More on the casual passerby

So this is a great comfort to me, and underlines the fact (again!) that people just don't much like sending their photos in. After one week of what appears to be saturation public transport ads (sides of buses and at every tube station i've been to) casual passerby has 21 submissions, one of which is - predictably - someone just taking a photo of themselves (which means they must also be publishing every single photo they get. Are they moderating, I wonder?).

One of our ads was on the telly this morning (which I saw, because I was inexplicably watching Friends at 7.30 this morning. Ahem!), which has -- oh my god yes -- resulted in one person sending in a story. Well blow me down with a feather. My favourite bit of promotion so far is that a 2/3 page article in the Daily Express (next to a charming piece about stopping greyhounds from getting car sick) resulted in almost no increase in users at all, and actually *no* contributions. That's right; it was completely unsuccessful, which leads me to believe that the digital divide may actually run through the heart of middle England, and be full of people in M&S tan slacks, worrying too hard about the threat of immigration to be ordering books from Amazon or shopping at Tesco. I'm sure that's not the sort of "disadvantage" Patricia Hewitt can have been thinking of.

Anyway, the real point is that you can't force people to do things they don't want to. It also makes me realise the real power of the www.bbc.co.uk as a distribution platform ... you can stick pretty much anything up within the BBC Behemoth and be assured, somehow, of 1000s of unique users a day, and in comparison "diverting" standalone propositions that aren't of inherent use (i.e., sites that aren't banks and maps and journey planners) don't have a leg to stand on. It's so odd to have come from a service where you expect to receive hundreds of emails from your users every single day to managing one where you get one email, very occassionally, that says something like "I can't remember my password". I think that there's a real underestimation of the value that a trusted brand offers internet users; I mean, let's face it, I will listen to all sorts of rubbish on Radio 4 (apart from Money Box Live, which is what I imagine must be playing on the Devil's Own Radio) because it's part of the tapestry of my everyday life. And actually, in probing that a bit, I don't think I ever listen to Radio 4 in the hope of hearing something really marvellous and diverting and cutting-edge, I listen to it because it helps to fill my head with a distracting level of information. Hmmm. But I'm getting distracted. The point I'm fumbling for is that the BBC has a central role in my life (through Radio 3 and 4 and BBC 7), so that it feels in some way inherently a part of me, and which means I have a natural trust and relationship with its brand extensions. There's nothing comparable (in my life, anyway), and so I suppose this does skew digital distribution in the UK in a way that could never be remedied by something like the Graf Report.

I'm not really sure where I'm heading with this, beyond the realisation that perhaps my job is a bit pointless. And I do, of course, need to find another one very soon.

But enough, enough. My interesting discovery today is that a google search for "send in photos", yields this from the Homeland Defense Journal Online. It's a strange world where you can as easily submit photos of military training manoeuvres as you can, say, post your latest holiday snaps. Golly.

Casual Passerby

So this is interesting, and relates to some things I've been thinking about. But first of all, i noticed with delight today that one of my most popular del.icio.us tags is ... yes, you guessed it, bovril! If I'm not careful, I'm going to get a reputation for being obsessed with 70s food products ...

But anyway, I looked at the casual passerby website today because i saw a poster in the tunnel at South Kensington. So far so effective. But I am, of course, an unreliable control example, because I'm so preoccupied with the effectiveness of offline promotion for online propositions, and because I tried -- as a, erm, "mind experiment" -- to memorise the URL, because I want to know if people ever remember URLs they see in an offline context ... So anyway, I remembered it because I forced myself to (although my first instinct was of course to google it, but it didn't come up in google at all, so I then chanced my arm with ".com" ... which is in itself a novelty for an art project ... but anyway, must remember to punctuate more), and then when I got there my first thought was "oh what's this, this is a bit self-reflexive and boring". However, on closer inspection, when you root around a bit, it's actually quite an interesting proposition ... there are some slight flaws (take photos on London Underground, except on the tube), plus the user journey is a bit tortuous: see poster > remember url > look at url > find out what your supposed to do > remember it and save the number to your phone > go out and about looking for the posters and then take photos of them -- but I suppose they're looking for a self-conscious user group, so perhaps that is effective and sufficient?

Democratising Innovation

Ironically, the very interesting article about FLOSS and customer innovation by Lawrence Lessig in the latest LRB is only available to read online if you're a subscriber.

Eric von Hippel's theories of "democratising innovation" are just the sort of thing that need a bigger take up in the museum sector. When I was at the Museums and the Web conference earlier this year, something I found gob-smacking was the mother-knows-best approach to digitising collections and making them accessible. In fact, so incongruous were me and my fellow speaker in the set up that we ended up being shoved in the "anthropology" (social curiosity) section, when what we were actually talking about was about encouraging a democratised approach to engagement with objects and their interpretation. So many museum websites are still about pushing as much information out as possible in a sub-CD-rom environment, taking for granted the fact that everyone wants to come and Learn-with-a-Capital-L, that it seems almost astonishing people want to use them at all. As I rush to a sweeping generalisation, the greatest benefit I get from the Internet is the deconstructed/decentralised knowledge-base. Museum culture is so wedded to the nature of authority files that the threat of "knowledge fracture" is all-but terrifying for them, and seems to guarantee a strange symbiosis in which the museums themselves become mothballed entities; dinosaurs that house (in some cases) dinosaurs.

Anyway, jeez, where did that come from? Hopefully I will remember to get off my soapbox this morning before my first footstep on the path to sure celebrity: this morning I am being interviewed for the BBC Three Counties Radio Weekend Breakfast Show, which appears to start at 4.30 am on Saturday morning, earliness fans. It's quite possible that more people over hear me while I'm using my mobile phone on the bus, so am trying not to worry about it ...

Someone shut me up

While cruising round my phone last night, I discovered that -- in the 9 months since I've had this particular phone -- I have been "on the phone" for 121 hours, 4 minutes, and 54 seconds, 65 hours of which have been outgoing calls. I have also sent and received 1133 text messages. So that's an average of about 13 hours and 125 text messages a month. I mean, I know some of this stuff from my phone bill, but I didn't know that I've spent nearly 6 of the last 270 days just talking to people on the phone. I mean, that seems like quite a lot to me. And what of those 6 days? I guess they were probably kind of fun, but some of that time would have also been spent, say, checking my bank balance or having boring work conversations or arguments with my boyfriend. So perhaps I will institute a new minimal chat phone policy? Hmmm.

Anyway, I was intrigued to hear a report about Google Earth on R4 this morning being trailed by John Humphries saying "And here is so and so reporting from his computer". He clearly wasn't actually reporting from his computer, because he was out and about talking to people who had things to say about Google Earth, but there you go -- sort of spatially interesting nonetheless, and particularly within the context of it being about something that is about, er, space and location. Also intriguing about this was that the only example of breach of privacy was in regard to "Beckingham Palace" (which wasn't glossed, oddly), rather than national security or personal safety. So you can see that the rulings of the PCC are uppermost in the mind of the journalist. Like a bad blogger I can't be bothered to go to the R4 site and find the link to this. Oh well.

Meanwhile, I am soothing the own office environment by listening to johnny cash via alt country radio on the new Last FM site ... which frankly I am only mentioning because I have massive professional jealousy. Speaking as someone who has spent bloody ages working on a slightly kooky and not-quite-right web site (that is sorta getting there, but in its owwwwwn time), I must say that this looks great. *sigh*