I popped along to represent We Are Social at The Albion Society’s latest breakfast debate on Wednesday. Up for discussion was ‘Digital Democracy’ and, boy, what a panel we had: Guardian Editor, Alan Rusbridger, Mumsnet founder, Justine Roberts; Tess Alps of ThinkBox and Dan Thain from Blue State Digital.

Alan was up first and didn’t disappoint. He stated boldly that the media industry was undergoing a massive upheaval that’s splitting the ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ dichotomy of traditional journalism and changing the model of media from one of expected Authority to public Involvement.

Driving this shift is, of course, the Internet – and social web in particular. It’s empowering people to no longer be the passive audience it once was but to want to get involved.

Alan suggested this was a massive, almost inconceivable challenge to journalists but is ultimately leading to better things.

As examples he contrasted the traditional model of foreign affairs reporting: usually written by one ‘expert’ but non-native correspondent. Now we can call up multi-media news content direct from people on the ground with first-hand experience.

Travel news no longer relies on a journalist traveling to a country for three days and writing up their experiences as the average trip. Travel reporting can turn to other traveler’s experiences and those living their lives in the destination.

Complex issues such as tax avoidance which is often too complicated for the average news journalism can be exploded into dramatic news by throwing the investigation and analysis process open to a better informed public.

All of this leads to newspapers becoming focal points for involvement and following Jeff Jarvis’ famous maxim: ‘Do what you do best, link to the rest.’

So how this link to democracy? Well, drawing an analogy with the Authority vs Involvement model, Alan suggested that the attitude some MPs have that they should be trusted because they’re MPs and they deserve our vote is broken.

Smart politicians and parties will understand that political and democratic value in the future will lie in the involvement model. Social media and networks will create a new politics, imbued with greater trust generated through peer-to-peer involvement.

Adapting the concept of online news paywalls, Alan also suggested that while openness was key to fostering involvement, closed (i.e. paywalled) content and networks reinforced perceived authority  and critiqued parliament for still being too closed off from the rest of society. This, he argued, was fueling the crisis of trust being experienced.

Justine Roberts from Mumsnet approached digital democracy from a similar perspective and revealed some fascinating inside facts about politicians courting – and even infiltrating – the leading Mums community.

Justine questioned why so many politicians were keen to get in front of Mumsnet members. She suggested that unlike Twitter which is still largely mysterious to a lot MPs, Mumsnet is an easy concept to grasp: 95% female community; 1m uniques a month; on the media’s radar (since the media claimed the election will be the Mumsnet election) meaning their opinions are more likely to be reported.

Given this high-level of awareness does Mumsnet have any real political power, Justine asked?

Firstly she dispelled he myth of a block vote. Their own internal surveys of members how’s that party support is fairly evenly split across the three main parties. Despite this the BNP was actually caught trying to infiltrate discussions and shape debates towards a fascist/far-right agenda.

Where Mumsnet real political potential lies is through driving single-issue campaigns relevant to members. Justine gave an example where members had vociferously opposed plans by the Government to change the childcare voucher scheme. The campaign eventually caused Gordon Brown to change the unpopular policy.

Given this effect on policy Government was now engaging the community proactively. The wisdom of the community is being exploited by the Department of Health who are involving Mumsnet community members to help develop its policy towards women that have suffered miscarriages.

What this all adds up to, Justine suggested pragmatically, was that while Mumsnet may not have political power in the traditional sense, it certainly has power to mobilize its members in the same way organisations such as 38Degrees can.

“Mumsnet,” she concluded, “is a non-aligned mouthpiece for its community. It’s not a union bloc vote; it’s more like an octopus with pre-menstrual stress.”

Tess Alps from ThinkBox took on the counter-argument by suggesting that without professional media internet conversations would just be “noise”. In terms of democracy she als suggested that while we think that unmediated access to politicians is a good thing when its Obama, what happens when its Nick Griffin. I kind of thought that was undemocratic in itself, but didn’t challenge her.

Tess also suggested that politicians are lazy when they turn to Mumsnet because it’s easier than visiting a working men’s club. Of course, no-one was suggesting politicians shouldn’t visit other communities of voters so this point fell rather flat.

