O’Conall Street

Blogging councillors. What next?

Belfast’s latest young gun, the SDLP’s Cllr Niall Kelly (Balmoral DEA) has jumped into the blogosphere head first and to date his online musing are proving insightful and entertaining. I understand from Cllr N Kelly (the other being Cllr Bernie Kelly, also SDLP, also Balmoral DEA) that he intends uploading details of council business and regular news for constituents as well as his own general political commentary.

As a communications tool, blogging, digital and social media offer councillors a real opportunity to communicate in a time and cost effective manner with all their target audiences as well as allowing them to campaign on a broader range of issues online then they could ever do through traditional media.  

Check him out at BelfastStoop.com . He posted a fun Youtube video the other day on the US election which I am unashamedley uploading on O’Conall Street.  

Advocacy has broken out in the Lakeland county ahead of the Ulster Final showdown with the other orangemen - Armagh. Two songs, two you tube videos and all from a county with a pretty small population. 

Have been trying to get my head around the implications of yersterday’s court ruling in the States against Google, the owners of YouTube. TechCruch has an incisive and interesting and challenging perspective on the judgment which is reproduced below.

 The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle.

Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, issued the opinion and order.

That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.”

Meanwhile, the judge denied Viacom’s request that Google turn over YouTube’s source code as it could “cause catastrophic competitive harm to Google by sharing them with others who might create their own programs without making the same investment.”

I can understand why Judge Stanton, who graduated from law school in 1955, may be completely and utterly clueless when it comes to online video services. But perhaps one of his bright young clerks or interns could have told him that (1) handing over user names and a list of videos they’ve watched to a highly litigious copyright holder is extremely likely to result in lawsuits against those users that have watched copyrighted content on YouTube, and (2) YouTube’s source code is about as valuable as the hard drive it would be delivered on, since the core Flash technology is owned by Adobe and there are countless YouTube clones out there, most of which offer higher quality video.

YouTube’s core value is in it’s network effect - the library of content along with its massive user base.

The privacy fallout of this ruling is spectacular. The EFF has already chimed in, noting that the order is highly likely to be in violation of federal law.

Judge Stanton doesn’t seem to care much about that law, for now. And he clearly doesn’t understand that far more data is being transferred than is necessary to comply with Viacom’s core stated concern, which is to understand the popularity of copyright infringing v. non-infringing material. Viacom has asked for far more data than that, and there’s only one use for that data: to sue individual users (or shake them down via the threat of lawsuit, which has been perfected by the RIAA) who have watched a few music videos or television shows on YouTube.

I say this with the utmost respect, but Judge Stanton is a moron. And Google simply cannot hand this data over without facing a class action lawsuit of staggering proportions.

I am spending the day in Nottingham with the Directors of the British Geological Survey (BGS). Last night Dr Marie Cowan was bringing me up to speed with some of the BGS’s recent communications initiatives. Marie is one of a growing number of scientists who see the value in science communications and its role in attracting young people into Earth Sciences.

The BGS joined YouTube last week when it posted a short video on a role play day for sixth form students during which they consider the arguments for and against a planning application for a quarry in an area of special scientific interest. We used this role play model to great success back in Belfast. In our case the case application related to a gold mine in the Sperrins, very topical in the context of this weeks news from Conroy Exploration that they believe the potential for the Clontibret site is much greater then previously thought. The video is an excellent first step into YouTube for BGS. The potential to use social and digital media to platform science communication is immense and I am sure we well see much more where this came from.

In Colombia the family of Ingrid Betanourt will be celebrating her release after six years under FARC captivity in the jungle. Her cause was another examples of a cause which has been keep alive on facebook and other social networks as well, of course, as being a major international news story.

Finally less then a year after announcing the closure of its Limavady plant, Seagate Technologies has detailed a £120 million investment in Derry. I have not had a chance to see the full details of the announcement but hope this will see further high added value activities coming to the North.

The Irish Times  today goes free to view on the World Wide Web and not a day too soon. I posted previously about the irony that a decade ago the Guardian website and Ireland.com competed for roughly the same market share. That all changed with GuardianUnlimited went free stealing the march on the other major independently owned, progressive broadsheets in Britain and Ireland.

I have no doubt the Irish Times online readership will increase and increase exponentially from today and that Ireland’s share of voice in the digital and social media space will also increase as Irishtimes.com stories become available to share. To get the ball rolling on O’Conall Street, there is a story today about the IDA warning the southern government of the potential threat to foreign direct investment from the North which is well worth a read.

One of the first significant opportunities for the Irish Times to increase its profile in global terms will come when the government takes the inevitable decision to rerun the Lisbon Treaty referendum.

Meantime and much closer to home the ‘big four’ political parties north of the border are now turning their attention to the selection of candidates for the European elections next June. I can see no reason why Bairbre de Bruin will not be on the Sinn Fein ticket and Jim Nicholson should be safe as the UUP standard bearer. As for the DUP and the SDLP, things are still very much in the air.

The SDLP is under real pressure of identify a candidate capable of a credible run. The party may also want to take the  opportunity to test possible future more permanent arrangements with other partes on this island. The nomination process was reopened last month and members have until the end of August to nominate with a selection convention / special conference rescheduled September 20th in Belfast. It will be interesting to follow the debate over the summer. Will the only pro Europe party in the North opt for a seasoned stalwart or is their an outsider waiting in the wings? Either way the succesful nominee will face a long uphill marathon run to put him or herslf in the final shakeup.

Peter Robinson will not be looking forward to this particular election. Jim Allister will vigoroulsy defend his seat from the dissident DUP corner. There has been some talk that Edwin Poots might be the DUP nominee. On the other hand a William McCrea, Lord Morrow or even Ian Paisley Junior could make formidable challengers for the Belfast barrister.

