by Rob Cottingham | May 8, 2010 | Social Signal
Buy an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, and you get to choose from thousands and thousands of “apps”: software that ranges from full-blown business applications to games to novelty items. But before an app can make it to your iPhone, it has to make it onto the virtual shelves of the App Store… and that means convincing Apple that the app is worthy of inclusion.
Apps are rejected all the time for a wide range of reasons – some of them more opaque than others. And that often leads to controversy… and, sometimes, embarrassment for Apple, when its gatekeeping looks less like protecting the user experience and more like arbitrary capriciousness.
The latest glitch came when online cartoonist Mark Fiore won the Pulitzer Prize (a watershed moment for doodlers unaffiliated with newspapers, by the way). It emerged that just a few months earlier, Apple had rejected his NewsToons app for “ridiculing public figures” – a rule that covers much if not most of the world of satire, and a big swath of civic conversation. (And it’s not the only time arbitrary rulings on cartoons have caused consternation.)
The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists sent Steve Jobs an open letter raising free speech concerns. The App Store is “becoming one of the primary ways people publish news and information,” they said, and “with that innovation comes new responsibility.”
That one sentence hints at a much bigger issue, one we’re all going to have to deal with.
* * *
More and more of our online social activity is happening in “private” places – that is, sites and services that are owned and controlled by companies. The more happens, the more those private places begin to look like civic spaces. Yet those spaces are governed by corporate gatekeepers – accountable not to us, but to the owners of the sites, services and products mediating that experience.
Maybe in an ideal world, the market would pressure those owners to be more responsive to participant communities – or risk losing them to a more open and accountable competitor. But there’s a self-perpetuating cycle with large networks like, say, Facebook. Once they reach a certain size, their market share is a market differentiator; of course you’re going to participate on Facebook, warts and all, because that’s where everyone you know hangs out. And they all hang out on Facebook because that’s where all their friends – including you – hang out.
Besides, you have a ton of stuff locked in there: photos, videos, months or years of notes, updates and application data – not to mention your network of friends. It’s not like you can pull up stakes, leave Facebook and have all that stuff follow you.
Facebook has this huge market share because they’ve built something compelling. They’ve made a lot of things very, very easy – from maintaining a decent-looking social profile (compared to the god-awful mess over on MySpace) to keeping tabs on what your friends are up to. It’s not as though they haven’t earned a big chunk of market share.
Same with Apple. The iPhone is a glorious device, as is the iPad that followed it. There’s good reason for Apple’s reputation for making spectacularly well-conceived, well-designed products – and their large audience makes them an attractive platform for developers.
But here again, there’s a vicious (or, if you own Apple stock, virtuous) circle at work. Developers flock to the iPhone in part because there’s a large user base. Users flock to the iPhone in part because there’s a massive selection of apps, built by those developers. The more users, the more apps being developed; the more apps, the more users drawn to the iPhone.
In each case, a company has gained enough market share to make it far more difficult for a competitor to pose a threat. In each case, they’ve gained enough market share that their gate-keeping decisions have a significant impact on the flow of information and conversation. And in each case, those companies have at times treated that impact capriciously and arbitrarily – falling fall short of a reasonable standard of accountability.
What can we do at that? I’ll look at one alternative in part 2.
by Rob Cottingham | May 7, 2010 | Social Signal
Graphic recording has long held a certain fascination for me: the idea of capturing the ideas and emotions of a speech, workshop or meeting on paper, as the event progresses. (Nancy White‘s graphic record of my Northern Voice keynote last year remains one of my happiest public speaking experiences.)
Rachel Smith of the New Media Consortium delivered a quick but info-packed presentation at MooseCamp on graphical recording on the iPad – which is a pretty good answer to the question “If Rob could attend any conceivable session at Northern Voice, what would it be about?” She’s one of the leading lights in the field, and she’s understandably jazzed about the iPad’s potential.
Unlike me, she doesn’t use a stylus; because she works in so many colours, it’s inconvenient to have to put it down, swipe to bring up a colour chooser, and pick it up again.
