So I thought I’d go and check out my6sense again, figuring that it must be out of private beta by now. But I was stopped in my tracks on the homepage by the most visible example of the “new media around” I’ve seen to date:

In case you haven’t come across it, the “new media around” is a linguistic phenomenon that’s making waves in the media, technology and marketing industries with companies as l.a seo experts leading the industry with the services they offer. It involves the word “around” being used as a substitute for a great many words and phrases including “about”, “related to”, “surrounding” and so on.

It’s been ‘around’ for a while now but it first made an impression on me a year ago. Since then I haven’t noticed it migrating beyond spoken communication – the meeting room and conference call – into the written word until quite recently, when I saw it appear in some UX documentation. But this is the first time I’ve seen it actually appear in an interface, and I’m not sure how I feel around/about it.

Maybe it won’t be long until we hear John Humphrys on the Today programme saying, “later this morning I’ll be talking to the Prime Minister around the latest wave of cuts” – that’s when we’ll truly know it’s arrived.

This is part two of a three-part post. Click here for part one

When programmes like Question Time, X Factor or The Apprentice are broadcast, an increasing proportion of the audience are watching with other devices close to hand. Some might have a laptop in front of them, others a mobile phone. As the programme begins, these secondary devices come into play, helping viewers share quips and observations with their friends and with the wider world.

From a design perspective, it’s not pretty. People are focusing on more than one screen at a time, their attention divided between the programme and the stream of comments. A large number of apps, devices, tools and services are being used. The ergonomics are awkward, with laptops perched on knees and thumbs typing on Blackberry keyboards. It’s a mess, a dirty hack, a bottom-up kludge where everyone’s improvising with products designed with other things in mind.

Media owners and interactive designers can react to this with both excitement and frustration: it’s exciting that a mass audience is doing something new with technology, something that has its own momentum; but it’s frustrating that they’re doing it in such an inelegant way. A lot of designers and broadcasters would prefer that the social TV experience was happening within a context they had defined, enabled by tools handed down to audiences for precisely that purpose.

Audiences, however, might be quite happy doing what they’re doing with the tools they already have. Can media owners offer them something compelling enough to change this? As Lindsey put it in a comment on part 1 of this post:

…there are serious questions about usability and the role of the TV as an ‘appliance’… simply layering the social web experience on top of a broadcast viewing experience won’t work. …the web people will not be able to assume success on the basis of the same usability principles they’ve always used, when they’re working at 10 feet.

So a more ambitious approach is needed for any “product” that wants to be a central part of the social TV experience – merely putting a browser on a TV isn’t going to cut it.

There are lots of reasons for this, not least of which is that the television has never been good at receiving user input. The three-digit page numbers on Ceefax were a pain to type, and searching on the Virgin Media iPlayer is a gruelling chore that demonstrates how little text entry has improved since then. When you’re watching a TV programme while following numerous online conversations about it, you need to comment quickly and the act of typing can’t be too distracting. Until the television gets better at this, secondary devices like phones and laptops are here to stay.

Browsers on television screens aren’t the only angle being explored. During the UK’s 2010 general election campaign, broadcasters looked at ways of using online conversations about the leaders’ debates to enhance their coverage. Jude summed this up pretty well in another comment on part one:

The TV networks… each created their own online/social viewing pages with ‘worms’ to show focus group reactions, drawing together social media references, setting up their own chat pages, etc… it was as if they’d tried to do everything at once because they didn’t know what would strike a chord.

Which is understandable, given that broadcasters are still trying to grasp this phenomenon. Adopting a spirit of experimentation by doing as many things as possible is admirable, but can result in an unfocussed experience where the lack of confidence translates to a sense of desperation.

Jude also mentions a tactic the TV networks used, where online audiences were surveyed to capture instant public response to the debates. This idea – incorporate elements of the online discussion into the programme itself – works well in principle, but can a TV programme really convey the volume and diversity of a full-fledged online discussion in a spot lasting thirty seconds? Or are the two mediums in conflict here, with the very nature of television encouraging a kind of editorialised “summing up” that runs counter to the nature of the online discussion As Jude says, this feature came across as fairly “traditional media” when applied to the electoral debates, so maybe the gap between online discussion and linear TV is still too big (although it’s decreasing all the time, as Martin Belam points out in this informative article).

