Cityware: social networking 2.0?

A while back I blogged on what might be happening at Facebook - in particular, the possibility that it might become the web 2.0, social network "operating system".  This seemed especially likely now that Facebook has opened up its site to allow third-party developers to write programmes to sit on top of their base interface. 

I have to say though, I hadn't predicted the sheer rate of development that is taking place.  Today, thanks to an article on the BBC, I discovered possibly the most exciting application I have seen thus far - Cityware.  This has been developed by researchers at the University of Bath, working with corporate partners Vodafone, HP Labs and Nokia.  Basically it is a three part system relying on Bluetooth data to interlock your Facebook profile, your mobile phone and data-collection nodes that have already been established. 

The logic is very simple; mobile devices, with bluetooth activated talk to each other and to the data collection nodes.  Through the information that is gathered by the nodes - namely the devices bluetooth identification code - these devices, and their relative proximity to each other, can be coupled up, creating a real time picture of how individuals interact on a daily basis.  At the moment, the number of nodes is quite limited, with Bath UCL and UCSD hosting nodes established by the software's designers.  However, the node software is publicly available and can be put on any bluetooth enabled PC.  So there are probably a larger number of nodes already and that figure should carry on increasing in campuses and offices around the world.  Furthermore, the developers are working on node software capable of running on mobile devices.   

This is potentially a pretty profound development.   So far, it seems we have been able to identify two principles that have organised social networks.  Firstly, they have been created through people importing their real world friends into online environments.  Secondly, they have been driven by people sharing an interest and, due to that interest, interacting online.  This technology points to something quite new - a bit tacky I know, but maybe something we could call social networking 2.0 - where a more complex picture of human interaction can be constructed, based not just upon who we "know" but who we interact with or even just pass by.  So for example, if I were to attend a conference with my bluetooth on my phone enabled, I would be able to track down the other people who were in the room, without having spoken to them on the day itself or collecting their contact details.  Because the key defining factors in the kind of social networking that Cityware lets you construct are proximity and location, a whole new range of possibilities emerges.

And in case you are wondering, I have installed it on my phone and my Facebook profile.  However, I won't be in London for a few days, so I shall report back if anything interesting happens (for anyone interested, the Facebook install page is here). 

Help! The Copyright Board is making me a criminal

Last month the Canadian Copyright Board decided to reconsider placing a levy of up to $75 on iPods. This isn’t the first time. The levy was put in place in 2003, but was struck down by the courts which said that it was the job of Parliamentarians to decide what should be levied. This didn’t stop the Copyright Board which, as Michael Geist reports thinks that they levy could also be “applied to cellphones and personal computers, and warning that excluding the iPod from the levy system would "instantly makes the conduct of millions of Canadians illegal, and even possibly criminal."

See: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/

The wisdom of the crowds says...

I recently reviewed James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of the Crowds for the Journal of Information Technology and Politics.  The crowd thesis is of interest because it permeates many online processes and activities.  A really obvious example, that virtually everyone will be familiar with, is Google.  The search engine essentially takes information, created by the online behaviour of millions of people undertaking billions of actions, and organises it into a useful format, prioritising websites on that basis.  One aspect of this process is to be found in the Google toolbar, as detailed in a Slate article today.  If you half fill the box, Google uses the searches that other people have made before you to offer suggestions as to what you might like to search for.  So for example, if you type in “Tom Cruise” the additional suggestions are: Movie, short, height, katie holmes, films and on oprah.  You get the idea.  But then this got me thinking… what would the suggestions be if I typed in some of our more famous political leaders?  Here we go (and I warn you some of them are slightly weird):

Gordon Brown - estate agents, rocking horse, mp, associates, for Britain, biography, glass eye, estate agent, wiki 

Tony Blair - wikipedia, biography, resignation, speech, resigns, wiki, catholic, speeches, steps down

David Cameron - mp, gikandi, blog, zionist, wikipedia, wiki, ’s wife, biography, wife

Ming Campbell - No suggestions

George Bush - watch, quotes, watch stolen, jokes, intercontinental airport, albania, in albania, senior, airport, ’s watch

Bill Clinton - biography, quotes, foundation, impeach, scandal, library, wiki, harvard, bio, birthday

Hillary Clinton - for president, campaign, 2008, website, biography, jokes, campaign song, president, quotes, botox

Barack Obama - biography, muslim, for president, religion, bio, campaign, quotes, wikipedia, website, myspace

John Edwards - for president, psychic, campaign, house, haircut, wife, home, crossing over, 2008, wiki

