Sunday, 10 February, 2008

Breaking down the browser barrier

The problems of accessing social websites is often discussed by government webbies, and I dare say it is an issue for the private sector too. How can we be expected to engage with online communities if they can’t get past the firewall?

However, a bigger issue in my view is the fact that even if one can access Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or WordPress.com, one’s ability to use the site is quite likely to be totally hamstrung by the browser that you are using. If you work in the UK public sector, this is likely as not going to be Internet Explorer, and probably version 6, if not 5.5. IE6 was launched in 2001, 5.5 in 2000.

That’s right. The vast majority of people are using a browser that is at least seven years old. Imagine what has happened on the web in those seven years. It’s unbelievable that we are still relying on this crap. I mean, given the moaning that goes on about potential loss of information that is often heard when using social web services is suggested, it ought to be quickly pointed out that the knackered, outdated browsers that are being used are a far greater risk than a document that’s being edited on Google Docs.

Anyway, the browser usage figures are pretty depressing, especially in the UK. Take this map of Europe, for example, which has been produced by XiTi Monitor. It shows the percentage takeup of Firefox in each country:

Firefox map

Yup, we as a nation are second only to the Netherlands in our slowness to switch to a better browser. Makes you proud, doesn’t it?

If we want to be able to sell social media and web 2.0 to people, we need to make sure they have the infrastructure in place to ensure it works properly. This links in partly to issues around accessibility, which Laura Whitehead wrote about recently, and also the potential digital divide. But here’s a challenge that could have a massive positive impact on the use of the web in the public sector: get your department to switch to FireFox.

What browser do you use at work? Has it caused you any problems? It’d be interesting to find out.

PermalinkBreaking down the browser barrier

CoComment

At some point in the near future, I promise that I will blog about something other than blog comments. I mean, I know it’s good to find a niche, but that one is a little specific even for me. Anyhow, when I mentioned before that I wanted to be able to track the comments that I am leaving on other people’s blogs, and maybe display them on DavePress too, so that people  who read what I write here can get involved in the conversations I have elsewhere.

CoComment

One service suggested by a couple of people was CoComment. I’ve just signed up for it and will be testing it out over the next week or so. It certainly seems to offer most of what I want to achieve. After the ubiquitous signing up process, you download a FireFox plugin, which doesn’t seem to do a lot at first glance. What it does, though, is change the appearance of comment boxes on blogs and other social media sites. Take this example, where I visited the comments on Jeremy’s blog:

Comment box

You can see that it has tied the comment box up with my CoComment account. What this hopefully means is that my comment will be associated with my presence on CoComment, and listed when you visit my profile there. Excellent.

CoComment also offers some widgets to insert into your blog sidebar, which show the latest comments I have been making, which is more or less what I was after. They also provide an RSS feed of my comments, which could be more useful – maybe a daily posting like my del.icio.us links would be nice. Even better – take the RSS feed and post new comments I have made to Twitter, thus widening the potential circle of conversation even wider.

So, CoComment looks like it will be good stuff. I will report back once I have used it for a little while.

PermalinkCoComment

More on comments

Following my last post about blog comments, a couple of posts have popped up in my feed reader about the topic. Firstly James Cridland ponders what makes him decide to leave a comment on a blog, or use his own blog to respond:

First, this reply is going on a bit, and it would be quite difficult to leave this in Martin’s blog comments anyway. (Because I’ve used more than one link here, it probably would be regarded as spam, too). A reply in my blog affords me the space to reply.

Second, by my blogging here as a reply to Martin’s post over there, it means that those that read my blog are aware of Martin’s posting. If I’d have just posted on Martin’s blog, nobody would be aware of Martin’s posting. The extra addition of Google Juice, etc, also is a good thing for both of us.

Third, this is just as relevant a posting as many of my others here; if people really want to read my witterings here (as apparently quite a few do), then it’s probably just as useful to them to read this reply.

Length of response is definitely an issue for me when deciding whether to comment or post. The second point is also an important one, I think, especially in terms of the visibility of a conversation.

John Naughton also picked up the theme today, answering those that have wondered why he doesn’t allow comments on his excellent blog. His three reasons are that he lacks time to moderate and answer comments; that his blog is predominantly a resource for capturing his own thoughts for his own purposes, rather than being a  conversational  exercise; and finally John quotes a Dave Winer post:

Do comments make it a blog? Do the lack of comments make it not a blog? Well actually, my opinion is different from many, but it still is my opinion that it does not follow that a blog must have comments, in fact, to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog.

