Mark's posterous http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com Most recent posts at Mark's posterous posterous.com Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:37:00 -0800 REVIEW: David Weinberger's 'Too Big to Know' http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/review-david-weinbergers-too-big-to-know http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/review-david-weinbergers-too-big-to-know

The title of David Weinberger’s ‘
Too Big to Know’ refers to the overwhelming complexity and volume of information flow of the networked world. (The book has a keen sense of his
tory and Weinberger points out that writers have been complaining about information overload since at least the Romans.) A post-Modernist stance is summed up in the playfully over-long sub-title: ‘Rethinking Knowledge Now the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room’. The nub of Weinberger’s argument is that the nature of books (and more generally paper publishing) has defined what we have understood as facts, expertise and knowledge in the three centuries since the Age of Enlightenment. Now that paper publishing is yielding to the Net what we understand as  facts, expertise and knowledge is also changing.

The paradigm shift
The world of books dealt with complexity by restricting access to publishing. Publishers put out a fraction of what was submitted to them, you couldn’t be an expert without being published, most people who had something to contribute were put off by the high hurdles, and the system amounted to a series of filters that kept output to a manageable level for academic journals, libraries and other media. Weinberger adopts a Darwinian tone to explain how it all worked:

Our system of knowledge is a clever adaptation to the fact that our environment is too big to be known by any one person. A species that gets answers and can then stop asking is able to free itself for new inquiries. It will build pyramids and eventually hadron colliders and Oreos. This strategy is perfectly adapted to paper-based knowledge. Books are designed to contain all the information to stop inquiries within the book’s topic.”


But it came at a cost. Good ideas got left behind. Many experts never got published. And the system made it hard to root out false beliefs. Now we’re in the world of networks where there are no such publishing restrictions. Information has broken out of books and is reorganising itself around the new means of sharing knowledge: the shapeless, shifting networks of the web. In the process, the comforting solidity of book-based knowledge is being lost. And in its place comes a form of knowledge in which facts increasingly look like social constructs, the notion of expertise is morphing from an elite concept to something much broader, and becoming knowledgeable appears to require networking skills.

“Knowledge lives not just in libraries and museums and academic journals. It lives not just in the skulls of individuals. Our skulls and institutions are simply not big enough to contain knowledge. Knowledge in now a property of the network, and the network embraces businesses, governments, media, museums, curated collections, and minds in communication.”


Weinberger believes that for the first time we have a medium big enough to carry ‘knowledge’ -- there are no practical limits to how much information the Web can hold. The beauty of the system is that it is infinitely scalable. But it’s messy.

“... the Net can only scale that large because it doesn’t have edges within which knowledge has to squeeze. No edges mean no shape. And no shape means that networked knowledge lacks what we have long taken to be essential to the structure of knowledge: a foundation.”


That’s the essence of why so many of us, as individuals and as members of organisations, find this era unsettling.

For those unconvinced that terms as key to our culture as something like ‘fact’ could undergo suchchange, Weinberger patiently explains how the word has already changed its meaning twice in the past 400 years. I'm the early 17th century, when it first appeared in English, it meant deed. When Bacon developed the scientific method in the 18th century, it meant something like the opposite of theory. And with Bentham and the development of political and social thought it came to mean something along the lines of free from the bias of interested parties.

“Push on a fact hard enough, and you’ll find someone contradicting it. Try to use facts to ground an argument and you’ll find links to those who disagree with you all the way down to the ground. Our new medium of knowledge is shredding our optimism that we could all agree on facts and, having done so, all agree on conclusions.”


Traditional knowledge as an accident of paper
Weinberger accepts that there’s no agreement over what constitutes knowledge. But he proceeds anyway to define three key elements:  
  1. Knowledge is a subset of belief. We believe many things but only some of them are knowledge
  2. Knowledge consists of beliefs we have some good reason to believe, whether it’s because we’ve done experiments, because we’ve proved them logically, or because God revealed them to our people
  3. Knowledge consists of a body of truths that together express the truth of the world.

It’s this third element, under attack for a couple of generations,  that is looking outmoded now as  the Web seals the fate of notions like the idea that “the news” could be fitted into the pages of a newspaper, or that a 65,000-strong collection of articles could properly constitute an encyclopedia.

