Monday, 14 January, 2008

Public Sector Social Media Meet

Members of the Community of Practice for Social Media and Online Collaboration are meeting up at the Learning and Skills Council National Office in Coventry on 26th February 2008 between 10am and 3.30pm for a day of Web 2.0 fun and frolics, including:

  • The benefits of using social media in the public sector, real life examples
  • Building social web sites: blogs, wikis, forums and social networks
  • Making social online video
  • Group discussions on where the potential is for social media to make a real difference and a "how do I?" : Matching tools to problems
  • Future developments of the CoP

If you aren’t already a member of the community and you feel it would be worthwhile attending please join us here and sign up on the wiki to say you’ll come.

#Public Sector Social Media Meet

10 Great Firefox extensions

I love FireFox, because not only is it faster and more secure than Internet Explorer, it’s also a lot more powerful, especially when you consider the many extensions you can use to add functionality.

Here’s a list of some of the ones I use:

1. Del.icio.us bookmarks

This is a brilliant add-on which works in two ways. Firstly, it adds a button to your FireFox toolbar which allows you to tag a site with a small popup window and without having to visit del.icio.us itself. The second button it adds opens up a sidebar in the browser, showing your latest tagged links and a search box to hunt out stuff bookmarked years before.

2. Download statusbar

This makes downloads appear in FireFox’s status bar, rather than in a pop up window. Makes life much tidier, and offers more information on what’s happening.

3. Copy plain text

As a blogger I find this invaluable. Selecting text and right-clicking allows you the option of copying text, while stripping out any formatting, which makes copying it into a blog paste a breeze, without the fear of weird formatting messing things up.

4. IE Tab

I try not to use Internet Explorer wherever possible, but sometimes you just can’t get out of it – when, for example, the site you need to view doesn’t work so well in FireFox. This cool extension allows you to switch the rendering engine in a tab to IE, so you are running it within FireFox.

5. Colorful tabs

I don’t know about you, but I often end up with tonnes of tabs open, and sometimes it can be a nightmare telling them apart. But with Colorful tabs, they are all presented in a number of delightful pastel shades, making it easy to switch to the one you want.

6. BlogJet this

This is installed along with BlogJet, the desktop blog editor I use. It makes it easy to reference a particular web page in a blog entry, by pulling the URL and the text from the page in question into the editor for you.

7. ScribeFire

This is an honourary mention, because I don’t currently use this. ScribeFire is a blog editor that runs as a Firefox add on. It works really well, but I’m a dedicated Windows Live Writer guy these days…

8. Twitbin

Integrates Twitter into your FF sidebar, so you can keep up to date with your friend’s tweets without having to leave your favourite browser!

9. Evernote Clipper

This plugin makes life much easier when copying snippets of the web to Evernote for future reference.

10. Search extensions

The search box in the FF toolbar can be added to so it becomes even more useful. I’ve added GodDaddy, Wikipedia and Mahalo to mine so far.

Can anyone recommend FireFox extensions that they couldn’t live without?

#10 Great Firefox extensions

The University of Wikipedia

Mike Butcher at Techcrunch UK reports on a University tutor banning her students from researching essays on the web:

The education world has pursued new technology with an almost evangelical zeal and it is time to take a step back and give proper consideration of how we use it.

Too many students don’t use their own brains enough. We need to bring back the important values of research and analysis.

Too right. Now, I’m a fan of Wikipedia and believe that, as a tool for getting a quick overview on the subject, it’s invaluable. I look stuff up on, and link to, Wikipedia time and time again. That doesn’t mean, however, that I would use it as a part of academic study. That’s no different from using Britannica as a basis for an essay or thesis, and surely nobody would do that?

The issue here isn’t Wikipedia, or Google, but the fact that the students in question are idiots.

Universities make incredible resources available to students through web catalogues in libraries, etc. However, maybe there is a lesson to be learned in terms of the ease of use of these systems – is that why students are turning to less academic sources? Or are they just being lazy?

#The University of Wikipedia

Replacing Notepad

notepad Notepad, as I am sure everyone knows, is a text editor that comes free with Windows. It’s very, very basic, but that’s part of its charm. I use it quite a lot, for quickly editing HTML or PHP pages, or sometimes just to strip the formatting from some text I am copying and pasting.

The trouble is that Notepad is sometimes a little too minimalist, and there are a number of free (as in beer, though sometimes as in speech too) replacements out there vying for your text. They offer functionality such as allowing much larger file sizes than Notepad can, having more than one file open at a time, and some fancy scripting markup effects. Here’s a couple of examples of what text editors are out there.

(Please bear in mind that I am not wanting to generate some kind of mad Vi vs. Emacs text editor flame-war here! But please do leave a comment letting everyone know what your favourite text editor is 😉 )

#Replacing Notepad

Use Google CSE on your blog

Google’s customised search engine service is really cool, useful and dead easy to use. It’s what I used to create LGSearch, which is one of the most successful bits of online work I have done. What Google CSE does is allow you to create a ‘whitelist’ of sites you want to limit your search to, so it’s a way of guaranteeing relevance in search results.

