“User-Generated Content” is an irreparably ugly and broken phrase. First, we’re people, not “users”. Second, people write and speak and design and compose and sing and play and build and earn and pay; machines “generate”. Third, it’s words and pictures and sound and money, not “content”.

2007 and the “next” big media thing is an article of mine that’s published in this week’s New Statesman – or, rather, in the free supplement to their New Media Awards that accompanies it. Fortunately, the article is also available for free online.

In the article, I consider (given the title of the awards) that whenever you call something “new”, you imply something else to be “old”, and that lots of people get hung up on this rather than simply considering what happens “next”. You can read the article to find out where I go with it.

A lot of the impetus for this piece came out of Reboot 8, so it was good to channel that somewhere, and you may also recognise some of the other concepts “linked” to in the piece. It was also interesting in that I set out to write a piece about “online”, and ended up writing a pretty straight “media” piece – something I’ve never tried before. I also cut a section about Web 2.0, because it didn’t quite hang right – but there’s certainly something to be said about that nomenclature also creating issues where there were none. Perhaps there’s a space to write that somewhere else – it’s still hanging around my head.

Anyhow, nice to be in print again, and to be given the chance to think about ideas like these around the web, publishing, and innovation.

“Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer, but ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool”

Ze Frank is so on the money. Good Show, go and watch it.

So, now that Jack‘s show is happening, S&W have finally decloaked Availabot.

Wow. Suddenly lots of cryptic conversations with Matt over the past few months make sense – mass production, Chinese toy factories, the hell of USB serial communications.

It’s a lovely thing. I really like the emphasis on the individuality – rapid fabrication of appearance, username hard-coded into hardware – one physical thing represents one digital thing, and it’s obvious and understandable without the need for a Thinglink idea or a product code. Matt Jones’ Availabot looks like Matt Jones. When I hand you the red-headed one with a quiff, you know it’s mine; plug it into your computer and that’ll confirm it.

Also, it harks back to the peripheral vision idea of Glancing, I guess; I really like this quotation on the page:

Rather than showing up on your screen, it shows availability as a physical object in the world. That means that you can move the puppet out of view when you don’t want to be distracted, watch out for it when you’re working on other tasks, and have a background awareness of your friends from the corner of your eye.

Hiding things by hiding them on your desk, not your “desktop”. Paper bags, stacks of books, not command-H. We procrastinate (or indicate busy-ness) physically, after all. Made me grin.

Anyhow: awesome concept, probably complex in execution, but very elegant nontheless. I hope it goes somewhere!

A PDF transcript of my Reboot talk is now live. It’s essentially a tidied-up version of the wadge of paper I spoke from, so excuse the conversational tone. Hope you enjoy it.

So, my talk – Telling Stories turned out alright in the end. If you saw it, I hope you liked it. If you’re interested in obtaining a written copy of it – which I have, because I wrote it longhand – then email me. I slightly deviated from the written version, and am not sure I want to put it online directly in its current state – it needs tidying – but I’ll happily send you a PDF.

Reboot8 is over, now. For me, it was awesome. I’ll write a little bit more about it later today or tomorrow. There’s lots to digest, and lots of people to thank. To everyone I met, it was a pleasure; to those I’ve met before, a pleasure to see you again. And thanks for vaguely shepherding me. I get a little lost at these things, you know.

So: more concrete thoughts, a bit of a wrap-up, and a stack of photographs later.

Exciting news of the day: I’m going to be speaking at the Reboot conference in Denmark this summer.

Looking forward to it lots, though obviously I need to start working on the talk soon. Still, following ETech, I don’t think I’m going to let myself get quite so stressed.

What follows is the rough pitch I outlined in an email (written, as ever, in conference-abstract-ese); final version may vary, obviously, but I think it conveys the gist of what I want to discuss:

“Telling stories – what social software can learn from Homer, Dickens, and Marvel Comics”
or: “Social software as serial narrative”

Social software is playful, and much ludic analysis has been made of it. But what of narrative analysis? After all, we use this software to tell the grand serial narrative of our lives – cataloguing them via Flickr, journalling them (in whatever form) via our blogs. And then consider the wealth of parallel narratives many people have – a delicious account, a Flickr account, multiple blogs, LiveJournals, MySpace accounts, some contradictory, some anonymous, some fictional, some fact. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature; we should encourage parallel storytelling, encourage the formation of personas, and make the interaction between these different platforms as complete as it needs to be to support this.

We should design our software around these narrative impulses. In ten, twenty, thirty years time, for good or ill, we will want to look back at the stories we told – for they are part of our greater story. So as well as encouraging parallel narrative, we need to consider how best to support the long ongoing narrative that we weave.

So: let’s look at how, over history, serial narrative has been told, distributed, and retrospectively altered, and see what it tells us about the tools we build to tell our stories.

