March 2008

Last week, the UK media saw a flurry of attention around the publication of the final report of the Byron Review, Safer Children in a Digital World. It looks at the need to protect children from harmful or inappropriate material, both online and in games, and is based on data from 346 respondents, 93% of whom were children.

Interestingly, most of the blogosphere coverage centres around the impact on gaming, but there are some good pieces about its recommendations for the way children should be educated about online risks.

Ewan McIntosh points to the Times’ coverage of the report, which says that

[Byron calls] for a massive campaign to educate parents, teachers and childcarers about how to ensure that children get maximum benefit from the digital world without being exposed to its dangers.

Ewan suggests that educating children about online risks without introducing them to danger is akin to trying to teach someone to swim without a swimming pool, and I suspect there’s some truth in this.

The Telegraph’s initial report cautioned of a media backlash:

Parents and politicians cannot make this world wholly safe. Maybe the best they can offer, for all the talk of education and crackdowns, is to equip children better to deal with hazards placed in their way by adults. Byron's findings sound moderate and balanced. That may not defuse a media firestorm about the (largely unproved) evils of the internet.

The ippr’s own research on the subject, due to be published fully in April, reveals gaps between parents’ knowledge and that of their children:

“My mum will ask sometimes ‘is it safe?’ but she doesn’t really know” (Girl, 16, ABC1)

“Everyone lies about their age ‘cos I think it’s like if you’re under 18, your profile gets set to private” (Girl, 15)

“We have restrictions at school but we can just get an administrator’s account and take them off” (Boy, 14)

“Restrictions stop you going on bad sites, like games sites and stuff. If you take them off you can go on anything” (Boy, 14).

“I want to spend less time ‘cos what I do on it is just really pointless – like MySpace is just really addictive” (Girl, 17)

“First it was like everyone was on MSN, then everyone sort of has Bebo, now everyone who had MSN moved on to Facebook so it’s just what everyone’s doing at that time” (Girl, 16)

“Some things they [parents] don’t understand and they ask me to explain it to them but they still don’t understand” (Girl, 13)

A cause for concern? Yes. A cause for panic? No. There’s a clear message here about the need for greater education and understanding. An acknowledgement that children will learn how to bypass content filters at school — I did — and that they’ll end up speaking to people online who their parents don’t know.

Attempting to deprive children of access to valuable resources (particularly in schools) is likely to lead either to black market trading — borrowing teachers’ access passwords to social network at lunchtime — or legitimised evasion — what are you supposed to do when a school project calls for research into marketing of alcoholic drinks? What’s important is that children understand the risks involved in these interactions, and that their parents and teachers understand their value.

Do you go topless to meetings? 43 Folders points to an article on MercuryNews.com about design firm Adaptive Path’s decision to ban laptops, mobiles and smartphones from all of their meetings.

Lo and behold, it worked — “It took some convincing, but soon people began connecting with one another rather than with their computers”, said Todd Wilkens, who’s blogged before about his war against Blackberries.

In 2006, Merlin Mann posted 9 useful tips for more productive meetings, which are listed here in brief:

1. Circulate an agenda
2. Have a theme
3. Set (and honour) times for beginning, ending, and breaks
4. No electronic grazing. Period.
5. Schedule guests - don’t have people in the room who don’t need to be there
6. Be a referee and employ a time-keeper
7. Stay on target - as soon as something’s closed, move on
8. Follow up
9. Be consistent - set a pattern for how your meetings work

The guys at BNET have another interesting suggestion — have stand-up meetings. No chairs, no falling asleep, and there’s an incentive to keep things quick.

Of course, meetings often turn out to be completely unneccessary — 37signals’ book Getting Real suggests that ‘meetings are toxic’, and points to some wise advice from Lisa Haneberg:

There are too many meetings. Push back on meetings that do not make sense or are unproductive. Only book a meeting when you have an important business issue to discuss and you want or need input, approval, or agreement. Even then, resist the urge to invite everyone and their brother – don’t waste people’s time unnecessarily.

With increased choice of communication channels — phone calls, SMS, email, IM, Twitter, Skype, and social network sites like DOPPLR — you’d think we’d get better at optimising our communication. What’s the best way to contact someone with a particular question, or to discuss a particular subject? How can I reach this person most easily?

