If you use a paid-for web service at someone else’s domain you’re a tenant. A second class citizen. You don’t have much control. You’ll probably have to live with your landlord’s furniture and decoration and a restrictive set of rules. Your content will only exist at these URLs for as long as you keep paying the same people that monthly fee and for as long as your provider stays in business. Experience tells me that this isn’t very long. As a paying customer you’ll have a few rights under your contract but they probably won’t amount to very much. When you leave you’ll probably be able to get your data back in a useful format but when you put it back on the web somewhere else you’ll lose all your inbound links, search engine rankings and many of your visitors. This kind of service seems like a good deal until the day you need to move.

When you use a free web service you’re the underclass. At best you’re a guest. At worst you’re a beggar, couchsurfing the web and scavenging for crumbs. It’s a cliche but it’s worth repeating: if you’re not paying for it you’re the product not the customer. Your individual account is probably worth very little to the service provider, so they’ll have no qualms whatsoever with tinkering with the service or even making radical changes in their interests rather than yours. If you don’t like it you’re welcome to leave. You may well not be able to take your content and data with you and even if you can, all your URLs are broken.

The conclusion here should be obvious: if you really care about your site you need to run it on your own domain. You need to own your URLs. You’ll have total control and no-one can take it away from you. You don’t need anyone else. If you put the effort in up front it’ll pay off in the long run.

But it’s no longer that simple.

Anyone who’s ever run a website knows that building the site is one thing, getting people to use it is quite another. The smaller your real-world presence the harder it is. If you’re a national newspaper or a Hollywood star you probably won’t have much trouble getting people to visit your website. If you’re a self-employed plumber or an unknown blogger writing in your spare time it’s considerably harder.

Traffic used to come from three places: the real world (print advertising, business cards, word of mouth, etc.), search engines and inbound links. Whichever field you were in and at whichever level, you were competing against other similar sites on a fairly level playing field.

Social networks have changed all that. Facebook and Twitter now wield enormous power over the web by giving their members ways to find and share information using tools that work in a social context. There’s no obvious way to replicate this power out on the open web of independent websites tied together loosely by links and search engine results.

Not so long ago you had to be on MySpace if you were an up-and-coming band. Now it’s probably Facebook. Either way, your social network presence is more important than your own website.

If you’re an independent photographer looking to get established you probably need to get your pictures on photo sharing sites like Flickr where they can be easily found by millions.

Many of the most valuable conversations around technology and many other fields happen on Twitter. If you’re not there you don’t really exist, especially if you’re just getting started in your field.

You can turn your back on the social networks that matter in your field and be free and independent running your own site on your own domain. But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve. We need to use social networks to get heard and this forces us into digital serfdom. We give more power to Big Web companies with every tweet and page we post to their networks while hoping to get a bit of traffic and attention back for ourselves. The open web of free and independent websites has never looked so weak.

Perhaps none of this would matter very much if the biggest player of them all — Facebook — wasn’t such a grotesque abuser of its position. Even before announcing Open Graph this week it was pretty clear that Facebook wanted to own everything everyone does online. Facebook currently has 750 million members. If it were a country it’d be the third most populous country in the world, bigger than everyone except China and India. The United States has a mere 312 million people — not even half the size of Facebook.

Facebook’s Open Graph technology allows third-party websites to tell Facebook what people are doing. It extends Facebook’s Like button to include any action that the site owners think might be interesting to Facebook. Play a song and your music streaming site tells Facebook what you’ve played. Read a newspaper article and Facebook knows what you’ve read. LOL at a lolcat and your LOL gets logged for all time on your indelible activity record. Facebook calls this “frictionless sharing”, which is their euphemism for silent total surveillance. Once you’ve signed up for this (and it is optional, at least for now) you don’t need to do anything else to “share” your activity with Facebook. It’s completely automatic.

Site owners and developers are lapping it up. Hosting company Heroku posted this incredible tweet the day after Open Graph was announced:

Huge Open Graph momentum with social devs, we’ve seen more than 33,800 new Facebook apps in last 24 hours #f8

Yes, that’s nearly 34,000 new Facebook apps created in one day by customers of just one hosting company. Astonishing numbers.