Five properties of the social web that create new forms of knowledge
Weinberger identifies five new things human beings can do that couldn’t be done before the advent of the social web:

1. Mobilise bigger groups than ever before
In 1994’s ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ James Surowiecki identified the conditions under which a ‘crowd’ could outperform ‘experts’ -- diversity, independence, decentralisation, and a means to establish a collective decision. The simplest form of this is ‘crowd-sourcing’ -- the manner in which the Guardian mobilised more than 30,000 citizens to ‘Investigate your MP’s expenses’ by  trawling through official documents on what they’d claimed for. (NB Weinberger glosses over the fact that this approach only got half the job done).

As in geo-political events like the Arab Spring, social media is helping larger and larger groups to assemble. They almost seem old-fashioned now but the two most obvious examples of projects requiring many minds to work are Linux and Wikipedia. These just wouldn’t have happened under top-down heirarchical set-ups.

2. Find ‘experts’ at the most granular level
Innocentive, a problem-solving platform created by Eli Lilley to channel external expertise, regularly hosts prize competitions to solve long-standing problems. Wired magazine describes it as ”the research world’s version of iStockphoto.”  Ed Melcarek won $25,000 when he solved Colgate-Palmolive’s challenge of injecting fluoride powder into toothpaste tubes without contaminating the surrounding air. He’s a physicist and worked out straight away that the answer was to ground the tube and add an electronic charge to the powder.

MIT researcher Dr Karim Lakhani studied Innocentive’s competitions and concluded, “the further the problem was from the solver’s expertise, the more likely they were to solve it,” often by applying specialized knowledge or instruments developed for another purpose. He also discovered that participants were motivated by extrinsic benefits. This is one of the standard results of network theory -- what Mark Granovetter originally diescribed as “the strength of weak ties” -- the most efficient networks being those that connect the broadest range of information and expertise.

Weinberger cites Scott Page, author of The Difference, on his view that on and off the Net. “diversity trumps ability’:

“The best problem solvers tend to be similar; therefore, a collection of the best problem solvers performs little better than any one of them individually. A collection of random, but intelligent problem solvers tends to be diverse. This diversity allows them to be collectively better.”


3. Facilitate clusters of expertise
While the Net connects nearly everyone and is incredibly diverse one of its essential features is much denser sub-networks.  YourEncore, a network of former Procter & Gamble employees, mobilises the skills and knowledge of thousands of older workers to solve problems from a variety of organisations via an online community. CompanyCommand.com is a network of West Point graduates, which allows them to swap notes outside the formal power structures of the army. It later spawned the official CALDOL online expertise community. Meanwhile
PatientsLikeMe.com enables patients to share their experiences of symptoms, treatments and responses. But it also takes that data, which is from real experts -- those that are actually experiencing the disease and the treatment -- makes it anonymous and sells it to researchers.

An interesting combination of 2) and 3) is Primary Insight -- a consultancy specialising in connecting those organisations looking for specialist advice with a diverse range of experts.

4. Accumulate and disseminate knowledge in real-time
This is perhaps the most obvious. For the first time you can see networked expertise coming together in real-time. Almost everyone who has downloaded new software will have experienced one dimension of this. New software invariably has bugs -- part of the ‘perpetual beta’ culture of the Web. But almost immediately workarounds are shared by enthusiasts and fans. [Quote from Zittrain?]

5. Scale infinitely
Twitter scales perfectly whether you are using it with a few friends as an intimate communications channel or if you have a million followers and are using it in broadcast mode. The only other medium with this kind of scalability is paper. But paper lacks interactivity. It may not be possible for Ashton Kutcher to converse with his million plus followers but they can talk to one another. Conversation scales horizontally on the web if not vertically.

IBM’s edgy social media strategy includes company-wide jams in which the global workforce swaps notes on an issue of strategic importance. It started with the corporate values statement in 2003 but led on to an ‘innovation jam’ which spawned Smart HealthCare Payment Systems and Intelligent Utility Networks that have become central to the companys ‘Smarter Planet’ initiative.

The smartest person in the room is the room itself
If expertise is more widely distributed than we had realised, and knowledge requires a social dimension before it can be realised, then it follows that the most important factor is the design of the social networking that brings together the diversity of people and mobilises knowledge-sharing.