In part three of this post I’ll talk about some other ways in which people are trying to support new ways of watching and talking about TV, including what I see as potentially the most interesting – fusing the broadcast conversations and the on-demand viewing into one single experience.

Edit, Jan 2012: OK, so I never got round to the third part of this post! Too much time was spent watching X-Factor and not enough writing blog posts. I’ll revisit this topic at some point though, I promise

When the concept of on-demand television was still new and exciting, it was tempting to think it might lead to the demise of the mass synchronous experience that was broadcast TV. After all, what value could broadcast TV deliver that on-demand services like the iPlayer couldn’t? And was that value really worth the inconvenience and inflexibility it imposed on the viewer, who had to be in a set place at a set time to view the programme? Apart from sport and news, would anyone really care about the transmission times of programmes once on-demand TV had taken off?

By now we know that, yes, people do still care about the transmission times of TV programmes, and the synchronous viewing experience of broadcast TV can have a value that justifies the burdens it places on the viewer. But this isn’t because on-demand hasn’t taken off. On-demand services have transformed the way we view television, but the broadcast TV experience has a new lease of life too.

The internet, unsurprisingly, is the driving force behind both on-demand’s success and the renaissance in broadcast viewing. But two intertwined yet distinct “strands” of the internet are at work here.

With on-demand, it’s the internet’s infrastructure – content delivery networks, consumer ISPs, the computers and set-top boxes found in the homes of viewers. The nuts and bolts of the internet’s growth have enabled on-demand services and the design of products like the iPlayer.

But with broadcast TV, it’s not so much the technological or infrastructural “strand” of the internet as its social layer – social use of the internet among the wider public has grown hugely in the last five years. At the same time social interactions have accelerated, becoming more synchronous and less like the newsgroup / messageboard model of old. We post less words, more frequently, and the result is a far more conversational mode of online interaction.

This has introduced a new dimension to the experience of watching broadcast TV. Viewers might not be physically connected to one another, as they were in the heyday of TV with the whole family gathered in the living room. But they’re connected to hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of others, watching the same show as they are. Some of these people are friends and others are strangers, but all are in reach – all are potential contributors to a conversation about the programme. Even the viewer sat alone in their living room can feel connected and involved as they watch, in a way that they couldn’t before.

So the internet has brought about an alternative to broadcast TV while giving it a new lease of life at the same time. And it’s not just geeks that are engaged in this new way of TV viewing – if you need proof of this, a cursory glance at the #xfactor hashtag on Twitter should do it. The public has raced ahead of the technology here, using whatever gadgets come to hand to keep up with the conversations. No tool or “product” designed for social TV viewing is particularly prominent, it’s something that the public just does, in its own way.

Is this going to change? Will technology catch up with the public – will new services specifically designed for social TV viewing come along, will they work, and will they bridge the gap between the on-demand and broadcast experiences? I’ll explore these questions in more detail in part 2 of this post.

Yesterday I was wondering if it was really a good thing that we seem to be engaging less with technology while at the same time becoming ever more dependent on it.

That post was inspired by Stuxnet, the ultra-advanced software weapon seemingly aimed at Iran’s nuclear facilities. But a more everyday example of the risks technology can pose to overly oblivious users has appeared on the BBC’s website, with Rory Cellan-Jones discovering how easy it is to compromise an iPhone 4 and steal personal information.

[Security experts] used a netbook computer to set up a wireless access point. They called it “BTOpenzone”, a network my phone and many others look out for and join. I watched as they showed me a range of devices in their office in London’s Soho looking at the network – including my phone.

This wasn’t the only exploit used – the demonstration also included the iPhone 4 PIN hack, SMS number spoofing, and the interception of cookies sent via Facebook. As you’d expect, Cellan-Jones is at pains to mollify Apple and Facebook, the two companies whose products are shown to be compromised in the article. But none of this stuff is hyper-technical – for a hacker to pull this stuff off is relatively trivial.

The demonstration and the article as a whole is a great example of how blind, unquestioning trust in the technology we use can expose us to massive risks, not just from uber-hackers but from anyone with malicious intent and basic networking knowledge. It reinforces the point that we could do well to understand the technology that surrounds us a bit more than we currently do.

Stuxnet is a piece of extremely advanced attack software, currently active in several Iranian nuclear facilities while being studied intently by malware experts around the world. No-one knows who made it. It’s completely unprecedented – a militarised program, engineered to near perfection, something that’s more accurately described not as a computer virus, but as a weapon.

