Monday, 4 February, 2008

Editing text on a Mac

MacJohn Naughton had a request from a friend for an alternative to MS Word on a Mac. John pointed him in the direction of TextEdit (Windows users, think WordPad), which comes built into OSX. One issue with this was the lack of a wordcount function, which was soon sorted by an extra little bit of software.

I’ve been doing some digging into Mac word processing, and here are some other options:

  • AbiWord – standalone wysiwyg word processor
  • NeoOffice – Mac friendly port of…
  • OpenOffice – the open source MS Office challenger
  • TextWrangler – for pure text editing, no frills or fancy fonts!

Incidentally, I also came across this page, which might prove useful.

PermalinkEditing text on a Mac

Sunday, 3 February, 2008

Anonymous contributions

Jeremy Gould – barcamp impresario, Ministry of Justice web dude and blogger – raises the issue of anonymous contributions, both within blogs and comments on other blogs:

I was thinking about this last week when I came across a new blog by a civil servant who chooses not declare their identity. Its entertaining and a pretty accurate description of life inside a Whitehall department. But two problems come to mind:

  1. It will be too easy to say something inappropriate on the basis that no one knows who you are, and
  2. If the blog gains traction you can bet your bottom dollar that people will do their best to work out who it is – and eventually they will, causing problems for the author.

Interesting stuff, as this issue has been raised by quite a few people I have talked to about my plans for an online collaborative social network for the information authority. People say they would like to be able to post on the communities anonymously, in case their bosses are lurking, presumably, about stuff they wouldn’t like to be associated with their names.

I’m against it, and I will push for there to be no anonymous functionality in the new platform. There are several reasons for this, on top of those Jeremy identifies:

  • It gives an excuse for a potentially valid point to be ignored. It could be perceived, for example, that if the person contributing the idea is ashamed to be associated with it, then why should it be pursued?
  • The social graph is based on identity. The way social networks work is because we know and trust who people are. Anonymity takes that away.
  • Anonymous posting removes the responsibility for your actions – having stuff posted with your name next to it will make you think twice before posting
  • The need for anonymity is almost certainly a symptom of some wider problem which really ought to be addressed – why the fear in speaking out?

I found this article by Ben Macintyre in The Times interesting:

People behave badly when they think they are invisible. Masked balls were an opportunity for licentious behaviour in a buttoned-down society because (supposedly) no one knew who was who. People who would not dream of being rude in day-to-day transactions feel no such constraints behind the wheel, because the four walls of the car offer the illusion of anonymity; in my experience, drivers with tinted windows are far more aggressive than those without.

Bearing all this in mind, my view is not to provide the ability for people to post anything anonymously. Instead, make it clear how you can be contacted through the back channel, maybe an email or phone call, for ideas which a person might want to have aired but not attributed to them. It might be important to get information out, in which case quote an anonymous source, but make the it the exception rather than the rule.

PermalinkAnonymous contributions

Saturday, 2 February, 2008

Friday, 1 February, 2008

For Immediate Release

FIRFor Immediate Release is one of my favourite podcasts, which has Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson and a host of other contributors talking social media, web 2.0 and how it affects public relations and business communications. It’s good stuff.

Yesterday, Neville needed someone to step in to fill a few minutes, so I stepped up to the plate and spoke about barcampukgovweb. Neville has been very sweet and praised my efforts, but I think he might just be trying to make me feel better 🙂 Seriously, though, it was real honour to be a part of the show.

Anyway, you can download the episode here. I come in at about 16 minutes. I’d really like some feedback, as online audio is something I would like to do more of in the future. In other words, see this as your chance to stop me.

PermalinkFor Immediate Release

Microsoft/Yahoo! Roundup

Here’s some of the stuff I’ve been reading around the web about the proposed Microsoft purchase of Yahoo! There’s some interesting commentary out there.

Jeff Jarvis at Guardian Unlimited:

This is just as well for Yahoo, which had no strategy, really. They’d gone as far as they could with the old-media model, as exploited by the last CEO, former movie-studio head Terry Semel. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang started saying the right things about turning Yahoo into a platform, but it probably would have taken years to turn his culture around. They were too used to operating like a movie studio or publishing house.

Will this be big enough to beat Google? No, because big won’t win in the end. Open will.