You could equally make the same argument when politicians first clocked that visiting working mens and other social clubs was a good thing to do instead of just talking to the local chamber of commerce when voting rights were extended.

Finally Blue State Digital’s Dan Thain, presented a case study from their anti-BNP Hope Not Hate campaign (it seems the far-right was a recurring theme of the morning).

Dan argued that the campaign, like most political campaigns, was driven by email marketing and reinforced their prowess for all things email – the same strategy that mobilized Obama’s votes in the US election.

Unbelievably the Hope Not Hate campaign has an email database greater than any of the UK’s main political parties – although I wonder how it compares to the BNPs? If you like data driven, transactional email campaigns it’s a great case study.

All in all it was a great breakfast briefing and good coffee too. My beliefs fall firmly on the side of Alan Rusbridger and Justine Roberts.

I was chatting to Justine afterwards and we both agreed that single-issue communities are likely to be powerful tools for political organisation in the future. They are built on social capital and work together to achieve shared goals regardless of traditional party affiliation. While the mainstream media may have coined the term Mumsnet election as a short-hand for the power of that specfic platform, they probably don’t realize how close they are to the truth.

On Wednesday last week, we moved into our new home in Golden Square. We’ve got the whole of the first floor of no. 37 (the building behind us in the photo above – you can see the entrance to our left).

As you can see from the contrast between the photo above and the one from when we moved into the Qube just under a year ago, we’ve grown considerably since then. There are now 24 of us here in London (Jamie is missing from the photo above because he and his wife had their first child yesterday, a beautiful baby girl) and despite Sandrine and Camille kindly freeing up some space by moving to Paris, we needed a place where we have room to grow further. We’re going to miss the plush surroundings of the Qube (and the amazing event space we had there), but we’re looking forward to making Soho our home, especially over the summer months.

And now we’ve got some spare desk space, we’re extending an open invitation to anyone who’s interested in or works in social media, to drop by, grab a coffee, a desk and use our WiFi.

Our full address details are on our contact page – do pop in and say hi if you’re in the area!

On Monday it was a pleasure to be in the audience for Amnesty International‘s event “Is technology really good for human rights?”

Perhaps a few years ago, the answer would have been an overwhelming ‘yes’ from most and a very strong ‘no’ from the odd dissenter or two. Yet at the panel – chaired by Rory Cellan-Jones and with a platform shared by Kevin Anderson, Annabelle Sreberny, Susan Pointer and Andrew Keen – there was a marked measure of maturity and of shared ground between diverse voices.

Andrew Keen has long been one of the most prominent critics of the emergence of social media and the clamour around it, but, over the phone from Washington, provided a balanced view that information technology has been used as much by oppressive governments against their people as it has been used for those fighting for human rights. Keen enthusiastically cited Evgeny Morozov, who talked at last year’s Demos event on the internet’s effect on politics, and is well known for his critique of the Internet in oppressive countries.

But I’d argue there’s something more intrinsic than this. Personally, I believe technologies are not by default open-ended and neutral; they are designed with their designers’ politics and values embedded within them. However they can be co-opted and transformed in their implementation, contrary to their original intent, to wield power. And if technologies didn’t have power for ordinary people, then governments wouldn’t be so keen to restrict their use, whether through technical means – such as blocking and censoring social sites, or the more old-fashioned way like jailing and torturing bloggers (a fact which also shows that governments cannot rely on technology alone to oppress).

This view of technology as a tool was shared by Google’s Susan Pointer, who stressed the important of working together to keep the Internet healthy and continuing to democratise the media. But I found “democracy” an odd word to use – nobody voted for Google to be the number-one site in the world, and there do not exist the systemic checks and balances that exist in a democracy; although there are informal checks on their power, from word of mouth to the comparative quality of their rivals, these are agreed by the community at large, not mandated by the rule of law.

“Anarchy” is often used to describe the online world but even this has its flaws; power and influence are still wielded disproportionately by certain individuals and communities, from celebrities on Twitter spreading good causes and campaigns, to the power users of Digg linking the latest news stories, to the meme-creators of 4chan. There is still inequal power, it’s just distributed and allocated in a different way.

