honestlyreal

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The opposite of outrage?

“Elderly war-hero imprisoned for six months for making a recording of an event.” Here’s the protest site.

There’s enough in there to trigger outrage on so many levels!

Where’s our respect for someone who fought for our freedoms? We thought proportional sentencing was going up the spout after the riots, but this? Isn’t this just like Kate Belgrave and her great work to bring public council meetings under greater scrutiny?

In short, you’d expect Twitter to have exploded.

That Messrs Fry, Linehan et al would have been besieged with appeals to amplify the story. That they may even have responded. You’d think some of those wingnuts who made such a blogtastic fuss about my namesake and his shotgun would be right on it. (You can Google all that for yourselves. It began with libertarian outrage but quickly crossed into mainstream.)

But there hasn’t been an explosion.

In that particularly awkward dance of observer and observation, this blog post will no doubt “raise awareness” and make a few more people notice Mr Scarth and his plight.

Anyway, straight away I’m looking for mainstream media coverage of this travesty of justice. And I’m not finding much. Results for “Norman Scarth jailed” give me a lot of blog posts, but that’s all.

Weird.

My attention is now very piqued.

I talk to @newsmary about it. She’s noticed this too.

And mindful of my recent post about negative dynamics in networks, I start to realise that the absence of “expected” outrage is, of itself, modifying how I feel about Mr Scarth’s case.

In short, it doesn’t smell right.

I found some other stuff too, about his previous brushes with the law. About a conviction for violence. About time spent in jail. (Google can be harshly unforgiving like that, no matter if the sentence has been served. More on this anon, in relation to my membership of the Sector Panel looking at transparency in respect of criminal justice data use and release by government.)

But I’m very eager not to judge the case one way or the other. It’s not my role, and there isn’t enough decent evidence available, even if I were so inclined.

What I am observing is that the lack of an expected response can by itself modify feelings about a situation.

Is this another sign of the conditioning we’re experiencing as our melding with the online world matures?

Google Plus Ungood

I know many people have managed to get up and running with Google+ fairly easily. The usual snags have been reported, of course, as users get used to the idiosyncrasies of the network, and as new etiquette and conventions emerge.

Today, it’s become clear that there are some deeper issues emerging, as Google enforces a “real names only” policy. Erm, good luck with that, in a hard identity sense, guys. Unless you’re going to try and peg people back to a state-issued identifier… (no, I’m not even going to go down that road of horror).

There’ve also been a few nasties creeping out of the woodwork as users realise some of the drawbacks of putting it all in the cloud. One wrong step with your service provider, and you’ll be writing a rant like this as thousands of hours of curation, not to mention thousands of irreplaceable and irretrievable content files, are briskly wiped out.

But for me, Google’s latest foray into social networking has pretty much been a non-experience. Although I was invited fairly early on, and signed up successfully for a few days, it all went belly-up pretty soon afterwards.

Why? Because of the cack-handed way in which Google identities work, that’s why. Here’s the detail.

Like most people, at some point I signed up for a Gmail account. I didn’t get a very nice address, as I wasn’t in there early enough, but it is a version of my name.

What I do have, and use instead, is a funky email address that I set up 10 years ago, and a couple of years ago moved over to Google Apps. (Bear with me.)

That email address is pretty much the way in which I’m identified for all services I use that are based on email address. In many ways it is my self-asserted identity on the Internet.

So it won’t surprise you to learn that when I came to create a Google profile, based on an email address, I used my “home” email identity.

So far so good, and for a couple of years everything worked smoothly. Google Apps did the things Google Apps did (email, calendar, contacts). And for the other Google services I used (Analytics, and probably not much more than that), I logged in with my Google profile. All was well. I had a slightly uncomfortable feeling that there may be trouble down the line though, with two identically-named identities that were logically separate.

And I was right.

A few days after I joined Google+ I got a friendly-but-firm email from Google. “We’re consolidating your accounts,” they told me. This dual use of the same email address can’t go on. Not optional. Indeed.

As I’d been invited to Google+ using the “profile version” of my email address, I feared the worst. And I was right. That was the account which was going to be stripped of my preferred email address. To be replaced by a “temporary address”–something horrible with a percentage sign in the middle of it. Great. The G+ connections dried up–nobody knows me as “the percentage sign email guy”–they know me as my ordinary, erm, email address. Bugger.

