Happy Birthday YouTube

Happy Birthday YouTube, which turned five earlier this week. The site that started in February 2005 now apparently serves over 5 billion video streams each month.

I’ve been spending more time on YouTube recently, mainly thanks to Arthur’s compulsive viewing of classic theme tunes (seriously, like three hundred of those views are us). But the coverage of YouTube’s birthday got me thinking about the culture of YouTube and why it seems we haven’t yet found the right fit for it in government.

Frankly, there’s not much I can say, as everything you could want to know about the ethnography of YouTube is in Michael Wesch’s fantastic lecture, which itself has passed 1.3m views:

There are many great points Wesch makes about the psychology of the YouTuber, the intimacy of the relationship between user and webcam, and the backlash from the community against fraudsters. Strikingly, the most popular YouTube film of all time wasn’t about a celebrity, a famous telly clip or even a wardrobe malfunction, but this:

160m views. Boy bites finger. 160m times.

The way government has been using YouTube seems a long way from these finger-biting, funny, human heights. There’s been clever stuff, controversial stuff and some classic, pioneering stuff:

But on the whole, the basic man-in-suit format dominates, and the viewing numbers are generally in the hundreds even for quite major ministers and events. YouTube and film-making generally is taken relatively seriously by the participants and the subjects within government, but it doesn’t seem to be breaking through in quantitative terms at least. What can we learn from some of the big YouTube success stories?

1. The power of the how to
Lauren Luke built a profile and a business from sharing make-up tips via her webcam. She’s a natural presenter, sounds warm and engaging, and is seriously good at make-up. She offers viewers both a friendly face, an ongoing series and conversation, and practical, useful help in every film:

2. Video is a participative medium

There’s another lesson perhaps in the work done by the Home Office to tackle knife crime, which Ross first pointed me to:

Clever, and engaging. A film that reflects what I used to hear described as the ‘lean-forward’ nature of digital media, contrasting with the ‘lean-back’ legacy of traditional broadcast TV.

3. The darker side of human nature
Some of videos that have gone truly viral aren’t exactly… let’s say friendly to the subject. Viz the Numa Numa guy:

Now, it’s not exactly something I’d want to get my ministers doing, but there’s a lesson here. There’s a large part of YouTube which is about silliness and mockery, and maybe that’s where the really big numbers are. If you spend any time at all skimming YouTube comments under pretty much any film, you’ll likely come to Lev Grossman’s conclusion:

Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred

The intimacy between user and webcam, and between viewer and YouTube, and between teenager and comment box, can make YouTube a rather shady place at times, much like the world it reflects.

So let’s be more practically useful (like the DSA’s excellent channel). Let’s be authentic, unscripted and a bit wobbly. And lets use online video in the ways online video works best in 2010. But if it doesn’t go massively viral, that’s probably for the best.

Why I’m going dark for purdah

When the General Election is called, and government enters the pre-election phase known as purdah, I’m going to suspend my personal blogging and tweeting at least until the results are announced.

Why? In a word, it’s too risky.

This will be the first election with really active social media. Last time around, Whitehall Webby (2007) was still a glint in the virtual eye, along with Facebook (2006) and Twitter (2007). Even Guido had been going less than a year (Sept 2004) only just outdone by Tom Watson – one of Parliament’s earliest blogging MPs (2003).

Now, things are different. The political blogosphere is enormous, connected and credible. Mainstream media figures blog and tweet alongside their primary channels, and use those new sources for stories and feedback. And like millions of others, including hundreds if not thousands of British civil servants and a number of old university friends now running for Parliament, I’m blogging and blathering in a variety of other social media.

Mainstream journalists covering my Department’s issues, politicians of all parties and party workers are amongst the 1,200 people who follow me on Twitter (along with a sprinkling of some exotic young ladies from Las Vegas who seem really keen to meet me). And I simply don’t know who’s reading this, which is generally where much of the fun comes in.

But elections (and, I’ve learned, reshuffles) are different: the rules on civil service behaviour are stricter, the scrutiny is much more intense, and the knives are sharper. Frankly, in a climate of pressure on civil service headcount, it would be unwise to stray too far from the pinstriped fold during this particular period at least.

