Month: December 2008

Barcamp-Teacamp this Thursday (18/12/08)

Teacamps are the rather British regular get togethers for people interested in cool webby stuff in government. They take place every other Thursday at the House of Fraser cafe on Victoria Street.

Turnout has been a little disappointing of late, so I hear – I’m one of those that hasn’t appeared for a few meets – but it would be great to have as many people along as possible this week. For  one, it’s nearly Christmas and it would be good to pass on season’s greetings in person.

Mainly, though, it seems like a really good opportunity to discuss the upcoming Barcamp, which is taking place at the end of January. From what I gather, preparations are progressing nicely, but it would be great for a pre-meet to take place, where folk can talk together about what they are planning to present, or maybe what they would like to see from others.

So, hope to see lots of you there – 2pm, Thursday 18 Dec, House of Fraser cafe.

Web based or desktop?

Just recently, I have stopped using the WordPress inbuilt editor, which runs in the web browser, and have started using MarsEdit – a piece of desktop software I have previously been rather unkind about – to write my blog posts. Since getting a PC, just recently I have continued in this offline blogging vein by using Windows Live Writer.

This started me thinking about the ways I use online services – through web based or desktop applications. As always, the first thing I did was to ask my Twitter buddies:

  • Me: What makes you decide whether to use a web app rather than a desktop one? eg webmail vs client, or google reader vs feedemon or netnewswire?
  • Simon Wakeman: functionality functionality functionality…it depends, I use a mix of each, although my multi-PC multi-site work life lends itself to a cloud-based apps (newsgtr excepted)
  • Nick Booth: experimentation or if someone shows me something I like – then I’ll use it.
  • Matt Kelland: web apps are a last resort for me – only if I need collab access to the data AND I know I will always be online when I need it
  • Kevin Campbell-Wright: I’m with Simon Wakeman
  • Steven Tuck: using desktop for things where I want alerts eg twhirl, feeddeemon and web based for portability google docs, email.
  • Andrew Beekan: Accessibility. When it comes to readers and mail I like to be able to access wherever I am. Docs, I use a mix of Office & Zoho.
  • Michael Grimes: Because I can access them easily from anywhere (with an internet connection).

The answer, it appear, is ‘it depends’.

Let’s have a look at some examples of what I use and where.

Email

I use webmail all the time – Gmail in this case using Apps for your domain. However, I have also set up Apple’s Mail client to download my email through IMAP for backup purposes, which I do roughly once a week. The main advantage of using the client application on my desktop is that it works when I’m not online… but that is rarely the case and my iPhone can be used for emails that just can’t wait. So, I’m happy with webmail. Unless anyone wants to convince me otherwise?

News reading

I started out reading RSS feeds late 2004, using Bloglines (Google Reader didn’t even exist in those days…). Then, as a Windows man, I discovered the wonder that is FeedDemon, a desktop application that really is the Rolls Royce of aggregators. When Google Reader came out (for the second time, the first version was rubbish) I toyed with it for a while before returning to FeedDemon.

When I switched to a Mac, I immediately downloaded NetNewsWire, the equivalent to FeedDemon. Sadly, I found that it just wasn’t the same experience, both in terms of ease of use and features. So, I switched to Google Reader, and that was that.

(It’s worth pointing out that both FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are part of the Newsgator family of RSS products, including the online RSS reader. All three sync together, so you could use NNW on a Mac, FD on a PC and NG at a third machine, and all would be up to date with what you have read and what you haven’t. Pretty neat.)

I really got into some of the features of Reader, like sharing items, with and without comments, which get automatically re-reported in FriendFeed. I also have got used to using Google Gears to download an offline copy of my feeds to read on the train. So, am also a web-based man when it comes to RSS. I have, though, just reloaded my latest subscription list into NetNewsWire to give it another go – along with the iPhone app and the fact that I now have a PC with FeedDemon on it – which could convince me to switch back…possibly.

Blog writing

A quicky this as I seem to write about it so much – I prefer writing blog posts offline. It’s irrational in these days of always-on broadband, but I feel rushed using the built in WordPress editor. There’s more on this topic here. On a Mac, the only sensible choice of offline editor is MarsEdit, whose lack of rich text editing is, frankly, a strength. The only time I use the built in editor these days is when I am using a different machine to my MacBook, or if I need to use a lot of bullet points (which are a bit annoying to do in MarsEdit).

