The Joy of supplying IT and Making it Beautiful

Mark Little asked the panel in the web summit last night for advice on setting up his new venture. The last word of the evening came from Wired Editor-at-Large, Ben Hammersley. He just said “Whatever you do Mark  – Make it beautiful”. We all laughed and Mark was really bemused at having  to tell his colleagues in his startup in the morning to “Make it beautiful”. But when you look back at the evening, there was one common theme running through and it was the passion which every entrepreneur had for their idea such as Chris Horn’s joy of getting the first sale with IONA. That simple theme of “Making it Beautiful” was there throughout the evening. There was Craig Newmark’s passion to keep Craigslist as it has always been and not to sell it. And Matt Mullenweg’s clear core values of democratizing writing and making the writing as good as possible.

People ask me how New Media Med is going to make money and I often get very caught up with all the myriad of tantalising economic models which have emerged in the Internet.

Now I’ve settled on

“We make and sell online communities.”

No more complicated economic models.

And keeping it simple is beautiful.  Thanks Ben Hammersley for that suggestion.

UCC Launches Lose the Blues built on New Media Med technology

The Irish Times just did a article on the online community which New Media Med built for University College Cork. The online community called “Lose the Blues” is aimed at students experiencing depressive symptoms. The website is designed specifically for 18-24 year olds, who may be experiencing low moods. The community allows users to share their experience and offer peer support to each other within a safe environment.

The website was developed by Aine Horgan, and is part of a research study being undertaken at UCC by Ms Horgan and supported by Dr John Sweeney and Prof Geraldine McCarthy in the School of Nursing and Midwifery. The aim of the research is to see if the website can help improve one’s mood.

By building this online community,  New Media Med gives UCC complete control over their own data which was very important to ensure a safe environment. Having all the data also allows UCC to produce the reports needed for their research. New Media Med provides all the infrastructure for reliable trusted online communities where you control your own data.

Socialtext – Now we know what we know

We’ve been using socialtext for our own internal intranet for some time now so I thought I might put down some of the findings from  that experience. We were sending e-mails with attachments and passing links back and forth on skype calls with no recording of the combined wisdom of the company. I found myself browsing back through the transcripts of skype text interchanges and finding fantastic nuggets of wisdom. Topics get fragmented across many places – individual emails, different versions of presentations, excel files and word documents – stored in different desktop applications, shared drives and content management systems. Having become very familiar with Facebook, Twitter and Linked In and wikis, I set about looking for a tool to do provide social media for use internally.

I came across Socialtext which started out as a wiki vendor and was one of the first to introduce social networking and most recently microblogging with its recent introduction of Socialtext Signals, which brings Twitter-like functionality to the enterprise. We deployed socialtext and knowledge within our organisation was being captured piece by piece every day. Here’s a part of our socialtext dashboard:

Now after 6 months we have a very extensive knowledge base which makes it easy to get new employees up to speed or to get potential partners quickly up to speed on what we do and potential collaborations points.

Best of all, when you come back bloated after Christmas, it’s a great way of quickly getting everyone plugged and back tackling the issues which were there in 2009.

Simply Zesty’s social media camp

Went to simply zesty’s wintercamp on Wednesday – whirlwind tour of how to use social media in businesss from Facebook,Google and more. Full agenda here and Twitter running commentary #szcamp.

It’s all been recorded here on simply zesty’s website. Simply Zesty are a great example for how to use social media.

Things that stood out for me from the meeting were:

Facebook’s priority is to keep their network as a set of trusted friends
UK is better on web content than Ireland – hmmm – and we thought we were the island of saints and scholars

Watch what’s happening in the UK and you’ll see it 3 years later in Ireland
Google’s aim is to get people on to the web as fast as possible so they can sell more advertising
12seconds – video Twitter – record a 12 second video and vweet it

Facebook passed 350 million worldwide  - will it level off before every online person is on facebook?
Iphoto for organising photos on desktop and post to facebook
Urbanspoon find out what your friends have said about any topic
Changing  name of your Facebook page?  - difficult but possible
Facebook’s Privacy policy  changed this week – you will have more granular control of photos
Social search from google is based on your google profile
Google labs has information on different search algorithms
80 reports available in Google analytics – worth checking them all

Jimmy Wales and wikinomics

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia spoke at Trinity College Dublin last night. I went there to find out about wikinomics. The word wasn’t mentioned once but there were enough clues to how Wikipedia economics works from the philosophy of Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia is a non-profit organisation and is one of the top five Internet sites – enough said on the discussion about whether Wikipedia is a success or not.

He delivered his talk in a very matter of fact unassuming way – not like the big testosterone driven speeches that you get from some of the leader of commercial software companies who either prance around the stage or talk about having the biggest yacht in the world. In fact, it was more like reading s wikipedia article.

Here are some of the things I took away from the talk:

Wikipedia is free – free as in free speech not as in free beer. That’s a key message of the open source movement.

Wales didn’t like using the word crowd-sourcing. When Mark Little asked him about crowd sourcing, Jimmy explained why it wasn’t a good word for what Wikipedia volunteers do because of the connotations with out-sourcing. They don’t do it for the money.

Even though Jimmy Wales is strongly espousing the non-profit, philanthropic message now, he didn’t exactly start out that way in 2000. He wanted to build an online encyclopaedia, Nupedia and he paid people to write articles. In 2001 he decided to switch to the open source model and everything changed.

In the early days he got a lot of encouragement from a lot of the people in Slashdot.org – that’s where the essence of the community came from.

