I will attempt another live blog today, but it is a packed programme, so I will see how I get on…

See the programme

Interestingly this conference has sponsorship from match.com, not sure what this says about the delegates… Colin Mayer of the Said Business School provides the introduction, on the power of social media and the speed within which it has spread, from radio taking 38 years to reach a mass audience to Facebook reaching hundreds of millions within a few months. He went on to consider the potential power of social media in global conflict and political campaigns. But will the apparent democratisation of media come to be, or will we return to the dominant voices of the few in what we choose to read?

Continued…

From weblogs to Twitter: how did we get to where we are today and what are the main impacts to date?

Dave Sifry has been blogging since 2002, excited by being able to get online without having to pay companies millions of pounds.

Bill Thompson has only been online since 1984, and claims things were much better in the old days… reading usernet every day to communicate with Sun Microsystems and using email to communicate with friends and colleagues. Looking back the surprising thing is that it wasn’t exciting, it was just part of work. Perhaps when the technology just works well we don’t notice it – there are no conferences about fax machines!

He also set up as website for the Edinburgh Fringe 15 years ago, which published news and reviews, updated every day. The only difference was, everything went through him. Now anyone can get online at any time, without permission. This is key – if you remove the power to ask for things to happen, people do remarkable things.

We are very much at the early stages of social media – at present 1 billion people are online but as more come onstream we will see more revolutions, more exciting things coming online.

Bill Dutton commented on the reinvention of the speed of internet innovations – many people in the audience would not have heard of Twitter 12 months ago. However, the internet as always been social, right from the start. However, the take-up of social networks is a real phenomena – only 12% of over 14s used social networks in 2007, up to 29% in 2008, considerably more this year. It has a truly transformative power, changing the way we communicate with people but also who we communicate with. It reinforces the social networks we already have, but also to meet new people, it is not isolationist and can be life-changing – apparently 20% of newly married couples met their spouses online – leading to a nice plug for the match.com sponsorship!

Nigel Shadbolt – Working in AI, we just did not get the web for a long time, but when we got the scale of the internet remarkable things began to happen because of the collected creativity. So as AI we have turned up late but we are here now, and with the semantic web, moving away from the document-centric model we will see interesting things happen. But why were we so unprepared for all this, why could we not predict it? This leads to a promotion of his area, web science, bringing together law, economics, sociology. The blogosphere makes an interesting case study, but could we have used this to predict the scale of micro-blogging?

We have a view of the Western blogosphere, the English speaking blogosphere, but what about other cultures? For example there are bloggers in China, but they spend more time on traditional bulletin boards and social networks, what are the cultural differences? And what happens when giants stabilise, like Wikipedia, and will there be a price to pay for this?

Sorry, was thrown off the network for some time there!

There is a problem with verification – how do we know who to trust? Bill D – socially networked individuals have a responsibility, they have an additive effect.

Making Science Public: data-sharing, dissemination and public engagement with science with Ben Goldacre, Maxine Clarke and Cameron Neylon, led by Felix Reed-Tsochas.

Maxine Clarke as editor at Nature provides three essential services for scientists: find the best advances in science, provide quality and trust for readers and provide swift access to these results. Social media have not made sufficient impact on the publication process – keys are things like finding the best peer reviewers to get the best science out there. There have been experiments where scientists can comment on reviewers comments or online forums but very few scientists do take part in these. Not much is happening in terms of engaging the author with those who are reading it, at least on the website where the paper is published. Journals should be encouraging communication and refinement for papers before publication through pre-print, encouraging openness before publication. Journals can also help after publication by forcing public data-sharing. Can also upload protocols, so other scientists can follow it, annotate the protocol and ask questions. Although some scientists are engaged, the vast majority aren’t so it is still quite untested.

Cameron Neylon spoke as a practising scientist trying to get funding for science and get papers past Maxine for publishing in Nature! Some years ago a colleague approached Cameron about putting lab notebooks online, basically a blog but behind a firewall. Due to technical issues the decision was made to put the entire notebook openly online, making the science truly open. Also began to use social media tools such as Twitter and Friendfeed. Although what Maxine says is true, that numbers of scientists using tools are currently low, numbers are increasing. There are ways of doing science in the open that make the process of research and publication more quickly and efficiently than the current processes.

Question to Ben: do you think the move to the blogosphere for scientists is a transformative change, how does it change the interactions between science and the public?

There are a lot of good science journalists out there, but there are a lot of problems, especially for niche areas where people with a science background are interested but are not working in science any more. Blogs have advantages, and there are some very good blogs out there where scientists are communicating and engaging directly with the public. In his recent debate with Lord Drayson on science communication didn’t feature anything on new media and this is an oversight as these can reach many more people than the limited range of published books.