The many examples cited by Weinberger illustrate the complexity of this -- from the completely open Twitter to the professionals-only companycommand.com. From free Facebook to charged-for Primary Insight. From networks operating across an organisation like IBM’s ‘Jams’ to networks operating across an interest such as patientslikeme. Each is designed to mobilise new sources of human intelligence. And each is configured differently.

‘Too Big to Know’ is an entertaining guide to the new world of networked knowledge, but it’s also a useful reminder of the sheer diversity of network types necessary to meet the challenge that the smartest person in the room be the room itself.

 

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Sun, 08 Jan 2012 08:30:00 -0800 Self Publishing by the numbers -- great infographic on the economics of DIY book publishing: http://bit.ly/ABug9M http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/self-publishing-by-the-numbers-great-infograp http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/self-publishing-by-the-numbers-great-infograp
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The advent of e-books and the proliferation of e-readers have lowered the costs of entry to the world of publishing but, as this infographic makes clear, to a large extent this is simply taking us back to how things were in the 19th century.

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Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:53:00 -0800 How is the TV Landscape Changing? Excellent infographic from @readwriteweb (h/t @paulbradshaw) http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/how-is-the-tv-landscape-changing-excellent-in http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/how-is-the-tv-landscape-changing-excellent-in
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The rise of social TV is the most striking part of this infographic -- 15 per cent of respondents to a Yahoo/Razorfish survey said they were on their phones for the entire duration of shows. An extraordinary 94 per cent said they did something else digital during programmes.

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Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:17:00 -0800 REVIEW: How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/review-how-to-win-friends-and-influence-peopl http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/review-how-to-win-friends-and-influence-peopl
Brent Cole has written a revised version of Dale Carnegie’s 1936 classic to deal with the challenges of digital communication. Nice idea. But poorly executed. The New York Times describes it as ‘brand suicide” on account of the inelegant prose and preponderance of corporate jargon compared to the original. I found it rather repetitive and poorly organised. It felt to me like a long lecture from my grandmother on the need to be nice. And I couldn’t help feeling that you’d have to be super-human to observe consistently all the principles given the awkward fact (rather downplayed in the book) that other people don’t always play nice. But it did make me think and if you can get past the rose-tinted style then there are some good ideas here that will resonate with community managers.
 
The key quote:

“In digital time and space, with open access and frequent communication, the perfunctory principles of corporate activity have largely broken down and been replaced by the basic principles of human relations. If you don’t know how to win friends and influence people in a genuine and positive manner today, not only will you have trouble keeping pace in a marketplace ruled by the consumer, you will also have trouble keeping your people employed.”


Behind the book are two fundamental ideas: 1) Long-term success requires trust-based relationships (the premise of the 1936 work) 2) Digital communication is re-humanising business. The latter is the new dimension -- this isn’t a work for those who feel little has changed with the advent of the Web and social media.

The book draws liberally from other self-help guides. Todd Duncan of ‘Killing the Sale’ fame is cited on the ten fatal mistakes salespeople make. Duncan’s basic insight is that in too many businesses the balance between getting the messengers’ wants and meeting the recipients’ core desires has been lost. Here’s how Duncan analyses interpersonal communications in a sales context:  

Dialogue ................................ Monologue
Considerate .............................Conceited
Authentic .................................Fake
Transparent ............................ Manipulative
Secure ................................... .Needy
Interested in meeting needs .....Interested in making money
Builds trust .............................. Builds tension


Some of the real-world examples are a little thin but one good case study comes from Amy Martin of Digital Royalty who has helped with NASCAR’s highly effective social media work. She comes up with a five-stage engagement ladder. It starts with ‘access’ -- NASCAR fans get unusual levels of access to drivers at race meets.

  • Access leads to connection. (Fans are able to sign the actual racetrack.)
  • Connection leads to relationships.
  • Relationships lead to affinity. (You can’t fake this affinity.)
  • Affinity leads to influence. (There’s a reason so many brands are attracted to NASCAR.)
  • Influence leads to conversion. (These fans would likely buy anything this driver is selling.)

That kind of engagement heirachy could apply to any industry.

