Post-Hej! Backchannel reflections

The two backchannels at Hej! provided by Jaiku and Onelinr was used quite a bit during the conference. I was monitoring the channels and talking to people about them during the entire time of the conference. Here are a few things I noted:

• Total count of posts: Jaiku, 278. Onelinr, 1129. I think there are three main explanations for the difference in the amount of posts. The first one is of course the slight barrier of having to sign up for Jaiku and having to use the Jaiku interface for posting which, IMHO, feels just a tiny bit more complex than Onelinr’s. The second reason is that Onelinr is anonymous, whereas Jaiku is not, and this definitely affects the amount and contents of posts. The third has to do with the fact that Jaiku posts are recorded and tied to one’s identity, while Onelinr posts are not–something that came up when I talked to people.
• On a rough count, there were 51 negative comments written on Onelinr, or 4.5%. 5, or 0.5%, of these I consider severly negative (they should probably have been moderated out). On Jaiku we had 10 negative comments, or 3.6%. 1, or 0.3%, severely negative comment. Generally, posts on Jaiku were more positive and appreciative in character, whereas on Onelinr comments were more “chatter/gossip”-like. This certainly also has to do with the fact that the Onelinr channel is completely anonymous. People don’t want to be pointed out as the “one who complains”. In my opinion, many of the negative or sarcastic comments on Onelinr actually made the discussions and talks more exciting and interesting to watch. But in a few cases I think it would have been good if comments were simply moderated out.
• I’ve for this reason been working on a basic moderation system for Onelinr. It’s very simple; if you log in as a moderator you have “remove oneliner”-permission on one or a number of channels. Several moderators can have permission to the same channel. Moderations are broadcasted live to all connected clients. I’m not yet sure how to solve the problem of giving initial moderator access. Probably it will work like this: if you create a channel the system will ask you if you want to create an account for moderator access. As a moderator you will then be able to give more moderators access to the channel. I will wait with rolling this out until I’ve gathered more feedback.
• I have not yet a system in place to monitor the number of people who are watching a channel. This would however be fairly simple to implement. There were 57 members on the Jaiku channel, and 220 unique visitors to Onelinr during the course of Hej! (Google Analytics).

Finally I’d like to share some of my favorite Oneliners from the Hej!-channel:

• “You can find marketers everywhere, techies nowhere. That says something in itself.”
• “As a user I don’t f*cking “generate” stuff. Create maybe. But am I a USER still?”
• “Optimize your business model, rather than your code.”
• “Mysql. Not invented here.” [on Spotify's proprietary database]
• “Oh dear. World domination is two years away.” [On the Erlang talk]
• “We need a slow motion replay on this.” [On the Erlang talk]
• “Björn is making spectacular sense.” [On Björn Jeffreys talk]
• “N95 wt Flickr+Jaiku = Human 2.0″
• “Hard to make humans do things. You need truzt.”
• “38% dogs unfortunately.” [Reply to Nikolaj Nyholms statement that 62% of all photos contain humans]
• “Users generate users (in the best of cases).”
• “I sell hahah!!! i take money haoohhaa.. i ski in the alps haahaa” [On Johan Stael von Holsteins talk]
• “onelinr = the matrix”

 April 22nd, 2007