Citizen Media Watch

Living in Sweden, and especially taking an active part in covering and exploring social and citizen media, I take many things for granted. One is the right to take photos in public areas, another to report about what I see and opinions and thoughts I have on any thinkable subject.

In other parts of the world, however, those simple actions can get you into serious trouble. I recently read an article in AsiaMedia about the situation in Sri Lanka. The country is the world’s third most dangerous place for journalists to operate, with only Iraq and Somalia being more deadly. Seven journalists were killed there in 2007.

Pedestrians who use their cellphones to film bomb attacks or even everyday events get questioned by police, and it’s not only authorities that pose a threat to reporters or anyone with a camera. There’s a trend of citizens not turning to the tools of citizen media to improve their situation, but instead turning against anyone trying to do this, or anyone remotely suspected of it.

Anyone with a still or video camera in public is immediately suspected as a “trouble-maker.” This endangers our right to click and shoot for personal or professional purposes.

Despite this, however, there is a movement of citizen journalism, though it’s a lonely and vulnerable job, especially with a decrease in democracy in recent years. New media activist Sanjana Hattotuwa is interviewed, and says:

- In Sri Lanka, the significant deterioration of democracy in 2006-2007 has resulted in a country where anxiety and fear overwhelm a sense of civic duty to bear witness to so much of what is wrong. No amount of mobile phones and PCs is going to magically erase this deep rooted fear of harm for speaking one’s mind out.

The article writer, Nalaka Gunawardene, brings up an example which clearly shows the poor state of democracy and the hardship for bloggers in Sri Lanka.

A fellow blogger recently wrote a moving piece about a 65-year-old woman who sells fruits and vegetables at her local market in Colombo. The story behind the story was how the blogger had been surrounded and questioned by four men and the police, who demanded to know whether she had “permission from the municipality to photograph.”

Luckily, the vegetable sellers came to her rescue. “They… said they asked me to come with the camera to take some photographs of them,” she wrote.

But she posed the question: “Do we have to have a camera license like a gun license of yesteryear?”

(via Social Media)

Happy new year, all!

I’ll start this year off with a 2 month vacation from this blog. I’ll be travelling during January and Febuary, and post updates in The Many Faces of L., but won’t do much here at Citizen Media Watch. See you in March, when I start my new job as managing editor at Broaden Community.

I once more welcome Gitta Wilén as a guest contributor here at Citizen Media Watch. This time she has interviewed a hyperlocal blogger, Alf Fransson.

Alf Fransson, 69, is blogging about a small area 1.3 Swedish miles from Askersund in Närke, Sweden. By putting up his own placards at the local petrol station/grocery store, he has managed to engage the people who are living in the area to read and to give response to his blog material.

The Åsbro blog has been up and running since the beginning of this November 2007. Fransson says that he got inspired to start blogging by his stepdaughter. The address for the blog is estabo.blogspot.com. Estabo is the name of the place in Åsbro where Fransson lives.
- I did not want to use the blog address “asbro”, because it is Swedish for something else but Åsbro, he laughs.

There are 1.600 people living in Åsbro and Fransson’s blog is about things which concern the inhabitants: “Do we need efficient street-lighting?”, “Why is there cable worth over a million lying down by the lake ‘Åsasjön’?” and “What is going on at the Åsbro kursgård?”

Fransson has been visiting and writing about the companies in the area. One of the companies is Alfapac, which is Åsbro’s largest industry and employs about 80 people.
- It gives me the chance to satisfy my own curiosity as well as getting material for my blog, he says.

There are some musicians and authors living in Åsbro and Fransson has plans for future blogging:
- I am thinking about interviewing people. I would like to write about personalities in the field of culture, he says.

Fransson also wants to blog about interesting places to visit in the area. Not so well known excursion spots.
- Most of the people do not see the beauty of their own neighbourhood, Fransson says and adds:
- There is an old sacrificial well situated in the forest that I would like to show to you and my readers.

Per Mosseby of Pixbox says at Hubbub 07 he thinks the developing countries is where the mobile revolution will truly happen.
When mobile applications have been developed, the laptop is better than the cellphone in all aspects of the services that were going mobile. That is however changing, Per Mosseby says.
- Things are really starting to happen. The iPhone is a small revolution in this field. This means that everyone has to think about mobility.
- In my eyes it all comes back to what I think is going to be the big revolution in the mobile space.
When the bottom of the pyramid population can afford cellphones - all these 4 billion people who don’t have a digital identity - there’s going to be a lot of turnover.
- They do not have an alternative device to go back to.

Niklas Tyllström is at Hubbub 07 to talk about Green hat people, a pretty cool real life game where you get instructions in your cellphone and then go places in your city to find clues and answer questions.
- We were lacking unpredictability in our lives. We came up with a concept where the real world is the playground.
They found that people were not willing to pay for the service. Instead they are running an advertisement-based service.
They had to move from everyone as a target to corporate events.
- Just to stay alive, Niklas Tyllström says with a laugh. He still hopes that everyone will want to build their own games and play, though.
Once more the N95 is used as an example. They were asked to be part of the launch in Sweden. More powerful phones of course create greater gaming possibilities.
- In our perspective, to make a multi-faceted game, it gets really cool. The gaming experience gets really intense. To make that happen on the mass market, that is a challenge. Marketing, partnering with organizations and going to schools are ways that Green hat people are working to broaden their user base.
Timing is crucial for your concept to take off.
- As being Swedish, and in that sense trying to promote a service that is derived from converging technologies, the drivers should really be highlighted. The pricing is important, and the ease of use.
If you have to download something to use a service, there’s a good chance you don’t. Tyllström sees an age difference in that behaviour. Young people usually don’t see downloads as a problem.