Maybe there’s no right word, no right theory to describe this – yet. Kevin Anderson argued quite correctly that despite digital’s pervasiveness, it’s just too early for us a society to fully get to grips for the implications it has had on social interactions; any key to making digital communications effective for human rights depends on making virtual actions correspond to real ones and this is something we’re still learning.

Perhaps slightly pessimistically, I think that as we push the networked and physical worlds closer together, and the boundary between the two blurs more, it will create further tensions, and not just with oppressive regimes in the fight for basic human rights, but closer to home and different sets of rights as well – witness the clash of cultures taking place right now over the Digital Economy Bill in the UK. But the struggle for human rights is the high watermark of this set of tensions, and consequently the one that attracts the most attention and hence both hype and detraction.

So when stories such as Twitter powering a possible revolution break, and a regime is not toppled, there is inevitably the retrospective criticism that Twitter, or digital technologies in general, fail to promote human rights. Annabelle Sreberny’s account of the Iranian demonstrations however show that the story was much more complex and added some much-needed colour. Before the election demonstrations had taken place in 2009, the Internet had proven vital in organising likeminded people without face-to-face communications, through Iran’s network of bloggers and YouTube users, supported by a sympathetic and well-mobilised Iranian diaspora. The immediacy of Twitter and its similarity to the spontaneity of the protests caught the interest of Western observers, but the grassroots communities, that had formed around their cause, was part of a much longer-term struggle over many years, and that it’s not over yet by any means. Saying Twitter ‘failed’ to liberate Iran is to miss the point entirely.

So what about the answer to the question? Kevin Anderson’s assertion that the Internet had been a net good was met with no disagreement, and even Andrew Keen wouldn’t stretch as far as saying that technology had damaged human rights. Technology alone achieves little, though, and no single technology or website is going to make the difference. People are what make the difference, but it takes the technology to help them make that difference; how the two work together and they use the tools designed for them are what counts, creating the right combination of people’s will and technology. If they don’t fit together for whatever reason – a lack of people with the right skills or connectivity (as is the case in much of sub-Saharan Africa), or an inability to translate sentiment to action (what was widely panned as ‘slacktivism’) – then no breakthrough will be achieved. Getting that fit right is the key to making sure that the answer to the question will be ‘yes’.

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It’s time for We Are Social’s Monday Mashup, our pick of some of the web’s finest social media developments.

PleaseRobMe.com reveals dangers of social networks
If you’re a heavy user of Foursquare and Twitter, you might want to take notice of PleaseRobMe.com. The website made the headlines by highlighting in real-time the whereabouts of people who checked in on Foursquare and shared their location on the web via Twitter. The goal of the three Dutch developers who set up the site was to highlight the dangers of publicly telling others your location on the Internet because it “ leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.”

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.

Facebook become America’s second most popular website, beating Yahoo!
Compete.com revealed that Facebook had surpassed Yahoo as America’s second most popular website.  Facebook drew nearly 134 Million unique visitors in January 2010, compared to Yahoo’s 132 Million visitors.

While traffic figures are important, the blog notes that the real story is around user engagement and on this front Facebook wins hands down:

Check out how monthly Attention (time spent on Facebook.com as a percentage of all time spent online each month) ramps over the past year for Facebook, while both Yahoo and Google show a decrease. In January, 11.6% of all time spent online was spent on Facebook (compared to 4.25% for Yahoo and 4.1% for Google).

The recent launch of Google Buzz is no doubt aimed at eating into the amount of time that users spend on Facebook, but time will tell if Google can be successful here.

MySpace real-time search goes live on Google
MySpace announced on their blog that Google search now picks up publicly available updates from MySpace users in real-time.

… when you search for anything on Google, as part of your search results you will see live updates from MySpace users, including news, photos, and blog posts that they have chosen to publically publish. Further, all of these updates will be ranked to reflect the freshest, most relevant results, making it easier to find the latest information on anything you’re searching for on Google, including the music and artists you enjoy most.

MySpace now joins Twitter as one of the services that are now live in Google’s real-time search, announced last year.

