The other day, somebody sent me a link to fflick (myself, I’d have capitalized the first ‘f’). It’s a site which (I assume) uses language analysis to aggregate movie reviews off of Twitter. They present this data as a rating out of 100 for any movie, and enable you to just check out reviews by your Twitter friends.
I wondered how accurate these ratings were. And, of course, I saw a chance to make a chart.
I compared the fflick ratings from the top ten box office films this week to those of another crowd-sourced site, IMDB, as well as two professional review aggregation sites, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s what I came up with–apologies for the goofy X-axis labeling. As usual, cliquer pour agrandir l’image:
I know that’s a pretty small data set, but it’s a start. It’s actually interesting how close the four data sets are. I’d guess that the disparity in Charlie St. Cloud can be explained by two factors: uncritical teenage lust for Zac Efron, and the movie’s newness. It’s also not surprising that the critics are generally less enthusiastic about a movie than the general public. Still, fflick seems to do a pretty decent job of distilling Twitter’s cinematic zeitgeist.
This language analysis is a very deep vein in social media channels like Twitter. Marketers, researchers and hackers across the globe will be keen to explore what people love and hate, whether it’s movies, music or recliners.
I have a small problem. I really like the World Cup. Yet the games are played in the morning, with the last game finishing up shortly after lunch. I sometimes watch one game in the morning, but I have to record the rest and watch later in the day as time permits. I also occasionally do this for hockey games, particularly eastern ones that begin at 4:00pm here on the West Coast.
Of course, I spend a lot of time online, working and playing in the real-time, flow-oriented social web. So there’s a high risk of my learning the outcome of sports events before I get to watch them. I’ve heard similar complaints from people who time-shift television shows–the finale of Lost, for example, or the season premiere of True Blood.
I address this problem by going very light on Twitter, Facebook and, uh, high-risk blogs until I’ve watched whatever I recorded.
Smart Filters to Avoid Disappointment
There arevariousapps which offer muting functionality for individual keywords or users. What I could really use is a view of Twitter and Facebook that magically removes all messages related to, say, the World Cup.
How would we achieve this? The simplest route would be using bundles of related keywords as a filter, maybe gathered through a crowdsourced process. For the World Cup, we might block all country names and team nicknames for starters. Then maybe common terms like ‘goal’, ‘keeper’ and so forth. Next you’d probably want to block all player names. This presents an immediate problem, as you’re filtering out a bunch of common names like Lee, Kim, James and Green.
Ideally, I guess you want a service that can algorithmically discern between “Blimey, England keeper Robert Green concedes an easy goal” and “Blimey, our England office is never going to make our goal of going green this quarter.” Presumably the service would track a user’s historic data, too, and adjust the prediction based on the likelihood that they’re talking about soccer.
Occasionally I have odd little ideas. Sometimes I actually do them, sometimes I just write about them or sometimes I disregard them out of hand. The other day I had the notion to create a Twibbon–a little add-on to your Twitter and Facebook avatars–for Ivory Coast, the World Cup team I’ve decided to support. You can see it on my Twitter avatar.
Then I thought it would be fun to make avatars for the other 31 teams participating in the World Cup. James helped out, and we went to Photoshop Town. If you, like me and most of the rest of the planet, are excited about the upcoming tournament, you can find your team and Twibbon it up.
I was out of town with some friends this weekend, and–I forget how–this idea arose in conversation. The premise is simple enough: bloggers, tweeters, tumblr users (is there a short form for them?) and video makers run a charity auction. They commit to not blog (or tweet or whatever) for a day or week for a given amount donated to charity.
So, I might say “for every $10 you give to charity, I will not blog for a day. $50 buys you a week of my not blogging.”
Feeling passive-aggressive rage at a particular political blogger with whom you disagree? Or maybe you want more face time with a blogging spouse or relative? If you were a blogger who felt particularly competitive, you could buy an advantage over fellow bloggers by turning them off for a week or two.
It’s not world-changing, but it feels like the kind of upside-down idea that might have legs. What do you think?
TckTckTck, the global climate change campaign Capulet worked on last fall, is up for a Webby. If you’re going to vote in the Webbies, please consider voting for us.
You know, one of the under-recognized benefits of the web is that its enabled new forms (or maybe micro-forms) of creativity, or new veins of expression. We can thank the reduced costs of technology, the simplification of tool and the democratization of the audience for this explosion in creativity.
I was reminded of this today while watching the latest episode of Zero Punctuation (a bit NSFW). Produced by a witty Englishman named Ben Croshaw, it’s an animated series of juvenile, raunchy, hilarious game reviews. I’ve never played most of the games he’s reviewed, but it’s always five minutes well-spent. Here, for example, is his take on Dante’s Inferno (rated mature for lots of cuss words and, uh, suggestive scenes):
In a small way, this is a new form of game review: clumsy animation + rapid-fire, rude commentary. It looks nothing like the text-based game reviews of the past twenty years, nor does it bear much resemblance to, say, Siskel and Ebert’s TV chat from the cheap seats.
