from a social perspective.com

In order to prevent an enormous post covering the whole day like Håvard did on his post from Digital Trend Day I have decided to split my coverage of the Record seminar into two posts. The previous post covered the pre lunch sessions and this post covers the lunch and post lunch sessions. The reason for also covering the lunch is that I was so lucky to share a lunch table with Lars G. Teigen from Second Brain. I have to admit that when I was first tipped about them I didn’t have the time to check out their service and I forgot them quickly afterwards. Anyway, they had some media coverage in Norway today which is funny, and it’s always fun when Norwegian companies get some coverage abroad as well. I guess I’ll have to do a more thorough research on their application some time next week.

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The first session after lunch was held by Jon Olav Eikens, a scholar at AHO. He presented a fictive project called Urørt Labs, which is a project Urørt launched together with the Living Labs. I didn’t quite get why they made a fictive project to front some changes they were going to test out, however he showed a pretty neat way to browse for music on the Urørt site. In short – imagine googlemaps in 3d with only Norway as a map, and in stead of balloons you have straws with different colors that display the type of music present from that town and the length of the straws represent the amount of music within that type or category. I kind of liked it, even if it was just a concept and animation so far.

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The second session after lunch was held by Morten Skogly from Urørt. If you haven’t heard about Urørt, its NRK’s MySpace slash demo contest for bands. The whole session was streamed with Bambuser and you may see the stream at his site. He spoke very highly of the Living Lab and the help they had provided Urørt. He was making a thing of being very nervous when doing his presentation but I think he did just fine. The most interesting points from his speech were probably that they run a live beta of the site. As I understood it, the users have access to a live beta that isn’t currently set into production in order to do some testing and so on. Very interesting indeed. The developers then gave support on the beta version through a chat.

What strikes me when listening to both sessions from NRK is how every speaker talks about how hard it has been, and still is, to work with internet in such a large, old and complex organization. Nonetheless, they seem to be doing a lot of good stuff there, only not to the mainstream. In a couple of years I bet they will be a very large competitor to all the internet media sites in Norway.

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The living lab presentation was held by Ola Gaute Aas Askheim since Synne Fonkalsrud was unable to attend. The presentation was however to detailed to summarize in a short post. Nonetheless it was very interesting. The main focus was information about how Living Labs projects work and a bit about this one in particular. There was also some talk regarding their research methods that seem pretty nice and good. You could read more about them here.

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The last presentation for this seminar was held by Petter Bae Brandtzæg from SINTEF. I know some of his work from earlier as he held a survey on one of our former sites. Actually his first slide said something like: “Online communities die”, and on the second slide he had a picture of the RIP page of my former project (image at the top). It made my day for sure. Even if some of his key findings fit to the image of why we had to close the community or to be more frankly lost all our traffic, the image is a bit more complex then that. But I have to say; that if he wants to use that as an illustration its fine by me.
The key drivers he spoke of regarding keeping the users loyal were:
- People/Friends
- Content
- Usability
- Harassment (Not a driver, but there shouldn’t be any)
- Boring (the party is over) (also not a driver, but you get the point, it shouldn’t be boring)

Regarding people, communities are social; if you don’t have the right people there they won’t connect and won’t be social. If there aren’t any people there, the less interesting content there will be. The others are pretty self-explanatory I guess.
An interesting finding he had made was regarding harassment. As some of you know this was the topic of my MTech dissertation to find a way to get rid off. And one of the things that kept repeating was that the victims were mostly female aged 14 to 16 years and it occurred on sites where one could be anonymous. Nice to know, since it gives some more input to the whole “anonymous or open” on communities.

His best approach when designing a community was to achieve understanding of a group of people and develop technology that helps them. That’s pretty much my philosophy as well.

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That pretty much sums up the Record seminar. I did enjoy the speakers very much and I think it was very sad there was such a low attendance. I also think it’s a paradox that they spend so little time marketing the seminar. The main source of information is on a image flyer somewhere at Opinions homepage, they have a blog, but don’t seem to use it much. Take a look at what Eirik Solheim said about it on twitter afterwards when i pointed out that he wasn’t either referring to their blog. They, of all, should know how to spread the word about the seminar through social media. Utterly sad, and I hope they do something about it next year.

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The first part of the seminar is covered here and the whole agenda may be seen here.