Interesting. I’m starting to think that the ideal situation would be that everyone has their own blog, and we respond to one another using our own platform, and don’t use comments.

The trouble is that not everyone has, or probably ever will have, their own blogs. So those that actively want feedback have to make the facility available – no matter how unsatisfactory it might be.

PermalinkMore on comments

Friday, 8 February, 2008

On blog comments

How do you track the conversations that go on in comments around the blogosphere? It’s easy enough to know what the actual blogs themselves are doing, after all – we have our feed readers, Google’s blog search and technorati. We have trackbacks and pings to let us know when people are linking to us on their sites. But what about the hidden conversations that are happening in the comments?

There are two angles to this. For example, it annoys me that when I comment on someone else’s blog, I am leaving content there that isn’t aggregated on my blog. I see DavePress as my little hub on the web, from which you can find out what I am doing elsewhere, on Twitter, or del.icio.us, or Flickr. I have a widget on this blog that displays the latest comments here – I’d also like one that displays my latest comments elsewhere.

This might be a fairly selfish thing to want, but the ability to do this has more practical advantages too. If we want people, whether public servants or those working for private enterprises, to engage with bloggers and to respond to them we really ought to be providing a way for those responses to be easily tracked.

Likewise, when a discussion is going on around an issue, with lots of stuff in the comments, how can that be tracked, or even found in the first place? You can subscribe to comment feeds I guess, but if you do that with every blog you’ll end up with twice as many feeds as you have already…

I think this could be a really important issue if we are to start using blogs as consultation mediums.

I suppose one possible answer is that we abandon comments altogether, and instead everyone responds to everyone else via blog entries, linking to the original.  I have read of some bloggers turning off the comments on their site for exactly this reason.

It’s a funny decision to make, actually, whether to start your own post on a subject or whether to respond in the comments. I don’t think I have a hard and fixed rule about it, maybe it just comes down to how much I have to say on a topic.

Does anyone have any ideas on how we can track comment conversations – whether our own or those we are interested in? What could change to make it easier?

PermalinkOn blog comments

Polling day

DavePress pollEvery day, WordPress and the community around it manages to surprise and delight me more. I have mentioned how it can be used to consult before, specifically by using the amazing CommentPress theme. But you can also create small polls to run on your site too, whether on a page of their own or by running in the sidebar.

This is done using the Democracy plugin, which is really easy to set up and deploy. It allows you to set the options, or give voters the ability to add their own. IP addresses can be logged to stop multiple votes, and you can store an archive of polls on a page.

I am running a quick example on this site asking readers how they access the content on this blog. OK, so it probably isn’t very scientific, but it’s fun, and another great example of the flexibility, and sheer genius, that is WordPress and the people that use it.

PermalinkPolling day

barcampukgovweb Developments

barcampukgovwebThe community that formed around the barcamp for uk gov web types (hence the name) has been working hard to start developing idea and connections that can start to have a real beneficial effect on the way that public services are using the web as a medium for communication and collaboration.

One of the ways this is working is through the Google Group, which is seeing some interesting discussions and some germs of top quality ideas are starting to emerge.

The trick is to capture these ideas and the various links and put them in a space where collaboration can start to happen. This can now be achieved using the GovHack wiki, set up by Adam McGreggor. A section for projects has been created, and once the discussions on the mailing list reach a point where it’s appropriate to do so, a page is created on the wiki to allow the ‘work’ to begin.

So, things are moving gradually, but at least they are moving. Mini-meets, like yesterday’s in a cafe at the House of Fraser store in Victoria, London, can only help as ideas are bandied about and possible solutions demonstrated. We need to ensure, though, that as much is documented as possible, so those that can’t engage face-to-face can still use the mailing list and the wiki to get involved.

I think it’s amazing that this is taking off in the way it has – fine, it’s incremental and evolutionary rather than there being any massive quick developments – but hey! maybe that’s just the British way. And there’s nowt wrong with that.

Permalinkbarcampukgovweb Developments

Thursday, 7 February, 2008

WordPress is a platform

WordPressSimon Dickson points to a new theme that turns WordPress into a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. This confirms to me something that I have been thinking for a while that WordPress is no longer a blogging system, nor a content management system, but actually a platform upon which applications can be built.

Let’s take the evidence:

  • CommentPress turns WordPress into a super consultation platform by allowing readers to comment paragraph by paragraph on documents presented as posts on the blog
  • Prologue turns WordPress into a Twitter clone, allowing users to post very short messages as a cool way of keeping people in touch with one another. If you want to engage with Twitter-lke technology then this is a great way of being able to do it on your own terms
  • Now WPContactManager, as I mentioned above, turns WordPress into a CRM.

