Tuesday, 29 January, 2008

Tweetmeme

Mike Butcher reports on TechCrunch UK about Tweetmeme, a new UK based service which provides updates as to what the hot discussions are on Twitter. A Techmeme for microbloggers, if you will. Having had a look at it this morning, much of the conversation being tracked is around Tweetmeme itself, though the new WordPress Twitter clone theme Prologue is making waves too. This will be an interesting service to track, to see what conversations I might be missing out on.

As Mike says:

Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorises the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others. But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio). In addition Fav.or.it will integrate Tweetmeme into its API so you’ll be able to comment on blog posts through Tweetmeme.

PermalinkTweetmeme

Prologue – WordPress based distributed Twitter

prologue Matt Mullenweg has announced over on the WordPress.com blog that Automattic, the company behind WP.com, Akismet and the driving force behind WordPress development, have created a new theme for WordPress. Whoopie-do, you might be thinking. But this theme is more than just a look and feel for your WordPress blog. This theme clones Twitter. To quote the post:

Basically how it works is when someone has the ability to post to a blog they see a short form at the top of the home page with a post box and tags. There they can post short messages about what they’re doing.

Below the posting box is a list of everyone’s latest tweet or message, with their Gravatar next to it. You can click on an author to see all their messages, or a tag to see all of the messages in a given tag (which we use for projects). There are RSS feeds for everything: the entire prologue, each author, each tag, and even combination or searches can be subscribed to in your RSS reader.

How incredibly excellent. I’ve been after a clone of Twitter for a while, and to be able to combine it with my beloved WordPress is just awesome. I’m already putting something together to make use of this!

PermalinkPrologue – WordPress based distributed Twitter

Monday, 28 January, 2008

Pageflakes screencast

Quite a few people were interested in how the pageflake for the barcampukgovweb was set up, so I have prepared a screencast demonstrating the process. You can view the flash movie here.

This file is quite big (c19mb) and I am trying to get it onto YouTube in a reasonable format. If anyone has any tips on the best way to display this sort of thing, do let me know. I have played the flash movie in FireFox, though, and it is reasonably quick.

Hope it’s useful!

PermalinkPageflakes screencast

links for 2008-01-27

Permalinklinks for 2008-01-27

Sunday, 27 January, 2008

Email lists still the best?

An interesting point made by Tom Steinberg of MySociety at barcampukgovweb was when he was asked about the best platform to use to operate an online working group. An example of a working group like this could be those who attended the barcamp – how could they manage their interactions online in the future?

Tom’s response was that the mailing list was the best way for a group of people to communicate online, and so for the barcampers, the best thing to do would be to stick with the Google Group already created (by me, heh heh). I chipped in at this point with my theory as to why email lists seem to work well, especially with government types. It’s because email is work, and the web is not work. People are now so used to working through their email, that they are quite happy for it to be used for a number of purposes, whether it be news alerts (more popular than RSS feeds) or community interactions (more popular than social networks).

There are problems with email lists though, especially for community based collaborative efforts. Scalability is a major issue, with only 25-30 regular contributors being feasible on a list. The second is when individual work streams start to develop, which some list subscribers just aren’t interested in. Thirdly, you can’t work collaboratively on documents, and at that point additional services have to start to be used.

PermalinkEmail lists still the best?

Build your own search engine

This is a presentation I created  a while ago explaining just how easy it is to create a personalised search engine with Google CSE. I have had a few people ask me how this is done recently, so I thought it might be worth re-publishing it.

[slideshare 69077 customised-search-with-google4296]

PermalinkBuild your own search engine

Creative Connectivity Slides

I spoke last week at Creative Connectivity, a conference being organised by the Yorkshire and Humber Regional Support Centre, which is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee – on the subject of the risks and opportunities presented by Web 2.0 and social media for e-learning providers.

I was surprised by some of the discussions – college staff are really paranoid about things going wrong, perhaps justifiably, I don’t know. But issues were raised that I just hadn’t occurred to me before. Take online adverts, for example, which I have for a long time accepted as a necessary evil for getting access to great free web tools. But what if a college lecturer advises a student to use a certain website, which happens to have adverts for (say) online dating? Apparently, the college could end up getting a kicking from parents.

As with all discussions about risk, though, the key questions are “So what?” and “What’s the worst that could happen?”. Certainly when it comes to issues around personal data, the latter is most pertinent. I mean, what information is likely to be left on a social network by a student that an identity thief could really make use of? And what use would a 16 year old’s identity be, anyway?

Still, I think there is an opportunity here for someone to put together a closed, safe, ad-free social network for schools and colleges.

Here are the slides that I presented, in case they are of use.

[slideshare 237302 risk-opportunities-of-web-20-1201025828755198-3]

If you would like me to come and have a chat at your organisation or event about any element of social media and web 2.0 tools – whether to communicate, collaborate or educate, do get in touch.

PermalinkCreative Connectivity Slides

Seesmic

seesmic Lloyd Davies gave a great introduction to Seesmic as one of his sessions at the barcamp, and I was chuffed when he let me have an invite to the service. Now, I have done nothing with video on the web, yet, and thought that maybe getting into this cool new service would kick start me.

So what’s Seesmic? Well, it’s to YouTube what Twitter is to WordPress. Kind of the same but smaller and shorter.