At least Facebook is up front about Social Graph. Facebook’s abuse of its Like button to invade people’s privacy is much less publicised. We all think we know how it works. We’re on a website reading an interesting page and we click the Like button. A link to the page gets posted to our wall for our friends to see and Facebook keeps this data and data about who clicks on it to help it to sell advertising. So much so predictable.

What most people don’t know is that the Like button tracks your browsing history. Every time you visit a web page that displays the Like button Facebook logs that data in your account. It doesn’t put anything on your wall but it knows where you’ve been. This even happens if you log out of Facebook. Like buttons are pretty much ubiquitous on mainstream websites so every time you visit one you’re doing some frictionless sharing. Did you opt in to this? Only by registering your Facebook account in the first place. Can you turn it off? Only by deleting your account.

This is where I draw the line. I’m well aware that everything we do online and many of the things we do in the real world creates a data shadow — a digital record of our actions. If you carry a mobile phone your location is continually recorded by your phone company. If you’re suspected of a crime or go missing then this data will be handed to the police. Most of us know this and choose to use mobile phones anyway. We know that when we buy things that transaction is recored by our bank and the shop unless we’re using cash. We know that our computers and our broadband providers record what we do online. But all these things are predictable and at least arguably necessary to provide the services we use. We might not like these intrusions into our privacy but we like the law enforcement, fraud protection and service quality that they buy us. It’s a compromise that most of us are willing to make.

What Facebook is doing is very different. When it records our activity away from the Facebook site it’s a third party to the deal. It doesn’t need this data to run its own services. Moreover, Facebook’s aggregation and centralisation of data across all our disparate fields of activity is a very different thing from our phone company having our phone data and our bank having our finances. Worst of all, the way Facebook collects and uses our data is both unpredictable and opaque. Its technology and policies move so quickly you’d need to be a technical and legal specialist and spend an inordinate amount of time researching Facebook’s activities on an ongoing basis to have any hope of understanding what they’re doing with your data.

As individuals we can opt out. It’s still possible to live a full life in the developed world and not use social networks. Some people may find it harder than others — missing out on event invitations that are only sent on Facebook, for example. Not being able to see your friends’ photos because they’re only posted to Facebook. Not being able to join conversations on Twitter. But for now there are sufficient alternatives for most of us. As with smoking, it’s easier to not start using the social web than to stop. Once you’ve signed up the cost of leaving increases with every “friend” you make, every photo you post, every tweet you send. That’s why I’m holding out against Google+ for now.

For organisations and business it’s very different. We’re already past the point where social networks can be ignored. If you don’t have a social networking presence your businesses is at a significant disadvantage compared with those that do. It’s where the attention, the traffic and the conversations are. Even public and government services are finding their social networking activities increasingly important. How long before they’re essential?

The promise of the open web looks increasingly uncertain. The technology will continue to exist and improve. It looks like you’ll be able to run your own web server on your own domain for the foreseeable future. But all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies. Your identity will be your accounts at Facebook, Google and Twitter, not the domain name you own. You don’t pay Big Web a single penny so it can take away your identity and all your data at any time. The things you can say and do that are likely to be seen and used by any significant number of people will be the things that Facebook, Google and Twitter are happy for you to say and do. You can do what you like on your own website but you’ll probably be shouting into the void.

If I find any answers I’ll post them but right now things are looking bleak. It’s the end of the web as we know it and I feel pretty far from fine.

@adrianshort

Boris Johnson and Breivik anyone notice the striking similarities or is just me? He could be his younger brother

Jasper then proceeded to compound the offence caused by throwing around various racist comments to the effect that all white people were responsible for what happened in Norway.

All par for the course from Jasper. Or was it?

@andywasley suggested that Jasper’s Twitter account might have been hacked and that the offensive posts were written by an imposter.

Jasper certainly never claimed that his account was hacked so we can presume that the tweets were by him. He also went on to lock the account so that people couldn’t read what he’d written.

But if we needed to, how would we judge whether Jasper’s tweets today were in character or out of it?

Step forward the naive Bayes classifier — the kind of software that protects your inbox from email spam.

The Bayes classifier is an artificial intelligence tool that can be used to sort documents into various categories. For email the categories would be spam and not-spam (a.k.a. “ham”). The not-spam ends up in your inbox and the spam gets filed somewhere else.

The Bayes classifier uses mathematical probability to make its decisions. It won’t be right all the time but they tend to have a pretty good success rate.

