Month: December 2008

Links and Twitter

Steve Dale writes about his uneasiness with a new Twitter mashup service, Twitchboard, which automates the posting of content from Twitter to other social web services. At the moment, all it does is links: if you post a URL to Twitter it also gets pinged to your Delicious account.

I may be in the minority here but I feel slightly troubled by apps such as Twitchboard that want to think for me. I’m perfectly happy to create my own bookmarks in Delicious, which are reasonably well organised and categorised, or to click on Stumble! to add a link to a particularly interesting article I’ve read to my Stumble!  These are conscious decisions I’ve made to provide the ’semantic glue’ for my personalised social web. I tend to Tweet about fairly trivial stuff and will occasionally link to an article or picture that I’ve found particularly amusing. I don’t necessarily want to store these links for prosperity, or worse, create my own personal tag cloud around a random stream consciousness.

I can see some of the value, just in terms of time saving, for cross posting links to Delicious from Twitter. But I think Steve is right in this case – having Twitchboard perform this service would make you think twice about what you post to Twitter, and that’s just no fun. Presumably you also still have to go into Delicious to add tags and stuff (which is where most of the benefit lies) – so it isn’t that much of a time saver after all.

I mentioned in a comment on Steve’s post that actually doing this in reverse makes more sense: links I save in Delicious get automatically shared on Twitter. This is fairly easy to get set up, simply by using the RSS feed from my Delicious account and Twitterfeed to parse each link I share into Twitter.

It will be interesting to see how this works…

Some Holiday Picks

Photo credit: Ravages

I’ve seen some interesting stuff pop up in my RSS over the last few days – here’s some of them:

  • Shel Holtz has a really interesting post about using Ning as a communication and collaboration platform for projects.
  • BookSprouts is an online community for readers. There are others.
  • MacMod will be a Mac only social network
  • Neville has been having problems with his iPhone. I’m waiting on a call from my local Apple Store for my second replacement. They really are the Alpha Romeo of smartphones.
  • John Self picks his books of 2008.
  • TweeTree is a new service that does what Quotably used to do: put Twitter conversations into a sensible, threaded order.

DavePress comments powered by IntenseDebate

I’ve just moved the comments on this blog to the IntenseDebate system. It adds quite a bit of functionality to the comments, including threaded discussions (which are part of the new version 2.7 of WP, but I haven’t upgraded just yet…) and the ability to rate comments as useful or not (assuming you are logged into an IntenseDebate account).

If you have an account, it also means that you can keep a track of the comments you make on other blogs that use the IntenseDebate system, which also produces an RSS feed. The other useful thing for blog owners is that while the comments are hosted by IntenseDebate for the purposes of their services, a mirror of them is still held in your WordPress database, so you switch back to a more traditional way of doing comments without losing anything.

I still think there is an opportunity for a more open way of tracking comments around the web – at the moment the solutions are either tied into everyone using the same service – whether IntenseDebate or something like CoComment – or people doing their own thing, like Steph Gray who tags the blog posts he comments on with a certain keyword in Delicious, the feed from which he then republishes in his blog sidebar.

Anyway, I’d appreciate any feedback you have on my use of Intense Debate here on DavePress.

Government spends ‘£16m on media monitoring’?

The Guardian reports that the Conservative Party have unearthed that the spending by the various arms of the UK government on ‘media monitoring’ – ie finding out what people are saying about them – reached the sum of £16 million pounds over the last three years.

Whitehall departments alone spend more than £11m on outside media monitoring companies, including £2.7m in the last financial year.

Quangos including the Arts Council for England, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, have spent another £2.248m.

The Conservatives pointed to the fact that the government has its own in-house monitoring service, which employs 19 staff and costs £1m a year to run.

The full cost of media monitoring is likely to be even higher, however, because the figures exclude two of the biggest government departments, the Department of Health and the Department of Work and Pensions.

ØThe Conservatives said the two departments refused to provide details of their respective spending because it was deemed to be "commercially sensitive".

That does sound like rather a lot of money to be spending. The quote above does mention COI’s own media monitoring service (see towards the bottom of this page) which I am sure is an awful lot cheaper than commercial alternatives.

Another way of cutting down on this sort of cost, of course, is to make use of monitoring tools on the web. Alright, subscribing to a few Google searches on key terms probably won’t replace the efforts of getting an agency to do it, but it surely would help if individual teams within an organisation are monitoring what people are saying online about their work.

After all, with almost all of the mainstream media now making most of their content available on their websites, I wonder just how much stuff would get missed – assuming you were tracking the right stuff?

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