It got worse. To be able to get into G+ at all I didn’t just have to log in to Google using the temporary profile, I also had to log OUT of Apps (explicitly, even if I were already logged out of “normal” Google)–otherwise Google thought I was attempting to access G+ using a “business identity”. The horror!

The solution–according to Google–was to assign my Google profile an entirely new email address. Right. A new identity, for what could emerge as a pretty important service, should Google actually get their act together. An identity, and email address, that I didn’t need or use anywhere else. Not. Ideal.

So we have an impasse. I am hanging on, the temporary account unused and unloved, in the hope that Apps users will at some point be able to use their Apps email as a G+ identity. (It’s a rather faint hope, given the strategic direction that Google seem to be taking with identity.)

Why would I waste time now building up a social network where I, quite literally, don’t know who I am?

But it explains why I’m not part of this party, remain unconvinced of Google’s ability to handle the basics of social interaction, and am pursuing a wholesale review of my domains, addresses and identities for what now seems an inevitable clean break, sooner or later, with Google. Nice work, chaps.

Update, 25 July: a few morning-after-posting thoughts

Is there any real significance in all this? Surely this is just the moaning of yet another free-service user who didn’t read the Ts&Cs? Nothing paid, nothing to complain about.

Well, this is significant, because:

  • Identity, and cross-platform identity, are hugely important in an ever-more-connected world. Mess with those and you mess with the core of user experience: user existence.
  • Like it or not, it’s hard to see how a relationship with Google won’t form some part or other of everyone’s Internet activity at least over the next few years. This makes a Google profile (whatever neglect Google may have shown for it to date) disproportionately important.
  • The attempt to enforce “realness” is weak. Google’s requests for reference to “government-issued ID” (redacted or not)–whether to “prove” age or identity–is a troubling step. It puts a little friction in the path of being anonymous, sure, but if you want to, you can be.

And these characteristics (inflexibility, heavy-handedness, dependence) are all indicators of things that we’ll need to worry much more about in the future.

PS

Google account administration functions really are up the spout. Here’s a good piece by Dan Harrison on Google administration in general, and another on Google Apps deficiencies in particular. I’ve said it before: if a profit-focused, cash-rich organisation like Google finds identity so difficult, do we really hold out much hope for government?

PPS

Google Wave also revealed some of these flaws. I actually thought, briefly at the time, that the whole Wave concept was actually a Trojan Horse to get people to sign up for a Google profile (or to take one more seriously if they already had). And what did they force me to have as my Wave ID, despite me already having a friendly Apps address, and a slightly less friendly Gmail address? Something like paulclarke0001@gmail.com (I actually forget how many zeroes.) Face hits palm.

A Glossary

This glossary of social media and digital engagement terms comes from a recent piece of my strategy work. It’s skewed towards the government sector, in terms of language and examples. Feel free to use any of this that might be useful for other purposes. Or to challenge my definitions. Or, perhaps, to add glaring things I’ve missed.

Blog: Derived from “Web log” – originally a regularly-updated journal on which visitors (and the original author) could leave comments. Now generally used for a site (or section of a larger site) where text-based content can be created in the form of short articles, almost always open for comments to be posted. These comments may be subject to some degree of moderation.

Campaign site: Website created in association with a specific promotional campaign; usually for a defined period of time; may include facilities to receive user feedback and present an opportunity for engagement.

Commentable document: A facility for hosting a document under review, usually divided into manageable sections, and permitting comments to be left for the author – and to permit dialogue between commenters. Combines some of the features of a wiki for collaborative working, but retaining an initial document structure throughout. Has been used on a number of government policy documents made available for digital consultation. One tool that delivers this functionality (an implementation of WordPress) is Commentariat. e.g. http://interactive.bis.gov.uk/lowcarbon

Content-based networking sites: e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, TripAdvisor – sites based on content of a certain type (e.g. video, images, reviews) with a strong element of user feedback, user-generated content (UGC) and elements of social networking (e.g. ability to create groups, forums, favourites, peer-to-peer relationships etc.)

