Dave

From small acorns…

Just to give heart to anyone out there who is struggling with a blog they’ve just started, I thought I would share something with you all.

This was my first effort at a blog and it was terrible. Now, I am hardly some kind of uber-blogger these days, but I would like to think that I am a little better at it!

So, blogging is a skill like many others – it can be learned. Just give it time and stick at it.

For anyone interested in the complete Briggs archive, most of it is here.

Face in the Stone

Face in the Stone

Here’s a photo I took whilst we were away in Cornwall last week – it’s almost like it’s alive! I’m about halfway through posting up the best of the 200-odd photos I took – you can find them all here.

I’m not much of a photographer and just use a simple point-and-click Sony, but when the scenery is as good as this, it’s hard to go wrong!

theWikiFinder

I’ve been playing about quite a bit with Google CSE this weekend, firstly seeing how it would work with Twitter (as mentioned here previously), and secondly now with wikis.

There is a load of great information out there on the various hosted wiki services like WikiSpaces, pbWiki, Stikipad and WetPaint to name a few. But how do you find these wikis if you want to contribute, or just to read stuff from them?

So, here’s theWikiFinder. It searches every wiki hosted at those mentioned above, along with Wikia and Wikipedia too. I tested it with the phrase “social media”, which brought up the wikipedia entry first (naturally) but second was David Wilcox‘s Social Media Wiki on WikiSpaces. For some reason I feel this justifies the effort putting it all together – it works!

Planning workshops

I’m doing some work at the minute putting together the agenda for Tuesday’s socia media shindig in Coventry for members of the IDeA Social Media and Online Collaboration Community of Practice (…and breathe). It can be tricky keeping an eye on what it is that you want to achieve at these events, so I have put together a little template that helps me plan what we are going to do, why we’re doing it, how we are going do it, and what we all hope to get out of it.

Feel free to download and use/hack the template as you see fit via the link below:

RTF Workshop Planner Template

Here’s a quick run through of what I mean for each column in the template:

  • Time – pretty obviously, the time each slot on the agenda starts
  • Agenda Item – the name of each session
  • Objective – what it is that the session is trying to achieve
  • Task – what are we asking people to do exactly?
  • Format – talk, listen, discuss etc
  • Preparation – what needs to be done by whom to ensure the slot will work well
  • Output – what are we all going to get out of this?

It’s not rocket science, but it’s amazing how helpful it is just to have stuff written down!

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