Month: June 2010

Looking forward to LocalGovCamp Yorkshire and Humber

LocalGovCampThis Saturday sees the latest LocalGovCamp, in York. It’s going to be a great day. Learning Pool are pleased to be helping out with a bit of sponsorship, and Breda and I will be in attendance.

It’s funny to think it’s only a year since the first LocalGovCamp, in Birmingham. I’ve such fond memories of that day – the sun was shining, Stuart was a hit on the decks, and Mrs Briggs and the boy even turned up and joined in.

For a trip through memory lane, the Flickr tag page provides a great visual time machine. I’ve just spent far too long looking through the photos from Birmingham (June ’09), Lincoln (Oct ’09), London (Jan ’10) and Cheltenham (March ’10).

Anyway.

I’m quite excited about this LocalGovCamp, because in the spirit of these events, the format has been messed with slightly, with a parallel track for councillors to talk digital engagement. Should be fun and I’m hoping to get involved in that at some point with some exciting plans for Learning Pool’s Modern Councillor service.

The regular track has already had a wide range of suggestions put forward for sessions on the day, so we should be short of a few things to talk about:

  1. How efficient is social media? or, How the internet can teach you how to save money
  2. Our digital future – what does it look like?
  3. Getting offliners online – digital mentors – who where when how?
  4. Libraries and Social Media
  5. The mixtape as social media
  6. Web & online content strategy for local government. An informal discussion about who’s got one, why / why not?
  7. Connecting, public culture & cuts – how the social web can help public cultural institutions to connect with the public, and consider new patrons and forms of patronage
  8. Stuff you can do with Flickr
  9. New ways of working – a solution to local government’s crisis?
  10. Enterprise 2.0 – deploying social technologies within our organisations to improve comms
  11. Selling open data in local government – what steps do we need to take as sector to get us sharing our data
  12. Election wash-up – why wasn’t this the first Internet election?
  13. Co-designing the Knowledge Hub – developing an open process of development
  14. Using ‘Free’ and ‘Good Enough’ technologies – the next stage of digital services development?
  15. Smart Cities & Internet of Things – What could the future hold?
  16. Social Media Surgeries – Lesson, Practice, and Applicability to other contexts
  17. Engaging less able people by the use of virtual walks/events in their area or field of interest.
  18. Front- line social media: Engagement, Consultation & Learning
  19. Just games? Does the growth in social and geo-sensative gaming have any meaning for local government?
  20. Crisis, what crisis?  Innovative responses to emergencies

I expect it isn’t too late to get in, if you want to. Come – it’ll be fun!

Photo of Andrew Walkingshaw at LocalGovCamp Birmingham by Arun Marsh.

Google jokes

One of the things I like about Google is the way they try and inject a bit of humour into what they do. Being funny is a key part of internet culture, and Google’s occasional light-heartedness is a welcome break from other more po-faced tech companies.

Here’s a couple of examples:

1) Recursion

Search for ‘recursion’ on Google, and see the suggested result. It took me a couple of seconds to get it…

recursion

2) ASCII art

A real one for the geeks this. Seach for ASCII art on Google and see what happens to the logo…

ascii art

3) Anagrams

Search for the word anagram on Google, and it offers this suggestion – ho! ho!

anagram

4) World Cup

This one came to my attention today via Google’s Matt Cutts, who posted this to Twitter:

Matt Cutts

And here it is:

gooooal

Nice one!

Bookmarks for June 3rd through June 7th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

John Naughton on the iPad

John Naughton‘s Observer piece on the iPad is well worth reading in full:

It’s when one tries to use the iPad for generating content that its deficiencies become obvious. The biggest flaw is the absence of multitasking, so you have to close one app to open another, which is a bit like going back to the world of MS-DOS. Email, using the on-screen virtual keyboard, works fine, and if you buy Apple’s text-processing app, Pages, then you can create documents. But the hoops one has to go through to pull existing documents in for editing are ludicrously convoluted and there’s no way one can easily print from the device.

Further, his week long diary is also a great bit of writing about what this device is actually for:

  • The week has reminded me of how much I value my laptops (MacBook Air and Hackintosh netbook)
  • The iPad is primarily a consumption device — and is very good for that. But it’s hopeless for originating or editing existing stuff. It doesn’t fit into my personal workflow. At the moment, it can’t handle digital cameras (though Quentin tells me there’s an optional USB-type connector available) and doesn’t have an onboard camera, so much inferior to iPhone in that respect.
  • The huge sales of the iPad suggest that Apple has discovered another profitable market niche — between laptop and smartphone. If so, then it isn’t the elderly, PC-less folks of this world. To make use of the iPad you need (a) access to a machine running iTunes; and (b) access to a wi-fi network.
  • For me, the iPad turns out to belong to the category “nice to have but not essential”. It’s beautifully made, but overpriced (esp in UK) and heavy.
  • I can see that I might find it useful in some circcumstances — e.g. a day spent travelling away from base when all I need is email, web browsing and small amounts of writing. For some people, that may be all they need.
  • Finally, I can’t see it making big inroads as an eBook reader, somehow. Of course the big screen is an advantage. But it’s offset by the increased weight, and the poor performance in bright sunlight. And it’s too bulky to carry around. When I compare it with the Eucalyptus App on my iPod Touch — which enables me to carry, for example, the entire text of Ulysses in my pocket. Given that the iPad is only marginally heavier than my hardback Everyman edition of Joyce’s novel — and I don’t carry that around — well, you can see that the Pad is no competition for the Touch.

This pretty much matches my experience. The iPad is wonderful for informal consumption of content quick browsing whilst sat on the sofa, scanning through PDFs and other documents, chatting on Twitter etc. But trying to create anything significant on it is presently a nightmare, and it’s not a Kindle-killer for me.

Update: Andrea Di Maio has posted his thoughts too:

What the iPad has turned into is a compelling professional device. I use it to take notes during meetings, to show slides to small groups around the table, as well as to do formal presentations (I bought the dongle to connect to VGA projectors). Most of my blog posts are now drafted on the iPad, an so are my research notes. When I find a wifi hotspot I just send those as attachments to my Gartner email, where I import into the relevant tool.

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