Monday, 10 March, 2008

Dead tree web 2.0 reading list

There are a number of books out there which are covering a lot of the stuff I am interested in with regard to the web and collaboration. It might be worth coming up with a reading list – how about a challenge to read them all by the end of the year?!

These aren’t necessarily all web 2.0 specific books: some cover background and the history of the technology too.

1. Here Comes Everybody – Clay Shirky

2. We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity – Charles Leadbeater

3. A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet – John Naughton

4. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything – Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams

5. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder – David Weinberger

6. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual – Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, and Doc Searls

7. The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand – Chris Anderson

8. Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date – Robert X Cringely

9. Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers – Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

10. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy – Andrew Keen

Are there any classics that I have managed to miss? Or are some of my picks utter dross that shouldn’t be touched with a bargepole?

Disclosure: the links to Amazon are associate links, which provide a bit of money towards Palimpsest, the arts and politics discussion forum I run.

#Dead tree web 2.0 reading list

The culture of collaboration

Steve Dale writes about the need for organisations to consider the cultural as well as the technological issues around collaboration and communication using the web”

An excellent posting from Shawn over at Anecdote about fostering a collaboration culture. A good corollary to my recent postings about what I see as growing and misplaced belief that Web 2.0 is the solution to more effective knowledge sharing. They key point I was trying to make is that technical solutions (blogs, wikis, RSS) by themselves do not create, nurture or develop learning and sharing communities, or improve engagement between government and citizens. I emphasised the importance of people in the equation, both in terms of skilled facilitators (those who support and encourage conversations and collaboration) and the willingness of the users themselves to actively engage (e.g. a shared domain of interest). Shawn refers to fostering a culture of collaboration, which I think is quite often overlooked by those who are rushing headlong into implementing Web 2.0 facilities in order to achieve better knowledge management.  To put this into perspective, the investment (time, cost and support) for the ‘people and process’ side of the communities of practice being developed across local government exceeds the cost of the technology by a factor of ten or more. Furthermore, this is recurrent cost and not a one-off capital expense.

I’m delighted that Steve is already signed up with the etoolkit project wiki, as getting this balance right is key to the success of the project. The toolkit we are developing will make clear the complete costs of implementing a social media solution to a problem, including people’s time and training, as well as the financials. Social media and web 2.0 are quick and easy to do, but not so quick, and not so easy to do well.

#The culture of collaboration

Twitter – awesome source of blog traffic

It was interesting to see the results of the little poll I have been running in my sidebar recently regarding how people read posts on this blog. Out of the 25 votes cast, only four people responded that they read posts via the links that appear on Twitter. The thing is, my blog’s stats show that the largest referrer of traffic to this site every single day is Twitter.

My blog automatically pings my Twitter account with a short message telling everyone that follows me that a new post is up on DavePress, and the title, so they know what it is about. There is a link there, so all people have to do is click that and they’re here. Magic – and much quicker than RSS. This is all done with the plugin TwitterTools by Alex King, and you can download it here.

Well worth it for anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog.

#Twitter – awesome source of blog traffic

Prologue+Wiki=collaboration

etoolkit

I wondered last week about the ways we can use online tools to collaborate on projects – I had on my mind the etoolkit that David Wilcox (and now Beth Kanter, Emma Mulqueeny, Alex Stobart, Nancy White and Steve Dale…) and I are developing in the open.

My issue was that while wikis are perfect for putting stuff together and bringing together thoughts and resources, they aren’t that great for conversations or throwing out ideas, which is where group blogging can have a great impact. The trouble is that a standard WordPress (say) blog is rather an unwieldy beast for this task, making you sign up for the blog, log in, go to the admin panel, then click write post etc etc…

There’s an obvious solution here, and that’s the Prologue theme for WordPress. Makes it dead easy for people to contribute ideas, with the possibility of threaded conversations using the comments. Perfect. I have started one for the etoolkit here. It’s hosted at WordPress.com which means that while allowing others in to contribute is a little clunky, there’s little harm done or money lost if nobody uses it.

#Prologue+Wiki=collaboration

Friday, 7 March, 2008

Developing an open toolkit

David Wilcox and I had a meetup earlier this week, where we talked about the different ways that organisations need to be approached in terms of how they might make use of social media and web 2.0 stuff – or not, as the case may be.

We touched on David’s work at the RSA and the subsequent collaboration for membership organisations; as well as some of the outputs of events like the Social Media Big Day Out and the barcampukgovweb.

Wouldn’t it be nice, we thought, if there was a toolkit out there which provided the materials needed for an organisation to work through the options, decide what their issues are and figure out how they can meet those issues with a mixture of on and offline responses.

So we did the only thing a pair of self-respecting social hackers do, and set about creating such a thing – and all in the open, of course. You can find it all at the etoolkit wiki. Don’t worry, that’s just a working title.