This is the advantage of open source software, of course, that because people have access to the innards of the system, they can understand how it works and put it to innovative uses. Of course, the flexibility of WordPress certainly helps, with themes and plugins being used to achieve much of these innovations.

It will be interesting to see what other applications based on WP start to emerge.

PermalinkWordPress is a platform

Redesigning DavePress

I have been wanting to give this blog a redesign almost ever since I started it. For some reason I just haven’t taken to the Mandigo theme I was using – a bit dark, maybe? I do think that darker themes are less forgiving of some of the clutter that we bloggers like to fill our sidebars with.

So, I have settled on PopBlue, by Bob, which is a much lighter theme and hopefully the single sidebar will focus attention on the content rather than the widgets and other crud. I ‘designed’ a quick logo, using an icon from the free Crystal Clear set and a bit of text.

Couple of jobs to get done though, including:

  •  Sorting out the CSS for images so that text floats nicely  around them in posts (any help gratefully received…)
  • Making blockquotes stand out a bit more
  • Replacing the standard search bar with my Google CSE one

So, there is plenty to be done…

PermalinkRedesigning DavePress

Wednesday, 6 February, 2008

Social Media Risks

One thing that came out of the recent barcamp for UK government types is that as much as those who really dig this stuff do their best to champion its use wherever possible, it really comes down to how senior managers feel about it.

The issue, of course, is one of risk. Doing anything different is inherently risky, and when that something different is directly engaging with people through an online conversational medium, then it’s even riskier. I don’t think we social media enthusiasts should ignore the fact (and it is, I think, a fact) that there are some really quite persuasive arguments as to why government, or indeed any organisation, shouldn’t go near this stuff.

Shel Holtz has come up with five common reasons why organisations won’t risk social media:

#1 – IT won’t let us

IT doesn’t want to spend the time or money to test social media software on company networks, claiming it can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take up to a year to make sure applications don’t conflict with existing programs. They also resist external hosting, asserting that it puts company data at too much risk. (Makes you wonder how much they care about our 401(k) data, since that’s never housed on internal servers.)

#2 – It will be abused

Employees will say inappropriate things. Customers will complain. Bad language will appear on comments. People will insult management. We’ll end up spending time on issues we don’t really think are important. Care to add to the list?

#3 – Management fears loss of control

The company has invested considerable time, effort, and money to craft a brand image that will be completely destroyed if we open it up to the masses. Besides, transparency is a bad thing and we don’t need our internal workings on display.

#4 – Legal and regulatory risks

Nobody likes a lawsuit. Besides, the Securities and Exchange Commission will the company if an employee inadvertently makes a forward-looking material statement. Pharmaceutical companies fear the FDA’s punitive powers for promotion of unapproved indications while the financial services industry fears fines from the bodies that regulate their activities.

#5 – We don’t have the time or resources

Communicators are already overworked. Where are they supposed to find the time to do all this new stuff? How can they even stay on top of the ever-shifting social media landscape?

These are all valid points, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t convincing counter-arguments, or mitigating actions that can be made to minimise them. In a future post I will cover what we can do to convince people that these are issues that can be overcome.

PermalinkSocial Media Risks

Digital Curator

One of the interesting discussions at yesterday’s focus group meeting at Ruralnet was around the idea that by aggregating all the content that’s out there on rural issues, Ruralnet might end up overloading people with information. In other words, no matter how well tagged and categorised content is, an awful lot of people just don’t have the skills or the experience to deal with a huge amount of information.

What sort of skills are required? Some are:

  • The ability to scan web pages and articles to check for relevance/interest
  • The use of RSS to subscribe to content you are interested in
  • Using tags to further break down content to identify the stuff you really want
  • Using tools like social bookmarking to clip content to read/use later

Steve Rubel has written an interesting post today, entitled ‘The Digital Curator in Your Future‘:

The call of the curator requires people who are selfless and willing to act as sherpas and guides. They’re identifiable subject matter experts who dive through mountains of digital information and distill it down to its most relevant, essential parts. Digital Curators are the future of online content. Brands, media companies and dedicated individuals can all become curators. Further, they don’t even need to create their own content, just as a museum curator rarely hangs his/her own work next to a Da Vinci. They do, however, need to be subject matter experts.

The point here is that the tools are not enough. Google Reader, Del.icio.us etc already exist and can be used to manage and view information. But the need is there for a guiding human hand, someone used to dealing with large amounts of information and with the ability to be able to spot at a glance what is useful, and to whom.