Crowdsourcing: The use of digital (or other) media to allow the contribution of information or ideas from a wide range of people, usually around a topic, a question, or a request for innovative suggestions.

Dashboard: a utility that searches and aggregates information from many channels across the internet, and displays it all in one place, in real time, for management, monitoring or consumption purposes. Example: www.netvibes.com/socialcare

Digital engagement: The use of interactive techniques to improve service delivery and information provision via digital media technology.

Email subscription: Although not ‘social’ in terms of community formation and peer-to-peer interaction, allowing users to register email addresses to receive personal(ised) updates represents a form of digital engagement. Digital tools build a two-way relationship: the user receiving content, and also experiencing some sense of being part of a community, even as information recipient.

Forum: Area for registered members to discuss specific topics. Can form part of a wider overall site. Characterised by a core user base making multiple contributions and often sharing relationships or culture. Forum content may or not be moderated.

Group: A type of forum generated by users within a social networking or similar type of site. Shares many of the characteristics of a forum, but can be more volatile. Members (who are a subset of the members of a larger form or social network) will typically interact for a shorter period of time, usually around a specific single issue. Creation of fan pages (or similar designations) also effectively forms a Group.

Metadata: Information about information. Often invisible to the user, metadata allows content to be classified, structured and sorted. Tags represent a use of metadata.

Microblogging: e.g. Twitter, Identi.ca, Yammer (the latter within corporate environments). Member communities sharing short message content, openly and by direct peer-to-peer message. Highly flexible in their use, and prone to rapid escalation of issues: creation of “a Twittermob”.

Moderation: Editorial judgement over or control of user-generated online content. Numerous varieties exist, from moderation by peers or by the site owner/author, to outsourced arrangements where professional moderators assess and process comments on a larger scale.

Post: To publish content to a blog, micro-blog, forum or website, either as a new topic or as a comment on existing content. Also, as a noun, to describe the content posted (synonymous with ‘blog post’, ‘forum post’ etc.).

Private social networking site: A social network intended for a specific community of interest. Offers similar features to an open social networking site, but almost always sets conditions and controls over entry and participation. E.g. sites set up using Ning.

User-generated content: Any content provided by users, rather than the owners of an online environment. May or may not be moderated (see above)

User feedback: A specific type of user-generated content: that created as a response to provided informational content. Can take the form of freeform text comments, ‘votes’, likes/dislikes, or more detailed survey-type information.

Social bookmarking: A method by which people can store, organize, search and share articles, blog posts and other information. There are many different libraries, each with their own bookmark, including Digg, de.lici.ous and Reddit. Increasingly, posting content links as tweets or to Facebook profiles provides a common form of bookmarking.

Social marketing: The use of marketing techniques to achieve desired social outcomes (e.g. behaviour change). May or may not involve the use of social media. Included here to avoid confusion with social media marketing.

Social media: Digital tools that permit people and organisations to interact freely with low (or no) barriers to entering a conversation.

Social media marketing: The use of social media to promote a particular cause or product. May or may not have social marketing implications. Included here to avoid confusion with social marketing.

Social networking site: A website offering general-purpose networking features to all who may want to join. Facebook dominates the adult market; Bebo has a focus on a younger/teenage audience; MySpace is now focused on music/video content and may be regarded as a content-based networking site, albeit one with a high membership.

Tags: Keywords describing online information that allow other users to search for relevant information.

Twitter: The best known of the micro-blogging platforms. Users contribute short messages, either on the twitter.com website, or using a number of third-party ‘client’ applications: whatever the route, interaction happens in a consistent and open way. Terms include:
Tweet: to post content (short messages up to 140 characters long)
Re-tweet: to republish another’s post. Good for spreading messages widely, or adding commentary to them
Hashtags: words or phrases preceded by ‘#’. This allows them to be grouped together and easily searched.

Webchat: A structured discussion using instant messaging to a host, who then responds. Usually moderated.
Example: http://webchat.number10.gov.uk

Wiki: An open collaboration environment in which users may freely (or with some controls) create and modify content as a community. The best known example is Wikipedia, where an open community collaborates to create an encyclopaedia, but wikis can be used for tasks as varied as communal creation of a policy document, or managing the names and interests of attendees to an event.