The BBC:

If Yahoo agrees to the deal with Microsoft, it will be a shotgun marriage, but it will be Google holding the shotgun.

If Yahoo’s management says “yes, I do”, it will be an admission that its attempts to turn around the company have failed.

Yahoo shareholders, in turn, will not be able to believe their luck. Microsoft was probably the only company with pockets deep enough to bail them out.

For Microsoft, however, this is the deal that could break it.

Making the offer is an admission that Microsoft’s management has been scared by the success of Google.

Scoble:

what makes Yahoo/Microsoft interesting is the email audience. That’s another 300 million people to add to Hotmail’s audience of close to the same. Yahoo has a ton of interesting Web properties that are far more interesting than anything Microsoft has done lately. Groups. Finance. Upcoming. Etc.

This gets Microsoft back into the Web game in a big way and puts a defense around Microsoft’s Office cash-generating-machine. I bet that some of Yahoo’s smartest engineers get moved over to the Office team to help build an online Office that’ll keep Google’s docs and spreadsheets from getting major marketshare inroads.

It’s the fear that Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets might someday take marketshare away from Office that I think was driving this deal.

Read/WriteWeb:

Yahoo! is great at content and online innovation, though. That’s what Microsoft needs right now. Google is posing a threat to Microsoft not just because it is winning in advertising, where Microsoft is a relative beginner, but because Google is shifting the software world to online.

Microsoft is serious about innovation, they just haven’t been doing much of it in house for awhile. The Live.com work and the Microsoft acquisitions in the health space indicate to me the company really is trying to do more than just catch up in search and advertising.

I think that this acquisition is going to mean a whole lot more energy put behind services like Flickr and Del.icio.us and innovative content sites like Yahoo! Sports and Finance. All of that will be good for Microsoft and it will be good for those of us who find those sites and services inspiring.

Paul Kedrosky:

1. It will happen. Neither company can afford for it to not happen, and no-one will outbid Microsoft given its dire need. About the only way Yahoo could keep it from happening would be to cut a quick deal to outsource its search to Google, which would be smart, savvy, and MicroHoo-killing — and almost certainly won’t happen.
2. It won’t (really) matter. Some more scale in search will help Microsoft, no question, but the fundamental problem is that Microsoft is trapped between two worlds and has an absence of vision. That has been holding it back, not engineers and not ownership of Yahoo pageviews. Microsoft isn’t doomed — far from it — but buying a broken asset doesn’t turn it into a BrinPage-killer either.
3. It’s good for Google. Two elephants mating are always good for confusing customers and helping incumbents, not to mention improving margins. You will see Google gain surplus search and advertising share as this deal comes together.

John Battelle:

I’m still not sure this works. I don’t see how the two cultures merge. But perhaps that’s not the point. Perhaps at the end of the day, Yahoo becomes Microsoft’s long misbegotten media arm, and the folks in Redmond can finally stop worrying about what their focus is.

GigaOm:

There’s a six-letter reason this deal was struck and it begins with G and ends with -oogle. The specter of the search giant’s dominance was raised at least four times on the conference call, both as the reason the two firms should combine as well as an assurance as to why Google couldn’t make its own bid for Yahoo.

“All of us see this industry growing through consolidation. Today the market is completely dominated by one player and by combining the asset of Microsoft and Yahoo…the industry will be better served by having more players in search and advertising,” said Kevin Johnson, president of the platforms & services division of Microsoft.

Mini-Microsoft:

My first reaction: “That’s a lot to pay for flickr.”

Dave Winer:

Does Yahoo + Microsoft make sense?

Nahh. It’s like the dead leading the blind.

And there’s tonnes more. Just check out Techmeme.

PermalinkMicrosoft/Yahoo! Roundup

Microsoft to buy Yahoo!?

Wow, major news breaking on the horizon. Microsoft have offered to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion.

Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.

So what is this? One last attempt to kill Google? Or two companies whose recent online strategies haven’t made an awful lot of sense joining up to make an even bigger mess of things?

Update: TechCrunch reports that it’s all about the ads.

PermalinkMicrosoft to buy Yahoo!?

Flocking

Flock On the advice of David Wilcox, I am giving Flock a go on my MacBook. Not because I am unhappy with FireFox, but more to see if it resolves some of the issues I have with NetNewsWire and the various blog editors I have been trying.