Outlook gets social with LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace
Microsoft announced a number of major developments for Outlook, including a public beta of LinkedIn for Outlook and partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace. The highlights of LinkedIn for Outlook include:

• The ability to connect to your LinkedIn account directly from within your Inbox, and add connections
• The ability to view status updates and photos from connections next to an e-mail message they have sent
• The ability to receive automatic updates to Outlook contact information directly from LinkedIn
• The ability to synchronise mobile contact information with information from LinkedIn

Meanwhile, the Facebook and MySpace partnerships for Outlook 2010 will enable users to more easily connect co-workers and colleagues, as well as friends and family within their Outlook Inbox.

The LinkedIn public beta is available now, and Facebook for Outlook and MySpace for Outlook will be available later this year as the official release of Office 2010 approaches.

Google got the web Buzzing
Last week Google introduced Google Buzz, a social network “built right into Gmail so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch.” This was an aggressive push into social networking for the search giant, who is hoping to capitalize on Gmail’s massive installed user base, estimated at 176 million in December according to Comscore.

Though the launch generated an enormous amount of discussion online last week, Buzz wasn’t well received by all.  Privacy concerns soon dominated the early discussion of the service, and Google was forced to roll out a set of changes quickly to address Buzz’s privacy issues, such as disabling the auto-follow setting.

As users got to grips with how best to use Google Buzz, the tech and social media industry was busy wondering what it all meant for Twitter and Facebook. Less than a week has passed since the announcement, and already there is talk by Google of a ‘standalone’ Buzz site that people can access independently.

Needless to say, the arrival of Buzz was a big development and it’s one that we’ve been following closely here.

London Twestival 25 March 2010
Last week the organisers of London Twestival announced the dates for this year’s event:  Thursday 25th March 2010. Proceeds this year will support education projects of Concern Worldwide.

Mark your calendar and spread the word by following @LDNTwestival, and visiting the London Twestival blog.

BBC tells news staff to embrace social media
Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News this week told BBC news journalists to use social media as a primary source of information:

This isn’t just a kind of fad from someone who’s an enthusiast of technology. I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary.

The Guardian notes that this represents ‘a fundamental change’ in the Beeb’s attitude towards social media, who created a social media post back in October. In the past year, Sky News has also created headlines by appointing Ruth Barnett ( @ruthbarnett) as their social media / Twitter correspondent and by announcing they would be installing Tweetdeck software across its journalists’ computers.

Foursquare seals first major UK brand tie-ups
Foursquare added London to its list of networked cities back in October, and has recently announced that Debenhams and Domino’s Pizza have become the first major UK brands to target consumers via the mobile social network and game:

Debenhams flagship store on Oxford Street offers free coffee to anyone checking in to the store on a Friday. The ‘mayor’ of Debenhams is entitled to free coffee at any time. Domino’s, meanwhile, is offering a free pizza every week for ‘mayor’ of its branches.

While the mobile social network is still in its infancy, it is expected to grow rapidly and presents brands with opportunities to gather insights into customer behaviour and create brand ambassadors. But Foursquare also poses some challenges. BrandRepublic notes that Foursquare also provides players the opportunity to make negative comments on their products and services.

Twitter: Now more than 1 billion tweets per month
According recent research by Pingdom, Twitter passed 1.2 billion tweets per month mark, averaging 39.5 million tweets per day in January. Despite showing signs of stalled growth in August and October of last year, Twitter’s growth over the past 19 months has been huge:

• January 2010 had 16 times as many tweets as January 2009
• The activity on Twitter has doubled since August 2009
• January 2010 saw more tweets per day (39.5 million) than the whole of September 2008

Twitter usage data has been a bit patchy in the past, so it’s important to note that Pingdom’s methodology covered “all tweets, including those made from third-party applications via Twitter’s API. This means that we see the actual activity of the Twitter service as a whole.” And that activity looked a little something like this:

Check out Pingdom’s blog for more analysis.

Facebook Mobile: 100 million and growing
Facebook has hit another very impressive milestone, announcing last week that more than 100 million people actively using Facebook from their mobile devices every month. “This usage happens on almost every carrier in the world and comes less than six months after [Facebook] announced 65 million people on Facebook Mobile.” This follows the recent announcement on their 6^th Birthday that the total number of unique users of the social network has swelled to 400 million.