Twitter

I use a client for Twitter – Twhirl. Others may rant on about the benefits of others, like Tweetdeck (which is big and ugly and horrible in my view) but I have found Twhirl seems to do stuff just the way I’d expect and like it to. Which is more than can be said for the Twitter web interface, on the homepage. The brightest thing Twitter ever did was to outsource its UI, if the website is anything to go by…

Word processing

See blog posting. I just like typing into a desktop app more than a box on a web page. Even when the document I am writing needs to be shared, I’d still rather type it locally first, then upload to Google Docs or whatever. What are your thoughts on the online/offline decision? I’m clearly pretty confused about which I prefer and when!

Which do you prefer – doing everything in the browser, on the desktop or a bit of both?

Bookmarks for December 7th through December 15th

Stuff I have bookmarked for December 7th through December 15th:

Video hosting services

Whilst beavering away this week in Stockholm on Cisco08, I had a chance to play with a few different video hosting services, namely YouTube, Vimeo and Blip. Here’s what I found:

YouTube

YouTube was the default choice for me going into the event, simply because it is a name that everyone recognises and most people are used to the format and the way it works. It’s also easy to upload quickly from a Flip using the built in software. There is also a huge community around it, with rating, favouriting and commenting on videos well established.

However, I found that the quality of picture and (especially) audio was poor on the uploaded videos on YouTube, and the service seemed pretty slow at getting the videos ready for publishing after they had been uploaded. Also, you are limited to less than 10 minutes of video in any one go, which is a pain for longer pieces, such as recorded sessions at events (though short interviews are no problem).

Another problem is that users can’t download the video from YouTube, so it is pretty restrictive.

Vimeo

Vimeo is much less well known outside the circle of social media fanboys and girls, which is a shame as it seems a much better service that is currently provided by YouTube.

The interface is really easy to use and it seems quicker at uploading video, and converting it for use online. One other small but neat feature is that it sends you an email when the video is ready: nice. The quality of the video picture and audio seems much higher than YouTube and the embeddable player is nice to use without some of YouTube rather intrusive buttons and links.

Vimeo also allows logged-in users to download the original video files.

The downside of Vimeo is that you are limited to 500mb of video uploads a week unless you upgrade to a Pro account.

Blip

Blip is aimed less at the occasional video poster and more at folk who want to regularly upload content as a ‘show’ – you aren’t forced to do this, but it is clearly the intention of the site that it’s there for the more dedicated creators of video content. For example, you can get a share of ad revenue from your videos if you like, and the embedded player is highly customisable too.

Blip doesn’t seem to have many restrictions in terms of what it allows you too upload, and also makes it possible to download the original video files. However, I don’t find the player quite as user-friendly as the Vimeo one, and all the options on publishing your video are quite confusing and distracting.

Conclusion

I am going to more or less ditch YouTube for the video I produce. The quality isn’t there in terms of the output and this outweighs the recognition factor for me. Vimeo is great for short videos and for anything below roughly ten minutes, that’s the service I will use. Blip is great quality, and fantastic for longer pieces, but the slightly less friendly user experience means my initial choice will always be Vimeo.

Which is your video host of choice?

We are all networked learners

More great stuff from David Wilcox musing on the experience of social reporting in Portugal. Whilst there, he was lucky enough to come across Etienne Wenger, a highly regarded thinker in the field of knowledge management and learning, who I first came across due to his promotion of communities of practice.

My conclusion, inspired by Etienne Wenger – above – is that social reporters can aspire to be “social artists” who help create social learning spaces where people can work together on social issues. It’s something anyone can do, with the right attitude and some skills, but I think social reporters should definitely make it a key part of their work.

It would appear that Etienne’s thinking is taking him away from clearly defined communities into a more informal arrangement of learning through sharing as part of wider networks: the ‘social learning spaces’.

This is fascinating stuff, and as I am currently putting together a programme of workshops to help civil servants understand what they need to do to engage with the social web, I wonder how these social learning spaces might be implemented as a part of that.

Here we are seeing different elements of the way the social web can be used – reporting at events, sharing knowledge across networks, collaborative learning, online storytelling, engagement activity between government citizens – merging together into one, like a big Venn diagram.

I think this makes all of us who use the social web on a regular basis networked learners. Every tweet, every Flickr photo, every online video, every shared link, every blog post adds to the sum of what we can know, and we have this knowledge served up, directly to us hundreds of times a day. We probably aren’t even aware that it is happening, but by a process of ambient osmosis, it is.

Of course, what is required with any of this is the willingness to collaborate and share, and the awareness of that fact that we all need to benefit from this networked learning. The technology is just an enabler. But who wouldn’t want to be involved with an initiative that has so much to offer?

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