It is envisaged that the toolkit will be made up of 3 elements:

  1. The toolkit itself, a prepared pack of information
  2. A facilitated workshop
  3. A dedicated network space for post event support and discussion

The toolkit itself will be made freely available, probably under creative commons. It will be open enough to be easily bespoked for a sector, whether charities, local gov, membership organisations or whoever. People can pick the toolkit up and facilitate the workshop within organisations; or consultants could specialise in delivering it themselves and charge for it.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, and please do sign up with the wiki and start to contribute your ideas if you would like to.

#Developing an open toolkit

Thursday, 6 March, 2008

Working together

I really like the idea of using the web to bring people together and work on problems out in the open, rather like David Wilcox and Simon Berry did in their bid for the Innovation Exchange project.

They used Drupal, a group blogging platform that does tonnes of other stuff, which is great for enabling people to throw ideas out and let the community respond to them. It’s got pretty low barriers to entry as pretty much anyone can hit the ‘create content’ button and dump their brains onto the screen. There’s an immediacy about this approach that I like a lot.

But I am also a fan of the wiki as a form of collaborative working, and wikis do have advantages over something like Drupal in terms of getting a ‘product’ finalised. What it doesn’t have is that immediate ability for people to be able to chuck thoughts out to gauge a reaction as to how useful they are. Editing a wiki page has a seriousness that writing a blog post doesn’t have.

I suppose what I am after is a decent wiki for Drupal, so that all the good stuff in the blog posts and comments can be moulded together. Google Sites could do this perfectly, as its ‘Announcements’ page template is effectively a blog. But there are too many limits of public involvement in Sites at the moment for it to become usable in this context.

If anyone has any suggestions for something I am missing, I would love to hear about it!

#Working together

Wednesday, 5 March, 2008

TwitterNotes

TwitterNotes

TwitterNotes lets you post yourself notes using Twitter, just by prefixing the note with a ‘+’.

Dead easy, and great from a mobile phone. There is even a mechanism for making private notes, and tagging them using the hashtags convention.

#TwitterNotes

Tuesday, 4 March, 2008

BuddyPress

This looks very exciting.

Thanks to Nick for the tip off.

Edit: More via TechCrunch:

It is easy to dismiss this as completely unnecessary given the abundance of social networks already out there, as well as application development platforms like OpenSocial. But an open-source social network does present some intriguing possibilities. New apps and features could be added simply by creating new plugins. And there would be no lock-in to any proprietary code or development environment.

#BuddyPress

I promise…

…not to write another blog post about blogging for a while.

I do need another area of obsession though. Wikis? Social networks?

Any other suggestions?

#I promise…

It’s Not Just the Blog

As part of some notes I have been putting together for getting started with blogging, I’ve written about some of the other services that it might be a good idea to register with, in addition to your blog:

No blog exists within a vacuum, and if you to get the most out of yours, you need to be engaging with other online social services too.

1. Flickr

Flickr is a photo hosting and sharing site. What that means is that you can upload photos onto the web, and embed them into your blog posts without having to worry about whether you have them in the right size to suit your blog’s theme – Flickr resizes them all for you. You can then link back to the photo’s page on Flickr, allowing your readers to see larger versions, for example. You can also tag your photos with keywords that make it easier for people to find them and for you to find similar content uploaded by others.

Flickr is a social network in itself, of course, and therein lies another of its strengths for the blogger. If someone comes across one of your photos through Flickr and likes the look of it, the chances are that they will click a few links and find their way to your blog. Bingo! Another reader.

Along similar lines when it comes to media sharing are YouTube for video content and SlideShare, which allows you to embed and share PowerPoint presentations.

2. Technorati

Technorati used to be the number one search engine specifically devoted to blogs, but now it has pretty much been overtaken by the Google juggernaut. Having said that, though, it is still a pretty useful service.

Once you have claimed your blog on Technorati, it lets you track who is linking to you, which is both heart-warming and useful. You can assign tags to your blog, which can help people find you. Other things you can do include putting a little badge on your blog, linking people to your Technorati page and encourages them to mark your blog as a favourite. Other people are then alerted to the act of favouritisation, and so they too are aware of your blog.

It’s essentially another service to make your blog more discoverable.  And that’s a good thing.

3. MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog is a service from Yahoo! Which helps you both find out a little more about your readers as well as building a bit of community spirit around your blog. It does a number of things: it tracks where people are coming to your blog from, and where they leave it to; it logs members of MyBlogLog and displays their photos on your blog; and it allows people to join a community page for your blog and have discussions with one another.

It’s a great way of finding out more about your readers, what they are interested in and what topics, or styles of writing, attract are most popular.

4. Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. Rather than just save sites you see as useful to your browser, it allows you to save them to a publicly viewable website. Like Flickr, you can tag your bookmarks, which will help people to find them.

Del.icio.us also lets you integrate its service with your blog. So, you can have a daily posting of the links you have bookmarked that day to your blog. This is a great way of flagging up stuff you think your readers might find interesting but which you don’t have an awful lot to add to. You can also have a cloud of your popular tags in your sidebar, so folk can access links you have recommended on a certain topic.