Flock, for the uninitiated, is a browser based on FireFox, but with loads of social media stuff built in. There’s a ‘People’ sidebar, for instance, which gives you little updates on what your contacts have been up to in Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc. It’s quite nice, but the Twitter aspect of this isn’t as nice, I don’t think, as the Twitbin plugin for FireFox. There is also integration with del.icio.us for bookmarking, which is cool, though obviously that can be achieved with FF and the Del.icio.us plugin.

There is also a built-in RSS aggregator for the sidebar, which I am curious to know how often it updates the feeds – it hasn’t done so yet. When I imported my 350-odd feeds from NetNewsWire the folders I had sorted them into got lost, which is a bit of a pain. In fact the element of the people sidebar also seem to update most irregularly, which is annoying. For example, my status update on Twitter shows on the website but not in Flock – even though I did the update within Flock itself!

There is also a nice way of integrating with Flickr (and other media sharing services) in terms of the ‘Media Bar’. This lets you search for media along the top of the browser window, with little thumbnails of images appearing which you can then click on to see the original, or drag into other things, like blog posts, for example.

Ah yes, blog posts! Flock has its own blog editor built-in, and while it is a fairly unflashy affair, it does at least have some basic functionality missing in the others I have tested. There’s no option to add title tags to links from the hyperlink dialogue, which is a pain, but at least the editor is reasonably usable. Even if I don’t use Flock for all my web browsing, the blog editor will most certainly get some use.

The final cool feature of Flock is the “My World” homepage, which lists the latest feeds you’ve been reading, favourited sites you have visited, media viewed etc. Handy to get to stuff you want quickly.

Overall, Flock is pretty cool. The only problem is that whilst Firefox doesn’t have the social functionality built in, there are plugins available for it which do the job better, for a minimal investment of effort. But I will certainly keep using it, not least to blog with!

Edit: one major annoyance with the blog editor is that when you add tags to a post, it uses Technorati rather than the internal tagging system in WordPress – meaning a trip to the WP editor after posting…

PermalinkFlocking

Thursday, 31 January, 2008

links for 2008-01-31

Permalinklinks for 2008-01-31

Finding Mac Software

I am trying to find all the software I need to make my Macbook as useful to me as my Vista laptop is. Obviously some things are made much easier, like making Skype calls (no longer any requirement for a headset) or video (built in camera, no webcam needed!), but others are proving hard. I need replacements for my social media toolkit.

So far, I have been having most difficulty finding a decent offline blog editor. I guess you might question why this is necessary when WordPress has a perfectly adequate built-in online one, but for some reason I find blogging a much calmer activity when using a desktop editor. I never claimed to make sense 😉

So, I have downloaded MarsEdit, Qumana and Ecto and will be trying these out over the next week or so. I think it is going to be a compromise choice in the end, as it doesn’t look like any of them offer the functionality of a Windows Live Writer or a BlogJet. Ecto has already failed to publish this post once, and crashed, so I would say its days are numbered (not least because it also ballsed up the paragraphs on the post so I had to edit it online anyway. Grr).

Another hunt is for an FTP client, and on this score things are going much better, thanks to my Twitter buddies Laura, Ed and Jenny. I have downloaded Fetch, Transmit and Cyberduck and all seem perfectly adequate. Think it will come down to which I feel most comfortable using rather than functionality.

I have also installed Skype, something called Skitch which I think will let me take screenshots like SnagIt does, and something called TextWrangler for making notes with.

PermalinkFinding Mac Software

Down in London tomorrow

Have taken the day off work for a trip to London tomorrow to visit Lloyd Davis‘ Tuttle Club, or London Social Media Cafe.

It’s going through an itinerant stage at the moment, finding a home wherever there are willing hosts and free wifi. You can find out more on the wiki – tomorrow’s meet is taking place at the Coach and Horses in Greek Street (should that be Geek Street?).

It should be great, a few of the folk from Saturday’s barcamp will be there, as well as Neville Hobson who I have communicated with on many occasions but never met. Looking forward to it.

PermalinkDown in London tomorrow

Google: not just search

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to most people reading this blog that Google provides a number of services other than their traditional business area of web search. Many of the tools can be used as part of an online community environment, indeed it’s possibly to build an entire platform – albeit one spread amongst disparate, if partially integrated, services – using these tools, all for free (or at least very cheap). In this post I will cover some of these and discuss how they can be used to communicate and collaborate online.

