Image: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

This morning I spent a considerable amount of time staring at my Facebook News Feed. And by staring, I mean long, lingering confused staring – accompanied by a scratching of the head and the making of a contorted, confused face that looks so charming to the outside world.

Let’s see if you have the same reaction – open your Facebook News Feed, skim-read the names of the people and organisations listed on your feed, and then keeping scrolling. And scrolling. And repeat at least ten times. Now ask yourself – “who are these people?”.

If you’re like me, you’ll find that perhaps the majority of people in your Facebook feed are not your closest friends, or people that you vaguely remember or even care about. Organisations listed are not ones that you engage with very often in your waking life or even give much of a stuff about.

Welcome to Facebook Edgerank.

Edgerank is the most frustrating part of the whole Facebook ecosystem – and, as we know, there are many. It’s frustrating in that for much of the time, it seemingly doesn’t work. It doesn’t do what we want it to do – either as a user or a business. It’s also frustrating due to the fact that when it does seem to work, it works beautifully. If only it would work more often.

So what is it? Edgerank is in the same family as Google Search, in that it is an algorithm that effectively tries to guess what it is that you are really interested in – although unlike Google, there isn’t an easy explanation, or indeed a tried-and-tested process that will get yourself seen by more people.

The harsh reality behind Edgerank is that, in calculating what it believes you want to read, it gives you with around 16% of posts or content published by Friends or Pages that you have Liked. Which means, that 84% of posts from People or Organisations that you have Friended or Liked – that is, directly expressed an interest in – are effectively invisible to you. Or put it another way: the average Facebook user will never see 4 out of every 5 posts published by their network.

And the posts that you do see? Well, see above – that 16% to me feels wrong. Those posts in my feed are chock full of people that I’ve Friended, but barely know. I haven’t visited that business Page recently and I haven’t Liked or commented on their posts. Yet, there they are.  Surely this fact, combined with the 4 out of 5 invisibility ratio, build to what amounts to an Epic Fail on the part of Facebook? When all is said is done, I’m not seeing what I really want to see. There is a world of ideas and content out there I’m passionate about, yet it’s remarkably absent from my feed.

But is Facebook responsible for this Fail?  Yes and no – Edgerank assigns preferences to us, based on our Facebook browsing history. And there is of course a massive difference between what we think we’re interested in, and what we’re actually clicking on. (The truth is often quite terrifying – sure, you read Alain De Botton, so why does your browsing history only show pictures of cats in hats?)

Facebook also assigns a weighting to the post itself, based on its popularity within our network. All this means that you will see some posts from a Friend or a Page, but not everything. You might see a popular photo from a Friend’s night out, but you won’t see their next less-popular post about what they made for breakfast the morning after.

In the words of every great, lame shampoo commercial, “here comes the science” -

Edgerank is based on three core areas: Affinity, Weight and Recency.

• Affinity is calculated by how connected you have been to a Friend or Page in the past. It’s based on your actions – your clicks, likes, comments and shares; and the recency of those actions. The more of these you do with a Friend or a Page, the higher your affinity, and the more you will see them in your Feed.
• Weight is a value assigned by Facebook to a particular post based on the interactions. Here, a Comment is worth more than a Like, a Share is worth more than a Comment. So, posts with a high number of interactions have higher weight and thus more likelihood of appearing in your feed. Look now at your feed, how many posts have no Likes, Comments or Shares? Few, in any, I’ll wager – Weight is a popularity contest. But know this – if your post has no Likes, Comments or Shares, the chances of it appearing in the News Feed of your network are next to zero, so was it therefore worth posting at all?
• Finally, the sci-fi sounding Time Decay – the older the content, the less value it has. This tends to mean that any Post has a rough life-cycle in News Feeds of less than a day.

However, even if you were to master all of the above, and become a ninja of the Edgerank business, there’s a sucker punch – Facebook’s Promoted Posts now allows you to pay cash to pole-vault ahead of the pack. $10 here or $15 there will broaden your Affinity, add more Weight and slow down your Time Decay.

If you’re still reading, chances are you’re getting a little deflated, even borderline depressed by all of this. So here’s a couple of tips for getting the better of Edgerank – not to completely buck the system, but to at least bend it a little and get the most out of it.

