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New version of the great Share This plugin for WordPress (amongst other platforms). It allows users to send links to their favourite social network or bookmarking site; or indeed to email or IM them to friends.
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Buzzword is an extremely nice looking online word processor, recently acquired by Adobe, according to Mashable. Not as feature rich as Google Docs, Zoho et al, but a great example of just how attractive web apps can be.
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Great tutorial from Mahalo on how to employ Google Analytics on your site. GA is an astonishingly powerful free website stats tool, which provides sophisticated metrics on who is accessing your site, from where, and what they are interested in.
Month: November 2007
Woken by a cat
Loving this!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjshyT4cZpI]
Amping up WordPress
Quick presentation on improving a WordPress blog from Mark Jaquith:
[slideshare 158924 amping-up-your-wordpress-blog-1194474703187376-3]
Sketchcast – social whiteboards
Sketchcast is a great little tool which allows you to record yourself drawing a sketch – whether roughly with a mouse or more accurately with a graphics pen – and you can add audio commentary too.
Here’s a great example from Anecdote, explaining how communities of practice can be used to create action and outputs. I hope it embeds ok – one of the few limitations of WordPress is in the way that embedded media works, it often messes up the layout of the post unless you use a plugin to handle it for you. Hopefully there will be a Sketchcast plugin for WordPress soon.
GroupsNearYou.com
Richard Pope has been working on a new social website for MySociety, called GroupsNearYou.com. Here’s how he explains it on his blog:
For all the talk of social networking people forget that for a whole host of internet users have been doing this kind of thing for years using really the really the < web 1.0 technology of email groups and phpBB forums (sw4people, Urban75 and Hern Hill Forum blog are just a few local to me).
They can make a real difference to the local community aspects of people’s lives – discussing crime, finding out about local restaurants, ganging up on their local council or whatever. Many of the people who run these groups (especially the email based ones) are often not that internet savvy, but have found simple tools that let them connect with people where they live that have a shared interest.
The problem is, unless someone tells you directly about one, they are all but invisible.
To this ends, I’ve been building a site for mySociety called (sticking to the “does what it says on the tin” naming convention) GroupsNearYou.com that is aiming to map the locations and details of these groups and, importantly, help people find ones relevant them.
At the moment the site is pretty sparsely populated, but I am sure that will change in the very near future. Making decent websites available to community groups is a topic I am greatly interested in, but equally important is making them accessible and easy to find. Great work, Richard!