An issue of quality versus quantity

Convergence Culture:Mobile phones are only using a fraction of their technological potential, writes Haydn Shaughnessy

News organisations around the world have been trying for a decade to figure out how to make use of the mobile phone - your mobile phone and the fact that you have a camera and can record pictures and sounds. Famously, members of the public captured the O'Connell Street riots and the London Tube bombings, but these events are thankfully rare.

A new website, Geo-stories.com, set up by the BBC and Nokia, attempts to take mobile-phone content a stage further than simple recordings of important events. Armed with mobile phones, a group of students in the UK were asked to record narratives rather than snaps or raw video. The results are on the site. I don't find the photo and video compilations particularly compelling as content. I wouldn't pay the mobile-phone charges to view them. But they point a way forward in an important area of creativity.

"We have the phenomenon now of constant partial attention," says Mark Hardwick of Ymogen, a London-based company that helped produce the narratives for the BBC/Nokia pilot, "which is to say we consume in very different ways; not listening, for example, to a CD from beginning to end but being surrounded by many media objects - the PC, TV, MP3 player, a newspaper, and by homework and other tasks. Kids today are very good indeed at switching their attention and focus between these. That's something we have to work with." Hence the Geostories project used students.

One of the big unanswered questions for broadcasters and websites who want to use user-content is how to manage its volume. Organisations that encourage viewers to send in material are often overwhelmed by the amount they get.

Some kind of automated compilation will offer a way to create cheap but not necessarily low-quality content. Consequently, Ymogen is now working on ways to allow a viewer to choose his or her way of viewing narratives. That could be, for example, by saying: show me all narratives created in Dublin, or Cork, or show me all narratives involving men, or women, or holidays or sports. These techniques offer viewers category-based access points to content. The creative puzzle, though, is how to give those compilations additional value.

Ymogen along with many in the mobile industry believes the very fact of mobility offers a clue.

Phones know where they are and so does the phone network. Connected into a mapping project such as Google Earth, it should be possible to enrich a narrative by allowing a viewer to select different perspectives on the physical space in which a narrative or narratives take place.

The technology behind these associations is simple enough - people tag different aspects of their narratives. A tag is just a key word that you associate with an event, person, or circumstances. Tagging is like free-form categorisation. You choose a tag word and the software on a site such as Geostories delivers up all narratives associated with that tag. To put it in a more concrete way, what if The Irish Timeswere to allow you to save and tag stories on its website. At the end of the year, as Christmas comes along, you may wish to do your own overview of 2007. You could, for example, organise everything you've read and tagged in The Irish Timesthat mentions Roy Keane or Bertie Ahern or Wicklow or Kinsale.

Now what if it allowed you to select stories based on events where you were present, to view those stories through your mobile, and to access satellite images and 3-D renderings of those locations? You would be at the centre of a rich narrative.

Tags are increasingly associated with places and not just documents. On Google Earth it is possible to tag locations. Projects such as Yellowarrow.net which encourage people to tag places are also adding to the ways that people are interacting with geography. Large companies who own well-known brands are also starting to get involved. "We are working with brands to see what we can do with their customers who are also producing content," says Hardwick. The overall objective is to let groups, whether you call them customers or communities, to co-produce meaningful accounts of what they do, their lives, their day, whatever, to have that appear on websites with as little editorial intervention as possible, but for it to be one step up the ladder of constant partial attention from a YouTube clip. Amen to that.

http://www.geo-stories.com/

www.yellowarrow.net

http://earth.google.com/