Also: Forums vs blogs | Too darn busy Losing stuff | The Smiths reprise
Innovation Labs is, along with Backstage, one of the most important projects the BBC runs, in my humble. Last week was the fourth and final week of this year's labs, during which some of the country's most innovative and exciting indie producers work on various BBC digital media projects. In October and November the BBC toured 13 cities explaining the ten briefs for the 2006/7 labs and producers submitted outline proposals
Briefs included ideas around: delivering BBC news to 14-24 year olds; real-time sports coverage; interactive dramas for teenagers; helping users navigate around BBC content cross-platform; made-for-mobile or location-based services; and reflecting the wider conversation about the BBC on the corporation's own site.
Matt Locke, the outgoing head of innovation at the BBC, said the labs give producers a real insight and understanding into the commissioning process because they work intensively on a project together for a week, and it also gives them direct contacts for the BBC's commissioners. Ideas tend to develop far more quickly in one intensive week than over a period of several months, as would typically happen with the commissioning and proposal process, but the real innovation here "comes out of conversations".
This being digital media, each lans tends to see a focus on certain themes and trends. Last year's projects were very concerned with tagging, folksonomies and geo-location, said Locke, and this year there is more attention to widgets. That's probably a reflection of the continuing increase in the sue of social net sites, as well as the increasing trend for sharing information and content between sites.
Matt has done a great summary of Innovation Labs on his Test blog, and dishes out some advice to the Economist's Project Red Stripe which is a commendable effort in crowdsourcing.
He summarises what the BBC has learnt from running an open innovation project like Labs: know who you want to have a conversation with; know how your community talks to itself; be clear about the structure of your conversation; not everything has to be out in the open; make open projects intellectual property-free spaces; and understand that open innovation is an evolving process.
"Labs is very different from Backstage - its very task-focused (commissioning new innovations); marketed very directly at its target audience (digital indies across the UK) and based on setting the brief in advance, rather than leaving it open to see what people want to build.
"But this is because of the nature of its target community - indies want real commissioning opportunities, they want to understand what the BBC's strategy is, and they want to meet the commissioners to build a working relationship. From our point of view, we want to find ideas at an early stage, we want to steer them towards our strategic needs, and we want to get to know the indie - their skills, expertise, etc - before collaborating on projects with them."
Kathryn Corrick at New Media Knowledge has a write up of the labs too, and picks on the experience of two developers from Limitless Innovation' as they work on a social events service attached to BBC content. The rest of the labs is diligently blogged on the labs' BBC blog, presumably by whoever wasn't asleep at the end of an extremely long week.
I know I'm always going on about Google's 20% thing, but innovation is so vital and the very nature of big, mainstream media organisations seems anti-creative and, almost by definition, non experimental.
Everybody needs an innovation lab, if you ask me.
Forums vs blogs
Forums are more useful than blogs, reckons the MD of media intelligence company 23. David Crane said there were around 1.5bn forum comments posted last year, compared to 252m comments on "more fashionable" blogs, but that forums offer better quality discussion, partly because of anonymity of posters and partly because comments are volunteered rather than solicited.
I'm really not so sure about that. I hardly ever use forums, mostly because the discussion tends not to be so topical. Blogs publish when something happens, and then people comment. As for the anonymity of comments, I think it's fairly well established that openness and accountability encourages a better quality of debate.
"The individual is the real influencer in today's world. And the place where individuals exert that influence is in forums. In many ways forums are the forgotten son of the Internet, one which has been pushed aside in the hype surrounding various other social media avenues."
Still, I have as much patience for a blogs vs forums debate as a bloggers vs journalists debate (oh Lord please no!) so I'll leave it there. Suffice to say that if you're online and über-busy, blogs comments are right there on whatever you're reading, but forums have to be sought out. I think someone with a newfangled thesis in the dynamics of online participation would be better placed to explain how interaction varies between blogs and forums.
My favourite thing about 23 is that they used to be called NooMedia, although I can see why you'd want to ditch the name if you've been grappling with its humour legacy since 1995.
Too darn busy
Alina Tugend on the New York Times is complaining that she's the odd one out because her friends are always too busy to talk to her, and she has plenty of time to read books, have long lunches and look after two kids. Conversely I have no kids, no time to read books and an eternal battle to keep on top of things. It's the modern condition.
I sheepishly agree with the pints to refers to from Dr Edward Hallowell's CrazyBuzy book, in which he explains that it is partly the despite for control that leads to us losing control:
- It is so easy with cellphones and BlackBerrys a touch away.
- It is a kind of high.
- It is a status symbol.
- We're afraid we'll be left out if we slow down.
- We avoid dealing with life's really big issues - death, global warming, AIDS, terrorism - by running from task to task.
- We do not know how not to be busy.
Talking of which, I've been here since 7.20 this morning and I'm going home now. (New York Times)
Losing stuff
I'm not exactly delighted that yesterday's digital digest post evaporated into thin air but hey - gremlins get to the best of us.
I mentioned the four key web trends as confirmed by research from the Association of Online Publishers, the web magazine DONT TV and downtime on the world's top 20 websites, but hey - things move on.
The Smiths reprise
Silliness for the day: which Smiths song are you? I wanted to be Heaven Knows, but I clearly have to work on the misery.