This is yet another facet of the role that is emerging, including the community facilitators that Steve Dale has written about, and the online community organiser that Seth Godin has discussed. Bring in other elements: Steve Bridger‘s buzz director, David Wilcox‘s institutional hacker, Nancy White‘s community technology steward.

Slowly there is a job description building up for a role which is needed within every organisation – the only issue is, do they know it yet?

PermalinkDigital Curator

Tuesday, 5 February, 2008

Video upload weirdness

I have been trying to upload the screencast I did for Pageflakes onto blip.tv and YouTube so it’s a bit easier for people to access. Trouble is, I’m not having much luck with it.

My screencasting package, BBFlashback, has produced a 60-odd mb WMV file (am back on the Windows machine for this job, folks) and everytime I try to upload it to a video sharing service, the resultant video doesn’t move – my dulcet tones work their way through producing a public Pageflake page, but the screen just shows the original image from the start of the clip. Then, when the audio stops, the video starts moving.

Is there something I am doing wrong here, chaps?

PermalinkVideo upload weirdness

Monday, 4 February, 2008

links for 2008-02-04

Permalinklinks for 2008-02-04

Two point oh? Or zero?

The BBC are coming up with guidance on how staff should pronounce the phrase “Web 2.0”. Is it, for example:

  • Web two point oh
  • Web two point zero
  • Web two dot oh
  • Web two
  • etc etc etc…

I have always been a two point oh kinda guy myself, which puts me in line with most folk. I do think there is a nice simplicity to just web two,  but it misses the essential nerdiness of the extra version number, redundant as it may be.

What’s your preferred pronunciation?

PermalinkTwo point oh? Or zero?

What NetNewsWire needs to learn from FeedDemon

FeedDemonOn my Vista-running laptop, I had FeedDemon installed, a super desktop based RSS aggregator. I’ve always been more comfortable using this type of app as opposed to a web based solution like Google Reader or Bloglines. When I don’t have my laptop with me and I need to use a public PC or a mobile device, I can still use the NewsGator onlie service, which syncs up with FeedDemon so I don’t end up having to read stuff twice.

NetNewsWireWhen I got my MacBook, then, it was an obvious choice to download NetNewsWire, NewsGator’s desktop app for the Mac. I hoped it would be the equivalent of FeedDemon, but sadly it isn’t, for me. This is surprising, because both products are developed by the same community, and I would have thought that some of the innovations of FeedDemon would have filtered through to the Mac app.

Here are some things I’d really like to see added to NetNewsWire, that are already in place in FeedDemon:

  • The ability to hide subscriptions with no new items: FeedDemon let’s me ensure that the only feeds that appear in view are those with something new to read. I can’t find this option in NetNewsWire, and it means I have to scroll through loads of empty feeds to get to the new stuff
  • Newspapers: these are the different ways you can display feeds. For example, the way you look at a Flickr photostream feed is different from a standard text based blog. FeedDemon lets you set just how you want stuff presented. NetNewsWire, as far as I can tell, doesn’t
  • Panic button: OK, so this is a very new feature to FeedDemon, but it’s super useful. If you have a huge backlog of feeds, the panic button lets you mark a certain amount of them read, leaving you with the current stuff. NetNewsWire needs this!
  • Attention reports: FeedDemon provides you with loads of stats about what items and feeds you pay the most attention too. Useful stuff. Can’t find it in NetNewsWire

Any other NetNewsWire users out there? How do you find it in comparison to other apps?

PermalinkWhat NetNewsWire needs to learn from FeedDemon

My PageRank is 0!

PageRank 0Now, this is depressing news. Brace yourselves.

I downloaded and installed the Google toolbar this evening, just so I could check the PageRank of my site. Yeah, I know there are third party sites out there that do the same job, but I wanted the information from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

I wish I hadn’t bothered.

My PageRank is zero! Nought! Nil! Nothing! Nada! Zilch! You get the picture.

(For those that are unaware, PageRank is the system by which Google decides the priority of sites turning up in search results. It’s passed on by linking: getting linked to by a site with a high PageRank score can dramatically increase your own, thus netting you some serious search engine visability. As always, if you want to know more, Wikipedia is your friend.)

I really don’t understand how this can be. I mean, I am not expecting anything too dramatic, but a solid 4 surely wouldn’t have been out of the question? I even have the Google Sitemaps plugin installed, and everything!

It’s not like I don’t appear in Google at all anyway – as this search shows. So maybe there’s an argument that who cares?

The trouble is that I do.

PermalinkMy PageRank is 0!