This raises some really fantastic prospects for future service deliveries to meet real needs – I’m thinking crowd-sourced accessibility – captions written on the fly, support for cognitive disability etc. and raises the profile of many issues in analysis of content that we need to solve in technology and in society – its really exciting. It seems to me that unfettered tweets are likely to reflect the nature of “the crowd”. I suspect for example they will follow some kind of median behaviour patterns – full of racism, homophobia, culturism and similar biases, having a focus on the median view, within 70 percent of the bell curve. Some people will feel excluded, some will feel abused by others and so on.
What do we need to solve to use this kind of thing meaningfully in a way that benefits us all ? We need technological support for AND an *applied* understanding of mechanisms of community growth and attitudes – how these work together. Specifically we need to support:

Cultural adaptation
Inclusion and how it works (and how it doesn’t) in community growth
Content analysis that supports these

and we need to build into the tools the respect for these matters that is somehow paid lip-service to in our societies but not completely and often ignored completely in unawareness. Building a global or even local system that incorporates the violence that is so visible in our other societal systems – providing automated support for systems that only work with “the norm” – would be disastrous – doing so may well amplify the negative aspects of our societies – what we all feared in cyberpunk science-fiction. However, I don’t think that will happen – I think we *will* learn to understand these things in society and support them in technology – we will be forced to because anything else simply won’t work.

As I see it, we are reaching a point where human moral growth and technological growth really do interact in an iterative spiral of growth – its two-way. This is something to do with scale. It really is an exciting time to be alive.

andy

Note that I first installed Zeebox in December and used it in a pub just before Christmas, while a Jane Austen documentary was on the TV. When I spotted a “Zeetag” saying “sexually transmitted diseases” (illustrated) I did think the service had been spammed but when I saw a repeat of the programme a few days later those words were said in the documentary.

I will be interesting to see if “second screen” do take off, especially in light of the opportunities for misuse.

In addition to the question of possible misuse related to user-generated context, this software also raises the interesting question as to who ‘mints’ the programme tags around which the content is aggregated. The BBC and other channels may have their own tagging schemes to ensure programmes can be uniquely identified, but in reality we’ll use “Sherlock” for Sunday’s programme.

I also wondered how authentic the tweets will be, especially for more obscure programmes. Will people be paid to try and build the appearance of a community around programmes? Or might tweets even by generated automatically?

Lots of interesting issues!

Note that I was looking at Zeebox during Borgen on Saturday night, and found it too difficult to concentrate during subtitled programmes. I agree that radio is different,

Note that there were only a few dozen of visits to the posts last night and none only two appeared to be from the BBC:
http://www.live.bbc.co.uk/buzztracker/buzz/moderation/bd060b61e0b82620274e6d6cc8922a48 and
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00m5wm7/buzz

I think there are probably still quite a few usability/attention splitting issues to address, though…

One thing that interests me is how we might be also able to use secondscreen ideas to augment radio…

PS did you get much traffic to this post last night? I’m sure I saw a link to it in the buzz listing around the programme, but then it seemed to disappear (or maybe I just imagined it? If it was there and anyone clicked through, it’d show in your logs as a referral from the BBC.)