Each communication channel has obvious advantages and disadvantages — the synchronicity required for a phone or Skype call vs. the immediacy and speed at which conversation can happen; the tiny keypad for SMS vs. the convenience of quick messages on the go; the ignorability of IM vs. its flexibility in multi-participant conversations. And yet we still don’t seem very good at getting it right. I still find myself drawn into long SMS conversations which would have taken half the time and would have been doubly useful as a voice call. I call people when a quick chat message on Skype would have done the same job without interruption.

And yes, I end up having meetings where any or all of the above would have been preferable. The meeting seems like a fallback option; a safe bet. It’s all too easy to send out one of those invite emails and drag people to a table somewhere with a flipchart. There’s nothing you can’t resolve with a good meeting. And hey, if you didn’t resolve things, just schedule another one…

Just a quick reminder that this week’s your last opportunity to vote in the Webware 100 Awards — to cast your vote for Skype, just click here and follow the instructions.

For more information about the awards, take a look at the Webware site. And don’t forget to vote, too

On Sunday, Wired brought us the story of the first Twittered marriage proposal — and here’s the evidence:

Stephanie Sullivan, who accepted Greg Rewis’ proposal, said that ‘email, Twitter, Flickr and Skype are the staples of a long-distance relationship — not to mention extraordinarily high cellphone bills!’ Of course, I’m going to mutter something about Skype’s rather good mobile products here, but it’s great to know that Skype’s helping to make people happy even if they do run up big mobile bills at the same time…

On the subject of long distance relationships, yesterday the mental health team from Emory University blogged about how to maintain relationships while 10,879 miles apart; last month, Lee McEwan talked about the rise of the commuter marriage, and we heard last week about UK blogger Roo Reynolds’ thoughts on Ambient Skype. What’s next?

Philip Howard, the Times’ Modern Manners columnist, offers some sage advice to those of us in a quandry about when to call:

How should one use programmes such as Skype to contact friends? Unlike telephones these programmes tell users when their friends are online. I find it very tempting to call them, but realise they may already be talking to someone much more important to them than I am. What should one do?
Christopher Evans, Shipley, Yorkshire

I should call them, provided that you do not contact them immediately and every time they are on online. It's marvellous that we can contact friends with the touch of a key. The downside is that such continual contacts are promiscuous. We must beware of becoming online bores.

Should we update the Skype etiquette statement to cover promiscuous bores?

Good news for Linux users — Skype for Linux version 2 is now available. Aside from zillions of bug fixes and new language support, the most exciting feature of version 2 is the introduction of free video calls to Linux. This is a feature everyone’s been asking for, so we’re extra-happy to have made it happen.

If you’re a Linux user, head over to the download page and grab a copy — builds are available for Ubuntu, Debian Etch, Xandros, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mandriva and Centros.

For more info, check out Ryan’s post on the Linux blog. He’s quite excited by it too

Just a quickie today — reader Andrew Bruck asked about in-flight internet:

Is it technically possible to offer Skype on an aircraft? In the US it's common to use normal seat-back phones but they're not cheap. Any thoughts on that? You mention Eos and Silverjet who are breaking the mould with their service across the Atlantic and I wonder whether Skype could hook up with an airline and offer Skype in the sky? Or is that just pie in the sky?

While we all wish Skype was available right now on planes, I suspect we might have to wait a bit. However, there are some promising noises coming from the other side of the pond. 15 of American Airlines’ 767s will be equipped with gogo in-flight internet, though given the pricing structure announced yesterday it doesn’t look like it’ll be appearing on the transatlantic routes just yet. For those travelling on transcon flights in the US, however, it’ll be very exciting indeed. Andy Abramson, for one, seems to think so

Ewan, who rather humbly asks why on earth people would want to subscribe to his blog, muses eloquently on the need for greater online civic engagement. He describes the situation at the moment as a bit of a meatball sundae (good book, by the way) — our leaders are providing the cream topping, but what’s underneath is still very much meatball. The Scottish Government ‘blog’ and the PM Petitions website are good examples of cream topping. OK, in its defence, the petitions site provides some (albeit perhaps not wildly accurate) quantitative data on public opinion, but there’s nothing particularly conversational about demanding that Jeremy Clarkson be made Prime Minister.

