The Canonical Me

Image: ©Marvel Comics

What is the optimal web page to use as your canonical link? Which one best represents you when sharing to others?

First impressions do count. Currently I am presenting a broad spread of online initial impressions. I have been thinking about how best to manage, streamline and rationalise these.

My thinking has always been that this blog functions as my canonical page. My personalised URL aidenkenny.me already points here. However it is important to regularly question my assumptions and correct course accordingly. Online conventions and mores never stand still. Eight years later, is a blog still the best front door into my online presence?

The common failing of all blogs (implicit in their structure) is that anyone arriving here for the first time is faced with the topmost entry of an eight-year stack of content. Depending on the nature of the particular post, the overall nature and intent of this blog is not always going to be as clear as it ought to be. There is no top-level overview or effective introduction. If this blog were not to serve as my default destination page in future, what are my alternative options?

The About.Me service attempts to address this issue, providing one simple landing page that contextualises and links to most of my online presences, Indeed my About.Me page is still the only link that I use in my Gmail footer. That page does update with my various feeds, but it has always seemed underwhelming to me for unquantifiable reasons. Most tellingly, I keep intending to go over there and freshen up the visuals and rewrite my bio, but I can never find any compelling reason to do so.

In many ways my Facebook page has become my most active and up-to-date web page. If only in aggregate because so many of my other web services log their activity into my Facebook feed. Even though it is pretty difficult to encounter someone without a Facebook account these days I am not comfortable putting that forward as my canonical page. I have never set out to accumulate a comprehensive collection of Facebook acquaintances, so the reach of my Facebook Friends List is not that broad.

My Twitter page is definitely not my canonical page any more either. These days I find that most of my friends are not tweeting as much as they used to. There is little conversation happening there amidst my circles. Personally, I am too busy to spend much time on the service, so my own tweets have become quite intermittent.

I can think of some people I know who could appropriately adopt their LinkedIn profile as their canonical page. While successfully presenting a comprehensive overview of my career achievements, I find that the mode of LinkedIn always feels somewhat historical to me. I do not get a sense that one can communicate the potential arising from current fields of interest and investigation. LinkedIn seems optimised to reassure people about what I already know that I can do, rather than engage with the risky improbabilities of the new.

Google resolutely intends for my Google+ profile to function as my canonical page. To date Google+ has yet to prove compelling to me, functioning more as an alternative RSS feed than as a social network. This highlights again how, regardless of my intentions for using any service, the amount of activity and communication by friends and peers is the ultimate driver of adoption levels.

What do you think? What URL do you use as your canonical web page to share?

UPDATE 30 April. Some people have pointed out that I missed one option here. To use my Klout profile, so that my canonical link can display my algorithmically-compiled authority on such topics as Branding, iPhone, Apps and er, Coffee.

A Modest Proposal: Content Credits to Offset New Broadcast Charge

I find it difficult to reconcile all of the actual media consumption that I observe around me with the Government’s mooted new Universal Broadcasting Charge intended to support large scale state-sponsored broadcasters.

Consider this domestic snapshot from last Saturday. My son glued to his iPod watching a succession of home-made Lego stop-motion animations on YouTube (this week’s novelty for his six-year old attention). At the same time my daughter was watching some Studio Ghibli movies in the original Japanese (even though she cannot read the subtitles yet). I was catching up on some 5by5 podcasts while doing housework. This mélange of professional, semi-pro and wholly user-generated content is typical of the mix of media consumed by the people formally known as the audience. Welcome to the 21st century mediascape.


So the existing Irish TV licence is an anachronism given the ever-increasing convergence and democratisation of media. Therefore something is obviously going to change. But is it appropriate to levy a flat charge for all media consumption for the benefit of specific actors within the mediascape. I foresee robust debate about where the proceeds of such a broadcasting charge are to be distributed.

Reading between the lines of recent Irish Times’ commentary about the proposed charge, I see them already angling for some portion of the resultant subvention fund. I think they want to broaden the state’s framing of what a broadcaster is within the terms of the relevant legislation. If some of those monies are indeed passed on to The Irish Times, then how much should go to Journal.ie, to Politics.ie, or to Broadsheet.ie? And you can just keep on adding names to that list…

But wait, aren’t we all broadcasters now? I broadcast hundreds of tweets, status updates and Instagrams each year. Not to forgot the occasional essay on this blog. A lot of people I know are equally as active as content producers, each broadcasting to their own web audiences. At present we do not receive any state support for our myriad broadcasting activities. Surely we are just as deserving as the Joe Duffys and the Pat Kennys? Who will right this injustice?

