beatnic - just wondering

Social notworking

In 2002 we built something on the BBC’s intranet called “Learning Online”. I was working with an amazing team of forward-thinking and innovative people.

We designed Learning Online to be the intranet home for BBC employees to manage their personal development, training and career development.

Alongside e-learning, personal development planning and a personalised virtual induction, was a section called MyNetworks.

If you picture MyNetworks as an early prototype for Facebook groups you’ll have a pretty close approximation. But this was 2002, so the concept was still fairly alien to most people.

The idea behind MyNetworks was simple. Create spaces for groups of people who had something in common where they could have conversations, share “knowledge” as documents or images, and plan events.

We had a lot of interest from various people, who set up and “ran” their networks with varying degrees of success.

There was one consistent and recurring theme.

Where a lot of time was spent “designing” a network before involving its members, the network invariably failed.

Often people would put great effort in to the planning of how a network would be run, and how the information in the network would be organised. When the network was finally launched, nobody used it. And those who did found a perplexing empty suite of rooms.

It seems obvious to say it, but the idea of “if we build it they will come” really did not work in most cases.

The less “designed” the network, the greater chance of its success, through participation and involvement of its members using the online tools to support the network, but not to be the network.

Thanks to Peter Bihr aka thewavingcat on Twitter I was able to sit in on some of Loic Lemeur’s Leweb this week via Berlinbase.de, a livestreaming mashup of video and text updates.

One talk that caught my attention was by Robin Good who is MasterNewMedia.

He asked people about what learning really meant to them and played back recorded video of answers from learned learning afficionados in to the conference.

Good finished by listing 12 things we must all learn to do well. I just managed to scribble these down, so here they are:

1. live healthily
2. read and understand what you’re reading
3. learn - the system and the method
4. be creative, anybody can be
5. empathise
6. tell truth from fiction, especially in the “news”
7. predict consequences
8. value yourself
9. live a meaningful life
10. communicate effectively
11. ask good questions
12. have good fun

Things I’ve been getting excited about recently over a double espresso…

Wesabe

I’ve been looking for easy ways to track what I’m spending. Mint.com comes highly recommended but wouldn’t let me in without a US zip code (at the time of writing). So I went on the prowl for some alternatives.

After some research, checking reviews and so on, I came across Wesabe. And so far it’s exactly what I need.

It was quite easy to set up an account and start pulling in bank statements. Depending on who you bank with, some are automatic and some you have to update manually.

There’s a slight leap of faith moment when you start entering bank account details. But after reading around I felt reassured. Wesabe is very clear about their appreciation of and approach towards the need for top-notch privacy and security of your financial information.

Once you have all your statement info, you can start labelling or tagging your spending. You can choose to use “bills”, “utilities”, “gifts” and so on, tagging each item in your statement with as few or as many tags as you wish. And for me this is where it really starts to get useful. In fact it’s one of the few genuinely useful applications of a tag cloud I’ve come across (flickr and delicious being two others).

After about two hours I’d tagged all my income and outgoings across 6 accounts for the last 12 months, and now I could view them all together. I can easily separate out my business expenses from my personal spending, and have finally started to get my head round how much we’re spending on household bills!

This in turn is encouraging me to think about how to get better deals. Which means I’ll probably tap in to the community aspect of Wesabe before too long to learn and share tips.

The Wesabe folk seem well tapped in to the various channels available to keep across who’s saying what about them, and seem happy to join in the conversation. This is good news, and I think it’s pretty vital for companies offering services like this to have an authentic human voice, and not to hide behind corporate comms and PR machines.

Oh yes, I almost forgot… it doesn’t cost a penny to use.

Inspired by Tom Coombs’s recent “Have you seen…?” post, here are some of the things I’ve been banging on about recently over a double espresso. First… Last.fm

Last FM

Last.fm plays you music while you’re online. It can create your own personalised radio station based the music you like, using its audioscrobbler music recommendation system. Connect it to iTunes to learn what you’re in to. Or just go to the site and type in the name of a band you like and start listening.