We can use the same technique to see whether Jasper’s tweets today were likely to be his.

I set up the Ruby classifier gem for this job.

First we define two categories: Leejasper and Notleejasper.

Then we train the classifier using documents — tweets — that we know belong in each category.

I downloaded a batch of tweets from Jasper’s account. There were 97 from today and 442 before today.

So the 97 are “unknown” tweets that need to be classified. The 442 tweets from before today are used to train the Leejasper category.

We also need to train the Notleejasper category. I downloaded 8187 tweets from various people’s accounts, political and non-political, and used those.

Running the 97 “unknown” tweets supposedly from Lee Jasper today through the classifier indicates that 87 are Leejasper and 10 are Notleejasper — a result of 89% in favour of Leejasper.

And what of the other 10? They’re mostly very bland and could have come from anyone:

Notleejasper:  Actually I agree...
Notleejasper:  He wont be getting my vote either..
Notleejasper:  I think there are certain circumstances where its entirely appropriate to do so the AC Leukaemia Trust being one of them.
Notleejasper:  My point is the historical trend that provide the context for your example.
Notleejasper:  Of course what...?
Notleejasper:  What I actually said is that they 'look alike' so get of your high horse.
Notleejasper:  a rare thing indeed...
Notleejasper:  agism in the workplace don't make me laugh. The majority don't want to work longer thats why we have mass industrial action.
Notleejasper:  and the reason for that is?
Notleejasper:  what you dont think they look alike?

Overall a fairly persuasive result. I’ll reiterate that Lee Jasper hasn’t disowned his tweets from today but if he did he’d be on pretty thin ice.

Many of the tweets are trivial and banal (Atomant77)

Taken out of context, just about everything is trivial and banal. The time of the next bus from here to the town centre is trivial and banal unless you’re here and you want to get to the town centre.

But that’s what happens when you release comprehensive information about something. Most of it isn’t of interest to most people. Conversely, there tends to be something for everyone. Just look at the Freedom of Information requests that people make.

I don’t live in Walsall but I was very interested to see that there was a clairvoyant appearing at a council library to teach Tarot. As a rationalist, I don’t think this is the kind of thing councils should be subsiding. Does it happen in my area, too? It turns out that it does. I’ll be following this one up.

When you’ve got information on a computer you can slice and dice it any way you like. Cut through the mass of information you don’t care about to find what you do.

Twitter isn’t a good medium for reaching Walsall’s residents. It’s just for the “chattering classes”. What about my 85-year-old gran? (liberalcynic)

As Chuffy and HenryHomer said, this is an experiment. It’s not a new council service and they won’t be doing this every day.

If councils are going to improve their services over the long term they need to experiment with new ideas. This doesn’t mean committing massive resources to untested ideas. It means doing exactly what Walsall is doing here: Short, one-off projects that are cheap and have no adverse impact on other services.

You don’t have to have a very long memory to remember when councils didn’t have websites. And if you remember that, you’ll probably also remember the people who were resistant to councils having websites. The internet was just for geeks and the chattering classes, they said. Well, look at it now. No, we still don’t have everyone online (nor equally good access for those that have it) but I hope no-one seriously still thinks that the web is a waste of time.

With half the country now on Facebook, councils learning how to use social media looks pretty important, not only because there’s already a huge audience there but because most of the other half will follow soon enough.

More generally, this project is about capturing and disseminating information. Just because it passes through a computer doesn’t mean that it’ll necessarily be consumed on one. Web pages can be printed out. So can RSS feeds. Data feeds can be displayed on public screens like the countdown boards at bus stops and train stations. Software can send out text messages that can reach just about everyone. I’m looking at #walsall24 and thinking, “How could we automate this? What else could this approach be used for?” I see nothing wrong with Walsall blazing the trail here for others as well as themselves. Everything has to start somewhere.

Walsall’s Twitter experiment is a drop in the ocean, but reminding people of all the shitty stuff that councils do is no bad thing. (Chuffy)

… and …

It’s just a shallow PR exercise to make the council look good (liberalcynic)

It may have “image” benefits in a PR-sense but I think this is more about engagement than self-promotion.

