If blogs are the new press, whither regulation and accountability?

Spotted this article from my old BBC colleague Steve Bowbrick in The Word on the rise and fall and rise again of blogging. Steve makes a clear, well-written and compelling case for the maturing over time of the blog platform into a counterweight to the vapidity and conformity of much social media interaction on the one hand, and "the dissimulation, spin and sensationalism" of the mainstream media on the other. Recent events certainly reinforce the latter set of sentiments.

What particularly caught my eye, though, was a reference to the acquisition of TechCrunch by AOL. When blogs that have built their reputation on independence are acquired by big corporates, how does this affect their relationship with their readers? The same question applies more sharply still to the Huffington Post, also recently acquired, along with their proprietor, by AOL, and which has opened its UK branch in the week when the British press is going through its severest crisis of public confidence for a generation.

We at Unthinkable have been fascinated for a while by the role that accountability plays in digital media - whether that's digital media as a vehicle for accountability or indeed the accountability of digital media to its public. To say things are moving fast in response to the unfolding revelations of the News of the World's phone hacking scandal is an understatement. Announcements in the past hour point not just to a public inquiry but to the formation of a new watchdog for the press.

What seems to be very often missed in the current debate is that, as with the financial and parliamentary expenses scandals that came before it, this press scandal has itself been exposed by the activities of a vigorous press. So arguments for tougher regulation need to be tempered by that understanding. The Guardian has been at the centre of exposing the full extent of the NOTW's phone hacking activities, and the full inadequacy of the response by the police and politicians, and its editor Alan Rusbridger rightly points out the difficulty of identifying the boundaries of what can be thought of as "press" in the age of the blog. Whatever happens to the framework for press regulation (and indeed media ownership), it's going to have to contend not only with newspapers like The Guardian pursuing a "digital first" strategy, but also with pure-play digital outfits like HuffPo and their own corporate backers - and with an ecosystem around them that arguably should never be anything other than anarchic.

As ever in digital media, it will likely be the nouse of users themselves and the indomitable transparency of information that will ultimately be the strongest guarantors of accountability.

BBC Online's Social Strategy

There's a huge amount to say about the changes BBC Online announced last week. As a former member of staff with many friends whose jobs under threat, I'm prompted by both personal loyalty and passion for the BBC's mission and purpose to say a lot of things I might regret later. So this post isn't about the overall rights and wrongs of the strategy and cuts. It's about a narrower pet passion and area of interest of ours - social media and accountability.

Ian Hunter has written a concise and lucid post about this on the BBC Internet Blog, setting out some ways the BBC is seeking to move "from a site which offers a few fairly circumscribed social experiences to one which is more social everywhere". The most eye-catching and commented announcments are the closure of the 606 sport messageboard and the so-called "disposal" of h2g2 (in other words, the BBC is trying to find a sympathetic new owner for the latter project). There is also a reiteration of the deliberate trend away from messageboards and towards trying to shepherd interactions and conversations around BBC-generated content (blog posts, some programmes, some news stories).

There is also a restatement of the importance to the BBC's approach to social media of Facebook and Twitter. This itself takes a number of forms. Listeners to the increasingly cash-strapped World Service will have already noticed the extent to which the BBC has made itself dependent on Facebook in particular as CMS, CRM and user engagement strategy combined, with programmes often bypassing the BBC website completely in order to promote their Facebook pages. We've already blogged here about the iPlayer's integration with Facebook and Twitter. And we publicly recommended that the BBC engage more fully with external public conversation and comment around both its content and its strategy.

But there's clearly a danger here as well. In conceding ownership of the social graph, conversation and in many cases content itself to international commercial interests, an accountability deficit may emerge, where the BBC's audience and paymasters are less able to exercise their intellectual rights of ownership in a transparent manner. They may also be less able to own and manage the data they generate around themselves in relation to the BBC. It should be noted that Facebook and Twitter are both still entirely privately owned, unlisted companies.

