So, with a few client calls to make and some artwork sign-offs still outstanding, I ambled into the seat at the back of the balcony of York’s beautiful Theatre Royal one last time and, almost completely out of charge in every conceivable way, settled in for the last talk.

The talk was from Jonathan Harris of Number27.org. Jonathan describes himself as “an artist working with complex datasets”, as you probably will have gathered from the tone of the piece so far that’s a bit like Caravaggio describing himself as “a bloke who paints Jesus and that”. Looking back on a lot of my past posts this year it seems I’ve been quite consumed by the idea of presenting information, and lots of it, in particularly beautiful ways and Jonathan certainly ticks that box in a big, fat way. Rather than hyperbolise much more about the man, he possesses the sort of profound, beat-poet Americana of Keroac, Dylan or early Woolf but manages to uniquely fuse it all with the sort of Bay Area timbre and vulnerability of a very modern geek. He is, in short, a pretty engaging guy. Personality cults aside though it was Jonathan’s work that I found the most interesting thing about him. You can see all of his projects on his website here but I’m going to just pick out a few highlights below.

We Feel Fine was the first thing of Jonathan’s that I happened across. It trawls the Social Web for mentions of the words “feel” or “feeling” to analyse and present fantastic infographics of the content. The really fantastic thing about We Feel Fine is that it presents its information back in such lovely ways, the realisations and the interfaces – of which there are many – are actually tagged back to human emotions. The database entries are also visually represented in a way which mimics the emotion they represent, so the “fear” entries act scared andthe happy ones group together. It even goes so far as to reference the weather in the person’s area at the time, mind blowing.

The Whale Hunt is a fascinating, if a little gruesome, project which uses tagged and Categorised photos to chart Jonathan’s nine day expedition with Inuit Whale Hunters using tagged variables like “blood” and “heart rate” to track the excitement – and also boredom – of the experience. It splits down in a number of ways like by cast member and chapter and you can also see a mosaic of all the images which really hits home the colourlessness of the ice and the gore of the blood when they actually catch the whale.

Lovelines works in similar territory to the We Feel Fine project, concentrating this time on the rawest of human conditions of Love and Hate. It uses the same data collector to harvest mentions of the words “Love” and “Hate” from blogs every few minutes, it then also collects the name, age, geolocation and any other data it can about the blogger and factors that into the presentation too. It’s formed through the three different themes of Words, Pictures and Superlatives and gives you an odd experience of being a detached voyeur.

Update: It would seem that the massive amounts of traffic my blog has sent to We Feel Fine has melted the servers. *cough* I’m sure it’ll be back up soon.

In the new political landscape of budget cuts and tight financial margins organisations are coming under increasing pressure to communicate more effectively with the people who use their services. The web contains some fantastic tools to help you both stay close to the people who use your services and publicise what you do to new people. Social Media can also be a fantastic tool for campaigners looking to get publicity for their cause without having the budget to launch a traditional media campaign.

The people involved in the Bradford event are all seasoned digital communications professionals who have given their time for free and will be more than happy to pass on their knowledge of how to get started in using the Social Web. Come along to The Gumption Centre on the 20th July, 5:30pm – 8pm. Click here to book your place.

Since last year’s change to the privacy terms and conditions, a move which in itself attracted enough bad press to sink a government with a decent sized majority, Facebook has endured what some might say was a difficult adolescence. Their difficult teenage years started to intensify even more recently with movements springing up to boycott Facebook by deleting accounts from the service. Anybody who has tried to do this recently will know just how complex and painful a task doing this actually is. There are several layers to get through before you even get the chance to deactivate your account and it takes an even greater effort to actually get them to remove you from the system itself.

The central hub of the objection that the Boycott Facebook campaigners seem to have to the site is that the information they hold about you is being misused to the point of abuse by the service. Whilst I really can sympathise with them on this it does have to be stated that these people are displaying a quite stunning level of naivety in their outrage over the issue.

I’ve been in and around the web for a long time and, whilst I’m loathe to get into the clichéd terms of “The Free Web”, “Web 1.0”, “Web 2.0” etc., it’s pretty clear that the days of the web as a force for good and a haven of free speech/content was over long before we all rushed like crazed sheep to start poking each other and turning our ‘friends’ into zombies and pirates. Facebook, like most of the web’s most successful social brands, started out without any kind of business model or viral strategy. Like any business that starts without a goal, as soon as the product started gaining any traction so did the need to “monetize” (I know, I know. Sorry) it. You can’t expect them to provide the service for free can you?

Facebook has one primary asset that it can use as a saleable product. That asset is you, the demographic data assigned to each user account. Advertisers identify the people most likely to buy their product, they then identify the best vehicles to do that with. For instance and in the most traditional sense, if Boots are looking to promote their sale they are likely to, say, buy some ad space in the commercial break on Desperate Housewives. Likewise, if Carlsberg want to sell their Lager they will run ads in the break of the World Cup. It’s called targeting and companies will pay a certain premium to reach their target market. Facebook holds an infinitely more precise set of demographic information about you than just which TV program you are likely to be watching, everything from your age, your sexuality, what type of area you live in and what products you assign your brand loyalties to. To believe that the information Facebook holds about you, especially given the value of that information, will not be used as some sort of saleable asset marks you out as either terribly naive or some sort of anachronistic idealist. There is a transaction that takes place for you signing up to their “free” service. For some that might not be explicit enough but to believe that it isn’t implicit is just bananas.

