Just a quick note to point out the publisher-sanctioned free PDF available of The Art of Community by Jono Bacon. It’s a guide to building and running online communities and social networks. Bacon is the community manager for the Ubuntu operating system, the dominance of which compared to other Linux variants is arguably down to the strength of its online community.

The download was actually released in September, but I only found it today. I assume some readers have been similarly remiss.

I may write a little about its content later, but for the moment, a note on the publishing strategy.

O’Reilly is undoubtedly a little more progressive than most publishers, for whom giving away versions of their properties for nothing would seem like madness. It’s also released under a Creative Commons license that allows sharing and remixing of the contents – I could, for example, produce a 20-page ‘version’ of the tome and give it away here for free. (I won’t, though – I may have some time on my hands, but I’m not mentally ill).

Why should/would publishers do this? It’s actually a really shrewd commercial move. Think about the upsides:

1. People on the Internet love FREE STUFF. They feel warmly to people who give it to them. I like O’Reilly as a business to a greater extent because they’ve done this. I am slightly more likely to buy stuff from it.
2. It generates a lot of buzz and positive PR. I’ve blogged about the book, for example. More usefully for O’Reilly, Mashable readers voted it the 2nd most important book on social media. This will lead to increased sales of the dead-tree version, or I’ll eat my cat.
3. The book is nearly 400-pages long. Nobody in their right mind is going to read something that long on screen. It hurts your eyes. You’re going to have a dip into it, decide if it’s useful to you and then buy it.
4. Not knowing whether a book is good or not is a big barrier to buying them online. In a bookshop, you can have a flick through to see if it’s any good. On Amazon, you’re mainly buying blind, which people don’t like to do. (That’s why Amazon give such prominence to reader reviews and recommendations, of course – because they’re very well-aware of this.) The free version recreates the in-shop browsing experience, restoring consumer confidence.
5. This is not a reference book. Were this a manual on writing CSS, for example, the PDF version actually has some considerable advantages over print versions: because you can search and find the nugget you need using your computer. The Art of Community consists of long chapters with lots of discussion – you need to read it properly to benefit from it.
6. Someone, somewhere probably will make that 20-page remix edition and give it away. That, my friends, is called a promo.

And the downsides?

1. If the book was rubbish, then people would find out and not buy it. Of course, this is actually an up-side in disguise. The free version shows O’Reilly’s confidence in its quality. They are saying that they have nothing to hide.
2. Potential buyers might discover it’s not for them. This probably sometimes happens. Again, it shows the publisher’s confidence in the title  — if you pick it up, then it probably is for you. It also gives O’Reilly some moral kudos – it doesn’t want to dupe people into buying something that isn’t going to be useful to them.
3. People might pirate the book. This is something that’s happened since the middle ages, of course. You may recall, for example, the difficulty of deciding what Shakespeare actually wrote because of the multiple variants of the texts from school. I could take the PDF, republish it on Blurb and sell it myself. But that’s not really going to happen: O’Reilly would sue me and I’d go to jail. Some people might take the risk, but they are idiots.
4. People might print out the book on their office printer, bind it and thus avoid paying for the real deal. Again, this isn’t really going to happen — think about the time, the cost of consumables and considerable chance of getting fired when your boss finds out versus the £18 cover price for the real thing.

So there aren’t really any plausible disadvantages. Unless you’re in the business of selling bad books, in which case you should probably give the whole social-networky-sharing thing a miss, if you can.

Note that I am not remotely suggesting that the free PDF version is a cynical ploy – far from it – but it is certainly shrewd. O’Reilly is not waving goodbye to its profitability. What it is giving away is both valuable, but not remotely as valuable as the physical book — it’s a considerable driver for sales of the dead tree edition.

Seth Godin’s been talking about this stuff for years, I know, but there are still few publishers willing to experiment. Paul Carr’s recent decision to pirate his own book despite the wishes of his publishers is a great illustration of the on-going battle between the vanguard and the old guard.

picture credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

I’ve produced an experimental social media news page using Feedly Mixes. You can embed this sort of thing into any site you like.

As you can see, it grabs and mixes up the content from selected RSS feeds – a list of sites covering the subject, as chosen by me. It then ranks the articles according to whether I deem a particular site important. Articles that I tweet or share in Feedly will also be included and take precedence on the page. Then it uses Google Reader’s statistics on how many people read, saved and shared articles to bubble up leading stories. Finally, it uses the age of the article as a fourth filter. The content is refreshed every 3–4 hours.

I’m not sure that my particular implementation is especially useful. The sort of person likely to visit this site almost certainly already reads the sites I have selected.

However, I think it could be a really useful tool in other circumstances. If you work in a particular domain – let’s say it’s construction – then it really is child’s play to create a page that gives a digest of the day’s news from the publications that deal with that area. That page could be set as everyone’s home page in your firm, or a link on the browser’s favourites bar, making sure the whole business is up-to-date with the latest news.

It’s better than the sort of pages you get at Alltop because you decide and curate the content sources – the construction page on that site is a good example of why you want this – a lot of the sources are US-based, which won’t be very relevant if, like me, you’re based in South London. There’s also no way I can see to flag particular stories as important.