It’s likely the Cabinet Office will be issuing updated guidance this year to help people in my position to stay on the right side of the rules, so watch that space. But personally and pragmatically, I’m not sure any rules will be enough to keep individuals truly safe given the nature and norms of media coverage of bloggers and tweeters currently. Pretty much any personal comment on a public service, a media figure or government initiative or public reply to a politician or even a colleague is going to be susceptible to selective reporting out of context or misattribution as an official or professional view. Sad but, I think, true. Safer simply to go mute.

For me, it should be an enjoyable break. I suspect there’ll be plenty of work to do on the other side

Be Brave

Photo credit: Sharon O’Dea

Well, that’s another UK Gov Web Barcamp wrapped up, and #ukgc10 was a corker, not least thanks to the sterling efforts of Dave Briggs to organise the thing, and the generosity of Google in hosting us.

It still impresses me that 120-odd people from all over the country would want to give up their Saturday to talk about government, technology, data and engagement. But it seems we still do.

A little local difficulty meant I missed the morning sessions, unfortunately, but still had a great time in my former colleague Kim’s session on social media for internal communications, Stefan Czerniawski’s session on improving transactional services online,  and Simon Dickson’s obligatory salon on WordPress (lots of practical questions and note-taking; we’ve clearly moved on from when WordPress was a just a wow new technology).

I jointly did a session with Anthony Zacharzewski and Paul Clarke on persuading politicians and bureaucrats of the value of digital engagement in a climate of cuts. I loved Anthony’s take on the language issues at stake, and his segmentation of the evidence which persuades political and administrative masters, which was bang on the money. My own slides are here:

In a nutshell, I suggested three approaches to making the case:

• Making digital engagement just part of the process of policymaking, not a special set of ‘innovative’ tools to be piloted
• Explaining the changing digital world and the digital engagement activity we do in terms of the real-world impact it has on our own people, our stakeholders, our customers and our costs (a tough one for policy-led environments)
• Pointing to the good company we’re in, not just the wide range of public sector examples of the use of these tools, but also the private sector application of them for customer service and business development

My bottom line was: this is a time to be brave, and argue the case for digital engagement in government as a driver of more efficient and effective policymaking and ministerial engagement – as well as a more cost effective route to service delivery.

The year of the 4th Sector Pathfinders

Photo credit: childofwar

This time last year, I predicted 2009 would be the year of Less – fewer technology experiments, tighter resources, and involving a wider network of people in our projects. It didn’t quite turn out that way… but maybe I was just ahead of my time: 2010 is shaping up to be altogether more bracing.

So throwing caution to the wind, here are my top three predictions/resolutions/trends for the coming year:

Embracing Transparency

Whether we see political change or continuity in 2010, we’ll see a drive towards more openness about how government works. Data on who’s meeting who, who’s earning what, what government bases its decisions on, and what’s being spent on what (including websites) are likely to appear, intentionally opening up a can of whoop-ass on us bureaucrats, presumably along the lines of what US counterparts have already started to feel.

What the Director of Digital Engagement and his small team accomplished in 2009 in terms of making public data public is impressive stuff – there’s ambition and scale in that project, as well as strong, visible political support for what might otherwise have been overlooked as a technical matter, backed up by some truly impressive, craftsmanlike technical work I can appreciate but struggle to properly understand. That’s one to watch in 2010.

Worrying less about Getting Things Done

For a couple of years now, I’ve been dangling on and off the GTD wagon of next actions, contexts and weekly reviews that never take place. In 2010, it’s time to respectfully put David Allen back in his box (taking from him the good bits of his GTD approach) but finding other ways to achieve a sense of progress and a mind like water) (h/t @marxculture). Personally, I’ll be trying to work out what really needs doing, rather than just trying to get things done. But I think more generally, 2010 will be a time to reflect on why we do what we do, what value it has and what we’re learning from it.

Reaching out to the 4th Sector Pathfinders

In 2010, we’ll realise that in St Armando’s comedy lies a noble truth, particularly for those who believe that crowds, rather than institutions, hold the key to delivering some of the public goods we want. We’re not baking a cake here, but it’s likely that if government has less to spend and is driven to think a bit more creatively, some of the most interesting results in public policymking and service delivery are going to come from self-organising groups and networks, rather than from quangos, companies or charities. It’s a challenge: government is often stronger at dictating, directing and delivering than it is at catalysing, curating and convening.