The book emphasises the need for authenticity. The strongest quote here is from Wine Library entrepreneur (and another self-help book-writer) Gary Vaynerchuk:

“Engagement has to be heartfelt or it won’t work... You cannot underestimate people’s ability to spot a soulless, bureaucratic tactic a million miles away. It’s a big reason why so many companies that have dipped a toe in social media waters have failed miserably.”


The essential message from this and other examples is that digital technology has led to a shift in power towards consumers and buyers and that if you want to create a lasting business relationship (there’s a reference to Lifetime Customer Value) then you need to establish some kind of a personal relationship with customers.

The book proceeds to update Carnegie’s original guidance.


Six Ways to Make a Lasting Impression

1. Take interest in others’ interests. Learn to listen. Everyone’s favourite subject is themselves. Be less self-interested than others and you are more likely to earn their trust. Also see ‘Access Affinity’ below.

2. Smile. It’s contagious. People who smile have more friends. More broadly, be positive. Always begin and end your messages on a positive note.

3. Reign with names. The most beautiful sound in the world is that of your own name being voiced. So use people’s names whenever you can.

4. Listen longer. Not quite repetition of 1. This is more about listening as a constant process, not just something you do when you first get to know someone.

5. Discuss What Matters to Them. This is the Todd Duncan point -- don’t make assumptions about customers, find out what they are interested in, try to connect them with others with similar interests, think about binding them into your community before attempting to transact.

6. Leave Others a Little Better. The idea that there are no neutral conversations -- you either leave your conversation partner feeling better or worse for the exchange.


How to Merit and Maintain Others’ Trust

1. Avoid arguments. Todd Duncan’s Mistake 6. Too much communication resembles that of a court case in which a lawyer sets out an argument and expects the court to accept or reject it. Ignores possibility of compromise that comes from real dialogue.  

2. Never Say, “You’re wrong”. Same idea. Closes down conversation (and things are rarely so simple that you can say something so categorical)

3. Admit Faults Quickly and Emphatically. Authenticity is everything in relationships and if you don’t own up to errors then how are you going to establish trust? Best to come clean. And the quicker you do this the greater the appreciation from your partners.

4. Begin in a Friendly Way. The lack of emotion in digital communication poses a problem. Extra care needs to be taken in making sure the tone is right. Vaynerchuk thinks we’ll have to start thinking and behaving like small-town shop owners.

5. Access Affinity. Make use of the Web to tell you what you have in common with someone. If they are following you, commenting on your work or in the same social network group then you already have a relationship. What can you tell of their interests?

6. Surrender the Credit. One of the hardest things to give up in corporate life. But if you’re serious about collaborative outcomes you can’t afford to get bogged down in arguments over whose idea it was. But will your contribution be recognised?  Presumably yes if the collaboration works. August Turak, one of the founders of MTV, and a Forbes blogger talks of a ‘magical multiplier’ when credit is surrendered.

7. Engage with Empathy. We’re not naturally empathetic -- we need to work at it. Before reacting digitally, put yourself in the recipient’s shoes. How are they likely to react? What’s the most gracious way of handling this? How do I act to maximise the possibility of future collaboration?

8. Appeal to Noble Motives. Basic idea is that you should try to frame things so that collaborators can contribute to the greater good.

9. Share Your Journey. Part of authenticity is recognising that the barriers between the public and personal have largely come down. Judicious sharing of your personal experiences helps build relationships.

10. Throw Down a Challenge. Competition and collaboration aren’t opposites they’re part of the human condition and need to be brought into balance. You can stimulate collaboration by creating a competition that builds on some affinity and stimulates collaboration.

The book finishes with a section rather ambitiously titled ‘How to Lead Change Without Resistance or Resentment’, which applies the same ideas to change management but is of less direct relevance to community managers.

In the end, one of those books where you end up feeling that it could all have been said in a tightly argued blog post. Shame.

 

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Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:03:00 -0800 Great piece on coverage of public sector strikes by @paulbradshaw including the live-blogging pyramid of value http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/great-piece-on-coverage-of-public-sector-stri http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/great-piece-on-coverage-of-public-sector-stri
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At first, student journalists given a live-blogging task by Paul Bradshaw proceeded to simply document what was going on. He takes this experience to tease out all the additional ways in which journalists can now add value and suggests this is why live-blogging has become such a pervasive tool for covering breaking news.