Click the heart symbol in the music player to “Love this track” and your radio station gets ever more tailored to you.

I’m listening over at http://www.last.fm/user/beatnicity.

Starting life in East London in 2002, Last.fm has really come in to its own with the proliferation of broadband and now mobile broadband. In 2007 Last.fm was bought by CBS.

Every track you play will tell your Last.fm profile something about what you like. It can connect you to other people who like what you like - and recommend songs from their music collections and yours too.

Read more at last.fm/about

I’ve heard good things about the Last.fm iPhone app.

And finally if, like me, you like to sing along from time to time, check out Lyrics Muse - which combines Last.fm with a lyrics wiki to display the lyrics of the song you’re listening to in real time. And as the source is a wiki, if you think the lyrics displayed are wrong, you can always go and correct them.

I recently switched over from standard google mail, calendar etc. to make more use of and get my head round Google Apps.

The first thing I noticed was that I’d lost some features I’d enabled on the standard gmail.

I’d been using:

Settings > General > Browser Connection > Always use https (for tighter security)
Settings > Labs > Signature tweaks

Experimenting with various others, including as announced in the last 24 hours:

Settings > Labs > Tasks (a new To Do list feature)

More than anything I wanted to see what I could see before. It’s frustrating not to have them available as standard in Google Apps.

The good news is that you can activate these “hidden” features in Google Apps if you know where to look. As it’s not in the most intuitive place, I thought I’d explain where to find it.

First go to manage your Manage this domain, select Domain Settings, then scroll down the General tab to the section called New Services and Features

Here you have two checkbox options for:

1. Turn on new features (like group chat or colored labels)
2. Turn on new features in this domain when they are launched to Google consumers (before Google supports them for organizations using Google Apps)

Switching these on should enable Labs in your apps settings.

142 Court Lane, East Dulwich

Anne Shelton 1928-1994

Popular singer and the World War II “Forces’ Favourite” lived here

Voted by the People

This blue plaque was unveiled on 6 October 2008. Further info on the DulwichOnView website.

After reading so many posts in the blogosphere about its own demise, I must say it’s quite a relief to see it’s still here.

And according to google reader people are still writing stuff in their weblogs. And not just about the death of blogging either.

Now. If only I could have thought of a way to say this in fewer than 140 characters I could have tweeted it instead. Or drawn it and put it on Flickr. Or created a “blogging doesn’t look 2004 to me” group on facebook. Or…

• Genius online image editor http://www.sumo.fi/platform/ (via @sitepointdotcom newsletter) #

• To unexpected cross platform workshop in Soho. As planned. #

• Card sorts, wireframes, workshop and pub quiz. All in a day’s work. #
• @robgray re php agency - will get back to you #
• Made mistake of checking email on bus. Took a deep breath. Glad I didn’t hit reply all. #

• Card sorts, wireframes, workshop and pub quiz. All in a day’s work. #
• @robgray re php agency - will get back to you #
• Made mistake of checking email on bus. Took a deep breath. Glad I didn’t hit reply all. #

• What is it with all this “reaching out” all of a sudden? I have a conspiracy theory involving the Four Tops. Even if it was 42 years ago. #
• Sheltered from big rain under railway bridge by Waterloo Station with fellow cyclists on way home. Heard it was snow further north. #
• Sleet in south London. Maybe the snow’s on its way. #
• @sammenter What happened to the other 10? ;-) #
• @tomVS some great tweets at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=snow Not all London of course, but it’s a Twitter blizzard right now :-) #

• What is it with all this “reaching out” all of a sudden? I have a conspiracy theory involving the Four Tops. Even if it was 42 years ago. #
• Sheltered from big rain under railway bridge by Waterloo Station with fellow cyclists on way home. Heard it was snow further north. #
• Sleet in south London. Maybe the snow’s on its way. #
• @sammenter What happened to the other 10? ;-) #
• @tomVS some great tweets at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=snow Not all London of course, but it’s a Twitter blizzard right now :-) #