The people behind the PM Petitions site, mySociety, are doing some interesting work around civic engagement, however. They also have a fun blog which talks about things like how rubbish the HMRC website is, among other things…

Back to the real stuff, though — mySociety makes tools which help people get information out of or into government in the UK. TheyWorkForYou tells you what your MP’s up to, and WriteToThem lets you give them the thumbs-up or thumbs-down. FixMyStreet lets you tell your local authority about the things which make everyday life that little bit more irritating, like broken streetlights and concrete slabs which trip you up.

This isn’t quite conversation either, but it’s heading in the right direction. By making the pieces of the interaction easier to file in the right place (and we know how much government loves filing), it’s more likely that things will happen. And by getting the information out again, it’s easier for us citizens to find out what’s actually being done.

It’s interesting, too, to look at what goes on in the rest of Europe. Switzerland uses a system of direct democracy, with referenda deciding the minutiae of policy, and Estonians do everything online. Of course, again, these aren’t so much conversations as services, but the principles are the right ones.

I’m not saying that genuine civic dialogue is easy — we’re talking about large numbers of people with micro-different opinions in the most part — but when there are issues where mini-macro agreements can be made (school admissions policy for the local secondary, location of a new supermarket, community policing in the local area) there’s a lot to be said for exploring ways in which we can make better use of the internet. It’s around issues like these where I think conversation at a person-to-person level is possible for a reasonable number of participants — and where that conversation can have a relevant impact.

Do you ever feel like you’re in IT prison? I’m lucky to work for a small company, where I am free (pretty much) to buy and use whatever hardware and software I like. If there’s something new I want to try, I download it and use it; aside from having to connect to our company email server and use our file sync software, there are no specific requirements placed on what I do.

I’m basically in IT bliss. No procurement restrictions. No blocked websites. No nagging IT department. But, I’m sorry to say, I’m very much in the minority among my peers who work for larger organisations. Even the mid-size ones like to issue new recruits with standard ‘locked down’ (why does that phrase make me shudder?) laptops and block Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal ran a story yesterday morning about ‘Why Businesses Banish Cool Technologies’ — and my instinctive reaction was to answer ‘because they’re not cool’. It tells a tale of a company which blocks pretty much everything:

[Regulatory requirements mean] banning Skype, the popular online phone service that has instant-messaging software built in, even though many researchers say their clients like to communicate with them through Skype.

Web email is off limits because it’s impossible for the company to monitor what employees say in those messages. People can’t load files onto CDs, USB drives or other devices because there’s no way to control what they do with the data once it’s there.

Of course, a clever commenter pointed out that software from the likes of OnState allows complete logging of Skype calls and chats. Webmail’s trickier, admittedly — and I’m not an expert on the regulatory requirements imposed on financial institutions in the States, though I suspect they’re pretty hideous and distinctly un-cool.

Given all of this beating-technology-back-to-1994, I was really excited by a piece in Technology Guardian yesterday, with the news that BP and Unisys — both megaliths in their own right — are taking a much more enlightened approach to the dreaded corporate IT policy.

BP’s trialling a scheme where employees can opt-out of the standard corporate IT provision, and instead get an annual allowance to acquire their own hardware and software. There are a few restrictions, of course, much like my own situation: employees have to be able to connect to BP’s email and file servers, and respect their security policy, but those don’t seem like unreasonable requirements. The only proviso is this — having opted out of corporate IT, they also opt out of corporate IT support — a move described by Ian Julien, infrastructure and operations manager (and it’s not clear whether this is form the employee or employer perspective) as ‘bloody marvellous’.

It’s not clear whether there are restrictions on purchasing — is there a mandated supplier or lessor, for example? And, of course, the piece makes no mention about internet use; are social networking or shopping websites blocked when using corporate internet connections, for example? Is Skype blocked?

Nevertheless, this seems like a bold move. Of course, the motivation was primarily financial — the desire to shift things off the corporate balance sheet — but Ian Julien says that it’s pretty popular with employees too. I bet they’re seeing more MacBooks around the place for a start.

The broader problem, I suspect, is a product of fear and complacency — yes, there are industries in which regulatory requirements make things more difficult than they might be otherwise. I’m not about to suggest that we allow people at the SIS to send CDs through the post — but then they’re probably smart enough not to do that in the first place. It’s mid-size, unregulated organisations which, in a way, frustrate me most — particularly those with largely professional staff.