You can also make it easier for your readers to add your posts and pages to del.icio.us too, by including links in each one which they can click to be taken straight through to the del.icio.us site. These can also tell you and your visitors exactly how many people have already bookmarked a particular posts, which is another great way of finding out what’s hot on your blog.

5. Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging service, which allows you to post updates on what you are up to that are of up to 140 characters. The limit is important because some people used text messages on their mobile phones to both provide their own and receive updates from others.

Twitter can also be used to inform people of when you have made a new posting to your blog, which is another effective way of publicising your content. Twitter regularly features as the top referring site for DavePress, for example – people do follow the links that appear there.

#It’s Not Just the Blog

Who are you blogging for?

A key consideration for a blogger is who the blog is being written for. I am going to try my best throughout this post not to use the word ‘audience’, because the people that read blogs are more than that, not least because of the interaction they can have through comments and pings from their own blogs. But even if we avoid thinking of the readership – or intended readership – of a blog as an audience, we still need to have an idea of who they are. It might be that a blog is written primarily for the author’s purpose, more than anyone else, for example.

It’s fair to say, I think, that a log can probably be written for several groups of people, indeed maybe the question is who is this blog post for, rather than the entire blog itself. But it might be useful to try and break down the different groups.

1. Blogging for yourself

This doesn’t necessarily mean making very private thoughts public – maybe a handwritten diary is best for that kind of thing. But blogs can be used as notebooks, capturing thoughts and ideas so you can return to them later. Again, the blog format, including stuff that appears in the sidebars as well as in actual posts, alows it to become your hub on the web, so you can have in one place your del.icio.us links and flickr photos, say. The blog almost becomes your online scrapbook, but one which you ahre with the world and welcome their thoughts on – if you have comments turned on, that is!

2. Blogging as ‘consultation’

A blog can also be used as a sounding board, putting your writing out there for people to come back to you on, which you may then use for another purpose. A lot of the stuff I write here on blogging, and getting started with other social media and web 2.0 tools is slowly being edited and added to, and one day when I have some time I might try and put it into an e-book format or something. This is a bit like 1, really, as the beneficiary of it is yourself, but if you publish what you do put on your blog with a Creative Commons licence, say, then others can benefit too.

3. Blog your experience to create a niche

There are plenty of niches about, and one way you can carve one out for yourself is to write about an area of expertise tha you have, sharing your ideas and good practice with others who do similar stuff. You can soon make your blog the centre of a community of interest in your sector, as you tailor what you write to meet the needs of the people you work with, whether in your organisation or others.

4. Family and friends

It’s quite legitimate to use your blog just to communicate what you are up to so that family and friends can keep up to date with your movements. Using photos and video in your blog means that it will be a fair bit more exciting that your average round-robin letter or email. If your content is good, too, you might pick up some readers who just enjoy what you post, even though they don’t know you. Having said that, though, your readership is generally going to be pretty limited if you concentrate all your writing for family and friends!

5. People with the same interests as you

You can use your blog to write film reviews, or book reviews. A good friend of mine has started a blog doing just that and after a little over a year is now seeing publishing using his reviews on book jackets. Now, it helps that he is a fabulous book reviewer, but the fact that his blog features book reviews and book reviews only means that he attracts an audience of book lovers, ie people who share the same interest as him.

6. People who can help you

You can use your blog to attract the attention of people who can help you achieve something. Say you have a great idea for a web service but no idea how to put it together, well, by blogging about it, interested folk will come across you when Googling and can offer their help. Don’t just write one “HELP!” post, but write a few, explaining what you want to do and why, and how you are going about trying to fill the gaps in your knowledge. By making it look like you are making an effort, people will be more likely to help you, and you may well be informing others, too.

7. Future employers

Your blog can become your online CV, and the best thing (actually it could be bad…) about this is that it provides a snapshot of exactly who you are: your interests, your style and your ability to work with different types of media. For example if your CV or application forms claims that you have amazing communication skills, it’s fabulous to be able to back that up with a real example, of which a well-written blog is a great one.

What have I missed out?

#Who are you blogging for?

5 things every blog needs

I am trying to come up with a short, snappy list of things that a blog has to have if it is going to have any chance of being successful. I want to limit it to five. So far, I have come up with:

  1. Authenticity – your voice has to be genuine
  2. Regularity – you don’t have to post three times a day, but a regular flow of new content is vital
  3. Responsive – respond to comments, and what’s going on outside your blog
  4. Integration – it’s not just the blog, it’s flickr, del.icio.us, youtube, twitter etc etc
  5. Identity – The blog is the author’s space on the web – make sure it represents you well

I am not sure if 1 and 5 are repeating themselves. Has anyone got any comments or suggestions on how this list can be improved?

#5 things every blog needs

Monday, 3 March, 2008

links for 2008-03-03

#links for 2008-03-03

Sunday, 2 March, 2008

links for 2008-03-02

#links for 2008-03-02