[First published at nickanstead.com/blog] 

Heroes Schmeroes

What is it with American TV drama and sentimental dialogue? I have just watched the first two episodes of NBC’s Heroes. Just about every conversation in this latest mega series followed a simple pattern:

1. Someone will fly off in a rage, not listening to the other character.
2. They realise they've overstepped a mark, so they pause. The camerawork and tempo indicate they are reflecting, genuinely (emotion being the index of truthfulness – an epistemological black hole).
3. They sigh, possibly look at their shoes, then say, "Look, I'm sorry, its just...". And then they reveal some inner emotional turmoil as an excuse and as an appeal for understanding.
4. Finally they make a joke, smile, shrug, and everything's ok, but it happens again in the next scene, and the one after that

This is a mode of conversation based on interiority. The TV character reveals their interior, their emotions, and appeal to others’ interior states (‘heart to heart’). The episode degenerates into a series of touching moments. Plot lines cannot move on until a person’s interior state has been fully revealed and acknowledged by others. Things slow down and get stuck because someone won’t accept, or isn’t aware of, how their daughter or brother or boyfriend feels. This might be acceptable in something like Grey’s Anatomy, but in a series about superheroes?

Is there a generation growing up talking this way? Perhaps it is flippant to suggest scriptwriters are particularly prone to certain kinds of therapy? What if this mode of conversation seeps into other genres, even into news and current affairs? Have newscasters begun to reveal their emotional response to events as if audiences expect this now?

* Exceptions in the first episodes were some of those scenes involving the Japanese character Hiro.

Voting made easy

I participated in Young People, New Technologies and Political Engagement, a seminar hosted by the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Surrey. In my presentation, titled “Am I bovvered?”: The Next Digital Divide (PDF of slides here), I talked about how newly eligible voters in Korea make sense of the online political culture shaped by the first generation of Internet users around the 2002 presidential election. BTW, I felt as if my thunder was stolen when Stephen, who opened up the event by his keynote speech, coincidentally used a photo from the Catherine Tate show, from which the title of my presentation was also inspired.

(from 10 Downing Street)

The seminar was thoroughly enjoyable. A general theme running through this two-day-long event was that young people are not necessarily apathetic in politics but engaging themselves in their own fashion and the concept of citizenship therefore has to be rethought accordingly. For example, Bennett in his keynote speech pointed to the need to “bridge the traditional civic education ideal of the Dutiful Citizen (DC) and the emerging youth ideal of self-Actualising Citizenship (AC)”.


What I particularly like about attending conferences like this one is to hear about real-life examples of ‘Internet politics’ in different sociocultural settings. One of my favourite this time was VoteMatch, a site originally developed in the Netherlands to assist the general electorate with their voting decisions.


You are shown 30 statements regarding different political issues with a choice of Agree/Disagree/Don’t know. After answering all 30, you are asked which among those issues you feel more strongly about (so that the responses can be weighed). Then the site will tell you who you should vote for! Simple as that. What the site does is basically to read election documents from parties and candidates and calculate which one is most matched to your political preferences for you. Could voting, “our sacred right and duty”, get any easier?


According to the presenter Fadi Hirzalla, statistics show that this “voting aid” actually influenced young voters’ decisions. Despite perfectly expectable criticisms of its ideological and methodological biases, this instrument became very popular in the Netherlands and is now adopted in other European countries like France, Germany, Switzerland and Bulgaria.


I am a big fan of any sort of Internet-based political activity, but this one was, even for me, a bit of a goose-bumpy surprise. It then got me to think why I have difficulty in accepting this while I would have no problem with anyone who actively seeks more information and expert advice in order to understand something better. I haven’t quite figured out whether today’s voters are dumber or smarter.

(Mon vote à moi, French version of VoteMatch,

isn’t the name [My vote is mine] a bit ironical?)

* Reproduced from the original article on my website 

Blogging and the vernacular

I'm feeling quite proud of myself at the moment, as I have just redesigned my personal weblog... and if I do say so myself, it looks pretty amazing.  It is thoroughly Web 2.0 ready, with a whole host of neat widgets that do cool stuff down in the sidebars. Perhaps my favourite bit is the tag cloud. Not something you normally see on WordPress, which is category  rather than tag driven, but, with the help of a few plugins, it works really well (incidentally, for anyone interested in tag clouds, this is one of the best examples of their use that I have seen). 