Happy Birthday Flickr and YouTube
Last week two of the social web’s favourite services celebrated birthdays.  Popular photo-sharing social network Flickr turned 6, while video-sharing service YouTube turned 5 years old. It would be hard to imagine the web in 2010 without either.

Photo CC by fortes

Our friends at Hitwise have just released a study of Internet usage in France which includes a very interesting comparison with UK usage.

Unsurprisingly, social media is the second biggest activity in both countries after search. However, what is surprising is that according to this latest study, French people use social media 21% more than British people.

This is surprising because with both countries with a population roughly the same size, whilst there are 24 million Facebook members in the UK, i.e. more than one in three inhabitants, there are ‘only’ 16 million members in France, i.e. one in four. Proving once again that social media does not just equal Facebook.

As you can see, British people are more slightly more likely to use the internet to make transactions or to search for information whereas French people tend to spend more time on communication and entertainment.

Overall, search and social media activities account for almost a third of internet visits in France (27.57%) and almost a quarter in the UK (22.77%). Bearing in mind the latest industry announcements this week, with the search giant Google going into social, with Google Buzz but also with the acquisition of Aardvark, whilst Facebook is about to launch a fully featured webmail product with its Titan project, let’s have a bet that these market shares will only get bigger.

Torsten Henning Hensel builds on John Grant’s concept of the brand molecule:

And if you liked that, here’s the sequel.

After a couple weeks out of blogging action, I’m back to provide a Monday Mashup with the help of Melina Hägglund. Let’s get to it.

Facebook’s 6th Birtday: 400 million users, new design and webmail rumours
On Thursday Facebook celebrated their 6th birthday and chose the occasion to also announce that they hit 400 million active users – more than doubling their number of users in less than a year.

On the same day, they also decided to announce that they were rolling out some new navigation updates to help users find what they are looking for by making it easier to see notifications, requests and messages. The chat feature was also made more prominent and now shows users a list of online friends in the left-hand menu. For full details and screen shots, visit the official Facebook blog.

Meanwhile, Techcrunch carried rumours of Facebook’s plans to launch a fully featured webmail product in the near future.

‘Project Titan’ will see Facebook move away from its old messaging system to email providing full POP/IMAP support, meaning users can access the account other than through Facebook itself. The email address name would be your vanity URL – e.g. moc.koobecafnull@lruytniavruoy.

OMG: brains can’t handle all our Facebook friends
While Facebook was busy with new designs and birthday parties, Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University has been busy studying how many meaningful friendships a person can actually maintain. According to his original 1990 study, Dunbar’s theory suggested the size of our neocortex limits us to social circles of around 150 friends.

He has since updated his research to determine whether social networks like Facebook have changed this or not. Preliminary results suggest it has not. While social networking sites allow us to maintain more relationships, the number of meaningful friendships is the same as it has been throughout history – about 150.

Engadget turns comments off for a bit
The world’s most popular gadget blog and second most authoritative blog according to Technorati has shut off their comments for a little while. Engadget had this to say about the decision:

What is normally a charged — but fun — environment for our users and editors has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable.

The move was designed to quell the daily abuse from trolls, and after everyone ‘cools off’ Engadget plan on switching commenting back on. This temporary move, according to Mashable, opens a wider debate that has been showing up in one form or another for the last few years:

Should blogs have comments? Should these comments be moderated? When has a comment gone too far? … it’s once again time to rethink these issues.

We’d like to hear what you think.

Tory election hopefuls told their online comments must be approved first
Last week it emerged that Tory candidate will need to submit updates to be vetted before being posted online in an attempt to cut the number of gaffes in the run-up to the General Election. In an e-mail to candidates, they were told ‘electronic publications such as websites, blogs and Twitter have to be approved before they are posted’.  The move received criticism from Labour Twitter Czar Kerry McCarthy who suggested any attempts to control social media comments would simply “destroy the spirit of it… You may put your foot in it from time to time but if you try to control it, it just becomes sterile.”

Vodafone UK Twitter feed abused
And finally, it was a tough close to the week for Vodafone when an offensive Tweet from an employee somehow found its way onto the official @vodafoneUK feed. The offending tweet was quickly deleted, but the damage was done as users captured and share screenshots far and wide. Though social media policies were in place, the rules were breached in a highly public manner leaving Vodafone apologising profusely.