It’s got another thing in common with Twitter – it’s flakey as hell.

Lloyd warned me that the interface (a gigantic job lot of Flash) is crap, but that didn’t really prepare me for how woeful it is. I record my first embarrassing attempt at a video (apologies for the poor sound, I need to sort out my webcam settings) this morning, and now, nearly 12 hours later, it still hasn’t appeared in the ‘My Videos’ page, and the people I set as folk I want to follow still don’t appear either.

But I am sticking with it for now, and will try and get into the habit of regularly putting content up on Seesmic. It might even encourage me to start adding some more traditional video content to this blog. We’ll see.

PermalinkSeesmic

Thoughts from barcampukgovweb

This is probably going to be the first post of many as I try and get my head around the barcamp, what it all meant, and what happens now. The latter is the most important, I feel.

The day went well, everyone got along famously and it was brilliant – and worth the train fare – just to meet some really cool people for the first time, like Jeremy Gould, Lloyd Davies, David Wilcox, Jenny Brown, Tim Davies, and (finally!) Simon Dickson – who is, as I expected, a real livewire and a truly top guy. I also got to catch up with Steve Dale – always a joy – and Nick Booth, who is planning the next meeting of the Birmingham Social Media Club, as I think it is now going to be called. What was interesting was that this group of folk got on very well, and a germ of an idea was floating about with regard to meeting up more regularly, working more collaboratively to try and push forward our shared agenda, which is to get the public sector using the web properly.

One thing I am pleased with is the Pageflakes page I put together, which seems to have done a good job of pulling together the outputs from the day – photos on flickr (this one is of Steve Dale talking CoPs), for example, and blog posts are popping up in the Google Blog Search and Technorati feeds. Cool. Perhaps this is the future of distributed online communities: use the tools you are comfortable with and build the community through common tags and RSS feeds. Why should I have to write a blog post about the barcamp, for example, on any platform other than my own blog? I don’t want or need another account, or site to maintain – just let me use the one I already have in a social way.

Two questions popped into my head during the day though. Neither were answered – which is perhaps not surprising and not necessarily a bad thing – but nor were they asked, which might be a bigger issue. Firstly: what’s the big idea? Where are we going with this? What do we want out of it? Secondly: what are we actually going to do?

There is talk of a new ‘Digital People’ project, involving those inside gov as well as those outside who have services and skills to offer, which may help to take the agenda forward. It should certainly cement the relationships which have begun to be built at the barcamp. But what’s the endgame here? What’s the point? Consultation is certainly a possibility, and perhaps political engagement too. But we need a clear idea of what we want to achieve before we can even begin to think about how that might happen.

Here are some posts I have spotted so far following the event: Tim Davies, Feargal Hogan… more to be added as they emerge.

PermalinkThoughts from barcampukgovweb

Thursday, 24 January, 2008

Thursday, 17 January, 2008

Wednesday, 16 January, 2008

links for 2008-01-16

Permalinklinks for 2008-01-16

Tuesday, 15 January, 2008

Twitterific

Twitter is becoming an indispensable tool for me – albeit one I didn’t know I needed until I started using it in a big way. I guess that as with a lot of these social networking type utilities, Metcalfe’s law applies – the more people use it, the more useful it is. Now I am following a number of people, and them tuning into my updates, suddenly I can’t get enough of pinging little messages around: about what I am doing, or what I need to know, or how I can help others.

So what is Twitter? Well, it’s a ‘micro-blogging’ service. You’re limited to 160 characters per post. That limit is important, because it means you can use text messages from your mobile phone to update your status, and also to receive them from others.

As every good Web 2.0 service should, Twitter has released an API, meaning that others can building applications which ‘mashup’ Twitter with other services to make it more useful. A good example is Dave Winer‘s Twittergram, which lets you post short bursts of audio onto Twitter; or hashtags, which allows people to post on, and follow memes through Twitter.

Dan York has an excellent post on the ways he uses Twitter. I’ve quoted his headings below:

    1. Twitter as News Source
    2. Twitter as Knowledge Network
    3. Twitter as Virtual Water Cooler
    4. Twitter as a way to stay up-to-date with friends
    5. Twitter as a Travelogue
    6. Twitter to Track Conferences
    7. Twitter as a PR/marketing Tool
    8. Twitter as a Learning Tool
    9. Twitter as Fun
    10. Twitter as a Daily Lesson in Humility (and Brevity)

Today the service has had a little trouble though, and I blame Macworld. So many people will be sending Twitter updates from their mobile phones and laptops about the big breaking news from Steve Jobs’ keynote that the whole thing is under considerable strain. And Twitter isn’t the hardiest service at the best of times. More on this from Duncan Riley at Techcrunch. How hard would it be, I wonder, for some to just copy Twitter, but back it with sufficient infrastructure to actually work all the time?

Finally, a quick real world example of how Twitter can genuinely be helpful. Last week sometime, my good friend Steve Dale sent out a message requesting that someone suggest an example of a ‘shout box’ on a website. I responded within a few moments, giving a URL of a site where I had just added shoutbox functionality. Steve was in a meeting at the time, and those who were waiting for the shoutbox example were left open mouthed at the speed of this forum of communication and collaboration.

You can follow my latest Twitter updates in the widget on the left of this blog. Alternatively, join Twitter yourself and add me to your follow list!

PermalinkTwitterific