If you’re a management consultancy firm, for example, with a few hundred employees, don’t you trust them to make the best use of their time, and not spend all day on eBay? Don’t you trust them not to share client files with their mates down the pub or your competitors? Don’t you think that allowing them more freedom to choose software and hardware would increase their productivity? I’ve written before about how IM in the workplace can be a benefit rather than a hindrance to productivity, for example. But it’s a fear that employees might do something naughty — and a lack of trust in their dedication to suspect that they might — which keeps all of those computers firmly ‘locked down’.

Which is a shame, really — we’re living in a generation of IT innovators, who aren’t necessarily the people creating companies like Skype. I’m thinking about the small-scale innovators. They’re sitting in offices, thinking that it’d be much easier and save thousands of pounds if they could — oh no, wait, they can’t. They can’t install that.

I’d like to extend a warm welcome to the latest addition of our team of international bloggers — this time it’s to Howard Wolinsky, who joins us as our US blogger. If you spend time in the US (and who wouldn’t want to these days with the dollar as low as it is, and disruptive airlines like EOS and SilverJet to take the pain away) — or just want to keep abreast of Skype’s activities the other side of the pond — you can find out all about what’s going on on the new US blog.

Howard’s pictured here (left) being chatted up by Jason Fried of 37signals:

For those of us this side of the Atlantic, Oprah perhaps doesn’t have as big an impact on the media, peoples lives, or, indeed, book sales, as she does in the States, but if you imagine taking Richard and Judy’s influence on the bestseller lists and multiplying it by a hundred, that’s pretty much what happens.

Want to talk with Oprah on a Skype video call?

Well, with Skype you can. Oprah’s going to be discussing Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth every Monday for the next 10 weeks, live and online. Every week, she’ll be taking questions from viewers live using Skype High Quality Video.

For more, visit the Get Ready to be Awakened page on the Skype website.

Photo by our friends over at FeedBurner

In a post about Scotland's new schools extranet/virtual learning environment Glow, John McConnell discusses a question raised at a training session for the system. Glow provides video calling and desktop sharing, and attendee Hilery Williams asked:

Why not simply use Skype?

Of course, Skype does pretty good video calls, and there are plenty of easy ways to share your screen with others.

But, this time, I’m not about to leap to Skype’s defence. There are some clear logistical difficulties — the need to provide a single log on, for example — and some constraints — the need to track user activity. That’s not to say they couldn’t be overcome, but I respect the choices made by Glow’s developers, and John does too:

A national authentication core makes possible a mode of collaboration that simply cannot be replicated easily, or so flexibly, outwith such a system. That is not to say that one is better than another (although many will argue one way or another, of course) - but they are different. Whether they both have validity in terms of their vaue to for learning and teaching is something we can debate.

Ewan McIntosh points to his comment:

For me, however, the central function of the authentication system within Glow is nothing to do with security and everything to do with the collaborative power it generates. We need to see past the ‘safety’ aspects of authentication to the more important capabilities for community building that it infers on the overall system.

and argues this — that the sense of community is, in a way, far more critical to the broader success of systems like Glow than the infrastructure which underpins it.

A virtual community can be close to work, cheap and contain all the conveniences we need to get through our day, but so can some pretty dead meatspace suburbs, where there is no inclination to declare 'community spirit'. Glow, like many 'VLE' online filing cabinets of content before it, could become like this, though I hope and believe it will not.

Likewise, some of broadbandless villages in Scotland, where nothing seems to work properly on a windy day and the 'conveniences' work on a timetable all of their own end up having some of the most enviable community building I've ever seen. For me, this type of village is the socially connected, rather messy world I inhabit online, made up of people living in blogs (houses), wikis (bothies) or Twitter (village notices).

It’s this ‘messy’ online world where I think Skype really shines. It’s fast and lightweight (with no configuration to speak of) and flexible (video, calls, chat, mobile, all in one box; with extras abound to do almost anything else). For the creators and users of Glow, however, the question remains as to whether is will become a ‘ghost town’. I, like Ewan, hope it doesn’t, but let’s hope it can live happily alongside Ian’s ‘exciting village for the future, with its gossips, town halls and bothies’.