Rick Astley would never
Originally uploaded by hobart65.

Please help me by adding yourself and any piechart humour from your hard drive to the pie chart flickr group

www.flickr.com/groups/piechart

Awesome spraycan art - neckcns.com
Originally uploaded by hobart65.

Loved this artwork, assuming it will go on sale quite soon

www.neckcns.com

People behave differently in groups!

To what extent can social software applications be used to observe, engineer and predict social behaviour? Looking at management theory, organizational behaviour and psychology there seems to be a great body of work associated with the behaviour of groups. Groups are dramatically different to individuals. The focus of marketing practice today is primarily around understanding individuals, but the focus should be on groups. Tools, metrics and methods for groups simply don't exist in the mainstream.

I've observed patterns of emergent online group behaviour that repeat so frequently that they seem be to almost inevitable. Perhaps they are, and these behaviours are driven by human nature. Equally, the way that these groups form, grow and interact does seem too influenced by the interaction grammar of the application. The question I get frequently asked by brands/businesses is a point of view on how to control online social groups. I've tried to put together a theory that distinguishes between the things that can be influenced and the things that are unpreventable. So far, the best thinking on online group behaviour I can find is by Clay Shirky.

Online communities are far older than most people think, stretching back to the early 70's. So it would be very interesting to place the behaviours seen on facebook, bebo etc in a historical context. Direct experimentation to demonstrate theories should actually be quite easy. The really fascinating related area is the network analysis methods being developed by intelligence agencies to spot terrorist cells. Like the original birth of the internet in military technology, I see this type of analysis of online behaviour as potentially the most valuable to businesses in the long term. It would also cause people to re-evaluate their view of privacy. If you knew that the way you interact could be used to predict the nature and strength of your beliefs, values and allegiances, you would probably be far less keen about web 2.0 'contribute' culture.

I had a great evening of indulgence with a musician friend Max last Friday. He played a fantastic range of music, including his own, but the song that stuck in my mine was this haunting and powerful song by Sufjan Stevens. Get some tissues before you listen, it's the first time I've cried watching youtube. It really stops you in your tracks.

Max is primarily a blues guitarist He's been working on a new album that's inspired by "Segu Blue" by Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba

By some weird synchronicity an old friend from Munich, Felix Kemp, did the album artwork and gave me a copy last Summer. It was BBC Radio 3 Critics 'Album of the Year' Award for World Music and is a fabulous album of resonant hypnotic music.

Max has been writing songs that combine blues with Mali rhythms. The sound is really beautiful, hard to place, but is a bit like 'acoustic techno' if that existed. He's aiming to gather an Orchestra to perform and develop these songs. If you're a musician, (fiddlers, pluggers, strummer etc) who might want to join his Orchestra drop me a email or write in the comments.

Apple II Bootup
Originally uploaded by hobart65.

My first ‘digital’ experience was the Apple II. This was the first mass personal computer (PC) from Apple under the pioneering stewardship of Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniack. It was a PC as we know it, but sans the graphical user interface. The one I used had 64K of RAM, no hard disk, and a 5 1/.4 inch floppy drive that could store 360 KB. It was little more than calculator. The school machine I used was hidden away in the Physics lab in a room with no windows. Switching on an Apple II all you got was a black screen with a prompt. It had almost no software, but it did have a programming language. My first feeling was one of intense interest and curiosity. Thinking about it now, it was rather like buying a notebook and being excited about the idea of literature.

The experience of this early personal computer was one of monastic isolation. It was a toy focused on the creation of computer programs. Like the later BBC micro, the users captured by the machine loved play and programming. These revolutionary machines were the training ground of the lonely pioneers of our industry.


Computers, in this pre-Internet era, were particularly baffling for parents. “He’s into computing” was the standard dinner party explanation. The customary exchange was a silent nod of acknowledgment where both parties knew the line of conversation was at and end. I think the common mental picture was somewhere between a nuclear physicist and a b-list chess champion. Working in ‘interactive multimedia’ during the early late 80's and early 90’s, I found it more convenient to lie, rather than go through the pain of explaining the future potential of digital media.

This year I had my own particular ‘Road to Damascus’. My next door neighbor’s wife leaned over the fence one Saturday and asked me if I was on facebook. This was the first internet conversation I had ever had with a non-native about social interaction. It was a shock after 10 years of equipment recommendations, eBay bidding strategies and web sites for £75. Everybody on my road knows about email, Amazon, eBay and Photoshop. But, facebook had made something different happen in my life. It was something new. I’d only registered it in April 07 because of its phenomenal growth rate. The idea that a new web application could reach and recruit my attractive neighbor’s wife in two months was frankly astonishing.

This was the proof that the computer had ceased to be an isolated geeky toy. It is a social device that connects people. The innate assumption of the digitally literate generation was suddenly real. 'Switching on' isn't a black screen with a dot prompt, but a moment when an individual literally becomes manifest into existence. Numerous surveys and research confer, that device loss for today’s generation is on a par with bereavement. I asked my 9 year old son what he thought a computer was for. He said “Everything, it’s better than a car because you can order flights, and the best bit is that thing where you chat to people.” Communication is such a basic human need, it should be more of a surprise that social networking has taken so long to become mainstream. Facebook may be the site of 2007, but the sheer addictiveness of the experience proves social networks are here to stay.


Everyone knows ‘word of mouth’ is the most trusted way opinion gets distributed. Social networks accelerate and amplify ‘word of mouth’ into a bushfire. Online, this previously invisible and mysterious propagation is far more visible and observable. Marketing has a tendency to focus on how to persuade individuals. A host of established techniques have become the norm, and most large companies have some form of segmentation, pen portraits or persona work to focus their marketing effort. Whilst this helps marketers focus their campaign work, there is often little or no understanding of how messages really propagate and travel through a network structure. The best guess currently popular is the ‘tipping point’, where key individuals can create an epidemic. But many ad agencies I’ve worked with are happy to go with the notion of ‘succeed with the opinion formers and the rest will follow’



Web 2.0 - Flickr cluster finding tool
Originally uploaded by pinhole.

The age of social machines means that agencies have to develop a far more rigorous understanding of network flow. The data is there to view measure and analyze in real time. Insight into these complex mechanisms will be far more meaningful to businesses than simplistic back-of the-cab principles. The need for creativity and great ideas does not change, but the mechanism and potential understanding of their effect and transference has changed forever.