A slightly more poetic use for Feedly Mixes might be the Interesting Pictures feed from flickr or ffffound. Maybe a personalised web comics page or a selection of new short stories.

NB: WordPress doesn’t deal well with the iFrames used to display the Feedly Widget on pages – you’ll need to install the Embed iFrame plug-in to get it to work.

The user experience changes radically depending on the client you use:

• The twitter web page doesn’t automatically poll its source and change. Yet every time you hit Refresh, it’s different. It’s always a reminder that the world keeps turning no-matter what’s happening in your own little portion. As much as it lets you see into the world of the people in your network, it’s a reminder of your anonymity. At the same time, the prominence of the edit box at the top of the page is an invitation to poke the world; to let people know.
• ‘Pro’ clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl change the proposition substantially. You won’t miss that @ message or the mentions of your brand or interests. For this reason, they’ve become favourites among egocentrics and those with marketing or PR interests in the network. In these client applications, the edit box has less prominence. It’s dipping your head into a rushing river, but also checking to see if any of your fishing nets have reeled in a catch; and resetting the bait with another update. These clients automatically update every few seconds, you see the real time web rush past; but the nets into search terms and messages mean that the feeling of control is not so lost.
• The mobile experience is different again. You’re less likely to participate in some respects, because data entry on a phone is trickier than from a keyboard. You’re less likely to click a link because you know that your device has a 50% chance of timing-out or failing to render the resulting page properly. The mobile experience is thus likely to be more about observation: checking in on your network – the ambient intimacy of it all.

Where am I going with this? A couple of places.

1. Leaving Las Twitteros

First, it turns out that, contrary to the propaganda, Twitter is an enormous, blue FAIL WHALE when it comes to retention, Mashable reported yesterday. Most people leave after a month, it seems:

…growth from February 2008 to February 2009 was reportedly 1382%, with the incline increasing yet further in recent months.

But like many social networks, it seems many people lose steam with the service. Stat tracking firm Nielsen reports today that a full 60% of users who sign up fail to return the following month. And in the 12 months “pre-Oprah”, retention rates were even lower: only 30% returned the next month.

There is more than one explanation for the massive drop-off in the last paragraph. The statistics given only track web page usage. It’s reasonable to suppose that a substantial number of users graduate from using the web page to using a different client, like Tweetdeck. In the discussion of the article, author Pete Cashmore links to another showing that only 30% of updates come via. the page – the rest using other clients.

I don’t think that this explanation explains the Nielsen figures entirely, though. I know a lot of very articulate and intelligent people to whom Twitter simply does not appeal. They gave it a go and didn’t see the point. That’s OK. Saying that this is because they haven’t given it enough time and effort, as I’ve heard before, is an odd argument. It’s a bit like saying I could come to love self-flagellation if I put my back into it, and my nether regions.

The recent celebrity endorsements of Twitter which have led to such rapid growth won’t help matters. Listening to the prattle from @stephenfry & co is a less engaging experience than being in touch with people you really know and sharing with them, I would suggest. If you use Twitter in order to keep up with certain celebrities, it must be very frustrating when they’re getting on with their jobs rather than providing updates. I’m not saying there are right and wrong ways to use Twitter – there aren’t – but there are ways that are likely to lead to more engagement than others.

The rushing passage of stuff is fine in a 30-second commercial, but hardly everyone’s cup-of-tea when they actually come to use the Internet. Point One is that Twitter is quite important but is not and will never be the next generation of the web, etc. etc.

2. Whispers in the Wind

The second matter I wanted to briefly explore was the viability of Twitter as a publishing or attention mechanism for media owners and institutions. Nearly every publisher does this (including NMK and its Lords and Masters at the University of Westminster). Maybe you hand-craft your tweets or automate them – it’s easy, using twitterfeed from your RSS, but err… it’s not very good, is it?

Your institution or organisation will not produce that many updates a day. That’s good in some ways – people will quickly unsubscribe from feeds that talk too much – especially if they have a corporate or robotic feel. At the same time, because you don’t update so often, your reach is tiny compared to almost any other medium. It’s a nudge, a poke, a pebble tossed into the river, a piece of flotsam that people might nudge into from time to time. It’s worth doing only because it’s easy. But because the social media marketing experts are using Tweetdeck or something, then they get an illusionary experience of the impact of their posts – their net full of retweets and @s at the end of the day looks full even for a tiny organisation like the one for which I work. At the same time, when I dip my head into the live stream, I see scarcely any interaction with tweets from ‘official’ media or institutional feeds. And there’s another problem that augments this…

If you open up a new channel of communication in the social media space, then there needs to be an ear on the other end listening and responding to the feedback. Social media, by definition, is not about broadcasting, but is two-way. You start a blog, you need a comments person. You send an email; you need a reply-address that works. Carefully writing your Blog T&Cs or Twitter bio or Email newsletter subscript can allow you to redirect responses somewhere else, but by entering into a communications arena that is entirely two-way with a one-way methodology, you’re asking for problems. (Skittles and The Telegraph’s brave – you may have other words – experiments with posting unmoderated twitter feeds illustrate this handsomely). Point Two is that Twitter is for people, not things.