An online notebook
I’ve given DavePress yet another facelift. This one is a lot lighter and hopefully more friendly too.
Personally, I especially like the ‘adverts’ in the top right corner, pimping my social media wares, such as my newsletter, ReadWriteGov and LGSearch.
There is still some tidying up to do, but I’m nearly there…
Tom Watson is making a list of people who aren’t yet on Twitter, but who ought to be for all our benefit.
Stephen Fry (if it be he) has become an instant success using micro-blogging platfrom, Twitter. Life would be enriched if more of Britain’s treasured characters were sharing their daily thoughts with social networkers. So I’m compiling a list of the 50 well known people who should tweet. Good, bad, charming, rude, the rogues and the pious, you name them and I’ll write to them over Christmas to urge them to join Twitter.
Add your suggestions in the comments on his post.
Helen Nicol writes an interesting post about how to get wikis taken up within organisations. Using Wikipedia as an example, she writes, is a bad idea, because it sets unrealistic expectations of the amount of content likely to be generated, and will also likely scare people away.
Unfortunately, many companies begin their wiki experiments by trying to create the definitive knowledge asset on, say, knowledge management. This is a big ask for people who’ve never had their own contributions edited by someone they don’t know. It turns people off, and prevents them from recognising the potential in wikis. They need to start with a simple and non-threatening activity like a progress report or lessons learned review. Even a shared agenda would help as I said in this post some time ago. Starting small will really help people gain confidence enough to start working on bigger projects like knowledge assets.
This taps into a real problem for those wishing to encourage the adoption of these tools within their organisations. Saying wikis are like Wikipedia (which they can be, but…) is a bit like describing blogs as online diaries (which they can be, but…).
As I often say, the best thing is just to start using something, with a freely available tool, whether a blog or a wiki or whatever and then use that to demonstrate what you mean to the unbelievers. Much easier than making people think they have to start recording the sum of all human knowledge, or start publishing their innermost thoughts on the web!
Great comment left by Maureen Charles of Cambridgeshire County Council on the ReadWriteGov blog, acting as a real reminder of why I started arranging these events and the value they can have:
I was really impressed by the event in Peterborough. What resonated for me was all the ideas it gave for engaging young people. I couldn’t see straight away how to use them but the seeds were planted! After some creative thinking, I’m just now at the point where one idea is taking shape. Our participation worker who works with young people in care, has filmed them talking about their group “Just Us”. I’ve posted the video on “You Tube” and linked to it from the website. A start! Thank you.
No, Maureen, thank you.
I’ve just dug out an old 15″ flat screen monitor from a box and plugged it into my MacBook:
The way I have it set up is to have email and twitter on the flatscreen, while having the actual work I am meant to be doing on the macbook screen. I’m finding it certainly helps my concentration to keep the comms stuff to one side!
Anyone else work with two (or more!) screens? How do you have yours set up?