Another use of it is to replace your default blog search functionality. For example, it’s better than the WordPress standard search because it searches pages as well as posts; and it allows you to run contextual ads next to the results – taking people away from your blog but providing you with a little income, which is always nice.

The functionality is improved even more by using the new AJAX results overlay, which means there is no need to create a results page. Try it out on DavePress using the search box on the top right.

To get this on your WordPress blog, all you need to do is head over to Google CSE, create your search engine, remembering to only add your blog’s URL to the whitelist, and then copy the search box code into a text widget. Easy!

#Use Google CSE on your blog

links for 2008-01-14

#links for 2008-01-14

Sunday, 13 January, 2008

A social media software toolkit

Being a blogger is about far more than just words. To that end, you need tools which you feel comfortable with to enable you to create in any number of different media. Here’s some of the software I use to create my blogs and other online content. It would be cool to know what other options are out there, so do let me know what you use in the comments!

  1. Firefox. My window onto the web. Of course, the various plugins I use make Firefox into a better tool for blogging. But that’s for another post…
  2. FeedDemon. My RSS reader of choice. Of course, now it’s free, it should be yours too 😉 Being a desktop based reader, as opposed to web based ones like Google Reader and Bloglines, has a number of advantages – like downloading feed items to read when you are without the web – but to be honest I like it best because I am used to it. How pathetic is that?!
  3. Windows Live Writer. This is a new one for me as I always used to be a BlogJet fan. But I gave the latest version of WLW a try a month or so back and I love it. How come MS can get some stuff, like this, so right – and yet others so badly wrong? Using an offline editor just works better for me that using the inbuilt WordPress online offering. One advantage is that I can write blog posts without an internet connection, like right now when for some reason the connection’s dropped…
  4. Paint.net. A great free image editor. Much easier to use and more stable than the Windows version of the GIMP. Paint.net is easy to use and packed with features.
  5. SnagIt. Lee Hopkins tipped me off to this one and it’s the most recent addition to my toolkit.Snagit is a great little bit of software that makes taking screenshots a doddle. No relying on the PrtSc key any more! Snagit lets you copy just a portion of the screen, or even an entire web page that scrolls a number of screens. You can then use SnagIt to resize, crop and add effects as you see fit without having to fire up another image editor.
  6. FileZilla. A great little open source (free as in speech, as well as beer) FTP client.
  7. Audacity. It’s always cool when an open-source bit of software is also one of the best available, and Audacity is one of those. An audio editor which makes producing podcasts child’s play.
  8. BB Flashback. This lets me produce screencasts – videos of what I am doing on my PC screen. Great for producing demos and tutorials. Not sure if this is the best package on the market – lots of people use Camtasia – but this was more reasonably priced 🙂
  9. Windows Movie Maker. OK, so I need to get some better video editing software 😉
  10. Evernote. A lovely note-taking application. It lets me clip things as I am browsing through the web, whether text or images. Handy for pulling together thoughts for blog posts.

Photo credit: Saffanna

#A social media software toolkit

A thought on spam

spam Just a thought… If one runs a blog or online forum about erectile dysfunction and the use of viagra to combat that – how do you decide what is and isn’t spam?

A hypothetical thought, of course!

#A thought on spam

Creative Connectivity

I’m talking 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. The RSC are doing some great work in encouraging teachers and learners to engage with the web to create new learning opportunities. This includes a network they have set up using Ning. It will be a really interesting day, and I’m dead chuffed to be involved.

It’s on the 22nd January (2008!) between 10am and 4pm.

Click below for a PDF of the flyer for the event.

PDF Creative Connectivity flyer

If you are interested, visit www.rsc-yh.ac.uk/events.

#Creative Connectivity

Regeneration

Am currently reading Pat Barker’s Regeneration, all about Siegdried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and other fictional soldiers recovering at Craiglockhart War Hospital during WW1. I must admit to, shamefully, not knowing an awful lot about the ‘great’ war before reading Oxford University Press’ World War One: A Very Short Introduction. It so interested me that I immediately spent a Christmas book token on David Stevenson’s 1914-1918, which looks a beast of a read.

Here are some of the links I have been looking at, hunting down background information:

#Regeneration

Saturday, 12 January, 2008

links for 2008-01-12

#links for 2008-01-12

Friday, 11 January, 2008

Online collaboration does work

Despite now working in further education, I’m still involved in the predominantly local government based Communities of Practice social online collaboration platform, which is developed by the Improvement & Development Agency. For a quick run through of the whys, whats, wheres and hows, Steve Dale’s presentation from Online Information 2007 is as good a place to start as any.

[slideshare 200879 communities-of-practice-in-local-government-final-05-dec07-slideshare-version-1197474073591885-3]

I currently facilitate a few communities on the platform, principally the Social Media and Online Collaboration one, where we discuss the latest and greatest online innovations and muse dreamily on how wonderful it would be for our bosses to allow us to use them. Another is the Public Sector Knowledge and Information Management network – which could be significant as the management of knowledge becomes an ever-more important issue for public bodies.