• Lost my guitar tuner, found http://tinyurl.com/32966l And for son’s ukelele http://tinyurl.com/5sb7u7 #

• Regaining digital-ness after 2 days off. Free train wifi thanks to National Express east coast. Have several wonderful emails to reply to. #
• Laughing out loud on the train to the Mayo Kermode podcast. Professor says he shed tears at end of High School Musical 3. Toodles vs Bond. #

• Our street felt more spacious this morning and I wasn’t sure why. Then it struck me. No scaffolding on any house for first time in 6 years. #

• @sammenter I must add that to my pattern library ;-) #
• Tuning in to BBC World Service to listen to @cybersoc. Bit concerned that @DanDamon fell asleep 113 days ago. #
• Retweeting @Cennydd: Sorry. No. Architect is not a verb. #
• Watching Tony Robbins on TED from 2006 http://is.gd/12G6 He’s talking jolly fast. He keeps asking the audience questions and saying “Say I” #
• The intranet innovations James Robertson would like to see in 2009 http://is.gd/4F4X #

• In “virtual meetings” all day today. Odd expression that. Surely it’s either a meeting or it’s not. Will soon find out… #
• @teppie Tell us who the company is on Twitter. They should get message ;-) #
• An intranet is an ecosystem, not a busines system. An intranet manager must be a constant gardener. #
• Russell T Davies on BBC five live. Doctor Who was the result of a 1960s focus group. I’m in shock! #
• Backing up gmail with Thunderbird / pop3 #
• Connect, be active, be curious, learn, give. These are the 5 steps to happiness. According to research. Via Times article http://is.gd/4wZW #
• @euan So true. I find it strange trying to think about doing those things without the web or good technology. #
• @teppie Perhaps a twitter version of this might be handy for later http://tinyurl.com/4gf4ku :-) #

One of the hats I wear is Content Producer for Intranets Live, a subscription-based intranet media channel, with a monthly two-hour online show starting on 4 November.

In the first show we’ll be interviewing David Sacks, CEO of microblogging service Yammer, winner of the TechCrunch50 award last month.

Yammer is designed to provide a secure online space where company employees (with the same company domain in their email address) can broadcast short messages to each other.

For example, people can use it to ask questions or to let everyone else know what they’re working on.

Yammer follows in the footsteps of the hugely successful Twitter, which is being put to great public effect in the run-up to the US presidential election.

Philosophically, Yammer - “What are you working on?” within the company - and Twitter - “What are you doing?” publicly or privately - come from different places.

I’ve spoken with some companies who’ve been using Twitter to communicate in teams and groups privately for some time now. They say they can’t see the value in moving to Yammer. Others have said they find Yammer is just what they needed, and is really helping to make the feel part of the company.

Web-based services like these, along with many others, are described as the intranet beyond the firewall.

So I was just wondering…

1. With employees using more and more web-based services to get their work done and communicate, what now for internal communications and IT managers?
2. Why should we trust third-party services with our information?
3. What would happen if the service your company uses becomes a victim of the credit crunch?
4. What are the best and worst examples of people using microblogging services at work?
5. Do services like Yammer and Twitter finally spell the end of the company firewall as we know it?
6. Is all this the responsibility of the intranet manager? And if not, who’s responsibility is it?

Reading the e-Consultancy interview with Lou Rosenfeld on the importance of site search analytics, I was reminded of when I was product manager of intranet (or enterprise) search at the BBC.

It was back in 2002. People complained that search was broken, but we had neither quantitative nor qualitative data to analyse.

After consulting with my colleague Martin Belam, who at the time was looking after search on bbc.co.uk, I put in place a system for capturing search engine usage data.

In a nutshell, this included where people came from, what they searched for, and where they went.

