Social Media

Google launches UK politics site

googleukpolitics Completely unrelated to the Google UK-hosted barcampukgovweb, I’m sure, but Google have launched a dedicated UK politics site, with lots of UK politics related widgets for your iGoogle page, and a YouTube channel. One of the widgets available is based on TheyWorkForYou, MySociety’s service to keep you up to date with what your MP is up to. Tom Steinberg mentions it on the MySociety blog:

There’s no doubt that this sort of modular re-purposing of our information is going to happen a lot more in the future, and it’s great to start out with the best of possible partners.

Good work all round.

A sense of place

The Birmingham Bloggers meet last night went well, with a good turnout and some exceptionally high-quality discussions on a variety of topics. I found myself burning up with jealously a couple of times as people talked about the exciting projects they were working on. Jon Bounds has a nice little write-up. Nick was an absolute gent as always. I met Stef for the first time, and was blown away by some of the stuff he is doing, mashing up social media services.

One thing that came up was that ‘Birmingham Bloggers’ is too narrow a title. Something based around the term ‘social media’ might be best – maybe a Social Media Club, like Lloyd runs in London?

Much of the discussion was around how bloggers can help improve the image and raise the profile of Birmingham, especially in the light of the second city’s total exclusion from this Guardian write up about city bloggers. A number of possible solutions were discussed, with the general feeling that a planet of Birmingham based bloggers would be a good idea. I’m going to have a look at putting this together.

On the way home I thought a Birmingham based customised search engine might help. brumsearch was born this afternoon 😉 I like building things and being (hopefully) helpful.

But this focus on the geographical element of the meeting – discussions around promoting Birmingham through social media – left me feeling pretty isolated. I live in Kettering, an hour’s drive away, but work in Coventry, just down the road. This meeting is the nearest thing I can get to as a group of people who dig new media.

Charlotte, who also attended, wrote along similar lines:

The thing about a meeting like this is that it is hard to figure out why we’re getting together. I guess to meet and share with a bunch of folks with a similar pursuit…

I came away feeling pretty down about the whole thing. These guys were so enthused about where they live and what they can do to improve things… But I don’t have that sense of place, not about Birmingham (obviously) nor indeed anywhere else.

barcampUKGovWeb hotting up

Jeremy Gould has been hard at work getting the barcamp for UK Government web types sorted out. We’ve got a venue – the Google offices in London. Cool. All the details are on the wiki and Jeremy’s blog.

The Google Group mailing list has also seen quite a lot of action. One thread I started was on bringing together the conversation. In other words, people are going to be blogging, tweeting, adding photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube before, during and after the event, and it would be good to have one place where they are all brought together. It would also be really useful for people who can’t attend, but would like to interact from their desks, say.

I was going to cobble a quick web page together using MagpieRSS to parse the various feeds. I then had a rethink and realised it would be so much easier to use a public start page. For no reason other than it was the first one I thought of, I chose PageFlakes. And it did the job perfectly.

ukgovwebpf

You can find the site at http://www.pageflakes.com/barcampukgovweb/

Wikis – which is best?

Well, it’s a question. Wikis are funny things, and building communities around them can be quite tricky (although advice like this helps). More than any other types of website, wikis demand community interaction, indeed, they are nothing without it.

There are a number of different ways a wiki system can be operated. One is by using a hosted platform, where you register your wiki at a site, and they host it for you. Unless you want to spend some money, the chances are that you will have to put up with having adverts on your wiki, and you’ll be limited in how you can customise it.

On the other hand, you could register a domain (i.e. www.yourwiki.com) and install a wiki yourself. This makes you responsible for maintenance, support etc, but also means you can completely customise the wiki for your own purposes, whether in terms of style or functionality.

So, which should you choose? As so often is the case, the answer is something along the lines of ‘it depends’. However, to help you decide, here’s a number of points to consider when working out what you want to do.

1. Have you a clue about coding?

If the answer to this is ‘no’, then please get a hosted service. You don’t need to be a skilled coder, able to generate reams of perfect PHP at will, to get a wiki up and running, but it helps if you know a little bit about these things. Otherwise, you are likely to get irritated very quickly, and that’s no good at all.

Wikispaces

2. Do your users know what they’re doing?

If your intended user base are wiki working wonks who like nothing more than to collaboratively edit websites, then you are fine with either the hosted or self-hosted option. However, if the concept of wikis is new to your users, the hosted option might be the better one. Why? Well, they tend to be easier to use. Take Wikispaces, for example, which provides an easy to use wysiwyg editor for all page edits. This is much easier than using traditional wiki markup, which many of the self-hosted options rely on, which involves putting any number of ***asterisks*** or [[square brackets]] around words.

Mediawiki-logo-01

3. Will you need heavy customisation?

If your wiki will be a collection of basic web pages, with lots of text and maybe the odd image or embedded video, then most hosted wiki options will suit you just fine. However, if you want to have different methods of entering or presenting information available – for example by using a specific form for a certain type of information – then you will probably need a self hosted wiki which you can customise to your heart’s content (though remember point 1, above).

Stikipad

4. Traffic

Is this going to be the wiki of the century? Are the numbers of visitors to your wiki going to eclipse even those of Wikipedia? Probably not, but if you are planning on hosting your own wiki, do bear in mind that you are likely to be responsible for paying for bandwidth, especially if your site starts to gobble a lot of it up. Generally speaking, if you have a hosted wiki, this will be the provider’s problem, not yours. This is also true about uploaded content – if you will have lots of videos on your wiki, do bear in mind that you will have to pay for storage on a self hosted wiki. With all hosted ones, you should get a certain amount of free storage.

PBWiki

5. Instant networks

How about attracting people to use your wiki? One of the major problems a lot of platforms suffer from is the fact that they require users to have yet another account with yet another password to remember. This will be the case with any self hosted option, unless you are very clever (see point 1 again). However, if you put a wiki on a hosted network of wikis, then there is a good chance that some of your users will already be using that network, and will therefore already have an account there. Wikispaces is a good example of this.

PMwiki

6. Integration

The look and feel can be an important point for many sites – what’s the point of having a stylish theme for your website if when people click to visit your wiki it looks totally different? Some hosted wiki solutions will let you pay to edit the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets – a way of setting the design elements of your website) of the site, which will allow you quite a bit of room to customise the look of your wiki. But to retheme the guts of the wiki, you’ll really need to have a self-hosted one, where the source code as well as the CSS can be altered to suit your every whim.

WetPaint

So, there’s plenty to be thinking about. My basic rule would be to go for a hosted solution unless there are really good reasons not to, and my personal favourite platform for this is Wikispaces. However, if you really need to go for hosting a wiki yourself, then the best in terms of features and usability for me is MediaWiki, the system which powers Wikipedia.

Below I set out some of the options available. If yoy know of ones I have missed, let me know in the comments and I will update the list.

Hosted Wikis

Self-Hosted Wikis

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