Google Reader

Reader is Google’s RSS aggregator. These are really useful services which enable you to monitor your favourite websites without having to visit each one individually. This video shows how uber-blogger Robert Scoble uses Reader to get through an astonishing number of site feeds.

Reader is the best service of its type. Good community use of it includes the ability to share items you find particularly interesting. This produces a web page of content you have picked out which others can use, and there is an RSS feed for this too. Interesting blog posts or other website content can therefore be easily shared with others. Further social networking functionality is being built into it all the time, so it could become a great place to track what’s hot on the web.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Bloglines, Newsgator

Google Groups

Google Groups is a system of creating communities which communicate through email or a web based interface. It’s effectively a souped up mailing list arrangement, but works pretty well. The web section allows documents to be uploaded and shared, and web pages to be created for further pooling of information.

To be honest, services like Groups are somewhat unsophisticated in today’s world of Facebook, Bebo et al. But they are quick, free and easy to set up and could provide the basis for a community, certainly at the early stages. The ability to contribute just through email is pretty useful too. Using Groups as a mailing list server for barcampukgovweb worked brilliantly.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Yahoo! Groups

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Docs and Spreadsheets is Google’s answer to ‘Office 2.0’ – the use of office suites of applications within the browser. In this case it’s a word processor, presentations and a spreadsheet app. The benefits of this type of approach are as follows:

  • Zero cost of software
  • No upgrade worries
  • Access and edit your documents from any computer with a decent internet connection
  • Share and collaborate on documents from anywhere in the world without having multiple emailed versions flying around

In terms of online collaboration, these tools are astonishingly good. There are some risk considerations: you need to be online to use them, your data is stored on a third party server and the functionality isn’t up to the standard of desktop applications. But overall, the good stuff outweighs the bad considerably.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Zoho, ThinkFree

Blogger

Blogger is Google’s blogging service. It’s incredibly popular, largely because it was first out of the blocks. Personally, I hate it, but it’s pretty easy to use for beginners, allows total control of how your blog appears, lets you have adverts to make some money and there is a certain level of integration with other Google services.

However, it’s almost impossible to get the address you want for your blog as so many people are already using it, as a network it’s full of spam blogs, and is nowehere near as feature rich as the likes of my personal favourite in the field, WordPress.com.

Blogs should be an integral part of any online community platform though – they make publishing content so easy.

Cost: Free
Rivals: WordPress.com, TypePad, LiveJournal

Customised Search

Google’s customised search service (CSE) is extremely powerful, easy to set up and stuffed full of benefits for service providers and users alike. This technology effectively provides an alternative to products which cost a serious amount of money.

CSE answers the problem of searching the web and getting loads of irrelevant or spam-filled results. Here’s how it works: you provide Google with a whitelist of sites which you know to be relevant to want people want to search and when people use your customised search, they only get results from those pages, thus increasingly significantly the likelihood that they will be relevant. You can also label sites, which provides clickable filters for the user to further drill down into the results.

Google provides you with a homepage to direct users to, or you can embed the engine within another website, or even set up a bespoke homepage. Examples of uses of this technology include my efforts LGSearch, KMSearch and BookZilla. I have produced a slideshow demonstrating just how easy this is to do on Slideshare.

Cost: Free (you will probably make some money on adverts!)
Rivals: Rollyo, Swicki

Google Maps

Lots of people use Google Maps to find their way from A to B, and it works very well in this regard. It’s also very simple to insert a map into another web page, to show the location of your offices, for example. But the Maps API (application programming interface) means it can be much more powerful than that.

