This is a presentation I put together for a gathering of facilitators on IDeA’s Communities of Practice platform on the hot topicof social meda tools. I hosted it at the excellent SlideShare.

This video is a great intro to RSS. Tags: rss

I’ve got a Logitech 250 headset, which I mainly use for Skype calls. All of a sudden though, it’s been producing the most awful crackling sound, making it effectively unusable. Anyone know what the problem might be? Update: Whatever it…

One of the cool things about a single pound being worth more than $2 is that geeks like me can buy domain names on the cheap. For example, the other week I got a .net domain for less than a…

from Gaping Void.

Note the hilariously positioned bird poo. Tags: chirk+castle, hercules

Am pretty impressed with Google Groups, having had the need to play with it for a couple of days. More here. Tags: google+groups, lgnewmedia

Following the makeover that Living Without Microsoft has recently been given – and the upturn in activity that the site has seen as a result – I’ve been beavering away on WikiSpaces putting together a wiki for resources on how people…

Since I started Free as in Beer, I’ve come across a few of apps which have become essential: Evernote Zulupad Launchy If anyone who reads this blog has some favourite freebies, let me know! Tags: freeasinbeer

I mentioned Ning a few posts ago, and in the comments Steve Dale pondered whether it could be used to power a virtual community of practice – ie, would it work as a knowledge sharing and collaboration tool? I thought…

Contactify is a great little service which gets around the old problem of putting your email address on a web page. How it works is this: you register and provide your details, and Contactify provides you with a URL which…

Second on my list of tips was to make sure you are using the systems that suit how you work. What sort of things am I talking about? How do you blog? A blog is of course just a website,…

Conducted by Rajen Sheth, manager of Google’s enterprise products, this video runs for nearly 18 minutes and covers everything from the personalized start page to the collaboration tools in apps like Google Docs and Spreadsheets. There’s also a heavy focus…

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…but not at MyHouse, thankfully. The BBC reports: A 17-year-old girl has been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage in connection with a house party which left a family home wrecked. About 200 youngsters damaged Alan and Elaine Bell’s home…

Wrike looks like a worthy competitor to Basecamp in the field of free online project collaboration platforms. Tags: wrike

I had no idea that writing blog posts for future release was so easy with WordPress! All you have to do is edit the “timestamp” for the post when you write it to be the day in the future when…

Mike Arrington writes about WriteWith, a collaborative writing authoring platform which combines wikis, forums and ajax document editing. Once you have finished writing, the document can be exported to MS Office or Openoffice.org format, or even published to a blog.…

The Cabinet Office are launching a review into how social media can improve public engagement and empowerment: Minister for the Cabinet Office Hilary Armstrong wants Government to harness the phenomenon of internet advice sharing sites and empower people with information…

Oliver Kamm in The Guardian: In its paucity of coverage and predictability of conclusions, the blogosphere provides a parody of democratic deliberation. But it gets worse. Politics, wrote the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, is a conversation, not an argument. The conversation…