Many people missed the point of #gmp24, which as I remember it was to show people how much time Greater Manchester Police spent doing “social work” rather than fighting crime. It wasn’t so much “see how wonderful we are” as “see how our time gets wasted”. They wanted people to think about the role of the police and how it could best serve the community rather than affirm what a great organisation they were. What Walsall is doing with #walsall24 seems similar to that aim.

In my view, esteem has to be earned. If proper communication helps services to be accessible, efficient and popular, then esteem for the council will surely rise. (liberalcynic)

I take this point entirely. Councils should be engaging with residents and making themselves accountable to them rather than bigging themselves up. #walsall24 certainly couldn’t be rolled out as it is as a regular council service, but I’ll definitely be trying to think of ways in which some of the ideas could be applied to realise tangible benefits at a sustainable cost. Birmingham’s civic dashboard is taking steps in that direction and I expect to see far more realtime, fine-grained information being made available by councils and used across many media.

You may have seen the website at http://twifakes.heroku.com/ which promises to tell you how many “fake” Twitter followers you have.

Do not authorise this website. It tweets without your permission and there’s no telling whether it may do other damage to your account.

If you’ve authorised it, here’s what to do:

1. Go to your Settings/Connections page on the Twitter website and Revoke Access for the Twifakes app.
2. Delete the tweet that Twifakes sent from your account. This will slow the spread of the site.
3. Notify Heroku that they are hosting a malicious website.
4. Notify @spam and/or @safety about the site. #Twifakes doesn’t have its own Twitter account.

In case you’re wondering, your number of “fake” followers is the number of followers you have divided by twelve. Hardcore algorithm.

Twitter is currently in the process of closing down the old Basic Authentication system which meant you had to give apps your password before they could read or write your account. Obviously this system was open to abuse, but the upside was that people were generally pretty careful about where they disclosed their password. Ironically, the new OAuth authentication system that doesn’t require you to give your password to an app is also open to abuse because people are more likely to trust it.

Twitter needs to be much clearer about what a requesting app is being authorised to do with your account (if legitimate, #Twifakes would only need read access, not write access) and be much quicker about closing malicious apps such as this.

Imagine you’re running social media for a public library service. You’ve got ten libraries in the service and you want to use Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

How many accounts do you need?

The simplest approach, for you, is just to have one account on each service. You might have a Twitter account that covers everything in the whole library service, a Facebook page which people can “fan” and get updates, and a Flickr account where you post all your photos.

With all these accounts, you’ll probably be doing a fair bit of cross-posting, too. Some of your photos — possibly all of them — will go on Facebook as well as Flickr. Twitter doesn’t handle photos very well so you might find yourself posting links to Flickr photo pages there. You can even automate this using an RSS to Twitter service like Twitterfeed.

This isn’t going to be much fun for your readers. People tend to be interested in one or maybe two local libraries, not the whole service. An event on the other side of the borough probably doesn’t interest them, let alone hearing about new titles in stock or changes to opening times there. So people get deluged with information that they have to skip past to get to the 10% that matters to them. Some people will unsubscribe, feeling your services don’t provide good value for their time. Others will just feel a bit ambivalent skipping past the noise every time they read your feed. It’s not a great approach for them.

Social networks make it easy for people to mash feeds of content together but very hard for them to filter them. I can mash by simply choosing what I subscribe to. And filtering is the same thing — choosing what I don’t subscribe to. Most social media tools make it difficult or impossible to filter within a feed. So you have to do this on behalf of the people who might read what you write: separate your content into as many distinct and separate feeds as necessary. For a library service, this might mean creating separate feeds for each library and possibly ones for subject areas or children and teens too. This is more work for writers, and rightly so. Managing several accounts is harder than just one. But the onus is on us to do the legwork so our readers don’t have to plough through mountains of irrelevant content to get to the good stuff. The reward is that our readers will care more about what we write and consequently we’ll probably have more of them too.

The closely related topic of recycling identical content across several media or social networks is skilfully dissected at Unlink Your Feeds.

Last week I launched @SutMobLib, a Twitter account that tweets the location of Sutton’s mobile library in real time. No, I’m not sitting here all day sending messages. A program does that automatically. Every time the library gets to a new stop it posts up its location.

@SutMobLib on Bing Maps Twitter Search

The utility of such a thing isn’t immediately obvious. While I don’t like to generalise or assume too much, I suspect that the vast majority of mobile library users don’t use Twitter. So far a grand total of nine  people have signed up to follow @SutMobLib and most of those are various sock puppets of mine.