Wales firmly believes in is that generally people will act in good faith – the community usually trumps the very small minority which wants to create mischief. It’s interesting that every discussion that I’ve heard on radio or newspaper about Wikipedia always focuses on the few mischief makers. We in New Media Med have seen the same positive community spirit in an online epilepsy community which we started for James’s Hospital. People are helpful and no-one has uttered anything remotely destructive – even though they could – it’s a free open forum.

There is a commercial side to his business. It’s called Wikia but I didn’t get much enlightenment on how that’s going to work out – although he did say it was growing very fast. That development is pretty much the same as Linux and Apache being used in mainstream commercial enterprises.

Web 2.O for researchers at Dublin Insitute of Technology (DIT)

Just went to a really interesting lunchtime talk in DIT entitled “research internet tools – benefits and pitfalls”. Interesting discussion on wikipedia, especially since Jimmy (Wikipedia) Wales is in Dublin at the moment. There was a general agreement that wikipedia could be a great place to start and also had many topics (such as Jedward) that academics would never cover. But Wikipedia wouldn’t be something which could be cited in research papers.

What I found interesting is that the universities are coming out in the open now also. So you can find a huge amount of published research online. Various colleges have open access repositories. DIT’s is arrow.dit.ie.

Another example is Open Doar – a directory of open access repositories. So now researchers can find each others research much more easily.

Another big takeaway for me was the advice that we should think outside the Google box when searching. While it’s important commercially to know where things sit in Google, we have to remember that they make their money from advertising rather than through the search engine. Google has an excellent set of tools for analysing search rankings and for buying adwords but there are other search engines out there which are worth googling with.

Here are a few:

http://www.hakia.com/

http://www.chacha.com/

http://clusty.com/

http://www.kartoo.com/

http://www.mahalo.com/

Their approach is more semantic webby than being at the mercy of the keywords you happen to choose. I’m looking forward to using them for my research on Market Research Online Communities (MROC). – Maybe I don’t have the right keywords for that – but I’ll soon find out.

Tim Draper wants us all to race so he can pick the winner

I went to see Tim Draper, 3rd generation VC from Silicon Valley speak in Trinity College, Dublin last night. He took a 10 million foot view of the world (from Mars actually) and told us that anything is possible. Everything will probably happen eventually but the question is when. It’s easy enough to predict that all horses which start a race will finish but if you knew the finishing order beforehand that’s where the money is. Those who get the timing right make the money and that’s the VC’s job. They want as many entrepreneurs as possible to participate and they will pick the winners. It’s no mean feat to pick the winner and Tim didn’t really tell us how he can predict the finishing order except to say that he has a very good team to do that for him. Overall it was an inspiring talk and great encouragement on a Friday night – something entrepreneurs need at the end of the week.

Can social networks be used for epidemiology data collection

Collecting data on a human population has become more expensive per head in the past 10 years. Studies have suffered from low response rates and a higher drop-out rates in longer term studies. The reason is that there are many more media of communication thus raising the distraction noise and lowering attention spans.

A study from Sweden in 2008 by Christin Bexelius showed a much improved response from web based research when compatred to Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Sweden has today among the highest Internet and cell phone penetration in the world, making the population suitable for introducing new technologies in data collection (11). The Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (MEB) at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has since 2001 designed and evaluated several studies using e-epidemiology. In 2003, the first large scale web-based study including 47,859 women in the age group 41-60 was conducted (12). Today, the department has used the Internet for several large scale population-based studies, including an Internet based-hearing test and a surveillance system utilizing IVR and a web-based application. .

Social Media can now be adapted specifically to the needs of the researcher and web-based questionnaires can either be delivered to PC’s or to mobile phones. So could social networks play a role in data collection on a population?

Measuring social networks

Now that the social media genie is out of the bottle there’s no going back.

Patients are increasingly turning to social networks and discussion forums to discuss medical issues with others who are faced with similar choices such as ” Should I have surgery not?”. People still trust their doctors but they like to have reassurance from others like them. This is not new. People have been getting together to help each in networks such as Weight Watchers and Alcoholics  Anonymous for a long time.

We are well past the tipping point for social media adoption now that Facebook has a quarter of Internet users signed up. The first follow-on industry out of the traps is the supply of metrics for usage and monitoring of social media. Much of the same technology used for measuring and monitoring social media for marketing can be applied in a medical situation – it just needs to be adapted.

So is social media now mature enough to be used by the health services for grouping people with the same medical condition together?

Websites such as Facebook and MySpace encourage teenagers to view friendship as a “commodity” and are leading them to suicide, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales has warned.

The death of 15-year-old schoolgirl who took a fatal overdose of painkillers last week after being bullied on Bebo is absolutely tragic. However, we should be looking for ways to use social networking to help people who are being bullied or who suffer from depression. There’s no point in blaming social networking. It’s here to stay and used by 95% of tennagers.

When the telephone was first invented, it was viewed with suspicion because of fears of how it was going to be used. Today, where would the Samaritans be without the their helpline in the middle of night? Similarly, social networking can be used for good or bad just like any other medium. Archbishop Nichols should be using this media if he wants to get through to those very young people he wants to reach.

According to recent CSO reports in Ireland volunteering is on the increase again (Irish Times August 1,2009)  and it never actually dipped at all during the time between 1999-2007 when we were all supposedly so superbusy to have any time for each other.  I’ve been to events recently organised for non-profit groups in Ireland to use more social networks.  These events were thronged with charities looking for information about using social networks for their organisations.

Let’s harness this increase in availability of volunteers and use the medium for good.