I’ve been thinking about tagging a lot recently. One particular thing came to my attention yesterday, and I think it’s worth noting in public.

Users use tags to hack the UI. Tagging isn’t just metadata; it’s metadata you can use.

To wit: a friend mentioned that one of the problems he had with Flickr was that you couldn’t see al the photos from a particular date. Oh, but you can, I said, and showed him the Archives page which does exactly that – it lets you trawl through photographs by date. It’s a really nice piece of design, in fact, so if you’ve never looked at them, go and check them out.

Of course Flickr lets you see things by date – it’s one of the key pieces of data it associates with every picture. Yes, there’s some confusion between “date uploaded” and “date taken on” but that’s dealt with – Flickr lets you view by both.

My friend hadn’t found this supposed lack in functionality a hinrdance, though. Instead, he’s just tagged his photos with a tag for the year (eg ‘2006’) and, sometimes, a tag for the month (‘September’). He’s not the only one – hunt around Flickr for the preponderance of tags like ‘200506’ or ‘20031224’. Lots of people do it.

Why do they do it? Two reasons. Firstly, they’re adding data that they either don’t think is there or that they can’t find. Even though Flickr stores date information, and they can see that at the bottom right of each picture, if they can’t manipulate that data – if they can’t pivot around it – then they store the data in a way they can use it – they stick it in a tag field. And that leads to the second reason: they’re making something to click on.

Making a tag is like making a shortcut button. One click on “2006” shows me all my pictures from 2006. So does the “archives” function but it’s not quite as fast, to be honest, and not as immediately intuitive.

This is true of all tagging systems – tagging makes links, that’s they way it works. So as well as using tags to store data, tags get used to extend and build upon the user interface. As a developer, this has an unexpected bonus. If you see lots of tags emerging storing data you already track (such as dates), consider that the method for accessing data by date might not be obvious (or simple) enough. And if you see enough data of identical format being tracked – often in the form of machine-readable tags, such as geotags, then perhaps it’s time to consider adding a new feature. Tags are a great way to track how uses actually make use of your service.

(this may change at some point in the future; I’m still revising this stuff but thought I may as well put it out there).

Etech06 is going really, really well for me (so far): lots of things emerging in my head, at the least. One thing that’s coming out of quite a bit is a discussion of feedback loops.

Feedback loops are really, really important. Amy Jo Kim touched on feedback as an essential part of ludic design – without feedback, play isn’t satisfying (and play is what all early adopters are doing all the time). Feeedback is what generates challenge/reward structures in games. Feedback loops are how communities emerge – I do something, you do something back; it’s the implicit social structures Amy Jo mentioned. Derek Powazek is currently talking about the “new community” – and mentions MeasureMap.

And, of course, MeasureMap is all about feedback – I can see when I made posts, and when comments came; I can track popularity. I’m no longer sending blindly into the ether; I’m sending and tracking response.

And once you track response, you can write so much better; you can design so much better; you can act on the feedback and you get a loop. And that loop’s really important – it’s what keep things going. If there’s not a feedback loop, things tail off, fall away.

That’s why Google bought MeasureMap: they had Blogger already. People can post to the web; they can broadcast into the ether. Once you give them MeasureMap, they become successful, effective publishers. When people say “what’s the point of blogging?”, they say it as an outsider – they just think it’s publishing. They don’t know about the stat-tracking, the refining. Once you have a feedback loop – once you can see the influence (or lack of it) that you have… that’s when it all clicks. That’s when you get placed into a significance grid – your posts get located in space, time, relevance, authority, etcetera.

Play is about feedback; games are about feedback; publishing is about feedback. A lot of the stuff this morning about attention: it’s all about invisible, natural feedback – tracking eyes-on-screens. We can track hits; now we need to track attention. And when we can measure it, we can value it, and we can price it.

That’s the attention economy. Placing everything into this feedback loop of value.

If you’re a business guy, you see how you can price, monetize, and securitize that feedback. If you’re a player or a hacker, you see what loops you can join together in a mash-up, or where you can generate new feedback, what new variables you can track. And that’s the “connective tissue” that Derek’s talking about.

So ZDNet have got themselves a MacBook Pro and are unpacking it. And, whilst the lovely, slim packaging is very nice, there are some worrying signs – signs that suggest why a 12″ (or even 13″ widescreen) Macbook Pro is a way off yet.

Namely, the insatiable hunger for power.

The two important lines are “notice the larger 17-inch-style battery” and “the MagSafe adapter is about 25% larger, about the size of the Airport Express.”

The larger battery and larger charger are clearly necessary to support the higher power draw of the Core Duo, and the new battery size goes some way to explaining why they need a thinner optical drive in there.

If that’s all necessary for the 15″, then I’m not sure how they’ll cram it any smaller without affecting battery life or power. The MacBook (iBook as was) might be better off with the Core Solo, which could have a lower power draw. But a smaller Core Duo machine seems difficult, right now.