Q Is bad science journalism better than no science journalism?

The majority of science journalism works on dumbing down, histrionics on how we’re all going to die, we are missing these niche stories for educated people with an interest in the science.

Q What you are saying indicated the dangers of sloppy journalism?
Ben: This implies the internet is undifferentiated mush where you can’t tell what is good or bad, but that is for people who don’t understand the internet. People will identify where good stories are.

Maxine: As an editor don’t equate blogs with science journalism, writing and edited is under-rated. But there are some very good science bloggers out there who are good writers and getting high quality articles and debates.

Cameron: we should also ban the term “the public” as this isn’t helpful, they could be scientists or not, projects like Galaxy Zoo are getting people to classify galaxies because they want to – they are contributing to science, they are scientists in a way.

Maxine: On Nature Network a lot of the scientists are younger or different, but people interact differently, there is more debate on Nature Network than for example on the main news pages of Nature, and are even more heated debates using tools like FriendFeed.

Cameron: For scientists, those pushing social media fall into two categories, those who are coming towards the end of their contract who are using this to network and get their first permanent contract, and then they disappear as it is too risky to appear radical. Or people in their second tenure who are a bit more secure and can afford to take more risks.

Bill Dutton: More is happening at the edges, not at the high end of peer reviewed publications as this is the most static, perhaps at the collaboration stage, the older senior scientists aren’t involved, it is the people at the edges.

Social media, so what? Assessing the impact of blogs and social media
How do we measure the impact of social media? There are successful stories, but many more unsuccessful ones, where the use of social media has made no difference. Who is using social media, who gets most of the attention and why?

BILDblog is a watchdog for the influential German newspaper Bild, which the speaker claims is irresponsible journalism, which relies on readers sending in mistakes. This has become one of the biggest blogs in Germany. It is hard to say whether the blog has made any difference, it hasn’t really changed the paper but it may have changed the audience, talking to them directly about what the mistakes and flaws are.

In broader terms there is the Pirate Party movement when the government decided to try and block all child pornography sites, the downside being that there was no formal decision making or right of appeal as to which sites are blocked. The Pirate Party movement was petitioning against this as restricting the freedom of the internet, and raised the biggest online petition in Germany so far. The impact of this may be seen in the forthcoming German elections.

Evgeny Morozov is from Belarus and has an interest in who is blogging. There are activists out there and some have been very successful, but the same tools are also being used by the governments that are in power – for example in Iran there are clerics being training in blogging tools, paid employees who log into ideological discussion forums to leave comments to guide the discussion, but more sinisterly it is now very easy to track people with conflicting political views by tagging and following their contributions to social media. The idea of a Twitter-based revolution, the example seen of activists in Tehran reporting from the ground wasn’t led by Twitter and is now being followed by the government to identify the activists, how they met and interacted and now using this to track them, putting them at risk.

Richard Allan – there was a great concern that there was less interest in politics, that politicians would be talking to empty buildings, that the audience had left, but this became a great excitement where these relationships could be rebuilt through social media. In the early stages there was a celebrated idea that the new tools, such as blogs represented a new public open space where every one can turn up. However it was more like a bar, where the audience becomes self-selected, e.g. straight or gay, conservative or liberal , basically the same audience as before. With the growth of social networking (recommending, tagging etc.) this has broadened as friends of friends get involved so this has more exciting potential, more festival than bar!

Matthew Hindman – there is a misapprehension here on the “low barrier to entry” to setting up apps on the web – this is about monopolies, Google and Amazon are investing huge amounts in both equipment and research. In established areas of the web, such as online book sales, the barriers to entry are actually extremely high. But this is about setting up companies on business models – surely less significant for less commercial concepts, particularly in individuals wanting to communicate? To reach a mass audience, America has never been as exclusionary – well-read commentators are disproportionately male, white, and highly educated, so in terms of democratising the information from the web this has not been a success.

Q What are the unintended consequences of new media?

Stefan: That is difficult to answer as there was not necessarily an intention, and the beauty is that anyone can contribute, which means people will use it for spam and other evil things.

EM: In certain countries the number of people engaging in social media are increasing, so for example in a Russian village or a Chinese village the government don’t really know what is happening, what is going wrong, but if the conversation is online then this can be read, problems can be identified and then fixed, and this gives a legitimacy to the regime. This is an unexpected consequence, and can be a benefit (separate to issues from human rights).

RA: In terms of personal democratic space it is empowering to be part of the conversation.

I’ll bow out there, my fingers are hurting! Hope this was of interest!