Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all my reader!

And if it’s Christmas music you’re after don’t forget the annual offering from the very lovely Pete Marsh.

See you in 2010!

The following article was published last week in the BBC’s staff newspaper Ariel and appears with their kind permission. My original title was “Anti Social Media and the Human Shape”.

Social media. We love it.

I’m making a very good living out of social media myself.

But if you want to be “social” it’s about more than just starting a twitter account. For to be social is to be human. As Steven Fry wisely said recently twitter (and he could have easily said all social media) is “human shaped not business shaped”.

And human beings are strange creatures. Prey to emotions and irrational impulses and yet the only animal that worries “what’s the right thing to do?”

The ethics and morals of social media are still evolving. As everything and everyone goes online, what becomes important is how people behave, not what they’re called or what social tool they are using.

Recently two incidents have brought the ethics of social media and publishing online into sharp relief.

First Rupert Murdoch described the likes of Google as “parasites” and threatened to sue the BBC for using his newspapers stories. A few days later one of Rupert’s papers The Times reprinted a tribute to Edward Woodward from Edgar Wright’s personal blog. The trouble was they had not asked Edgar’s permission first, nor had they paid him. Edgar was understandably annoyed. So who’s the parasite now, cried the blogosphere?

Then the new Chair of the Press Complaints Commission seemed to suggest that the PCC could regulate blogs. There was a tart reaction from blogger Sunny Hundal. Sunny pointed out that when bloggers make mistakes they correct them prominently (one convention is to leave the text online but with a line through the offending section). However one of the long running complaints against the PCC is that some newspapers, when they are grudgingly pushed into admitting error, make sure that any corrections are buried well away from the original story and airbrushed out of history. “Thanks but no thanks. We behave better than you”, said Sunny to the PCC.

So if you think social media is just an easy way to get a “story”, think again.

One man’s story is another man’s personal tweet. Ransacking someone’s social media to get a news angle is like jumping into someone’s garden, stealing their flowers, shouting “I need this for something important” and then jumping back over the fence again. Bad behaviour, unethical even, and not BBC behaviour I would hope.

You’ll also have to behave well while those around you behave badly. Social media can an emotional and partisan thing. I’ve been called a parasite, and worse on message boards. Indeed only this week I was dubbed a “power mad cretin” by some anonymous wit who objected to the fact I removed his comment from the Internet blog. Fearlessness, honesty, humility, a sense of humour and a thick skin are all qualities you will need.

And these are not things you will learn on a training course, or through a new application on your iPhone.

Good luck and see you on twitter!

NB – on digging up the links for this piece I discovered that it looks like it wasn’t Rupert Murdoch who first dubbed Google parasites – it was in fact Robert Thomson. I stand corrected.

You can put what I know about advertising (digital or otherwise) on the head of a pin.

But I was invited to this “think tank” by these nice people a few weeks ago. So in return I’m linking to their video.

Digital Advertising for a Digital Britain: A Think Tank brought to you by VideoEgg from VideoEgg on Vimeo.

Some good things to read, watch and listen to.

1. Profile of Sir Thomas Legg on Radio 4.

2. Fascinating blog post about Helmand Province from Adam Curtis’ blog. (Thanks to Roo)

3. Nerdfighters entry on h2g2.

4. “Glamour’s Golden Age” Art Deco programme on BBC FOUR.

5. Peepshow – series 6 episode 5. It’s still funny.

From Conservative Home. I particularly liked number 3:

There is an attraction for free-marketeers in making the BBC compete with others for licence fee money… However we rejected it because we believe it would make all broadcasters focus not on attracting viewers but on attracting subsidies. We need a BBC that uses the licence fee to produce programmes of the highest quality – and commercial broadcasters to keep it on its toes. The danger of the top-slicing model is that broadcasters would focus their energies more on lobbying Westminster than producing programmes that viewers want to watch.

I suspect this will be the last in the series.

There’s definitely some wierd ironies here. (Originally spotted via Blue Cat Onine on Twitter)

Ms Fox revealed details of the break-in on the social networking site Twitter.

“O bloody hell the #digitalinclusion office has been broken into and all computers taken (,” she wrote.

Steve Hewlett in Media Guardian;

The most serious issue (as the BBC keeps saying to little effect) is the threat “top-slicing” poses to BBC independence. It is worth remembering what a fragile flower this is. Independence is the BBC’s key editorial and creative asset and yet it is only sustained, in such a typically British way, by a series of individually flimsy conventions. That the BBC royal charters should be 10 years and each licence fee settlement a minimum of 5 years isn’t written down anywhere, but it protects the BBC from having to mix too frequently with politicians who just can’t help trying to exert influence. That the BBC exists by Royal Charter at all and is in that sense not really owned by the government is another protection. And so is the BBC’s monopoly on the licence fee: it prevents an open competition for this revenue in which politicians (or government appointees) would have the final say.

#9 Bob Hoskins and Francis Barber in The Street on BBC ONE. Still available on iPlayer.

#10 Michael Parkinson on the Today programme’s Sports slot this morning.

Some rather good swonky avanguard classical music. Jonathan Harvey is composer of the week.

From the Radio 4 blog.