As a user -

Image: Outtacontext via Flickr CC

There’s a simple alternative which is not to read your News Feed, but to read everything. At the very top right of your feed, you’ll see an option to ‘Sort’. Click there, and you’ll discover that by default it’s set to ‘Top Stories’ (aka Edgerank-ed content). Change this to ‘Most Recent’ and you’ll see everything, warts and all – all posts by all Friends and Pages.

However, whilst this might seem like a good idea initially, you’re now increasing the volume of Posts in your feed and therefore also increasing the percentage of useless content. There are two alternative options for improving the quality of your News Feed:

(a) Opt Out: When you rollover every post, you’ll see a small arrow top right. Click on that to reveal an option to ‘Hide’ that Post from your Feed. Once you’ve done that, you’ll see two new options:

• For Friends – Change What Updates You Receive, or Organise Who You See In Your News Feed. (This latter option will explain how to move Friends into a list of Acquaintances, or second tier Friends (!), and thus see less of their posts).
• For Pages – Hide all stories, or Unlike them altogether.

For Friends or Pages that you’re really no longer interested in, take action – do the decent thing and remove them from your Feed forever.

(b) Opt In: This requires more effort, but is much more useful. Facebook’s Interest Lists allow you to create a feed from scratch – i.e. build up a new list based on local Friends, or favourite Pages, or any categorisation you like, and you can read that instead of your News Feed. Every person and Page has an option to ‘Add to Interest List’ (use the Gear symbol next to the Message option). All your Lists show up in the sidebar across desktop, mobile and app versions of Facebook. You can of course bookmark a List, or even set a particular List as your browser Home Page, so you’ll always start there, rather than on your Feed.

As a Page manager -If you thought the challenge was just to write solid, regular content, you’re sadly mistaken. There a few magic ingredients (Photos and Photo Albums stand more chance of being Liked, Commented or Shared than a Link; longer Status Updates are generally more popular than shorter ones); however the cold truth is simply this: you need to be more interesting. If you’ve ever read George Orwell’s Animal Farm you’ll understand when I say “All Facebook posts are equal, but some are more equal than others”. You need to rise up and be more interesting than all the other piggies in the feedlot.

Of course, Facebook isn’t oblivious to the fact that relevance is key to its success. The less relevant it becomes, the less we will use it, and so it’s clearly putting more resources behind the issue. Indeed, they recently started to roll out a new Feed design to better categorise and filter options in our News Feed – and they may have already done so by the time you read this post. In which case, some of the above actions listed in this post may have already moved around or been altered significantly – thanks FB

But irrespective of whether the functions change, if you are like most Facebook users and log in daily, it follows that you should really treat Facebook like your home. You need to tidy up once in a while, and every now and then, treat yourself to a good spring clean. You know the feeling – when you turn a sad home into a happy home with a concerted bout of throwing crap into the trash and getting the vacuum cleaner out. Do the same with Facebook and, who knows, you might even start to love it all over again.

The Nest has been named as one of the “Top Ten Forces & Faces in Australian Design” in the latest issue of the renowned national design magazine, Design Quarterly.

In their annual review of the Australian design and architecture industry, Design Quarterly conducted “a rigorous review of the practitioners and business leaders who are injecting new growth and prosperity into the industry – whether through new ventures, inventions, initiatives or activities”.

Dubbing The Nest as “Sydney’s rising star of digital creative agencies“,  Design Quarterly noted that “The Nest’s approach is somehow revolutionary in its simplicity – getting things just right in a perpetually evolving digital sphere”.

Click the image below to read the full article.

Stuart Buchanan, Founder of The Nest, will be appearing on a panel at this year’s Sydney Writers Festival, titled Reading in the E-Future, looking at the ways in which technology is changing the way we read.

The panel includes Eli Horowitz, the co-creator of The Silent History, prosaically  dubbed “a serialized, exploratory novel for the iPad and iPhone”.  Eli was also managing editor and then publisher of McSweeney’s – a journal that became a well-loved publishing empire, blowing a raspberry in the face of literary industry doomsayers.