@SutMobLib on Tweetie 2 "nearby search" for iPhone

Unlike most Twitter accounts that belong to real people, @SutMobLib isn’t great for conversation. It’s even less intelligent and interactive than it looks. Anyone that wants to be reminded when the library is visiting their neighbourhood would be better off just putting the relevant day in their calendar.

@SutMobLib is useful because Twitter is now more than just a social network connecting people. It’s become a platform for realtime geospatial information, where things like the mobile library can post up what they’re doing and where they’re doing it, as they’re doing it.

Experienced Twitter users know that while half the power of Twitter is following people you’re interested in and conversing with them, the other half is reading realtime searches for keywords, phrases and hashtags. Recently, Twitter enhanced the power of its search by allowing members to post up their precise geographical location with each tweet, which other members can then discover by searching around an area rather than around a hashtag or topic.

So Twitter has become a radar. Tweetie 2, a Twitter client for the iPhone, allows users to search “Nearby” based on the user’s current location and shows a map covered with plotted tweets. Web users can do something similar using Bing Maps’ Twitter Search. The popular client TweetDeck shows pop-up maps underneath geotweets.

Realtime geospatial search brings a new dimension to finding out about the world. For the first time we can pull up live information about a place, whether that’s people’s conversations and observations or the solipsistic self-reporting of things that tweet like Sutton’s mobile library. Various urban annotation and virtual graffiti projects have existed before now but Twitter brings this capability to a mass-market social network with tens of millions of members. Through reading conversations about coffee in Soho or chemo at the Royal Marsden Hospital, our awareness of the world around us just got a great deal broader.

@SutMobLib showing as a geotweet in TweetDeck

For some, that will mean discovering, spontaneously and without specifically searching for it, that a friend — or the mobile library — is around the corner and might be pleased to see us. The world around us is constantly shifting, with opportunities and hazards popping up and then disappearing again, often without leaving a trace. Now we can see those traces. Serendipity is the spice of life and it’s just got a very big helping hand. Fire up your radar.

—

Further reading on where ambient intelligence is taking us:

Peter Morville, Ambient Findability
Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground
Adam Greenfield, Everyware

Given that the rel=”alternate” attribute of (X)HTML’s <link> element is already semantically broken by the widely-adopted RSS autodiscovery spec, is there any good reason why we can’t adopt something like the code below and allow the relationship between a site and a Twitter account (or indeed, any third party site controlled by the owner) to be expressed cleanly?

<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://twitter.com/adrianshort" title="Twitter: adrianshort" />

(For HTML newbies, this goes in the <head> section of your web page.)

View source on this page and you’ll see it “in the wild” already.

Like this? Follow me on Twitter: @adrianshort

Francis Maude

Photo from Francis Maude, Creative Commons by-nc-nd UK licence.

As news reaches us that Gordon Brown has shut down his public email address, Conservative chairman Francis Maude goes on the offensive:

Gordon Brown is spending taxpayers’ money on the latest digital gimmicks, from Twitter to Flickr, but can’t be bothered to give out a simple email address.

The beleaguered Prime Minister is literally retreating to his Downing Street bunker, cutting himself off from an angry and disillusioned electorate.

Are Twitter and Flickr “digital gimmicks” that are beneath any self-respecting elected politician? Should government spend taxpayers’ money on such things? One could ask the same question about telephones, television, radio and the Internet more generally. They are communications media whose value for any particular purpose depends entirely what one does with them.

Barack Obama has amassed over 500,000 followers on Twitter and it doesn’t seem to have hurt his prospects much. (Shame he’s been too busy “leading” the “free world” to tweet lately.) Closer to home and somewhat more modestly, a man by the name of Johnson who seems to have found himself in charge of a large city happily Twitters away to a flock of 20,000 Londoners. If I remember correctly, the chap is the Conservatives’ most senior elected politician.

Further down the food chain, CllrTweeps has found 193 councillors from 129 councils on Twitter, including 54 Conservative authorities.