For example, you can create a map and display it on your site with a wide variety of information on it. Such mashups are an incredibly powerful element of the technology base of Web 2.0 and Google Maps is a great example of a company being open with its information for the benefit of the community. The potential application of this technology has limitless benefits for online communities and collaborative partnerships.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Virtual Earth, Yahoo! Maps

Gmail

Gmail (or Googlemail as it’s known in some parts of the world) is a web based email service that is probably the best one available at the moment. Here’s a list of some of the cool features:

  • Threaded conversations – replies are all kept together in context
  • Over 6 gigabytes of storage space – no need to delete anything
  • Excellent spam filtering – publicise your email address with confidence
  • Handle other email accounts through GMail – you can even send mail from a different address
  • Add labels to emails rather than putting them in folders – so you can have an email with more than one label
  • Use Google Talk instant messaging without having to leave the Gmail screen
  • Find your emails with the powerful search tool
  • The adverts are text only and unobtrusive

Gmail is great to use as an email system for online communities, whether as a contact address for the community as a whole or for use by individual members. There are a number of innovative ways it can be used as a productivity tool as well – soon making it an indispensable service.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail

Calendar

Google’s calendar offering is another one which, like Gmail, blew the opposition apart. It’s a great little service, with sharing information with others at the heart of much of what is cool about it.

You can share your appointments with other people, create group calendars which aggregate lots of people’s appointments into one, and make calendars public and readable by anybody.

This flexibility makes Calendar a great time management tool for any collaborative enterprise.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Kiko, 30 Boxes

iGoogle

iGoogle is the name given to what was the personalised home page. It’s basically a Google search page with lots of different content on it, which you can choose. It could be made up of RSS feeds, mini versions of Gmail or Calendar, an interactive file list of your Docs and Spreadsheets and a whole gamut of other widgets and services.

iGoogle actually falls behind some of the competition in this area, in that it’s difficult to share a personalised page with others, so its use as a community tool is limited. However, with a little organisation, it should be possible to work out a common set up between members of a community to help foster information sharing and reuse.

The real value of iGoogle, though, is its role within the Google Apps for your Domain platform.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Netvibes, Protopage, Pageflakes

Google Apps for your Domain

Google Apps, as the service is known for short, is a customisable version of the following Google services:

• Gmail
• Calendar
• Docs and Spreadsheets
• iGoogle
• Google Talk
• Web Page Creator

Essentially, you register a new domain, or configure an existing one, with Google and they provide these services for free up to 200 users. You can change colour schemes and add logos to give it all a corporate feel. Effectively, this is a enterprise standard groupware solution. For free.

iGoogle becomes more useful because you can control what the left hand column contains, so that a certain element of the page is similar for everyone, ensuring that specific information is distributed to everyone on the network.

The only lame part of the package is Web Page Creator, which is a service I haven’t mentioned before because it isn’t great and isn’t terribly important. Unless you are a DNS wizard, it’s tricky to get your URL displaying anything other than the pages you create in this very simplistic application. See the Change2 homepage for the sort of thing that’s possible (ie not a lot).

There are a couple of services that really ought to be integrated too, like Blogger and Reader for example. But Google Apps is still an amazing deal.

Cost: Price of a domain
Rivals: None that I can think of

What’s missing?

In terms of the Google spread of services, not a lot. Using the free stuff Google offers, you could clearly create a useful network, with a little work and using the Google Apps service as a hub to control the rest obviously has its benefits.

But there are a couple of things missing. One is a decent wiki service. Google has Notebook, a simple note taking and sharing tool, but it is nowhere near the power of, say, Wikispaces. This should be sorted out soon, however, as Google bought JotSpot not so long ago, which is an established and fully featured wiki platform. I would hope to see this made part of the Google Apps suite pretty quickly, too.

The other is a decent photo sharing service to rival Yahoo!’s Flickr. Google has Picasa Web Albums, which ties in with their free desktop photo manager (which is actually quite good) but there isn’t anywhere near the same power, flexibility or community elements that Flickr has.

Conclusion

Google provide a huge array of free tools to help you communicate and collaborate with others online. For many community groups and collaborative endeavours, this will be sufficient. The real gem is the Google Apps package, which for the price of a domain name will enable you to tie together a number of the services and provide a more tightly integrated experience for users.

But Blogger for me is too weak a blogging tool to be of much use to anyone but a real beginner, and I would recommend using WordPress.com instead as a free option. Also, until JotSpot is re-released, any wiki pages will have to be hosted on a non-Google site like Wikispaces. These are two areas that will need to be addressed before Google can be considered a one-stop community shop.

Further reading:

PermalinkGoogle: not just search

Wednesday, 30 January, 2008

I’ve bought a Mac!

