I gave a short presentation at the Podcamp Toronto “unconference” a few days ago about some of the things we’re doing at the Globe and Mail (the national daily newspaper I work for in Toronto, for those of you from elsewhere), and a number of people asked me if I would be putting the slides up anywhere, so I uploaded them to Slideshare and have embedded the presentation here in this post (RSS readers can click here to go straight to Slideshare and see them). If you want to see and hear the presentation, there’s a video link at the Podcamp wiki.

Here’s the condensed version: I introduced myself as a former reporter, columnist, technology writer and blogger for the Globe who is now the paper’s online “communities editor,” for lack of a better term. That means I am trying to think of — and follow through on — as many different methods of creating, enhancing, fertilizing and connecting with communities of readers around various topics. I went through a few of the ways we are trying to do that, as well as the rationale behind them and what we have learned from them, and then I closed with what we are hoping to do in the future.

The first big experiment was a project called the Public Policy Wiki, which we set up quite quickly and with fairly limited resources (or time), using an off-the-shelf implementation of TikiWiki, which I highly recommend as a very flexible and multi-faceted wiki platform. We deliberately didn’t over-design it, because we wanted to make it look different from the Globe — and wanted it to look sort of experimental as well, which it is. We had quite a lot of success with the first issue we tackled, which was the federal budget, but less so with the second issue (Afghanistan). We are launching a third leg soon on the environment.

One of the other big experiments has been our increasing use of Cover It Live, a live-blogging/discussion tool developed by Keith McSpurren and his team in Toronto. It provides an easy-to-use and administer platform for hosting live-blogs, with a dashboard that allows you to approve individual comments, auto-approve commenters (so their comments flow in automatically), block commenters, send private messages, post audio/video/photos, conduct polls and so on. It is easily embedded in a story page, and it has been a great tool for our coverage of things such as the budget, the CRTC hearings, a subway shooting and the Obama inauguration.

The third thing I focused on is Twitter (where I am @mathewi). We have only a handful of reporters and editors on Twitter, in contrast to somewhere like BusinessWeek, which has 50 or more, but we are gaining steam. I have been promoting the use of Twitter as a way of connecting directly with readers — not just to promote our content, but to use readers as a resource for stories and our coverage of them. It also humanizes the newspaper and its staff in a way that I think is particularly important at a time like this (my friend Duarte put that very well in this message).

As far as lessons go, you can read the slides yourself, but the things I’ve learned so far are in many cases relatively simple:

– things like the Policy Wiki don’t just draw a huge crowd without some work; there needs to be an obvious incentive of some kind, plus some good old-fashioned promotional effort, and better tie-ins between the wiki and the paper

– Cover It Live is a great way of making an event into a kind of micro-community, and many people like the immediacy; others (including some within the newsroom) find it noisy and distracting

– Twitter needs to be personal or it’s simply not going to work. And if you let it, it will suck up every spare moment you have :-)

Let me know what you think, and if you have any thoughts or questions, my contact info is on the last slide. If you like this post, click the little bird that’s embedded in the first paragraph and it will add it to Twitter for you.

Laurent Haug, a very smart guy and part of the brain trust behind the LIFT conference in Geneva, has written a great post on his blog about finding balance in social media, and how he thinks that we are beginning to do that — in other words, stepping back from the “all users are created equal” view that has driven some of the commentary around sites like Wikipedia and Digg and acknowledging that some people actually might have skills or qualifications that make them more valuable. Not exactly a revelation for some, perhaps (yes, I mean you Seth) but still worth saying. As Laurent puts it at one point:

“Kicking out the experts was not the answer. We do not all contribute the same value. Somebody who has carved violins all his life should have more editing power than me on Wikipedia’s Stradivarius page.”

Laurent goes on to talk about how he sees social media and online communities that generate content being made up of three necessary groups: the users, content creators who are “needed to scale the system to a dimension where it starts to matter;” the drivers, who “build the community framework,” and the experts, who “bring credibility to the whole edifice by sharing their extensive knowledge.” Go read the whole thing.