That Facebook use your (or their, if you really think about it) data doesn’t make them an evil corporation bent on world domination, what it does make them is a company with a revenue stream. Maybe in a Web 2.0 world that isn’t seen as cool or bleeding edge enough to some but it is a necessity. So, they are neither Snow White or the Big Bad Wolf, as with most things the truth is a far more nuanced grey area. Expect Twitter to be next up in the race to “monetize the user base”, it’s already started with their ad-Tweets, and what’s more I’ll wager they wont make half as good a job of it as Facebook has.

Anyway, in the absence of having anything substantial to post I just wanted to draw your attention to a rather beautiful documentary. I’ve been, in retrospect perhaps a little ineloquently, excitedly babbling about The Semantic Web for what seems like an absolute age. Having had my head stuck in computers and the internet for most of my life, I find it absolutely thrilling that we finally seem to be getting to the point where using one is an intuitive experience. It’s not there yet, not quite, but we are getting there. When we do you will find computers, not to mention all other items of digital media kit, being used in a far more creative way by a far greater swathe of the world then they already are. So it’s pretty exciting, enjoy.

A story about the Semantic Web

Interviews with:

Tim Berners-Lee

Clay Shirky

Chris Dixon

David Weinberger

Nova Spivack

Jason Shellen

Lee Feigenbaum

John Hebeler

Alon Halevy

David Karger

Abraham Bernstein

The Social Marketing Compass

This is a lovely graphic from renowned writer, analyst and speaker Brian Solis which sets out a very clear and well thought through vision of the social marketing universe with Brand as the Sun. Like or loathe the Marketing Speak element of the graphic it’s very eloquently put and has some real resonance.

Click for the full graphic

The Story of Twitter

Twitter has finally shed its New Kid on the Block image and is now firmly established as the tool de jour for quick and easy engagement.This graphic charts the journey between its birth and third birthday, see if you can remember a few of those watershed moments. I know I can.

Click for the full graphic

Facebook Growth

This is a lovely snapshot of the exponential (if that’s not too weak a word) growth of Facebook’s users. In six years the site has gone from a college dorm room project to one of the biggest new media companies in the world. To pick a stat out of the ether, 50% of users log-in every day. How amazing is that?

Click for the full graphic

Thanks for making this a fun series to do, as suggested I’ll definitely continue and if you have any requests or spot something you think warrants a mention then let me know.

Top 50 Earners in World Football

This is by the aforementioned Ben Huxley of Visual Evolution, the guy who also contributed to Totaal’s silliest ever blog post, who deconstructed the stats for the 50 best paid footballers and laid it out pretty nicely. The idea that Man City’s Emmanuel Adebayor earns a salary equivalent to 26,471 of his fellow countrymen/women is mind boggling. He also did this slightly more gruesome effort.

The Great Bear

Sort of more of a work of labyrinthine graphic punnage than a straight up infographic, The Great Bear has been hung in the Totaal office ever since we kicked off. It’s a lovely interpretation of the masterly Harry Beck’s original London Tube Map with the lines replaced by Philosophers, Planets, Actors, Footballers etc. It’s not so much the lines themselves that are interesting but it’s the intersections of the lines in this that bring up the most interesting results, you may have to squint a little but it’s more than worth it.

Left Vs. Right

What with the GeneralElection having just been called I thought it would be timely to include this information packed infographic on the beliefs of people on each side of the US Left/Right political scale. Maybe it’s the blurring of international boundaries, the colonial legacy or the fact that our politicians are, to a man, obsessed with US politics but about 90% of this holds water on this side of the Atlantic too.

More tomorrow!

The Social Media Effect

A nice lo-fi graphic which charts the amplifying effect of the social web on the most common online currency unit of the day, an item of content. The best thing that this illustrates is the “trickle-down” fashion of content from the most immediate networks like Twitter and Digg right the way through to google and network features.

Click Here for the full graphic

The History of Location Technology

The geolocation feature on smartphones has led to an absolute revolution in how mobile technology is used in the modern day and this graphic takes us right the way through the history of  location technology from smoke signals to the modern day.

Click Here for the full graphic

How the World Engages with the Social Web

This lovely graphic charts how the different countries surveyed interact with the social web covering the whole gamut of interaction from access, blogging, microblogging, Social Network use and video/photo uploads. A random fact from this: In China the equivalent of almost twice the population of the UK share photos and videos online. Wow.

Click on the image for the full graphic

The Six Different Behaviour Types of the Web

This, sadly US only, graphic charts the behavioural habits as well as the ages and number of the six major types of content consumers on the web. Are you a creator, a critic, a collector, a joiner, a spectator or an inactive? I’m cool with you as long as you are an inactive, I really hate you guys.