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Wed, 02 Nov 2011 23:30:00 -0700 Confused where to post your status updates? Breaking Copy has a useful flowchart to help you decide http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/confused-where-to-post-your-status-updates-br http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/confused-where-to-post-your-status-updates-br
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Breaking Copy having some fun with flow charts. More than a ring of truth to the Google-plus and LinkedIn paths.

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Sat, 29 Oct 2011 07:48:00 -0700 Ten tips for journalists on how to get the conversation flowing http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/ten-tips-for-journalists-on-how-to-get-the-co http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/ten-tips-for-journalists-on-how-to-get-the-co

Journalists are now expected to engage with readers and to get them to ‘join the conversation’. But just how do you do that? Most of the guides I’ve found either come from a marketing perspective or from analysis of open social media, in particular Twitter.  However, having dug around a bit and spoken to some writers who do this well, in particular Toby Moores (aka @sleepydog) I’ve come up with some tips, which I'm trying out with some success with Reuters chatroom moderators. They’re just a starting point. If they don’t work for you or you’ve got better ones then please let me know.

#1 Be clear about your role
If you are reading this then you know that you or your staff are no longer purely broadcasters of content to an unseen public, nor curators of other people’s content, but also, and possibly primarily, facilitators of conversation. There are degrees of how conversational the new journalism should be. They run from comments on finished articles, in which reader contributions come after the piece has been finished, through liveblogs, in which comments and contributions from readers are key (though usually not dominant), all the way to live chatrooms, in which the content is mostly generated by others. The further along this spectrum you go the harder you’ll need to push the ideas in this note.

#2 Think about how conversations work face-to-face
Conversation is a very natural thing. It may help to think about social situations in which conversation flows. You are almost certainly already an expert in the etiquette and tactics of starting, joining and extending real-world conversations. Different analogies work for different people but try to think about all those things that you do naturally when you meet friends in the pub or at a bar, or at some sports fixture or when you host a dinner party or, more formally, what happens if you are asked to chair something like a meeting or a panel debate.

#3  Be a good listener
Sounds obvious, right? But easier said than done. The sentiment is the basis of Dale Carnegie’s 1937 best-seller ‘How to win friends and influence people’. And it comes from the observation that if you want people to open up then the best thing to do is to show some real interest in them and get them talking about what they are interested in. (A re-interpretation of Carnegie's original work for the digital age has just been published.)

The main thing to do is to keep a close eye on what people are talking about. Think about whether you could help the conversation by introducing a special guest contributor or add some content that will throw new light on the theme. If a subject is raised and you know other readers who are knowledgeable in that area then invite them into the conversation.

Think back to offline examples of conversations and what makes a great dinner party host or debate chairperson -- their seeming ability to keep things flowing by bringing in new people or shifting the subject until the conversation takes off again.

#4  Set a good example
In ‘The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online’ the new media writer, critic and teacher Howard Rheingold describes the key role of a community moderator as an exemplar or role model:

“Good hosts model the behavior they want others to emulate: read carefully and post entertainingly, informatively, and economically, acknowledge other people by name, assume good will, assert trust until convinced otherwise, add knowledge, offer help, be slow to anger, apologize when wrong, politely ask for clarification, exercise patience when your temper flares.”

Rheingold is describing a form of virtual social skills.

One of the toughest challenges in live chats is dealing with a change of tack when there is important news. When this happens think about how you would interrupt a conversation at a dinner party or perhaps during a formal conference and use some finesse to avoid showing participants any disrespect.

Part of the role is to build trust with participants -- make them feel as though their contributions will be welcomed. Be extremely careful about closing down a line of conversation to avoid the risk of embarrassment -- you know what that feels like when it happens to you.

#5 Don’t lapse into broadcast mode
If there’s too much being said by one person it’ll feel like a broadcast and participants will disengage.

Try not to overload the audience with your own broadcast messages, statements of fact or self-promotional content. If you have hard news to share then think about giving it a conversational intro or end it with a question.