While you’re here, let me point you to three bits of festive brainfood elsewhere:

• Neil Williams’ comment on the fragility and tensions in blogging from the inside
• Dave Briggs on the sometimes overlooked internal dimension to 2.0 (which I’d love to be a trend for 2010, but still doubt)
• Stefan Sagmeister at TED on ‘The Power of Time Off’

Happy New Year!

Minding the shop

In my line of work, keeping track of the threads is half the battle. At work, we have (for now) three corporate sites, a sandbox, a development environment, and more. We have social media channels – some corporately-managed, many managed by external agencies in support of our campaigns – and an active stakeholder and media community who like to talk to us and about us, along with ten busy ministers.

We’re also expected to respond quickly to news stories which break in the media on the issues we cover, as well as be responsive to our colleagues in the Press Office, including helping them to monitor and evaluate the reach of their material online.

So ever since some nice chaps from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office blew me away with an internal dashboard they had developed for this purpose, I’ve been keen to set up something similar. Something which I can have open all day and which lets me see quickly if our sites are up, what’s hot on them right now, who’s sending us traffic, and what we’re putting out there in terms of news releases, tweets and multimedia.

I’ve stolen their idea pretty much wholesale, tweaked it slightly towards social media, and come up with this (click to open a larger version):

1. Site availability: we have Pingdom monitoring set up watching our various domains to measure their uptime, and this box uses its API to tell us what’s up and what’s down. Green is good.

2. Popular content: Google Analytics has a little-known API and the excellent GAPI PHP library to help you access it. In more or less real time, this box lists the top 30 pages on the site today. There’s a lot more to the API, which I might write about another time.

3. Top referers: if there’s a spike in traffic, chances are somebody important has linked to us – this shows a list of the top 20 referers today, again powered by Google Analytics.

4. Search engine keywords: More Google Analytics goodness, this shows the top 20 keywords people entered into Google recently which sent them to our site.

5. Custom Site Search keywords: Slightly squiffy this, as the Great Google haven’t quite sorted out their own technology, but in principle this shows the popular search terms people have used within our own site search (which is powered by a Google Custom Search, covering all our key domains).

6. News Releases we’ve issued: using the RSS feed of our news releases which we retrieve via COI’s News Distribution Service, this lets me keep track of what press releases have gone out recently, to help cross check against popular pages on the site and to help us know when to press the button on digital activity in support of them.

7. Social media output: powered by the RSS feed of our FriendFeed account plus some PHP jiggery-pokery, this is maybe the box I find most useful. At a glance I can see new YouTube videos we’ve posted (in red), Flickr sets (navy), and corporate tweets (gold). The aqua boxes show me what agencies are putting out there as part of our marketing campaigns.

8. Replies and mentions: it’s useful to see what people find re-tweetable and how they respond to tweets from @bisgovuk – this box runs off the RSS feed from a Twitter search.

9. News coverage: Not enough for full social media monitoring of course, but for those reports which do mention the Department by name, this RSS feed from Google News Search provides a helpful list, right next to the news releases which they often refer to.

10. Blog coverage: Often a surprisingly different focus from the mainstream media mentions, this box runs off an RSS feed of Google Blog Search results.

11. Our issues in the news: Believe it or not there’s a world beyond our doors, and this aggregated feed (a bundle of RSS feeds from sections of BBC News online relevant to our policy areas, gathered together and shared out again via Google Reader) helps me keep track of the big stories.

So there you are. I’ve been refining and tweaking it while I road test it over the last few weeks. It’s surprisingly simple (around 500 lines of PHP all told) but helps me get on with more interesting things while keeping half an eye on the shop I’m supposed to be minding. And there’s a hint of geek cool in there too. Whatever gets you through the day, eh?

n.b. This code was developed in my own time, using my own resources and information, and is not Crown Copyright. I’m happy to offer anyone who wants one (including my employer) a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use it, bearing in mind it’s early code and I can’t provide much in the way of support – for now, just leave a comment or drop me a line if you’d like a copy.