Click Here for the full graphic

Google Infographgraphic

Pingdom have pulled together this fantastic visual from all of the information on Google they have been able to scrape out from down the back of the internet’s sofa. And yes, it really has gone from a geek’s daydream to the biggest media organisation in the world in fifteen years.

Click for the full graphic

Social Media Landscape

This one is absolutely lovely, it distills a good few hours of client contact into about ten minutes of chartsurfing. Some of the info I would have to take issue with but it’s largely spot on and about as close to a ‘one size fits all’ solution as you are likely to get. It’s been commissioned by the guys over at CMO and really nicely done by the pixel pushers at 97th Floor.

Click for the full graphic

More to follow tomorrow, if you have any to add please stick them in the comments section below.

All in all there were twelve different attendees and representatives from two different companies, not to mention three different parts of one company itself, and the spread throughout the room was impressively wide. We had everyone from Office Managers and Receptionists through to Production Staff, Program Managers, Comms Managers, Web Designers and IT Heads.

One of the really interesting things that came out of the day was the engagement levels of the attendees. The social graph was particularly scattered with some people only keeping up with children at university via facebook, others who eschewed the text based social space and preferred video chat, guys who use youtube as their primary channel and some people who used nothing at all. To top that off we also had some people in the room who had twigged on to the potential of the social web as a networking and professional development tool.

In Short then, a pretty excellent cross section of society.

I decided that, as there was so many different agendas from the attendees in the room, that to fill a six hour session with niche, techy, or geeky content was a losing strategy so I focussed the day loosely around three main themes:

• The characteristics of the Social Web: How sharing, rating and iterating changed everything.
• The power of the Social Web: How budget needn’t be a barrier and time vs. ROI.
• Promoting and managing engagement with the Social Web: Policy building to grow communities

I interspersed the session with some videos which broke things up nicely and ensured that I came loaded with biscuits to keep the sugar levels up. Also, I had a bit of a flash of inspiration at the very last minute and decided to add in The ABBA Challenge. Throughout the day I dropped in the titles of well known ABBA songs and the first person to ‘call’ these on the Ning network I set up to support the day got points which went towards the grand prize of £25 of Amazon vouchers. So it’s true what they say “if all else fails, try bribery”!

I probably delivered about half of the subject matter that I had actually prepared due to interesting discussions breaking out all over the place on copyright, the Digital Economy Bill, spam and how the Social Web impacts on brands. The main thing I learned from the day is to keep agile when doing training sessions of this size, be led by the group rather than your schedule.

Anyhow, I’ve already had some lovely feedback from the day and connected with some very, very interesting people. Thanks to Helen Philpot for arranging it all and I hope to be back across soon. Also, check out Channel7’s website if you haven’t already.

The first of the ideas is a bit of an abstract one but one I’m convinced will work. Those who know me will know that I’ve always been a bit of an amateur theologian, I like to read about the way religions work and the arbitrary rules they set themselves, as a committed atheist I find it fascinating.

One thing I have always liked was the concept of tithing. Put simply “The tithe is that tenth of our income that we give to God, which enables Him to move on our behalf in the area of blessings”. Now, I’m not advocating that I randomly bestow a tenth of my income on a random church, after all some of these organisations are some of the richest in the country, and anyway I’m an atheist. The idea that I had was that I should give ten percent of my time, ie. one afternoon or morning of the week, over to doing stuff for free. At the same time I happened upon Matthew Knight of yarned, and we hit up a discussion about it. After a brief chat I decided that if he could do it than so can I, so I will. Being a new business, I think 10% is logical as a start figure. I already do about that amount, if not more, of unpaid advisory work but formalising it somehow makes it more real.

From now on Totaal, as a company rule for anybody on the payroll, shall henceforth have one morning or afternoon of the working week as “Tithed Time” to do something good. That means something charitable, something that gives something back to a community or something that is downright cool.

Also, something else that has been troubling me is the lack of perceived ethics in what I do. Now, that’s not the same as a perceived lack of ethics, even if we are a Social Media company, we have so far – and always will have – 100% client satisfaction. I’m as strict a critic as an agent as I was when I was a client and that wont change. More specifically, what we do as a company needs to be framed by what we wont do and what we don’t do.

It’s probably too big an issue to tackle right now but over the next few months I’ll be blogging, and speaking to people I respect offline too, about the best way to develop this ethical policy in more detail. It’s a given that I wont work with, or work for anyone owned by, arms dealers, oil companies or any companies responsible for acts of mass pollution like Union Carbide. What’s really interesting though is can I refuse to work for tobacco companies? I smoke, would that not just be massively hypocritical? Do I try and remain apolitical? I certainly have failed at doing that in my personal life even if I’m avowedly unaffiliated to either of the major parties.

I know some pretty ace people read this blog so if any of you have any thoughts on either of these issues it would be great to hear them. I could really do with some help on the ethical stuff, I want to make an interesting and considered, thought-provoking ethical policy and not a polemic. How do I do my bit for the planet or at least not muddy my environmental karma? HELP!