Various authors have had a go at looking at the right balance between ‘broadcast’ and ‘conversational’ content on Twitter. If you put out too many messages that are broadcast then readers appear to disengage. JD Lasica, a leading light in social media and journalism in the States, proposes a 75:25 rule -- three conversational tweets for every broadcast tweet.

#6  Write as you speak not as you report
Spoken English tends to be simpler than written English. On Facebook the simpler the style of writing, the more likely readers are to respond. Use short sentences and words. Use common contractions.  You should write in the first person. Human brains are wired for conversation. That’s why we find loud, one-sided conversations on mobile phones so distracting. When people are addressed directly, even if it is via text, they think they are in a conversation and become more engaged. Kathy Sierra provides some background on the strength of this phenomenom in educational texts.

Apply the ‘pub test’. Go back over some of your previous written conversations and read your messages out loud. Is that how you would talk if you were in a conversation in a pub or a restaurant? If not you are almost certainly over-writing.

#7 Be as personal as possible.
In a chatroom, instead of opening up with ‘Good Morning everyone’ try ‘Good Morning everyone, how are you?’ Name-check people to recognise their contributions. It’s what you would do in the pub or at a dinner party and there’s nothing more powerful to encourage others to get involved. But don’t overdo the personal stuff. Social media marketing specialist Dan Zarella writes up some empirical research on language in social media in his recent book Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness. In Zarrella’s analysis of why people read blogs the overwhelming response was that the thing that kept them coming back was the author’s unique point of view not that they talked about themselves. There are some more useful tips at Public Speaker

#8  Be upbeat
Zarella found that those with the highest Twitter followings tended to have the lowest ratings for negativity. We know from numerous studies that positive emotions are contagious and that positive personality types tend to have the largest personal networks.

So accentuate the positive. When someone posts something constructive thank them for it. When summarising conversations for late-comers make sure you name-check the most positive contributors.

Think about the language you use. This one is tough but try to use positive words. For a bit of fun, If you are on Twitter then try this tool, which analyses your style based on new theories about what your word choice says about your personality (more details in this New Scientist piece.) It only takes a very limited sample of your output but may make you think harder about how you come across.

#9  Don’t be afraid to issue ‘calls to action’
Zarrella has analysed the content of the most retweeted messages on Twitter and compiled a list of the terms most likely to get you shared. Many of the top items he characterises as being ‘social requests’ including the use of the words ‘you’ and ‘please retweet’

Toby Moores suggests adopting a rule that two-thirds of your contributions should end with a question mark. There are all sorts of ways of doing this. Again think about how you behave when the conversation flags in the bar -- perhaps someone will change the subject and take it off in a completely new direction, or perhaps someone will decide they want to talk some more about an earlier topic of discussion. For chatrooms at least, the beauty of conversation is that it doesn’t have to be linear.

#10  Take extreme care over headlines and summaries
On Twitter Zarella found that the other category of messages most retweeted were those with clear indicators that they contained very useful content like ‘how to’ and ‘top 10’. You may need to adapt the style somewhat but have a look at how language is used in headlines and summaries to ‘tease’ the audience on the Huffington Post where everything is written with the aim of promoting conversation.

Think hard about how you write summaries of earlier conversations. Write them as if you were telling someone who was late to the football game what had happened -- short, sharp and with the key bits of colour. Pull out the ‘talking point’ from the content. Develop a sense of what kind of headlines will lure people in. Discover your inner Huffington Post sub-editor.

 

 

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Tue, 25 Oct 2011 08:51:00 -0700 Best place for links in tweets is a quarter of the way in, according to Dan Zarella http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/best-place-for-links-in-tweets-is-a-quarter-o http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/best-place-for-links-in-tweets-is-a-quarter-o
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Interesting that most people instinctively put the link at the end of their tweet -- like a footnote I suppose - but that the best place is actually towards the beginning. But why would that be? Does this mean that even with the 140 character links people don't read to the end of tweets?

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Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:52:00 -0700 RSA Animate - The Divided Brain - YouTube http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/rsa-animate-the-divided-brain-youtube http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/rsa-animate-the-divided-brain-youtube

Brilliant animated treatment of an RSA lecture by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist on the war between the left and right side of the brain. All the conventional wisdom on this is wrong -- you need both sides for reason and you need both sides for imagination.

