of a publicly-funded project that was originally a purposeless game, but quickly found its niche as a mass-market product.

Play has now crossed the line from R&D, and become an integral part of a mass-design process – the cliched ‘perpetual beta’ of all web 2.0 companies. Rather than a single artist imagining a future and delivering it as a purely aesthetic experience, playful interaction designs are launched onto a market with the understanding than users will invent their own futures for them. Again, TileToy is a good example of this.

This is quite refreshing for those of us who have been dabbling in the borders between art, technology and innovation over the last decade or so. For most of that time, we were happy to spend our time rehearsing potential futures, playing behind the scenes, but not expecting the curtain to ever rise. Well, there’s an audience out there now, and they love technology. We’re not playing anymore – a scary, but liberating, thought. The challenge now is for artists and designers to capitalise on this.

CONTENT VS. DISTRIBUTION
Distribution was nearly king – you couldn’t get a cable channel going in this country without John Malone. But when real broadband arrives, owning distribution will be less and less important.

There’s a lot of signs that Murdoch really gets the new media space at the moment, but content vs distribution is an old battle, and this perhaps demonstrates how much his strategic instincts are still honed to fight old wars.

Content vs Distribution was the imaginary battleground of a war called ‘convergence’ that, like so many wannabee generals playing Risk or Age of Empires, occupied the executives and strategic thinkers of blue-chip media/comms companies for the last 10 years or so. Large bets were placed on whether it was more important to be at the centre of a huge content network, or a huge communication infrastructure. The riskiest gamblers (*cough* Aol *cough* TimeWarner) tried both, betting that this illusory convergence would create a new battlefield, and they would be the centre of it.

There were a couple of problems with this. The glamour of content hid the fact that its actually (in its hit-driven, pre Long Tail version) incredibly economically inefficient. Andrew Odlyzko’s excellent essay ‘Content is not King’ exposes this reality, landing a couple of really important facts, as well as some prescient predictions.

One of the facts is about the economics of content consumption. Odlyzko points out that the content sector is actually dwarfed by the communications sector in terms of average US consumer spend. He goes further, to point out that nearly all forms of content are subsidised for the user – ie, the user does not bear the full cost at the point of consumption, as costs are ameliorated by advertising, concessionaries, or indirect taxation (eg – the license fee). Conversely, consumers seem happy to pay way over the odds for some forms of communication, such as SMS.

In other words, we value gossip highly, and content rarely.

Of course, in our media 2.0 world, content can be conversation, and vice-versa. Murdoch might understand this, but it looks like he’s still placing his chips on the Head, not the Long Tail. Elsewhere in the Wired article he talks about building MySpace profiles for NewsCorp films and other content as a way to start to derive attention and revenue from MySpace into his Big Content properties.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how content operates in conversational spaces. In a recent post on his Long Tail blog, Chris Anderson challenges Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion that “Without the New York Times, there is no blog community. They’d have nothing to blog about.” Using Technorati to find out how many posts actually index Big Content brands, Chris concludes that the blogosphere is actually writing about almost anything *but* the New York Times. in fact, the top big media brand reference in blog posts (the BBC) is still only referenced in *0.3%* of blog posts.

Imagine a party with 1000 people in it. Murdoch would like to think that by walking into the party, people will start to talk about *his* movies. In fact, at best only three people will bother… That’s quite a cold, hard statistic if you’ve just spent half a billion dollars hosting the party.

maybe i should write more about kittens or web 2.0…

*MAD magazine used to have the title of this post as their masthead. Seemingly ignoring the inferior CRACKED…

This is all part of a project I’ve been developing over the last year called Innovation Labs. Its a pilot initiative to try and see how the BBC can work with new media indies across the UK. We had a call for ideas in late autumn last year, and recieved over 170 ideas from the three pilot projects in Yorkshire, London and the North-West. 29 ideas were selected, and we’ve been giving feedback to the teams over the last few months, preparing them for the rapid-prototyping exercises they’ll be doing in the week-long Lab.

Its a bit like a foo-camp, but with commissioning opportunities at the end. Even though the companies here are effectively in competition, there’s a huge amount of collaboration and sharing going on, as people give advice and suggestions across teams. Tomorrow, two commissioners from the BBC internet team – Jem Stone and Jason Daponte – turn up to give advice prior to the pitching, so things might get a bit more ruthless then…

We’ve redesigned the Innovation Labs site to reflect the week long events, with live blogs by mentors and participants at the Labs (although everyone seems too busy working at the moment to blog, so I might have to offer other incentives…)

Its an interesting and exciting project, but will only be worthwhile if it ends up in more good ideas being developed and commissioned by the BBC from outside companies. We’ll know by the end of March – after the third and final Lab in London – whether this has happened, but the signs are good, and I’ve already been talking to other regions across the UK about hosting Labs, so hopefully we can do it again, but make it bigger and better. Personally, I’m loving spending so much time discussing ideas with creative people, and would love to do it again next year.

There’s some fantastic footage there, making this far more interesting to browse through than the footage released for the Radio 1 Superstar VJ competition. It’ll be interesting to see how it gets used in creative projects, though.

When we were first kicking around ideas for how people might want to use the Creative Archive a few years ago, one of the key decisions was whether to make content available under a single project site, or to tie individual projects to existing brands. I think the latter has been the right choice, as creativity works best within a context. A context-less archive would be bigger and more flexible, but only advanced users would really benefit from that flexibility. Having a specific context and even a brief – as with the Radio 1 competition – provides more than simply a blank page for people to start with. Hopefully, this will encourage more people to engage with the content.

Of course, ideally we’d have both – a inspiration from familiar contexts for people to start with, and then open buckets of good stuff for more advanced users to play around. The Backstage discussion list have already been talking about how to build tools to aggregate the content from different CA projects, so hopefully one user innovation project will be able to help out another!