Here are my notes – drawn, naturally, on an iPad. (The resources I noted from her and Nancy are The Grove Consultants, Nancy Marguiles and the term “digital scribing” – Rachel suggested Googling it would produce much win.)
by Rob Cottingham | May 7, 2010 | Social Signal
David Ng‘s talk on Phylo – a trading-card game inspired by the study showing kids can identify more Pokémon characters than actual local species – rocked the house, not least because he had us do Chewbacca impersonations.
by Rob Cottingham | May 7, 2010 | Social Signal
Is there such a thing as too much clarity?
Northern Voice 2010 got off to a great start this morning with Bryan Alexander‘s opening keynote, a call for us to embrace mystery in the online world. He surveyed the terrain of mainstream fear-mongering around the Internet (“Facebook can give you syphilis!”) (I’m actually willing to hear that case being made) before suggesting that some degree of genuine mystery can offer a tremendously engaging experience.
I captured some of it on the iPad:
by Rob Cottingham | May 5, 2010 | Blogging, Social Signal
Updated: Thanks to Mitch Cohen for this comment pointing to a one-click bookmarklet – even easier!
Blackbird Pie (kind of a gruesome name, if you’ve grown attached to the Twitter icon) is a new Twitter service that lets you post individual tweets to your blog or web site – keeping that good ol’ Twitter formatting intact, while picking up elements of your site’s design (such as the typeface) as well.
Now, because of certain style overrides we have on SocialSignal.com, the result isn’t quite as picturesque as we might like:
There’s a certain amount of overlap and such. But it’s still pretty sweet, especially since our workflow used to be:
- Load tweet in browser.
- Capture screen. (We use Skitch, so we don’t have to…)
- Crop screen capture image and save.
- Upload image file to our site.
- Paste a link to the image file in our blog editor.
- Add alt text with the contents of the tweet.
With Blackbird Pie, the workflow is:
- Copy tweet URL.
- Paste into Blackbird Pie, and copy resulting embed code.
- Paste embed code into blog editor.
So much easier. And now the text is selectable by others – not a minor issue from an SEO standpoint, either. And it preserves hyperlinks to the original tweet, the Twitter client and the originating Twitter profile.
I like that for a number of reasons, not the least of which is making it easy for people to see the larger context of a tweet: a conversation, for instance, or the user’s Twitter stream. And if you’re trying to blog about a longer Twitter conversation, citing several tweets, this could save you a whole lot of time.
There are plenty of caveats – among other things, it doesn’t work on Tumblr yet, and I keep having to fight the urge to call it “Blackberry Pie” – but it’s a handy tool to have.
by Rob Cottingham | Apr 19, 2010 | Social Signal
I just got an email from the fine folks at SlideShare, letting me know they’ll be featuring our free e-book on getting value from blogging on the front page of their business and management section for the next day or so.
Which is great. For the e-book, that means more people will see it and, I hope, read it. And for me, well, I have to admit I’m a sucker for a combination of third-party validation and increased attention.
Actually, a lot of people are. It’s easy to get caught up in trying to motivate participation by offering prizes (“Win yet another iPod shuffle!”)… and in fact, contests do have a lot going for them.
But don’t underestimate the value of singling someone out, and giving them a higher profile, even for a little while. Discovering you’ve written the “Comment of the Week” or uploaded one of the “Photos We Like” can go a long way to making sure you contribute again – and maybe put even more effort into it next time, and encourage others to join in.
Better yet, the rest of your users will see there’s an opportunity to gain a little prominence, and they’ll be motivated to contribute more.
Getting featured is terrific, and the email I got from SlideShare is the icing on the cake. And the sprinkles on that icing? This paragraph:
P.S – Why not blog/twitter this and let the world know about this awesome masterpiece you have created?
Apparently that paragraph works, or you wouldn’t be reading this post today.
P.S. – I wonder if they’ve thought of hyperlinking the Twitter suggestion, so you could just click on it to tweet the good news to your network.