Langner, a security consultancy that’s been analysing the code, recently described Stuxnet as being “like the arrival of an F-35 fighter jet on a World War I battlefield.” Kaspersky Labs called it “a working and fearsome prototype of a cyber-weapon that will lead to the creation of a new arms race.” These claims sound hyperbolic, but the more I learn about Stuxnet, the more inclined I am to agree.

I’m interested in Stuxnet not so much because I have plans to disrupt centrifuge controllers in distant nuclear power plants (well, not in the near future anyway), but because it’s an example of how invisible technologies can have such a concrete effect on the world.

We’re living in a period where our use of technology and our dependence on it is growing. But at the same time our technology is disappearing from view. It gets smaller, it gets lighter, it gets better at understanding us without the aid of clunky input devices, it gradually disappears – as Adam Greenfield describes the phenomenon in his book Everyware, it “dissolves in behaviour”. We use technology, but we’re becoming less engaged with it.

We’re becoming a bit like the Eloi in The Time Machine, completely dependent on things we don’t understand. You can see the results of this pattern wherever you look. Whether it’s Microsoft’s adverts for Windows Phone 7 whose core message could be translated as “phones suck”, or workplace cultures where it’s embarrassing to be seen as technologically adept, there’s a strong theme of technology as an enabler, but still something that should be on the fringes of our lives.

I’m not setting out to criticise this trend or pattern, however, or argue that everyone should become a hardcore techie. If we were burdened with a detailed knowledge of every technological process we initiate in the course of a normal day, we’d probably all suffer from constant migraines. It’s good that, say, checking Twitter on my mobile phone feels like a casual and trivial  thing to do, and that we’re not forced to confront and experience the mind-boggling combination of technologies that are actually invoked when we do it. Technology couldn’t be as ubiquitous as it is if it hadn’t developed this Houdini-like talent for making itself invisible.

But then, when I read about Stuxnet, I’m reminded that these deeper layers of technology are still there, still real, and still have a concrete and tangible effect on our lives. We might push technology aside and keep it out of view, but there are others – like the organisation behind the Stuxnet worm – who obviously aren’t, and their ability to change the world should not be underestimated.

I’ve been thinking a lot about online maps recently. This is probably because I spent most of October in France, depending mainly on Google Maps for finding my way around. They’ve certainly come a long way in the last ten years. Remember when Streetmap seemed fresh and exciting? It seems like such a dinosaur now, compared to the more advanced map services that have come along since then.

There’s something appealingly recursive about online maps too. Before, there were no computers and we all lived in the real world, in physical space. Then the internet came along, and we had to learn how to navigate this new virtual world, an “information space”, represented by windows and menus and buttons and so on.

After a while, the information space itself became rich enough to contain useful maps. In other words, we encountered the physical space represented within the virtual space, which we in turn encountered in the physical space. Maybe this graphic will help:

Click to see full-size graphic

OK, maybe not. But if you ever find yourself walking down a street while ignoring your surroundings and looking only at the blinking blue dot on your phone’s mapping application, you might know what I mean. And yes, I’ve done that.

If you’re an online publisher that’s missing out on page views because people are consuming content with RSS readers, here’s a strategy that might help: break things.

By breaking your RSS feed and screwing up its formatting, people like me will be forced to click on your links and leave our reader applications, giving you the ad revenue you crave. But you need to obey the following rules:

• Only break things at the formatting & layout kind of level, nothing more fundamental. The feed still needs to actually work
• Make sure all the content can be seen in the feed, even though the formatting is broken. This will give us the incentive we need to click on the link. (and no, the first paragraph alone won’t be enough to achieve this. The whole article should be visible, but broken)
• Let some HTML code or something leak into the feed output so that we know it’s really broken and you’re not just making it deliberately hard to read.

I’m writing this post because Fast Company seems to have followed these points and succeeded, at least where I’m concerned. Their RSS feed has broken and it’s led to me actually visiting their site (and generating ad revenue) for a change.

Fast Company's broken RSS feed

It works because the reading experience is so poor that you’d never go through the entire article, but your eye can flick up and down the block of broken text, getting a good sense of the content. Interest is pigued but satisfaction is withheld. Is this just ineptitude on Fast Company’s part, or is there a kind of evil genius at work over there?