Out With A Bang

I’ll apologise to anyone in advance who hopes I might be able to deliver a technical explanation of how ‘backchat’ works; as I explained in the response to Tom’s comment…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=185

…on such matters of plumbing I defer to my honourable web producer and tech-meister Neil [Mason] and Karl and the crew at ETT; oh and Jamie [Arnold] and friends at 4iP… Neil might be tempted to add a comment later.

But, in essence, what we’re striving to do is dish up Mr Arnold’s hope for a ‘platform agnostic’ conversation tool.

Yes, we go looking for that #NCFC ‘tag’ on Twitter; just as Mr Fry encourages his followers to get their #oscarwildeday ‘tweets’ in.

But Twitter isn’t the only micro-blogging show in town; and there was a feeling of asking a largely uncertain football audience to start ‘twittering’ might be an ask too far… which is why we also use Jaiku as a conversational platform.

We can issue invites out of it and just enjoy a little more control over our new crowd.

Plus – for all their faults on the ultra local/niche advertising scene – Google clearly aren’t that daft. They bought Jaiku for a reason; very probably there’s some clever stuff about to emerge out of that platform that will run out of their G1 phone and Android thinking; this certainly made for an interesting read whilst we were putting our various pipes together…

http://jonmulholland.com/2007/11/19/what-google-has-planned-for-jaiku/

This guy strikes me as smart. And when it came to our 4iP ‘pitch’ and our decision to go down this ‘platform agnostic’ route, this line made it onto the PowerPoint…

‘Jaiku potentially gives Google the Holy Grail – time relevant, location based targeting of information, personalised to a very high degree. Google + Jaiku is not a million miles away from being able to push appropriate advertising to individuals based on their profile, their location and their availability…’

So, if all of us in media – new and old – are on the trail of the ‘Holy Grail’, then that all sounded quite intriguing… yeh, yeh let’s have a piece of that…

Drill that down to my kind of street-level in NR1 and I’m presuming that means that MFW’s ‘backchatters’ of the future can find themselves being offered a £5 pint and pie offer from the ‘Coach & Horses’ pub as they walk down Thorpe Road on the way to the ground.

Not saying that then pulls me a revenue stream, but makes it more attractive for punters to sign up for ‘backchat’ if that’s one of the benefits; likewise you could ‘backchat’ from a bar in New York and with that location-finding stuff, you could then discover that a fellow NCFC ‘backchatter’ was in a bar one block away… so you’re pulling your community together; drawing them ever closer to the camp-fire.

All the time, it is MFW and ‘backchat’ that is seen as the ‘enabler’; yes, it’s Google’s kit but we’re the ’service provider’ in a sense; we’re making the life of our passionate niche community that much easier… and, hopefully, picking up brownie points as a result.

We’re doing them a favour; not making their life harder.

Plus, if the world really is to become one where armies of ‘micro-citizen-publishers’ rule the Earth, then we need to construct a means of ’sucking’ up feeds and thoughts not just from Jaiku or Twitter, but from whatever next micro-blogging/publishing device lies around the corner.

And if we order, curate and manage it right, then the next stage will be to pump it out as our own RSS ‘conversation feed’; plus in this new ‘link economy’ world of ours, I have no qualms whatsoever in offering space at my table for the BBC to offer live links to audio clips off BBC Radio Norfolk or wherever.

That a badged-up BBC bod wanders through that ‘backchat’ conversation offering up his or her audio, if not video clip, wares.

Heh, if the Newspaper Society don’t want to dance with the local devil, I bleeding will… might as well get something for my licence fee.

I’m never going to be a radio station; I’ll do what I do best and then [offer] links to the rest.

BBC Radio Norfolk principal among them.

So, there’s a few thoughts; what, four days into the life of ‘backchat’. But I’ve no doubt that many more will spring up a long the way…

Tis a voyage of discovery. For now, no more than that.

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