Yes, for the first time in my life, I have bought a Mac – to be precise, a MacBook with 2.2Ghz, 120gb hard disk and a paltry 1gb RAM. That will be the first thing to be resolved, I reckon, but I might wait til next pay day for that treat.

My initial thoughts are good, it seems quick and I got it up and running with no problems at all. It’s a lovely size, which makes it ideal for lugging about, which was my intention really when buying it. Installing software seems easy enough, and so far I have added:

  • Firefox – natch
  • NetNewsWire – RSS reader, a Newsgator product so it syncs nicely with FeedDemon on the PC. Doesn’t seem a patch on FD though – and how the hell do I hide feeds from view which don’t have new items? Grr.
  • Marsedit – hoped this would be a useful replacement for Windows Live Writer and BlogJet, and while it has a nice way of managing images – especially from Flickr – it doesn’t even seem to have wysiwyg editing, which strikes me as being rather backward.

So, am impressed with the Mac, less so with the software. Any hints and tips gratefully received!

PermalinkI’ve bought a Mac!

Tuesday, 29 January, 2008

links for 2008-01-29

Permalinklinks for 2008-01-29

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.

PermalinkGoogle launches UK politics site

Every community needs a killer app

One of the key challenges to establishing a community is attracting engagement – not just getting the numbers in of people signing up, but getting them to actively take part. One step to achieve this is through gradual culture change, helped by active and properly targeted facilitation. Another is to create a reason for people to come to the site on a regular basis, in fact to make them come.

What do the following have in common?

  • Lotus 1–2–3 and the PC
  • Email and the internet
  • Google search and the world wide web

Easy, of course, the former in each bullet being the ‘killer app’ of the latter item. Lotus was such a good spreadsheet that people bought PCs just to run it. Email was a key reason for the growth of home web connections through the ‘90s. Google has made the web accessible for the masses.

So, to provide that reason for people to visit your community, you need to find it a killer app – something that your site does better than anyone else’s. Preferably, to extol the virtues of social media and online knowledge sharing (generally the raison d’être of online communities), this killer app should be open and possible to manage through the community.

So, what sort of things could we have as our killer app? I can think of two, both of which I have developed myself for the local government sector but which I didn’t tie to a wider community. I’m kicking myself now that I didn’t.

Firstly, customised search. Every sector under the sun is screaming out for one of these. Google and the other search engines are great at finding specific terms, but they have little understanding of context. LGSearch has had a tremendous impact in local government circles, especially when one considers the lack of promotion it received (a couple of blogs posts, the odd forum entry).

One of the first things you should do when building a community is to create the search engine. Just use Google Coop to start with, it’s easy but powerful (and free) and you can always sort out something else in time if it isn’t up to the job. Make sure the search is both embedded in your community’s home page and available at (say) a sub-domain so it can exist in its own right. Include plenty of cross referenced content between the search page and the community, to make it easy to explore.

Make the list of sites searched open to suggestion (possibly through a wiki) from community members – in other words, give people a reason to engage.

The second killer app is the wiki glossary. Every sector has its own jargon, acronyms, abbreviations, terminology and no one understands it all. This was the reason for the creation of localgovglossary between myself and Steve Dale, inspired by David Wilcox’s social media wiki glossary. These are great, because they are easy to understand, perfect for the wiki medium and are instantly useful.

Here’s an example of why wiki glossaries just work in terms of online knowledge sharing. One of the more regular contributors to localgovglossary is a chap called Duncan Ford, and the material he is posting are culled from notes he has been making for himself for years, whether on paper or in word documents. He’s seen several attempts to create an online glossary in the past, but the wiki format is the first to make it a viable enterprise.

Make the glossary wiki a publicly accessible key part of your community site. Being able to add to the wiki is a good reason for people to sign up, and once they’re, and used to the idea of knowledge sharing online, they will be more likely to engage in other areas of the site.

So, create a reason why people can’t not join your community. They don’t have to be either of the tools I mention above, but they are a couple of things that can be got off the ground very quickly and have instant rewards.

PermalinkEvery community needs a killer app

Twitter100

twitter100This blog has a clear theme this morning. Here’s another tool that makes Twitter even more useful: Twitter100. It displays the latest updates from up to 100 of the people you follow on one page. It certainly makes following what’s going on a lot easier.

Thanks to Mike Butcher for the link (via Twitter, of course!).

PermalinkTwitter100