There are of course additional concerns, such as the BBC losing control over its own content, and the building of private value to individual corporations instead of public or civic value to the commons. There are echoes with the long-running debate over the BBC's support of proprietary over open formats for audio and video. That one resolved pretty happily. And it's important to recognise the legitimate public service argument in support of, say, Windows Media or Facebook, on the grounds of meeting the habits of the audience - standards as defined by level of uptake rather than theoretical openness or public ownership.

As Ian puts it: "Much of this is standard practice across the web, of course, and we need to evolve to meet the changing expectations of our users." Absolutely right. But this in microcosm represents an overall concern with the BBC's online strategy - is there too much of a desire to fit in to the online world as it is, and not enough of a vision for the unique role that the BBC can play in shaping that world?

Digg v4: a sledgehammer to crack a nut?

I blogged here earlier this month on the Digg Patriots scandal. I wrote then that:

How Digg responds to this is going to tell us a lot about the limits of democracy on the web and the power of technological solutions to filter the worse bits of human nature.

Unfortunately Digg (a social recommendation website) is not turning out to be the clearest prism through which to view this issue. True, last week's release of Digg v4 sees some response to the problem of 'bury brigades', primarily through the removal of the so-called 'bury button'. But it simultaneously introduces another even more controversial innovation, in allowing big publishers to submit content automatically via RSS feeds, bringing their loyal subscribers in tow to vote stories up and effectively dominate the site's front page. The motivation behind both of these innovations (as well as a major overhaul of the site's visual design which make it look eerily like a branch of Facebook) is surely mixed - part need to monetise, part desire to improve user experience - and therefore it's harder to read the changes simply as a response to Digg Patriots and similar problems. So in answer to my own question in the title of this post: probably not.

But to the extent that the changes are, at least in part, a response to these problems, they may point to a retreat from the ideals of crowdsourcing. Digg have tilted power towards corporations (the automated submission through RSS feeds) and away from potentially troublesome users (removing the bury button). Corporations can, in whatever imperfect ways, often be held to account, and have the great virtue in this context of clearly being who they say they are, unlike users who often hide behind pseudonyms. By making these changes, has Digg effectively accepted that individual citizens therefore trust corporations more than they trust each other?

BBC publishes summary of Unthinkable report

I'm pleased to announce that the BBC has published the executive summary of the study that they commissioned from us into their use of social media for the purposes of accountability. You can download the summary directly, or view the blog post and ensuing discussion where Nick Reynolds published the report. And don't worry - although the original report is about 60 pages long, the summary is a neat 2-and-a-bit and you can probably read it in the time it takes to drink about an inch of coffee.

I'm impressed at the BBC's openness in publishing even the summary of what is a sometimes critical report. Having cut my teeth there, I can see this as a mark of a culture that is genuinely changing. I also know the personal effort that goes into driving that kind of cultural change, so commend Nick in particular for seeing this through. Personally speaking, this was a rewarding and fascinating project to be involved in, so it's great to see some public manifestation - and to see the BBC responding to at least some of our recommendations.

Digg and the guile of crowds

By now you've probably heard all you want to hear about the scandal uncovered by AlterNet of a group of militant US reactionaries using Digg's functionality to censor it by removing stories uncongenial to their extreme political views (or even in some cases apparently innocuous stories by people who hold uncongenial views - or even their friends). It's all over the web, having been picked up by Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and Stephen Fry on Twitter among others, and has even made the mainstream press. So we won't rehash the story here.

The angle that interests us is accountability. Crowd-based tools like Digg are held up in some quarters as an answer to enabling democractic accountability online. We ourselves have been particularly impressed with Dell's IdeaStorm, for example, which applies a Digg-style promote/demote functionality to ideas for product improvements sourced from the crowd. But the Digg Patriots scandal points to the fact that censorship needn't be centrally managed by malign organisations or governments, and that the tools provided with good intentions by websites like Yahoo! and Digg can be used by determined individuals to self-organise and subvert them. How Digg responds to this is going to tell us a lot about the limits of democracy on the web and the power of technological solutions to filter the worse bits of human nature.