Here is a mischievous idea; why not also offset any new broadcasting charges with a system of ‘Content Credits’? Then those who merely graze and consume content* without broadcasting and contributing back into the mediascape would pay the full amount. While net contributors would have their charges reduced in line with their broadcasting activities. I can imagine a sliding scale: maybe a tweet would be worth one cent per thousand followers, while a blog post would earn a one-euro credit per thousand words per hundred impressions. Or, if that kind of approach allowed people to easily spam the system, perhaps the credits could be calculated as a multiplier of people’s Klout score or some similar metric.

Would you be happy to blog your way to a reduced broadcast charge?

* Lets call them “Content Spongers”. (It is almost too much fun not to resist the urge to spin the rhetoric around.) Think of all the One-Percenters sponging on the system who only consume content and contribute nothing back to the Internets.

Thoughts on Gamification

I just unlocked the ‘client-friendly’ badge on GoldenLadder (or did I?)

I have been joining some dots between the automatic sharing functionality now being enabled in Facebook and the practice of utilising game theory to increase participation within social networks. Facebook’s new frictionless sharing model generates micro-posts based on current activities: I am listening to a song right now or I am reading an article right now, etc. That seems to be of limited interest, and something best experienced in the ‘river of news’ format of the new sidebar ticker. But from there it does seem to be only a short step to generating more interesting aggregate posts that may give stronger signals about whatever we are focused on.

It is too easy to scoff at the achievement badge notifications showing up in my Facebook news feed: Daphne is the mayor of her favourite coffee shop; Fred has unlocked the AppleFanBoy badge for three check-ins at an Apple Store; and Velma has gone to more than five museums in the last month, etc. I think that something interesting is going in beneath the surface that is worth thinking about a bit further. The gamification model is currently most associated with location-based check-ins, but what other possibilities could it lead too? So setting aside all of the incessant buzzing about privacy, and abou Facebook and Google being “just creepy enough” and the related conversations about advertising metrics and monetisation, let’s take a look at some thought experiments.

Tasting the Bacn

Email is not a marketing channel I have given much thought to over the past few years. A quick review of my own email consumption behaviours, habits and patterns proved informative about the utility of the subscription emails in my inbox.

We Are All Semi-Geeks Now

Waiting on a friend in a bar the other night, I noticed that all of the conversations going on simultaneously at the three nearest tables (it was a small bar: everyone was pretty close together) were all about tech and/or social media. Now this was not a high-tech, early-adopter crowd, it was a typical off-Grafton Street Thursday night shopping crowd.

Sharing Your Sign-up (or Twaring Your Twign-up, Even)

Here is a novel UI pattern. I was investigating a new Twitter-related service called Twournal* yesterday. I was applying for a beta invite to see how it worked. The ‘Request An Invite Code’ button did not take me to a page requesting the usual level of authentication (typically an email, a Twitter login or a Facebook login). Rather, to request this particular invitation, the process required me to activate the above viral tweet that would let all of my followers know that I was making the application.

Splinternet in the Wild

I have been thinking about the views expressed here and here by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research about what he calls the ‘Splinternet’. One other aspect arising from his thesis is that Facebook is becoming (or perhaps has already become) a de-facto second Internet alongside the primary Internet. There are many connections between the two. But it is becoming increasingly common for many people to spend the majority of time online within Facebook’s so called ‘walled garden’. This is therefore increasing pressure on organisations and businesses to communicate within the confines of Facebook.

My Twenty Primary iPod/iPhone Apps

As people do seem to be asking me about iPhone/iPod apps quite a lot these days, I am posting this here so that in future I shall have something I can link to. Borrowing the format established by the excellent First and 20 website I have listed the twenty apps that are most useful to me and thus have earned a spot on my home screen. I am forever adding and subtracting apps off my iPod, but this core set remains consistent and any new app needs to really make an impression on me to knock one of these twenty off my first screen in SpringBoard.

Notes from Viral Marketing Presentation at Science Gallery

Jonah Perertti of Buzzfeed.com gave an interesting presentation on viral marketing on 17 April 2009 at the Science Gallery, as part of the Infectious festival and exhibition. Viral marketing is tangential to the subject of my MA research, but I noted some points that may be of interest.

Some aspects of his talk aligned with the observations of Shirkey regarding the societal forces that limit or promote the effects of Internet technology.

• In the case of viral marketing it is the social imperative that drives the passing-on of the viral content.
• The architecture of the underlying system influences how viral memes spread. He drew an analogy with a forest fire: it is not so much about the particular match as about the dry brushwood and the trees. “The network structure is more important than the influencers.”

