Wrike looks like a worthy competitor to Basecamp in the field of free online project collaboration platforms.
Month: April 2007
Another reason why WordPress is great
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 you want it published, and it automatically appears for you on that day – so simple!
This is ideal for Free as in Beer, where I write quick posts on no cost software. Sometimes I come across more than one cool app in a day, but using this method I can line them all up for publication.
WriteWith – truly collaborative writing
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.
This could be an excellent tool for groups collaborating on documents across the web.
The Power of Information
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 that could help improve their lives.
There’s no point me writing much about this, as David Wilcox has already done so superbly:
On reflection, what is just as interesting is that Ministers and Civil Servants are becoming aware that presence on the Net is no longer a matter of creating – and controlling – your own web space. It is a matter of going to the places where people already are, and so ending up in many places at the same time.
I urge you to read David’s post in full.
Blogpolitic
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 bloggers have with their readers is more like an echo chamber, in which conclusions are pre-specified and targets selected. The outcome is horrifying. The intention of drawing readers into the conversation by means of a facility for adding comments results in an immense volume of abusive material directed – and recorded for posterity – at public figures.
The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted – overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.
A remarkable view for a political blogger to hold, unless Mr Kamm considers himself a Proper Journalist these days.
It’s early days yet. Political blogging has only really taken off in the last couple of years in the UK. Sure, much of it is unbearably negative and full of inaccuracies, but the same could be said of pamphleteering.
Just because some political blogs aren’t particularly edifying, it doesn’t make the blog format a Bad Thing. In time, some balance will be restored, and as always, the quality will float to the top.
In the meantime, we will just have to trust ourselves to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction.