Blackbeard Blog

Regular readers will know I don’t like influence-metric peddlers Klout very much. However I have finally discovered a use case for them: they make an excellent empirical test of the effectiveness of parody Twitter accounts.

Take, for instance, the viciously funny and sharply observed @peanutfreemom. She has a Klout score of 75 - very high indeed for a non-celebrity. She is a “Thought Leader” - and has particular influence in “parenting” and “allergies”. She is also a comedy account, of course. So her rating - and more specifically its breakdown - speaks volumes about her effectiveness, and for that matter about Klout’s.

I am doing a keynote speech! It is at the Association Of Survey Computing’s annual conference at the end of September in Bristol.

This is the first time I’ve done a keynote, so I thought I’d ask Twitter people about what they expect from such a thing, as opposed to an ordinary paper. What did people say?

• “Entertainment, but also some nuggets and thought starters”
• “They’ve gotta be from out of town, looking over the fence and more interesting than earnest”
• “Dynamic speaking style, thought leadership, some level of industry ‘fame’”
• “Presentation of media that does not include powerpoint”
• “Something broader but (loosely) relevant, a call to arms. And gifts ;)”
• “The unexpected”
• “Vision: new way of looking at things. Inspiration!”
• “Something big picture, preferably visionary and definitely inspiring. Basically the opposite of parochial and self-aggrandizing”

Blimey - this sounds like a big ask. Though actually my favourite response was this one, from Conquest’s David Penn (himself a very engaging presenter):

• “What I expect is some bloke who has written a book. What I hope for is some bloke who has written a good one.”

So what have I learned here? Well, the keynote speaker seems to have a certain amount of licence: they can break away from the concerns of immediate practicality and look to provoke or inspire. The responses have inspired me to be a bit bolder, tear up bits of my notes to be - hopefully - replaced with wilder speculation, better ideas and more jokes. (I’ve not written it yet, but the title’s been accepted - the suitably portentious “Twilight Of The Respondent”. More on this anon.)

Still thinking about that Guardian piece.

Obviously there’s no question that deindividuation is a phenomenon online. And yes, the way you get round that - unless you actively embrace it, a la 4chan - is by raising the social costs of bad behaviour. The way in which sites have done this in the past is by allowing community standards to emerge and then letting the community broadly police itself.

The standards that emerge in places like Metafilter, Reddit, Slashdot et al are very different: a lot of them exclude as much as they include, and in ways that don’t necessarily make those sites very nice places to hang out. But what they have in common is that identity is authenticated by the site and community, and rests on activity within the community rather than activity outside it.

Social networks, broadly speaking, work differently. Identity in social networks rests on offline identity and so its ideal guarantor is proof of that offline identity. One of the really fascinating things about Facebook - and a secret underpinning of its success I think - is that it’s one of the first online phenomena to have abolished the idea of the newbie. There are no experience counters on Facebook - no equivalent of “joining date” or “number of tweets”. There are network metrics, of course - number of friends - but they don’t necessarily correlate with experience. To be a noob on Facebook would be like being a noob in real life - which we do have words and ideas for, but not quite with the same flavour.

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