Also joining the panel is Quintin Schevernels, the CEO of Layar – one of the foremost proponents of mobile augmented reality technology, early to the table and quick to establish a well-deserved foothold in the market.  They recently adapated their business model to target the publishing industry more directly, so it’ll be interesting to hear what Quintin has to say about their upcoming plans and projects.

There’s also Dr Neil James from the Plain English Foundation, cited as “an expert in the rhetoric of writing”.  His latest book Modern Manglish “skewers the worst excesses of buzzwords and suit speak”.

The panel is marshalled by Anna Maguire, blogger and editor of the excellent Digireado, a site dedicated to digital reading and publishing.

Stuart will be talking about the work of Branches, our digital journal Cuttings and our new iPad app for the renowned Australian text, Summer of The Seventeenth Doll.

The panel takes place on Friday 24th May at 1pm at Wharf Theatre 2, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay.  Tickets from swf.org.au.

I came to the conclusion only recent that I am officially a “Magazine Junkie” – and, while we’re at it, I’m also a borderline hoarder. Two confessions for the price of one.

I simply cannot buy enough magazines – trimmed to perfection, bursting with colour and looking resplendent in all their glossy, shiny goodness. I’ve always loved them, and always bought them, but I hadn’t quite fathomed the depth of my obsession until the gargantuan pile next to my bed started to look as it was about to topple over and kill a small child.

You might find some irony in the idea of someone who spends all day every day talking digital, going home and finding solace in a stack of printed paper. If that were true, it would make a good story – but that’s not the angle. I adore magazines both for their bravado and for so beautifully encapsulating a moment in time. Every spread is a new idea, a fresh playpen for design innovation, and it will forever tell us what was so special about ‘right now’. The length of the curatorial hand and the precision of the art direction have both been honed to perfection in the magazine format – every dot on each page has been checked and rechecked before it goes to press. The paper stock, the pantone, the weight, the bleach – everything last tiny detail has been considered. (Perhaps to my other confessions, I can add obsessive compulsive perfectionist?)

In the tsunami of chatter swelling around the idea that “print is dead”, you would be forgiven for thinking that the writing was on the wall for the precious magazine. It’s true that magazines, like most print formats, have suffered in the digital age, as we find new avenues to satiate our fix of specialist information, those finer details, the freshly snapped photos and the wild ideas. Quite simply, magazines (for all their finesse) cannot keep up with the temporal nature of the web – it is simply too fast, too spritely, too god damn nimble. Of course, most magazines have their own web sites, social media pages, blogs, Instagram channels and more besides – but this is not the same experience, not by a long shot. These channels are merely fragments, a tasting plate and not the full ‘eat all you want’ buffet. As newsprint titles have found time and time again, the more editorial you give away for free, the less likely people are to buy your title.

The other longstanding (i.e. centuries old) issue for print titles is that of distribution. How do you get your printed publication into the hands of your readers, and do it quickly? One downside of living in Australia, on the underside of the globe, is that publications from Europe and America sadly do not arrive here instantaneously, as if by magic. Rather, they take a long time – weeks, or months even. If you’re lucky, some of the more popular titles might come with a “Latest Issue By Air” sticker on the front, denoting that they’re merely three weeks old, not three months past their sell-by date. Wherever we are on the globe, however close we live to a forward thinking newsagent, we cannot ever have access to those print titles instantaneously. We can’t feel that sense of “newness”, the feeling that something important has arrived, brand new, in our hands, within mere moments of the publishers declaring it to be “ready”.

Or can we?

Well, hello ‘digital publishing’.

With the advent of this new medium, most major print titles are now actually available for you to read at the very same moment as they being loaded onto a palate in a factory somewhere in darkest regional back-of-beyond. They’re available to read on your iPad, your Android tablet, your Kindle Fire and more besides. They arrive immediately, via official magazine apps, and often cost much less than if you we’re picking them up off the shelf. Every week, more and more titles that you love are debuting on tablet devices, and most of them carry an easy subscription model that will deliver the new issue to your tablet while you sleep.

You will now be rightly asking the question “but surely the experience is not the same”? After all, I did make a passionate case for print only a few paragraphs ago – some rant to do with weight, and smell and colour and the like. I know, but stay with me.

