An online notebook
Get posts by weekly email:
An online notebook
I attended the session by Liz Azyan and Simon Hume at Socitm09 on social media – which was ostensibly about the blocking of social networking sites in the workplace but which was also a general discussion around the benefits of…
This is a lovely little guide to getting to grips with Twitter: Thoroughly recommended.
Just a quick post as I am on my phone, but I am waiting at my gate at Stansted so I can get on a plane to Edinburgh, for the Socitm conference. I’m not speaking, which will mean I get…
I’ve been working with BIS and Becta quite a bit recently on the Learning Revolution project, which is all about improving access to informal adult learning – that is, learning which doesn’t generally mean a qualification. So, stuff like book…
I’m spending some time today doing some social reporting for EEDA, my local regional development agency, at one of their Understanding Finance for Business workshops. I’m taking photos and recording quick interviews with some of those attending, as well as…
After just one day, interest is already starting to build up for January’s barcamp. We have had a tonne of responses to the register of interest form, which is awesome, and have made significant headway in getting the venue arranged.…
The previous two UK government barcamps have been wonderful events – bringing people together to start and continue conversations about how web developments affect the public sector in this country. If we are going to run the event in January…
To carry on the culture theme, I’ve recently been reading 37 Signals‘ book Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application. For those that don’t know, 37 Signals are the guys behind simple but useful…
I had an enjoyable time on Thursday of this week, with the rest of the Learning Pool crew, customers and friends, at the Learning Pool networking event / third birthday party. Some good pals were there, and I got to…
You may not have heard of Zoho, but they are one of the leading providers of cloud-based applications on the web. If you are looking for an alternative to the likes of Google Docs, you might not go too far…
The Knowledge Hub is a terrifically ambitious project being run by IDeA, in partnership with CLG, to bring knowledge and information sharing to the local government sector. A mixture of technology and capacity building, the aim is to alter the…
As a user of Google’s enterprise tools, usually known as Google Apps, Socialwok looks very interesting. It sticks a social networking layer on top of your email, calendar, Docs and so on – something that the Google suite was really…
I had an enjoyable morning today with a bunch of local government communicators, at an LGC organised conference. It was also a great opportunity to catch up with my buddies Carl, Dominic and Simon. Here are my slides, where I…
There has been a great response to the What makes for a decent council website? experiment. Here’s the top 5 at the end of the first day: Plain english – Jargon and acronyms should be kept to the absolute minimum,…
After the kerfuffle over the Birmingham City Council website, as expertly documented by Paul Canning, there has been a considerable amount of discussion about what a Council website should look like, and what it should actually do. This isn’t just…
I’ve got a few speaking engagements coming up, as well as other events that look like fun… 1. Developing Public Sector Communications through Social Media, 15th September, London This is an LGC event, spending the whole day talking about how…
Sometimes it’s nice to hear what tech people use on a day to day basis. It’s useful to pick up hints and tips, and to pick up on cool tools you might not have heard of before. Here’s my day-to-day…
Interesting paper from Delib on the approach to government taken by the Obama administration in the States: The reality has certainly been a lot more muted than most geeks would have liked. Nothing overly glam and technologically ground-breaking, but instead…
DotSpots looks interesting: DotSpots is an annotation platform that allows users to add text or video comments to any piece of text on the web. Dotspots searches through millions of online news articles, indexing paragraphs of text and using an…
I rather enjoyed the Derren Brown stuff this week around predicting the lottery numbers. It was enjoyable and entertaining, and anyone expecting anything approaching seriousness was always going to be disappointed. But what of averaging out the views of the…