With a more fragmented unionist field then ever before and Sinn Fein on the back foot on issues like education this may be the most open European Parliament Election since 1979.  

Am speaking at a conference on lobbying in Europe today and have been researching the reaction to the Lisbon Referendum and how that might impact on the nation’s influence in Europe. 

Scanning the news coverage and commentary from across the EU things are not good for Ireland. With the sole exception of the notoriously eurosceptic Czech president, the other 25 premiers left Brian Cowen in no doubt as to how determined they were to progress with ratification.

The no campaign are on a roll. Republican blogs are proclaiming the nation’s blow to European imperialism and making no bones about the fact that their ultimate goal is to hold back the tide of European integration by painting the EU as some monstrous superstate not a collection of sovereign ones. It’s all a bit ironic given the potential to use the EU to push a united Ireland agenda.

Couple of pieces on You Tube sum it all up. First the Apre Match boys then a video from someone on the no side with their take on things.

I have been asked to speak at a Royal Irish Academy seminar on geoscience tomorrow in Parliament Buildings which is being led by Garth Earls, the Director of the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland, and have been canvassing expert opinion on how to best illustrate the gap between many scientists and the press. Dr Marie Cowan, the British Geological Survey’s communications manager pointed me to a very useful report on science and society which was published earlier this year by Research Councils UK.

I’ll be using some of the findings in my presentation but was taken by the positive trend in public perceptions of science.  Through the 1990’s and early noughites public scepticism of science was at very high levels. Fueled by Chernobyl, Foot and Mouth and the perception that science had become too close to business many scientists and institutions responded by distancing themselves from public debate and the media in general although this trend is slowly changing.

My research for tomorrow’s speech threw up another great story, that of Carl Sagan, which highlights the internal barriers to communication within the scientific community.

In 1992, the astronomer, author of twenty books translated worldwide, an enormously successful television series and a Hollywood film, was denied membership to the National Academy of Sciences.

In fact he was not able to raise the required two-thirds vote from its members. Director of the Laboratory of Planetary Studies at Cornell University, Sagan had distinguished himself for the calculation of the greenhouse effect on Venus, for his studies on the surface of Mars and on the oceans of Titan, Saturn’s large moon. Too many colleagues turned up their noses at his tireless activity in spreading scientific news, which had made him, perhaps the most famous scientist in the United States, and one of the most vibrant defenders of science in the world.

Two years later the National Academy of Sciences reconsidered its vote, honouring him with the Public Welfare Medal. Sagan had brilliantly challenged two important prejudices which besiege scientists that choose to communicate with
the general public: the idea that scientists who do are distracted from their “real” work – research – and the idea that scientists are not able to express themselves clearly, as if their mental universe were so far from the common man that at the very least they need a “translator”.

It has been very interesting to track how society has reacted to Iris Robinson MP, MLA’s comments on gay people. Whilst there is a small but well organised lesbian and gay lobby in the North of Ireland, reaction from members of that community has been spontaneous and driven by separate individuals rather than strategic or coordinated.

A decade ago it would have been very difficult for a disparate group of people to keep a debate going for this long as the traditional media would not have been able to accommodate the diversity of views or such a widespread response. The media traditionally go to representative groups for comment because programmes or newspapers simply do not have the time or the space to allow a conversation to continue in such an unstructured fashion. This is why organised lobby groups get a much greater share of voice. They provide the traditional media with a single voice, tipping the balance of influence in favour of coordinated campaigns and organised groups at the expense of the individual.

What is so different today?

Firstly the media has changed. All over the world the broadcast media has become more audience driven. The Nolan Show is a case in point. Producers and editors are surrendering more control to the listener and allowing the conversation to continue off air via websites. The same is happening with the print press where a story is now more widely debated through online comments. Finally blogging and social networks allow individuals to act and campaign without having to secure airtime or even be quoted in a news story.

For example, this week two gay men, John O’Doherty and Andrew Muir used the media to publicise actions they proposed taking to hold Mrs Robinson to account. Both are politically active, John in the SDLP and Andrew in the Alliance although he was also an SDLP member for some years.   As such they would have some experience of the media and the means and experince to get themselves on air.

Others have been doing their own thing outside the traditional media. Over the past two days a Facebook group has been created under the banner ‘Northern Ireland does not need homophobic politicians’ and a petition has been launched on the 10 Downing Street Website.  The latter has collected 732 signatures at the time of writing. A Google blog search shows over 200 sepearte posts on the issue in the past five days.

So despite the introverted nature of northern society it appears social and digital media is becoming increasingly popular and advocacy driven campaigns are spontaneously igniting when an issue captures the public imagination.

It will be interesting to see if this influences the Assembly’s response over the coming months.  

Croke Park had plenty of seats empty on Sunday for Dublin’s Leinster opener with Louth. This surprised me as Ticketmaster.ie  had no tickets to sell from last Wednesday.

It would be great to see some action from headquarters to address the weekly scramble for tickets and to ensure that where there are significant returns from clubs these are made available online. Opening the ticket office on Jones’ Road or Parnell Park is fine if you work on live on the North Side but not the fairest way of ensuring Dublin fans across the country have access to tickets on an equal basis.

Sorry for the indulgent nature of this post. As our Chris Brown (still ecstatic after Down’s draw with Tyrone) spotted in Private Eye this month. All too much blogging is….

There has not been a post on Slugger O’Toole, Ireland’s top political blog since yesterday (Sunday) at 6.24pm which is most unusual. I am presuming this is a technical glitch but have not had this confirmed.  Everyone on O’Conall Street hopes this influential and informative site is back in business soon.

What a day to go down boys.