One of the arguments against the e-book format is that they don’t feel like a “real book”. I couldn’t agree more. They don’t feel anything like books, no matter how much Apple invest in trying to fake the experience with wooden-panelled iBookshelves and ropey curled corners.

For me, the joy of books is that every book is different – forget about the words on the page for a moment (admittedly an odd request), consider rather that every book looks different. The cover image, the back cover type layout, the spine colour, the choice of font, the line spacing, the chapter layout – each book handles these very differently, whereas (with the exception of the cover image), e-book readers handle these all the same, all the time. All that is unique about the book design is stripped away in the e-book format, in many respects removing a disturbingly large slice of its unique essence. The book has become entirely homogenised and thus much less interesting.

Magazines, however, are a different beast. The digital edition of magazine titles not only allows the magazine to retain every pixel of its original design, it can also take that design somewhere else entirely. When digital publications first emerged, much was made of the fact that they were often ’pixel for pixel’ translations. This was a fundamental fail – magazines were often twice the size of the tablet, and thus became almost impossible to read when reduced. Pinching and zooming every page is no way to be enthralled.

Fortunately, the next (and current) wave of digital magazines is writing that wrong. The brave new world of the empty page can now be filled with all manner of wonders. Magazines are often now being radically redesigned for tablet, or in some cases, are even going ‘tablet first’. Legibility is often no longer an issue. What’s more, designers of these titles are increasingly aware of what works when it comes to augmenting the title with photographic slideshows, animated illustrations, interactive diagrams and embedded videos. All of these elements, far from being the emperor’s new clothes, are genuinely enhancing our reading experience – immersing us deeper into the content and context of the magazine format.

There is also the major consideration of the environmental impact of print – we could, forgive the pun, write a book on that subject alone. Consider the ridiculous environment footprint required to bring magazines to our door – particularly international titles, straddling oceans and continents for our moment of pleasure. That alone beggars belief, but also look around you in cafes, venues and stores and you’ll find piles of free papers, magazines and brochures, waiting to be monetarily consumed and then discarded. That’s literally truckloads of obsolete print waiting to be sent back to the recycling dump. But I digress…

As both a magazine junkie and a firm believer in the advance of digital culture, ‘digital publishing’ has become the sweet spot for me. It has everything I love about magazines (considered and curated content, married with excellence in design) with everything I love about digital (fast access, interactivity, engagement, currency).

That’s why we’ve started up a sister company to The Nest, an offshoot that could only be called ‘Branches‘. It specialises in the delivery of digital publishing, interactive magazines, books and brochures – and, with The Branches Imprint, we’re publishing our own titles too. Our quarterly anthology of new Australian writing “Cuttings” was released this week, and our interactive version of the classic Australian play “The Summer of The Seventeenth Doll” will land next month, in a collaboration with Currency Press.

As for my precarious tower of bedside magazines, it is now slowly dwindling as those same titles find themselves magically transported onto the iPad. And, you’ll be pleased to hear, small children are still alive to tell the tale.

The Nest’s apps for the Art Gallery Of New South Wales are this week featured in Concrete Playground’s list of ‘Ten Best Art Apps’.  Described as “an online weather vane pointing you to the cultural tornadoes that are just about to hit”, Concrete Playground prowls Sydney, Melbourne,  Brisbane and Auckland to pluck out the best of what’s happening in the arts and cultural worlds.

Of our ‘Contemporary’ and ‘Australian’ apps for Art Gallery Of New South Wales, they say: “Produced in association with The Nest, the Art Gallery of NSW’s two companion apps for iPad do a couple of things really well: they provide richly detailed vision of the gallery’s most celebrated works, and they do it in a really interesting interface that encourages browsing by feel and intuition. Once you focus on a work you like, you can also take in additional material, such as sketches, photos, and curator insights.”

The top ten list  also includes apps from the Tate, MOMA and Sydney’s Museum Of Contemporary Art.  Read the full article at concreteplayground.com.au.

Find out more about the apps and the stories behind our work for Art Gallery Of New South Wales on our Case Studies pages.

A new study reveals how arts audiences are using mobiles before, during and after arts events – and how they’d like to be engaging in the future.

