Bubbl.us is a great service. It allows you to create mind maps within your web browser. You can share them with other people, and collaborate on them too. A great way of mapping out projects with people who aren’t geographically…

Nice article from The Guardian: This week came the news that “William Wales” had joined the social networking site Facebook. Yesterday there was much argument about whether it was a hoax or not. Would Prince William really post a profile…

There’s a new version of WordPress out for those who host their own blogs. The main change seems to be the incorporation of the widgets plugin as a part of the base code. Dougal Campbell lists the main changes: Atom…

Right, the virtual community is now live, kinda. You can find it at Be warned: it isn’t pretty. But prettiness can come later. So, the point of this site is to create a community platform using different social media…

Warning: mildly incoherent rambling ahead… I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently to what the best way of creating online communities are. This is partly Simon Dickson’s fault. Back in March, Simon wrote, in a post titled “Because you…

Thought it might be worth a quick plug of another little blog I write, called Free as in Beer. All I do is post a link and a quick description of a zero-cost bit of software. Why not have a…

VodPod is a really cool way of collecting and republishing video. The way it works is this: you create a pod, which is a library of video you have chosen as being particularly good, and then add to it using a…

Have no idea where this is from originally, it popped up in an RSS feed for a del.icio.us tag. Excellent stuff, though!

The Daily Telegraph have put together a great social element to their website – hosting user blogs at my.telegraph.co.uk. I have signed up and the interface is very nice and clean. There’s a social element too, where you can add…

Nice to see that Gordon Brown’s campaign site is running the latest version of WordPress… Thanks to Simon Collister for the link. Tags: gordon+brown, wordpress

…of this blog? To be honest, it’s turned into a bit of a mess. It’s useful to have if only because it makes a handy archive of all the various bits and pieces I have written since I started blogging…

Presentation is the key to tip #7. This applies to both the appearance of your blog site as well as the standard of your writing. Picking up the latter point first, I think a good standard of writing is vital.…

Number 6 out of the 10 tips on blogging is on keeping notes. Writing blog posts that are interesting and well-informed isn’t easy. Sitting down in front of your blog editor waiting for an idea to come is pretty hard.…

Linking makes your blog grow in popularity. There are three reasons for this. One, it makes your blog posts more useful if they provide links to what you are talking about, rather than making people hunt stuff out themselves. Second,…

Off on my hols for a week, to somewhere in the North Yorkshire Moors. Am looking forward to it no end. Still, readers of Free as in Beer and LGNewMedia hopefully won’t notice, as I’ve bunged a week’s worth of…

Two quite quick items here, so I will cover them together. Feeding frenzy I discussed earlier the importance of the feeds which other blogs produce – so you must make one available for your blog. If you want to be…

I facilitate the Community of Practice for Social Media and Online Collaboration over at the Improvement and Development Agency. We are a pretty new group, though with over 40 members, we aren’t doing too badly. The aim of the group…

This is a presentation I put together for a gathering of facilitators on IDeA’s Communities of Practice platform on the hot topicof social meda tools. I hosted it at the excellent SlideShare.

This video is a great intro to RSS. Tags: rss

I’ve got a Logitech 250 headset, which I mainly use for Skype calls. All of a sudden though, it’s been producing the most awful crackling sound, making it effectively unusable. Anyone know what the problem might be? Update: Whatever it…