There are a number of non-trivial problems with viral marketing that need to be mitigated against:
1 It is unpredictable and hard to control.
2 What tends to spread is inconsequential: free, simple, fun and instant.
Ergo most messages are not viral. Furthermore, the slightest drag makes something non-viral. To grow at exponential rate 100 people will need to tell 200, who then go on to tell 400 and so on. If the spread rate is only one-to-one or less, then it will die out.

He spoke about his categorisation of the ‘Bored At Work Network’. This seemed to posit some kind of viral elite who are too busy, too hip and too creative to ever have any time to be bored, as opposed to millions of numb accountants and claims-adjusters waiting to click on the next photo of a kitten on a skateboard.

In terms of viral marketing for things other than novelty, fun, trivia, he spoke about ‘big seed media’. This seemed to have an old-school Interruption Marketing basis, as its starting point was leveraging an installed base of email addresses. His example was the Tide detergent company emailing a million people to shift 40k of product samples.

More interesting was his overview of the real-time audience data informing the editorial decisions on the Huffington Post home page. Articles are promoted or demoted based on their audience figures. This reinforces Shirkey’s analysis of the new paradigm of ‘publish first and filter second’. It is the same Darwinian methodology that kills off unpopular television shows, but whereas that process takes months this happens in hours.

Finally, in strategising how best to propagate your particular message, he advised “it is best to think like a Mormon rather than a Jew”. That metaphor is about focussing as much on the mechanism of how your message is to spread and not just on the content of your message. This is probably his most insightful point. Looking to the Irish graphic design blogosphere the greatest failing seems to be that most effort is expended on the content and little on ensuring both that the content is read and that it facilitates being read. Building in hooks for propagation whether by social imperatives or other means is part of the key to success.

My Thought for the Day 13/03/09

“Social Media defined: the most efficient method yet devised to allow companies to show the world that they hire people who cannot spell.”
08:22 AM March 13, 2009, from my Twitter feed.

Quote of the Day 12/01/09

“Facebook is about people you used to know; Twitter is about people you'd like to know better.”—Ivor Tossell

Quote of the Day 11/12/09

“[You] just can’t have an intelligent conversation with a Coke bottle. People do not wish to speak with brands.”
—Richard Binhammer, Member of Dell’s Digital Media team.

The Machine Is Us/sing Us

Investigating some more about the topic of ‘User-Generated Content’ after Saturday’s MA class I located this fascinating short film ‘The Machine Is Us/sing Us’ on YouTube. It has been created by Michael Welsh who is the Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Kansas State University. So the thinking behind his film is backed up with some serious academic research. That said, I found this to be a most exemplary piece of communication. It really makes its complex points in the clearest manner.

‘Show don’t tell’ is one of the primary rules for effective writing, and this film informs us by showing in the most unique manner. I could use this film to explain Web_2.0 and UGC to my four-year old son. (That is, to people who are not as in love with their own web presence as I am.)

Here Come The Blue Monsters

Hugh MacLeod is doing an acerbic series of cartoons parodying the self-importance of the Social Media Specialists, Consultants, Advisers and the latest flavour of Voodoo-Peddlers who have arrived on the business consultancy scene this year. I am posting this here as a useful reminder not to become too self-important or pompous, given that I will most likely write my MA dissertation on a topic within this space.

The Johari Window And Facebook

I have been thinking further about the relationship model of the ‘Johari Window’ which was outlined in Saturday’s class and it has given me some small insight onto the success of Facebook and other social networking sites.

It takes a lot of effort on our own behalf to maintain the top-left quadrant in the Johari window: our Open information. The status-update features of social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter etc, provides a very low-friction method of letting your friends online know what you are doing. Thus enlarging that top-left quadrant of your Johari window with a far greater circle of people in a very efficient manner.

If I take some of friends in the US as an example of how this works off-line: after not speaking for months it becomes somewhat of a big deal to phone them to have a long catch-up. Equally when they visit Ireland you can spend lots of time informing each other of what has been happening in the last few years: essentially filling in that top-left quadrant.

Now look at the same scenario within a social-network enhanced world. It takes minimal effort for friends to update their status messages. ‘Knitting a sweater for my nephew.’ ‘Preparing for my quarterly evaluation tomorrow.’ ‘Going for my first extended bike ride in many a moon.’ Then on the other side of the window, equally little effort is required to read these. Just spending two minutes over coffee at my desk in the morning and I can have a update on the ‘open’ window quadrants of 30–40 friends and acquaintances.

This can in part explain the phenomenal success of social networking. In that it allows you to have a more open quadrant with your mid-level friends. Those whom are not your dearest friends, but whom you would probably be closer to if you were only more accessible to each other.