If social media networks are only used by politicans to broadcast top-down messages to a passive audience then they have little value beyond more traditional methods including conventional websites. But Gordon Brown’s Twitter has collected over 270,000 followers which his aides use to engage in an ongoing direct conversation with a substantial chunk of the public. If Mr Maude is right, presumably those 270,000 people — and all those thousands that follow councillors, MPs and aspiring politicians elsewhere — are wrong.

Do you think they vote, Mr Maude? Answers on a postcard (in 140 characters or fewer, please.)

Like this post? Follow me on Twitter.

(Click on the image to download the PDF, 19KB, opens in new window/tab.)

Like this? Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/adrianshort

I’m a self-confessed and unashamed news junkie and this is how I’m starting to mash up news in my local area. For those that aren’t local, Sutton is a London borough with a population of approximately 180,000. Stonecot Hill is a neighbourhood within Sutton with a population of a few thousand.

Here’s how it all works.

Sources (green boxes)

I write Stonecot Hill News which is a local news blog running as a standalone WordPress installation on its own server. It produces an RSS 2.0 feed which here is treated as an outbound API.

Paul Burstow is the local member of parliament (constituency: Sutton & Cheam). Paul posts news regularly to his website and for many years that site has been serving an RSS 1.0 (RDF) feed. Whether he realises it or not, Paul laid one of the first foundations for news mashability in the borough.

The Sutton Guardian is the local newspaper, published by Newsquest. Together with its sister titles in other areas, they publish several dozen RSS 2.0 feeds for a wide variety of content.

Sutton Council is the local authority for the borough. Despite a recent £270,000 revamp to their website they haven’t yet managed to step into the Twenty-First and produce any RSS feeds. However, they do publish a variety of content regularly on their website, including their press releases.

APIs (grey boxes)

For the non-technical: API stands for Application Programming Interface, but that doesn’t tell you very much. Think of APIs like connectors or adapters that allow one program to plug into another in the same way that our household appliances can all connect to the electrical network because they share common plugs and sockets.

An API may be inbound (allowing data to be put into an application), outbound (allowing data to be extracted) or both.

As we can see in the diagram, applications which use APIs can be daisy-chained together, with the output of one application being fed into another.

RSS and Atom feeds are also APIs in that they provide a structured way for a program to get data out of an application. These feed formats are simple to implement (many applications produce them automatically) and are the first thing to consider when implementing a simple outbound API for an application.

Mashers (pink boxes)

Mashers are small programs that connect otherwise incompatible inbound and outbound APIs together. TwitterFeed is a simple example. Say you want to automatically post the new items from your blog to your Twitter account. Your blog serves an RSS feed but Twitter, while it has an inbound API, cannot accept RSS directly as input. TwitterFeed links the two, allowing the user to define any number of RSS feeds as inputs and any number of Twitter accounts as outputs, via the Twitter API. In this way, TwitterFeed plugs blogs into Twitter.

Yahoo! Pipes is a much more sophisticated and flexible masher. It can take inputs from a variety of sources (RSS, Atom, CSV, Flickr API, Google Base or even raw web pages), sort, filter and combine them in every conceivable way, and output the results as a single stream in various formats (RSS, JSON, and KML, the geo-format used by Google Earth). For my mashup I created this pipe to filter Paul Burstow’s, the Sutton Guardian’s and Sutton Council’s news and only pass through items containing the word “stonecot” to the stream that eventually ends in the @stonecothill Twitter feed, which is just for Stonecot Hill residents. The number of items coming through these sources about Stonecot Hill is very low, but when something appears residents will want to see it. (By way of example, only a single press release from Sutton Council in the last 227 concerns the Stonecot Hill area specifically.)

As mentioned above, Sutton Council doesn’t provide an RSS feed or any other kind of outbound API for its press release. I wrote a screen scraper in Ruby (using Hpricot) that grabs the press releases directly from the council website, dumps them into a MySQL database and pushes new items into the Delicious API. I’ve used Delicious here for two reasons. Firstly, because it generates an RSS feed automatically from all the items posted to it, so I can easily connect this output to other mashers and APIs further downstream without having to generate and host an RSS feed myself. Also, Delicious provides a useful search facility on its website allowing me to easily search just the press releases from Sutton Council. This isn’t possible with the council’s own website, where searches are scoped to the entire site.

