Dave – Page 313 – Dave Briggs

Bookmarks for October 17th through October 22nd

October 22, 2008

Stuff I have bookmarked for October 17th through October 22nd:

Information Fair Trader Scheme (IFTS) – "The Information Fair Trader Scheme sets and assesses standards for public sector bodies. It requires them to encourage the re-use of information and reach a standard of fairness and transparency."
Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War – Interesting article, via Ed Mitchell
AppleInsider | Due next from Apple: refreshed 20- and 24-inch iMacs – OOooh, some new imacs planned. My xmas list is getting longer and longer!
Ten tweaks for a new Acer Aspire One | Register Hardware – Thinking about getting one of these, so this contains some useful tips
Digital Britain – the future of communications – "An action plan to secure the UK’s place at the forefront of innovation, investment and quality in the digital and communications industries will be developed by Stephen Carter, the first Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting."

CLG, Youth Advisors and YouTube

October 20, 2008

CLG have added a whole load of fresh material to their YouTube account, which includes clips from minister Hazel Blears’ trip around the subcontinent and some from the department’s youth engagement work.

One of my favourites is this, from the first meeting of the new Youth Advisors with Hazel Blears, featuring the impish Rory Birch:

Twitter, qwitter and keeping up with your followers

October 20, 2008

Qwitter is an unusual service in that it fills a need that probably doesn’t exist. It simply tells you that someone has stopped following you on Twitter, and what your last tweet was before they did the deed, in case it might offer a clue why they did it.

This is such a tiny, niche service that I can’t believe anyone is actually going to make use out of it. I’ve signed up, just because I am interested. Am I likely to take any action as a result of someone not following me? Probably not.

Mike Butcher at Techcrunch says this of the Ireland based service:

Now, you can’t secretly unfollow friends or associates anymore. If someone unfollows you, you’ll know and you’ll be able to ask them why. That means it may break up a few twitter friendships. Then again, it may even improve a few. At least you’ll be able to ask someone why they unfollowed you. Maybe people will will learn to use Twitter in a smarter way?

Seeing Qwitter did make me want to take a bit more of a look at the people I follow and those that follow me, though. As of writing, I follow 274 people and am followed by 520. The main reason why there are so many followers is down to spammers, in the main. I keep my updates public and don’t bother blocking obvious spam followers – I just can’t be bothered.

I did think about how I could check which of the people I follow actually follow me in return. A quick question to Twitter resulted in a couple of responses:

Of which the best is Karma. It lists everyone connected to your account, along with whether you follow that person, if they follow you, or both. It’s a really easy way of spotting people you really ought to follow, or of figuring out why that person never replies to you.

Oh, and I just have to finish a post about Twitter with this:

Yeah!

ColaLife Campaign Video

October 19, 2008

Some news from the ColaLife campaign… as part of the submission to Google for the 10^100 competition, a 30 second video has been created. And it’s lovely:

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Please visit the YouTube page and mark the video as a favourite, give it a 5 star rating and embed it in your own blogs and social networks. The more that people know about this remarkable initiative, the better.

Rewriting the rules

October 19, 2008

John Naughton‘s Observer column on ten years of blogging is a delightful read:

This openness to immediate criticism and/or rebuttal is another revolutionary aspect of blogging. What we are seeing, wrote Clay Shirky some years ago (available online at http://bit.ly/fkxik), is nothing less than the ‘mass amateurisation of publishing’. What’s happening is a radical shift from the old ecosystem in which publications (newspapers, magazines and books) are filtered and edited before being published, into a world in which anything can be (and is) published.

All that remains is for English departments in universities to start studying blogging styles, for example the way in which accomplished online writers use hyperlinks. If you read the work of established bloggers or contributors to slick online publications such as Salon or Slate what you see is a move from having hyperlinks clumsily embedded in a document to the use of links to provide an ironic counterpoint to the main line of the piece. It’s all very, er, postmodern. But what do you expect? It is 2008.

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