We also conducted user research to gather qualitative data about the experience of using the intranet and what it was like to find things on it.

After only a few weeks, the usage data started to settle and patterns began to emerge.

We noticed that search term frequency had a long tail (though we didn’t know that’s what it was called at the time!).

The top 25 search terms accounted for half of all searches. The top 50 terms accounted for 75% of all searches made.

We tried searching for the top 10 terms, including “training”, “expenses”, “ariel” (the BBC in-house weekly newspaper) and “jobs”.

The results were worrying to say the least. Few of them returned the result expected on the first page of search results.

If we could find the most likely link (or links) for each of our top search terms, and return that as the top result, we should be able to guarantee providing most people with what they’re looking for.

So we set about building what became the Best Bets system. (How we did this I will write about another time, but needless to say it involved an SQL database, some asp code and some hacking in to the Microsoft Site Server system.)

We then set about working with the numerous intranet site managers to determine what the best link should be for each of the top 50 search terms. Further usage analysis, research and testing showed that this working. Success! People were clicking on the Best Bets result almost 95% of the time we had a search term match.

Over time we extended to cover the top 100 search terms, then 200.

Regular usage analysis showed us when new terms appeared and we took editorial decisions on whether they should have a Best Bet.

In spite of the success of the Best Bets system, we certainly couldn’t rest on our laurels. This was an improvement for sure, but as we well knew, it was only a part of the overall search and navigation user experience. There was plenty more work to be done!

Any search engine worth its salt these days comes with best bets functionality as standard. My advice is to take the time to study and understand how people are using your search engine. Test the top search terms yourself to see what the results look like.

Maintaining a best bets system is a relatively low cost exercise, and encourages regular monitoring of search usage and behaviour, which in turn will provide excellent information about your users’ expectations and your intranet’s findability performance.

A word of caution from experience: bear in mind that the formatting of the best bet in the search results page should be minimally different from the natural results, otherwise it risks ending up in the user’s blind spot and be regarded as a “Sponsored Link” rather than something genuinely useful.

A year to the day since I embarked on this freelance adventure.

It’s been full of variety, full of people, full of learning, full of challenges and full of fun!

Thoughts to follow sooner or later no doubt.

Two police officers trying out their Segways cause quite a stir in a Lisbon street.

They appeared to be thoroughly enjoying being the centre of attention, with tourists queuing up to have their photo taken alongside them.

Two seats, three wheels and it talks.

The GPS-enabled Go Car in Lisbon, Portugal.

Sight-seers use these small electric vehicles to travel around Portugal’s capital city and the GPS-aware commentary system tells you about all the places of interest on your route.

Further information on the Go Car website.

Congratulations to those behind School of Everything which had its official launch yesterday from Channel 4’s headquarters in Horseferry Road, London.

School of Everything is based on the simplest of ideas - that “everyone has something to learn, and everyone has something to teach.”

It’s a little like a dating agency, though I’m not sure whether they’ve considered speed-learning evenings yet.

Anyone can sign up for free to learn or teach. As of last night, there were some 1200 teachers registered.

Amongst the things that people want to learn, popular subjects include music, languages, driving and yoga.

The business model is likened to ebay’s - a small cut is taken by School of Everything each time a learner pays a teacher.

It’s a stunning idea, and it’s great that (erstwhile BBC colleague) Matt Locke at Channel 4 had the foresight to back it.

There certainly was an eclectic crowd at the launch, it was great to chat with and meet some of the team and the advisory board.

I get strangely excited when I encounter accidental patterns, such as the 37 bus passing the 63. My mind just makes the connection. I can’t explain it, but it’s almost as if my mind is trying to find patterns in everything.

So imagine my surprise when I recently received my membership confirmation for the Usability Professionals’ Association, and was informed that my membership number is 13579.

All very odd, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Am I really the 13,579th person to join? Or is someone at membership HQ playing tricks with my mind? :-)