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Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:30:00 -0700 Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world -- New Scientist http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/revealed-the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/revealed-the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the
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Network analysis suggests a hard core of 1318 corporations, most of them banks, lie at the heart of the international capitalist system, according to research written up in the New Scientist. On one level there's no surprise there. Finance is the glue that allows specialisation and trading on an international level. So the fact that banks dominate is unsurprising. But it's the degree of concentration. How do you work out whether that's appropriate?

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/295697/Mark_by_Illy.JPG http://posterous.com/users/4aB1QxbWv4TT Mark Jones Mark Mark Jones
Thu, 21 Jul 2011 05:00:28 -0700 My Twitter behaviour in an infographic http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/my-twitter-behaviour-in-an-infographic http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/my-twitter-behaviour-in-an-infographic

This auto-generated infographic correctly identifies me as a foodie. But curious as to why that particular attribute emerges from my tweeting rather than any of my other obsessions.

 

 

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Wed, 06 Jul 2011 01:50:00 -0700 Steve Bell on Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and phone hacking | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/steve-bell-on-rupert-murdoch-rebekah-brooks-a http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/steve-bell-on-rupert-murdoch-rebekah-brooks-a
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Bell at his brutal best.

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Wed, 11 May 2011 07:19:00 -0700 AlertNet's coverage of sexual violence in Haiti http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/52660865 http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/52660865

[View the story "Haiti rulers back anti-rape project" on Storify]

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Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:29:00 -0700 Economist's Royal Wedding Chart of the Day shows how Kate and Will indicative of wider trends in Britain http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/economists-royal-wedding-chart-of-the-day-sho http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/economists-royal-wedding-chart-of-the-day-sho
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Kate is 29, Will is 28, which makes her bang in line with the average age of a first-time British bride and him two-and-a-bit years younger than first-time grooms. Since I got married in 1989, the average age of first-time grooms has shot up by just over five years, slightly less for first-time brides. That's a huge jump and the Economist cites social and economic changes like the sexual revolution and the changing role of women in the workplace as principle causes. But a similar jump has happened in life expectancy over the same period and I wonder whether this might also be a factor -- why rush into marriage if you've got more time to play with?

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Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:20:00 -0700 First Past the Post gives you coffee when 70 pct would rather go down the pub (ht @felixsalmon) http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/first-past-the-post-gives-you-coffee-when-70 http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/first-past-the-post-gives-you-coffee-when-70
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At last some humour in the referendum over AV

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Wed, 20 Apr 2011 23:36:00 -0700 How #FollowFriday is SUPPOSED to work - The Oatmeal http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/how-followfriday-is-supposed-to-work-the-oatm http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/how-followfriday-is-supposed-to-work-the-oatm
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Very funny. I'm now following The Oatmeal but have never used #ff and now probably never will.

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Sun, 10 Apr 2011 04:35:00 -0700 INFOGRAPHIC: What do Britain's news organisations tweet about? (TweetMinster analysis) http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/infographic-what-do-britains-news-organisatio http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/infographic-what-do-britains-news-organisatio
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Fascinating analysis of what British journalists on Twitter did in February. Did the FT really not see anything from David Cameron worth tweeting about?

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Mon, 14 Mar 2011 07:08:00 -0700 Clever conversion of graphic on Arab unrest into build-your own revolutionary index by the Economist http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/clever-conversion-of-graphic-on-arab-unrest-i http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/clever-conversion-of-graphic-on-arab-unrest-i

What's really nice about the Economist's approach is that they encourage users to share the graphic with an easy-to-used embed code snippet.

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Wed, 02 Mar 2011 23:53:00 -0800 The world map of social networks http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/the-world-map-of-social-networks http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/the-world-map-of-social-networks
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Facebook dominates the social networking world but it's interesting that of the biggest emerging economies -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- all but India have dominant indigenous social networks. That could be a language thing. But that might argue for a stronger Spanish contender. And there is none.

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Mon, 28 Feb 2011 22:35:00 -0800 CARTOON: The modern workplace's benefit package (h/t @tweetsmarter): http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/cartoon-the-modern-workplaces-benefit-package http://markhaywardjones.posterous.com/cartoon-the-modern-workplaces-benefit-package
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