The whole notion of a tag cloud gets you thinking about the way language is used online. Coincidentally, according to the Guardian's Art's blog the good people at OUP have been doing some research looking to measure the impact that blogging is having on the use of the English language. The results might back up the arguments made by those who are cynical about the potential of blogosphere to have an impact on democratic discourse. The fifteen most common words are: Blogger, blog, stupid, me, myself, my, oh, yeah, ok, post, stuff, lovely, update, nice and shit. Hardly inspiring stuff, reflecting the often-cited criticisms that bloggers are egotistical and combative. But we might also be going too far to write off the potential democratic impact of blogs because of such data. After all, if the blogosphere will reflect people's offline interests and experiences, so political discourse and civic activities will only make a up a small proportion of what is going on. The question is whether that proportion enables people to partake more effectively and easily than was previously the case. 

New Political Communication Unit announces major new ESRC-funded research project: Political violence in the new media ecology

New Political Communication Unit researchers Ben O'Loughlin and Akil Awan, along with colleague Andrew Hoskins at the University of Warwick, are set to begin work on a new Economic and Social Research Council funded project investigating the impact of new media on the new security environment in the post-9/11 age: Legitimising the discourses of radicalisation: Political violence in the new media ecology.

The two-year project, funded by a grant of £291,000, will treat the idea of 'legitimacy' as central to the development of and support for radicalising views and terrorist acts. This includes the ways in which these are represented in the news media and the apparent ease and speed with which those that espouse and carry out political violence can attract global media attention, and thus 'access' to audiences and the potential to influence policy-makers. These trends have been considerably accelerated with the advent of so-called 'new media', and particularly the Internet, which cheaply and effectively facilitates the organisation of groups and 'networks'. This is particularly the case with 'Web 2.0' which is the 'second generation' of internet services such as social networking sites that enable online collaboration and sharing among users.

The research will investigate the nature of radicalising discourses in Web 2.0 and how these and acts of political violence broadcast on the web are supported and 'legitimated'. This includes exploring how the acts themselves and explanations for them on the web are 'picked up' and represented in the mainstream television news media, through the journalistic and editorial uses of words, phrases, graphics, images, videos and so on. We will look at how interpretations of this term 'radicalisation' are shaped by news representations through investigating audience responses, understandings and misunderstandings.

The researchers will use and develop the latest methodologies and conceptual approaches to media research. Mapping and analysing communications across Web 2.0 and mainstream media, across languages, and across social contexts, presents difficult challenges, and the research will draw on research networks inside and outside of academia to utilise cutting edge analytical techniques in the field.

This research emerges out of a previous project: Shifting Securities: News Cultures Before and Beyond the 2003 Iraq War. Shifting Securities identified a 'growing securitisation of everyday life' in Britain where there is a great deal of mistrust and suspicion between policymakers, journalists, and citizens/news audiences, amplified through media coverage of security issues and events. Key to this are debates about the 'legitimacy' of the different groups involved and particularly concerning the aims and prosecution of the 'War on Terror'. The research will be of interest to policymakers, media organisations, academic researchers and civil society organisations. The project website will be launched in September 2007. Preliminary findings will be made available in July 2008, and a closing conference will be held in autumn 2009.

The YouTube effect

An excellent article on the so-called YouTube effect on US politics. While it's short on analysis, it pulls together the best of the recent examples. Highly recommended.

Update on 2007-07-25 07:30 by Andrew Chadwick

Update: the verdicts on the first YouTube Democratic presidential primary debates are emerging.

New Statesman New Media Awards

Looking at the list of finalists for this year's New Statesman New Media Awards, I'm impressed by a) the mainstream political entries (Cameron and the Downing Street E-Petitions) and b) what we might call 'non-official but with a mainstream purpose' sites (18 Doughty Street, The Government Says, PlanningAlerts).

This reflects a growing emphasis upon tools rather than talk. In other words, the shift towards web 2.0 seems to mean not greater opportunities for citizen dialogue but rather for low threshold ways for individuals to get things done. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but it does reflect a conscious choice, of which we should be aware.

[Cross-posted at my Internet Politics book blog]

News and numbers

The BBC is monitoring the US-led ‘surge’ in Iraq , offering various indicators of its success or failure including body counts, levels of electricity provision and Iraqi hospitals’ intake of victims. In the report, the body count comes first, including a neat little graph. But, at the risk of sounding callous, is this body count necessarily the primary indicator of the ‘success’ of these military operations? Is a graph a useful way to think about this situation? The BBC does not include in its report what the military’s stated aims and objectives might be. By imposing their own benchmark, the BBC runs the risk of resentment from US or UK militaries, further weakening trust between journalists and military forces.