If there is anyone reading this blog who might be interested in either of these communities, do sign up. It’s tremendous to see people engaging with social web tools to work together, and to share their knowledge and experience. This stuff really does work, people.

#Online collaboration does work

Best British football ground…

…is of course the home of the mighty Reds, at least according to The Guardian:

1) The City Ground, 1935 – present

Why on earth Nottingham Forest’s board want to move away from the City Ground is be££££££££££££££££££££££yond m£££££££££y k£££££££££££££££££££££en, sorry, a key on my computer got stuck for a moment there. There’s more than enough space for paying customers as it is, and in any case, the place is a magnificent reminder of the glory days. Forest might be a third-tier club now, but the shining modernity of the Trent End Stand, overhanging the river, is positively top-class and qualifies the ground as the most idyllic of any in the country. Meanwhile take a walk round the other side of the ground past the souvenir hut – club shop it ain’t – to the cramped car park, and the place positively reeks of the 1970s; you can almost see the ghosts of Brian and Peter unloading crates of ale to feed the squad before a big match. And across the river … Meadow Lane. To move from here would be sheer lunacy, and madness to boot.

Quite right, too.

#Best British football ground…

10 Cool WordPress themes

WordPress

One of the many reasons why WordPress is such a super publishing platform are the many themes which are freely available to give your site a professional look and feel.

1. Envy – WPDesigner.com

Envy theme

Envy is a bold and bright theme with plenty of different elements to help you personalise it.

2. Insense – BloggingPro.com

Insense

Insense is a really classy, professional looking theme, which is just as useful for putting together a WP powered static site as it is a blog.

3. PhotoPress – Performancing

Photopress

Perfect for photo or video based blogs.

4. Elite – WPZone.net

Elite

Smart, darker theme. Sometimes themes with a black background can cause problems when inserting images – especially those with a transparent background. But Elite is still pretty smart looking.

5. Illacrimo – LifeSpy.com

Illacrimo

Again, very professional looking, and the one I’ve used a few times in the past.

6. Bluvision – lucianmarin.com

Bluvision

A bit like Envy, in that it has lots of space for you to personalise your site’s appearance.

7. Simpla – Ifelse.org

Simpla

Nice, clean look – perfect for a personal blog.

8. Glossyblue – NDesign Studio

Glossyblue-1-2-screen

Glossyblue is a theme I used to use on LGNewMedia. It’s really rather lovely. I notice Tim Davies uses it for his Drupal-based blog.

9. Gridlock – Hyalineskies.com

Gridlock

Gridlock is a perfect theme for non-blog WordPress sites.

10. MistyBlue – Romow

Mistyblue

The theme I used for FEconnect, and I stil have a soft spot for it 😉

#10 Cool WordPress themes

A sense of place

The Birmingham Bloggers meet last night went well, with a good turnout and some exceptionally high-quality discussions on a variety of topics. I found myself burning up with jealously a couple of times as people talked about the exciting projects they were working on. Jon Bounds has a nice little write-up. Nick was an absolute gent as always. I met Stef for the first time, and was blown away by some of the stuff he is doing, mashing up social media services.

One thing that came up was that ‘Birmingham Bloggers’ is too narrow a title. Something based around the term ‘social media’ might be best – maybe a Social Media Club, like Lloyd runs in London?

Much of the discussion was around how bloggers can help improve the image and raise the profile of Birmingham, especially in the light of the second city’s total exclusion from this Guardian write up about city bloggers. A number of possible solutions were discussed, with the general feeling that a planet of Birmingham based bloggers would be a good idea. I’m going to have a look at putting this together.

On the way home I thought a Birmingham based customised search engine might help. brumsearch was born this afternoon 😉 I like building things and being (hopefully) helpful.

But this focus on the geographical element of the meeting – discussions around promoting Birmingham through social media – left me feeling pretty isolated. I live in Kettering, an hour’s drive away, but work in Coventry, just down the road. This meeting is the nearest thing I can get to as a group of people who dig new media.

Charlotte, who also attended, wrote along similar lines:

The thing about a meeting like this is that it is hard to figure out why we’re getting together. I guess to meet and share with a bunch of folks with a similar pursuit…

I came away feeling pretty down about the whole thing. These guys were so enthused about where they live and what they can do to improve things… But I don’t have that sense of place, not about Birmingham (obviously) nor indeed anywhere else.

#A sense of place

FeedDemon 2.6 problem

There’s a bug with FeedDemon 2.6, I think.

Whenever I click the little orange RSS icon on the FireFox address bar to subscribe to a new blog, it tries to open a new FeedDemon window. Every. Single. Time.

This is a pain in the neck as I am never sure if I have actually subscribed to a feed or not!

#FeedDemon 2.6 problem

Thursday, 10 January, 2008

WordPress is taking over

Neville Hobson reports on the new site for BA’s new airline. And guess what? It’s running on WordPress.

More and more, public bodies and corporations are moving towards WordPress as a lightweight, flexible and powerful way of establishing a social web presence. Let’s have a look at the evidence:

Anyone got any more? I will update the post if you leave URLs in the comments.

#WordPress is taking over