Destinations (orange boxes)

In my diagram, the destinations are sites and services which represent new ways of consuming information coming from the original sources. Don’t want to read Sutton Council’s press releases on their own website? You can folllow them in Delicious or on Twitter. Want to keep up with the latest news about Stonecot Hill? Again, the @stonecothill Twitter account can find this for you from various sources. I also add my own items to @stonecothill, making it a unique mashup of original and syndicated content that’s highly targeted and very local.

The information stream doesn’t need to end with these destinations. Any destination that provides an outbound API can simply be another link in the chain to downstream services. In my diagram, the RSS feed from Delicious is used to do just that, pushing all its content on to the @suttonboro Twitter account, and just the Stonecot Hill-related content on to the @stonecothill account via the Yahoo! Pipes filter. Twitter has its own specific outbound API and also serves RSS feeds. There’s nothing to stop anyone else building on these destinations by combining and filtering them with other sources to produce their own unique, relevant information streams that they find useful.

What next?

If you run a website, it’s time to start thinking of mashability with the same degree of seriousness as you treat human visitors. Your website needs to serve up feeds and APIs so that other programs can connect to your content and deliver it to people in ways and contexts that they find useful. Some of these may have an audience of thousands or even millions. Others may have an audience of one. Regardless, by providing an API to your content you enable others to build things that you haven’t imagined, don’t have the resources or desire to build yourself, and won’t have to maintain. Businesses like newspapers that survive by selling their content (or selling advertising around their content) are thinking very carefully about the challenges and opportunities for the future of their industries. For government and voluntary organisations, it’s time to start thinking more like evangelists than economists. Spread the word like the free Bibles in hotel bedrooms and take every opportunity to get your message out there.

Sutton Council have been encouraged in various ways to implement feeds on their own website and the song will remain the same until they do. I don’t want to maintain my scraper for ever and I certainly don’t want to build any more of them.

The whole API and mashability agenda is far bigger than simple web feed formats like RSS and Atom. It’s time for technologists to stop flogging the line that “RSS is an easy way for people who follow lots of websites to read all their news in one place”. Direct human consumption of RSS feeds is never going to hit the mainstream in that way. If you’re reading this, you’re far more likely that average to use an RSS reader. (I’ve got 86 feeds in my Google Reader right now). The average web user has barely heard of the concept and most definitely don’t do it. I suspect they never will. But it’s likely they’re already benefiting from syndicated content through sites and applications that they use. If they never have to see or care about the underlying technology that’s really no more a problem than worrying that the average web user doesn’t understand HTTP or DNS. It’s just plumbing that can stay out of sight and out of mind as long as it works.

For the minority that do use personal RSS readers, I’d like to see more of them with built-in filtering features. Setting a simple keyword filter on a feed makes RSS reading considerably more powerful.

For those serving up feeds, I’d like to see Atom more widely used. Without wanting to open a can of Wineresque worms, RSS 2.0 fudges a number of important issues around content semantics and provides no support whatsoever for correctly attributing items in feeds mashed from several sources. Atom was designed to solve these problems and it does. Let’s use it.

Lastly, mashability is about every conceivable kind of content and content type. It’s not just about news and text. Every stream of information should have its own machine-readable feed. Every system that can accept data from human input should implement an inbound API to do likewise. To take one example, FixMyStreet is a website for people to report street faults to local authorities and currently takes around 1000 reports a week. It even has its own iPhone application so people can report faults complete with GPS locations and photos directly from the street. Only a single local authority in over 400 has implemented an inbound API to receive these reports. The rest get them by email, which must be manually copied into their own databases with all the effort, expense, possibility for error and opportunity costs that represents. Third-parties building extensions to other people’s systems is no longer unusual, so organisations need to embrace the possibilities rather than fighting against it or standing around looking bemused.

It’s time to open the doors and windows and get the web joined up, mashed up and moving.

1. Sutton Council’s Latest News section doesn’t have an RSS feed or any easy way for the public to track it other than by visiting it regularly.

2. The Sutton Guardian has more dirt than diamonds (although at least it has a feed).

3. Other things happen that don’t get reported.

4. You don’t have time to plough through two dozen websites to keep track of what’s going on in Sutton.

Solutions:

1. Visit http://twitter.com/suttonboro for a concise, well-edited overview of borough activity.

2. If you use an RSS reader, subscribe to the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/suttonboro

3. Subscribe to the latest updates by email, if that’s your thing.

Enjoy.