As reported by several sources, including Reuters and Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch (where the notion of an “exclusive” gets some debate in the comments section), MySpace has launched its widely-rumoured Digg-alicious news service, although Mike said that it would go live at 7 a.m. and all I get is a login prompt when I go there. Was the site not quite ready for prime-time perhaps? (Update at 12:05 EST — it is now live).

In any case, this new service from the geniuses at Fox Interactive Media (which owns MySpace and is a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s media and entertainment behemoth News Corp.) was reported to be coming in March, according to Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog. The service will pull in news from RSS feeds — although News Corp. says it will not favour its own services and newspapers — and users can also submit stories, and then vote on them. Apparently news services will be able to opt out and not have their articles displayed, according to News Corp.

Despite the fact that most people who go to such “user-generated” media sites don’t actually submit or perhaps even vote on stories, as Seamus McCauley discusses here (based on a new Hitwise survey), I still think this kind of thing could turn out to be very powerful, and that MySpace is smart to do it. MG Siegler at Parislemon says he is skeptical, and Seamus says that it is a missed opportunity, while The Last Podcast says it is just plain bad. Eric Berlin says MySpace missed the boat and should be focusing on getting user-generated content from its members.

The questions in my mind are these: What happens to Jason Calacanis’s Digg-ified Netscape? Or to Digg itself for that matter, which has been trying to branch out into non-tech news but without much success (as far as I can tell)? With 100 million members, MySpace has more than 100 times the audience that Digg does. Better yet, how long until Google News decides to add a user voting system? Now that would be fascinating.

Paul Kedrosky points to a fascinating study that was written about in the New York Times magazine this weekend (it figures that the one time I put aside the mag without reading it, it will have a fascinating story in it), which looked at the theory of “cumulative advantage.” This is also known as the Matthew effect — from the bible passage Paul quotes in his post — or the “rich get richer” effect.

Simply put, the theory is that if someone is popular — for whatever reason, be it real talent or just blind luck — he or she is likely to become even more popular, since people tend to gravitate towards things that are already perceived as being popular. In the study that is written up in the NYT magazine, a team set up a website where more than 14,000 participants signed up and were asked to listen to, rate and — if they chose — download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants.

The results showed clear evidence of cumulative advantage, says one of the authors of the study:

In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition.

At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict.

As the author notes, this kind of social influence — which might as well be called the Digg effect — “didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.” And that definitely complicates the tendency to believe in the wisdom of crowds when it comes to music or just about anything else.

“Even if you think most people are tasteless or ignorant, it’s natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow “better,” … if only because “that’s what the market wanted.”

What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market “wants” at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history: there is no sense in which it simply “reveals” what people wanted all along.”

Fascinating.

Update:

As Ethan at blackrimglasses.com points out, this is also known as a “power law distribution” and can be seen in all kinds of behaviour, both online and off.

From Mike Arrington at TechCrunch comes news that the next version of Firefox will include social networking features — features that are described in more detail at the Mozilla labs website. The new features, which for some reason are called The Coop, have their own project page here.

As Mike points out, this is going to make things kind of sticky for Flock, the privately-funded browser built on the Mozilla framework. In effect, it sounds like the Firefox team is planning to build some or all of what Flock has done — sharing of photos, blogging, etc. — into the existing Mozilla browser, although there are differences (The Coop seems aimed at sharing rather than creating blog posts from within the browser, for example). Does this mean that Flock is fucked again, as my friend Paul Kedrosky put it back in late 2005 when Performancing added a blogging plugin? Not necessarily. In many ways, the social features almost seem like competition for del.icio.us rather than what Flock does.

Allan Stern of CenterNetworks says this kind of thing is a good illustration of why it`s not advisable to build your product entirely on someone else`s technology, which is a fair point. But I for one hope Flock and Firefox both continue to exist and become stronger and add new features. Like Mark Evans, I think the more competition the better.