When asked by arts clients about how audiences are using technology, I often reference the 2011 Australia Council For The Arts report, Connecting Arts Audiences Online. This was a much-needed reality check, offering real data about digital engagement amongst local arts audiences. It remains a handy tool and is worth further investigation, however the bulk of the research would have been carried out in late 2010 or early 2011, and its currency is therefore dating fast. Two years in digital terms is an epoch, and we can’t now vouch for the integrity of much of the data.

Enter Group Of Minds, and their Principal Ron Evans. I had the good fortune to hear Ron speak at the 2012 Australia Council Marketing Summit – seeing him talk, I initially thought to myself, “here’s a man who loves his data”. Yet it became clear that Ron was more than just a number-cruncher – pragmatic and level-headed he may be, but he was also clearly passionate about how hyper-relevant data could force us to challenge and rethink our approach and our strategies. It’s there to be interrogated and understood, and – even when it smacks in the face with a home truth we’d rather avoid – it’s there to be used.

In 2009, Group of Minds Arts were commissioned by Arts Council Silicon Valley to “research the mobile preferences of arts patrons”. The research was updated in September of last year after a three-year gap, and as Ron notes in the introduction to the findings: “The goal of the research was to discover current usage of mobile phones in relation to arts activities; measure potential near-future usage; and explore key expectations for the medium in preparation for building mobile-based apps and websites for U.S. arts consumers“. The sample size was approximately 2,000, made up of active users of online arts sites, spread across six cities.

I’m interested in this data as it is representative of a traditional, mainstream arts demographic (the largest group of respondents was aged 48-62, with 72% of respondents being female). Forget about how younger audiences are forging a new paradigm for mobile engagement, this report should help to answer a different question – do older, mainstream arts audiences really want to engage using mobiles? And if so, how?

Here’s some key points that I pulled from the report:

• 38% of users owned iPhones, compared to 25% owning Android devices (21% noted that they didn’t own a web-enabled smartphone, the remaining percentage were users of phones such as Blackberry, Windows and such like)
• 70% said they would use their phone to look up arts events, and 19% had already visited an arts organisation’s social media channels on their phone. However, 54% say they use Facebook either all the time or “sometimes,” so there’s a clear disconnect between their everyday use of those channels, and their willingness to engage with arts organisations through the same method.
• 16.5% had visited a mobile-optimised site belonging to an arts organisation — this number is sure to grow as more and more sites are updated for mobile usage. However, 39% said that they had researched event info on their phones – which suggests that a large percentage are getting a less-than optimal mobile experience when they land on a site.
• 50% claimed to have used their phones to take photos before, during or after a performance, 21% shot video, and 32% used Facebook in the same situation (were they sharing, or just bored?)
• 21% have used mobiles to buy tickets – again, this figure will significantly increase when the end-to-end purchase can be completely fulfilled on mobile
• When asked “what mobile features would improve your experience of arts and cultural events?”, directions, proximity and parking information all scored a large 75%, 78% and 79% respectively. 58% wanted information on places to eat and drink nearby. Interestingly, 39% said that they wanted better ways to send info about the event to their friends, and 25% wanted content from the organisation that they could repost on social media

So here’s my key takeaways – the dot points from the dot points, if you will:

• Mobile use patterns, along with the requirements and expectations of audiences far outstrips supply – the % of mobile optimised sites is still worrying low, compared to the number of requests that are being made
• People want practical assistance when ‘on the go’ – a desktop experience might sell the sizzle, but a mobile experience needs to offer logistical support related to the actual visit (and potential social activities before and after)
• There’a a demand for content to share, a demand to take photos and videos – whether they think in these terms or not, arts audiences want to act as ambassadors, tell their networks about their experiences and encourage them to attend. Yet many organisations are still blocking that pathway – often actively discouraging this type of activity. You needn’t be opening the floodgates for audiences to video all performances, but rather finding ways to offer more sharable content via social media, and offering ‘moments’ where photography is not only permitted but encouraged.

Ron offers his own recommendations and findings in the conclusion of the report – which you can download free from the Groups Of Minds web site. Of course, there’s also a handy mobile-optimised version of the report – perfect for a quick browse while you’re waiting for the curtain to rise at your next theatre show.

How does this compare with your own research or expectations?  What sort of mobile experience should you be offering your audience or customers?