Another example of new forms is Pomplamoose’s videos. I’ve written about them before, but I like how they describe their work as a ‘VideoSong’:
This cover is a VideoSong, a new medium with 2 rules:
1. What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice).
2. If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).
I also like that they’re thinking about their craft, and eager to articulate to their viewers. Here’s an example of what they’re talking about:
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t include my friends at Common Craft who, judging by their multitudinous imitators, have spawned a very popular new form. Their latest video explains augmented reality in two minutes and sixteen seconds.
Last year at Northern Voice I gave a talk entitled “From Permalink to Profound: Where is the Art in Social Media?” I think these examples, while not truly social, certainly make use of the collaborative, instant-feedback nature of the modern web.
To me, it feels like 2009 was a banner year for infographics. Those sometimes-beautiful, always-intricate images that help us understand big or complex topics used to be the strict purview of news channels and textbooks. Now they’re everywhere. What’s to blame? Freer access to source data, simpler creation tools and bigger monitors? I’m not really sure, but I’ve never seen an infographic that I didn’t like.
Huh. All of those were about the web. For designers and site publishers alike, there’s a deep vein here for link bait around industry-specific infographics.
“Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism.” –Graham Greene
This weekend I received an email from a local arts organization that began:
We appreciate your work as an active citizen journalist and would like to invite you…
“Hang on,” I thought, “I’m not a citizen journalist”. I am often a curator, sometimes an editorialist and occasionally a critic. I rarely ‘cover’ something, inasmuch as I attend an event and report on it, but I don’t really self-identify that way. That arts group isn’t alone, though–I’ve heard plenty of others equate “blogger” with “citizen journalist”.
For me, it’s about intent. I don’t think “I’d really like to go report on that concert”. My thought process is pretty unexamined, but it’s more like “I like Cat Power, and I like writing about the arts, so I’ll write about my experience of attending her concert. Others might be interested in what I write.”
The Most Documented Games Yet
That email got me thinking about citizen journalism. Thanks to the Olympics, it’s an idea that’s much in the public eye these days. From groups like True North Media House and Vancouver Access 2010 to dozens of individual bloggers, Twitter users and rich media makers, these are surely the most documented Games yet.
There’s no shortage of reportage. We’re going to events and writing about them. We’re photographing the Games and the streets and everything in-between. We’re having fun.
We’re covering stories. But how often are we uncovering them?
Where is the local, investigative citizen journalism? To put it another way, who’s doing the citizen reporting that isn’t fun?
Who’s pounding the pavement, making calls, sifting through government reports, sitting in town hall meetings and doing all of the difficult, time-consuming work that professional journalists have been doing? Because I sure ain’t.
I asked on Twitter, and received a couple suggestions. Sean Holman’s work at The Public Eye is one example, as are Linda Soloman’s Megan Stewart’s stories on toxic chemicals for the Vancouver Observer. Notably, both Sean and Linda are professional journalists.
Can you think of other examples? Has any citizen journalist broken a story around the Olympics?
Five Percent Off the Top
I’m not trying to discredit or criticize citizen journalism. I just worry that most of it is, by its nature, lightweight and short term. Few of us have the time, resources, expertise, connections and (most importantly, I think) motivation to do the in-depth work of your average investigative journalist. On top of those discouragements, the web doesn’t particularly reward the long-form article or feature-length documentary. It’s a bite-sized medium.
If we assume that the writing is on the wall for much of the mainstream media, where does that leave us? I liked how Clay Shirky put it in a 2009 talk at Harvard:
Which leaves us with a giant hole, and a very threatening one. And in the nightmare scenario that I’ve kind of been spinning at for the last couple years has been: Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption–that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they’re shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.
Will citizen journalists step in to fill this void? I hope so, but you’d be hard-pressed to get me to sit through even one town-hall meeting. I’m happy to volunteer my time for good causes, but monitoring city hall isn’t a priority.
I know I’m describing a problem without offering many solutions. Here are a couple of ideas:
There are examples of an emerging kind of citizen statistician, who uses access to open governmental data to uncover political or corporate malfeasance.
Another solution is to divide the work of one journalist among 15 citizen journalists, and have each of them attend four town hall meetings a year. Collaborative tools make this approach possible if challenging.
The more I think about it, the investigative citizen journalists of the 21st century are the activists of the 20th. They care enough about a particular topic to dig into it with enough effort and fervor to uncover new truths.
What do you think? Where will we find the investigative journalists of the future?