David Haddad of Spontu works with social networking on the mobile. Since Hubbub is all about convergence, he focuses on the convergence of positioning, connectivity and powerful mobiles.
He shares some lessons learnt:

• Be intellectually honest about your motivation. Solve a real human social inefficiency.
• Choose a technology that works, with an eye on the future.
• Don’t compete, but rather build on other players. There’s a good basis available to build upon.
• Build something that’s good enough today. It needs to solve a real problem.
• Social networking needs to be all-inclusive, and work for everyone. Follow the least common denominator approach when finding your target audience.

- Execute a killer product strategy, don’t plan a killer app, David Haddad says.

He then answers three questions.
How will the mobile look like in the future, i e in four years?
- The Nokia N95 is targeted for the early adopters. Down in four years time, the phone that’s going to be in everyone’s hands is going to be similar to what you have now. The N95 is a good indicator.

How will social networking look in the future?
- If everyone in this room has an N95, how will that affect my experience with for instance Facebook? There are three things that differ from our current experience.
- The social networking will become concurrent, cirkumstantial and fundamentally socially impactful.

David Haddad thinks the adding of friends on social network sites will be automatic, by for instance bluetooth. News feeds will be more realtime.
Like Jaiku! : )

What can we do today to change the social networking environment?

• Pick your development environment.
• Choose your method of connectivity.
• How do you want to position users? There are many different technologies.
• How will you make money? Find a business model.
• Who are you going to partner with?

He believes in combined solutions for web and mobile units.

In the q&a a few interesting issues, including privacy and more on killer product strategies came up, but unfortunately there were network problems… and I didn’t catch much. I’m sure others have more, though.

My photos from Hubbub end up here. And here’s the Hubbub Flickr photo pool where everyone’s sending photos.

Update 2007-11-24: Four more speakers added!

Next Saturday afternoon the nice guys and gals at Nustart will host another conference at Nymble at KTH in Stockholm. The last one, Hej!2007, was a great success, and I am looking forward to Saturday when Hubbub07 takes place.
The focus this time is on fixed to mobile applications in web, voice and IPTV. The six ten speakers represent four interesting companies in this field:

• Sorosh Tavakoli, Founder of VideoPlaza, will talk about online video advertising
• Trond Bugge, serial entrepreneur and founder/CEO of Super Local Media, will evaluate the importance of mobile location-based access to information at a global level
• Henrik Thomé, entrepreneur and CEO of Sonetel, will talk about “Open source, globalization and Internet technology gives super-powers to the customer-focused IT-entrepreneur. Why have staff? Why have infrastructure?”
• David Haddad, co-founder of Spontu, will talk about convergence of positioning technologies – mobile internet, smartphones and social networking.
• Peter Arvai, VP of Product Development at Mobispine, will talk about mobile internet challenges for both operators and content providers
• Patrick Broman, software architect at Mobile Sorcery, will talk about catalyzing the mobile revolution
• Niklas Tyllström, CEO and Co-founder of Green hat People, will speak about the timing of convergence.
• Hjalmar Winbladh, CEO and Founder of Rebtel, who is challenging the telecom giants.
• Per Mosseby, CEO of Pixbox, will speak about “why the preferred mobile Internet device among the wealthy will continue to be the laptop computer, and why the smaller-than-subnotebook-revolution is happening - in developing countries”.
• Per Leine, CEO of Extransit

One of the things I really liked about Hej!2007 was that live blogging and use of backchannels were encouraged and made use of during the day. This is also the case at Hubbub07. Here you can follow the event:

Jaiku Onelinr Flickr

They are all visible on the live Hubbub site. There you can also find live blogs. I will be blogging live here at Citizen Media Watch, so check back during the event!

Encouraging live coverage and backchannel feedback might seem obvious, but far too often it’s an aspect that organizers put way too little effort in facilitating for the audience. Even at the recent SIME event, the backchannels were as far as I understand not official SIME backchannels and the feedback was not used on stage. Unfortunately I could not attend SIME this year, but Joakim Jardenberg’s thread on Jaiku addresses this and other issues.

Social media is supposed to make it easier for everyone to contribute and to express oneself. But a lot of people are still shut out.
- Blog services are not accessible for everyone, says Stefan Johansson of Funka Nu. He talks about accessibility at the Morgondagens webbplatser conference in Kista outside Stockholm.
He gives the example of Blindbloggen, a blog started by blind people. In the beginning they were enthusiastic, but the project died out because it was too complicated to use the blogging tool.

Accessibility issues are not only about people with physical disabilities. A lot of people simply don’t understand what they’re reading. It is a common problem that hasn’t yet been given much focus.
- One fourth of all adults cannot answer control questions correctly about an article they have read in an ordinary morning newspaper.
He thinks that accessibility is often forgotten when a new site or new functionality is developed.
- Few site developers have problems with using a mouse, for instance, Johansson says.
- They don’t think about it being a problem for some people. If you’re aware of the problem you can find a solution. Flash developers are also seldom aware of accessibility problems.

As soon as you build in requirements in your web site, you shut out people.
So how well does your site work with keyboard only?

- The best people to test-run your site is one blind person and one with ADHD. People with ADHD have low patience, and need things to work right away. They will tell you what you need to change.

A Swedish version of the Norwegian community site Nettby is to be launched shortly. Nettby is a success story with over 500 000 members. Now there’s a call for Swedish name suggestions at the site. Ironically, mostly Norwegians will name the Swedish site.

Here’s what the post on Nettby says (my translation):

If you have a suggestion for a Swedish name on a service like Nettby, send it to us! We will pick the top 10 suggestions and reward them with a 6 month Nettby Max subscription and Nettby t-shirts.
The person making the suggestion we decide to use will receive an Ipod Touch!