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links for 2007-11-12
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John Naughton’s Observer column on Apple’s iPhone
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Jing is a service that allows you to create screencasts – recordings of what you do on your PC screen – within the browser for free. Cool!
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Monday, 12 November, 2007
Sunday, 11 November, 2007
links for 2007-11-11
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Stephen Fry on the iPhone: “In the end the iPhone is like some glorious early-60s sports car. Not as practical, reliable, economical, sensible or roomy as a family saloon but oh, the joy. “
Saturday, 10 November, 2007
Charlie Brooker: Agony Aunt
I love Charlie Brooker’s columns at The Guardian‘s Comment is Free site as much as I love his TV stuff. I’m just catching up on his posts after being offline for a while, and came across this gem:
Years ago, on a night out with a girl I was slowly going crazy for, the sheer weight of mental calculation left me unable to make any sort of move. We shared a cab together, and after it dropped her home, she sent a text message saying: “I wanted you to kiss me.” But the moment had gone. A week later she met the love of her life and that was that. It happens to everyone at some stage, obviously. But this was worse because it happened to me.
links for 2007-11-10
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New version of the great Share This plugin for WordPress (amongst other platforms). It allows users to send links to their favourite social network or bookmarking site; or indeed to email or IM them to friends.
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Buzzword is an extremely nice looking online word processor, recently acquired by Adobe, according to Mashable. Not as feature rich as Google Docs, Zoho et al, but a great example of just how attractive web apps can be.
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Great tutorial from Mahalo on how to employ Google Analytics on your site. GA is an astonishingly powerful free website stats tool, which provides sophisticated metrics on who is accessing your site, from where, and what they are interested in.
Friday, 9 November, 2007
Woken by a cat
Loving this!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjshyT4cZpI]
Amping up WordPress
Quick presentation on improving a WordPress blog from Mark Jaquith:
[slideshare 158924 amping-up-your-wordpress-blog-1194474703187376-3]
Sketchcast – social whiteboards
Sketchcast is a great little tool which allows you to record yourself drawing a sketch – whether roughly with a mouse or more accurately with a graphics pen – and you can add audio commentary too.
Here’s a great example from Anecdote, explaining how communities of practice can be used to create action and outputs. I hope it embeds ok – one of the few limitations of WordPress is in the way that embedded media works, it often messes up the layout of the post unless you use a plugin to handle it for you. Hopefully there will be a Sketchcast plugin for WordPress soon.
Thursday, 8 November, 2007
GroupsNearYou.com
Richard Pope has been working on a new social website for MySociety, called GroupsNearYou.com. Here’s how he explains it on his blog:
For all the talk of social networking people forget that for a whole host of internet users have been doing this kind of thing for years using really the really the < web 1.0 technology of email groups and phpBB forums (sw4people, Urban75 and Hern Hill Forum blog are just a few local to me).
They can make a real difference to the local community aspects of people’s lives – discussing crime, finding out about local restaurants, ganging up on their local council or whatever. Many of the people who run these groups (especially the email based ones) are often not that internet savvy, but have found simple tools that let them connect with people where they live that have a shared interest.
The problem is, unless someone tells you directly about one, they are all but invisible.
To this ends, I’ve been building a site for mySociety called (sticking to the “does what it says on the tin” naming convention) GroupsNearYou.com that is aiming to map the locations and details of these groups and, importantly, help people find ones relevant them.
At the moment the site is pretty sparsely populated, but I am sure that will change in the very near future. Making decent websites available to community groups is a topic I am greatly interested in, but equally important is making them accessible and easy to find. Great work, Richard!
links for 2007-11-08
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Tangler is a host of discussion forums with a difference – it acts more like an instant messaging platform than a traditional forum. Looks a cool way of getting discussion groups together quickly.
Wednesday, 7 November, 2007
Zoho’s CRM
I have been looking for a cheap, quick to implement and eay to use CRM (customer relationship management) system to use while a long term solution is identified. This led me to have a play with Zoho’s offering, which is a real gem. Not only is it pretty fully featured, but there is also the ability to customise fields, and add your own. This is invaluable as the service is pretty heavily sales-focused.
Add to this that the system is free for the first 3 users, and only $12 (about £6) a month for any additional users, it’s a real bargain.
Another option within this space is 37 Signals’ Highrise, which isn’t as fully featured as the Zoho effort.
There are downsides of course – I’m not sure, for example, what the data protection issues are for holding large amounts of other people’s personal data online are, especially for a public body. But in terms of features, ease of use, customisability and price, this is a real winner.
links for 2007-11-07
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HiveLive is another service to use to create your own social network. Very useful for creating niche or sector specific online communities. There are a growing number of these available, keeping a track of them, and which is best for which situation, is g
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Great little interview between Beth Kanter and Heather Cronk, who is involved with Pledgebank, a MySociety project which aims to pull people together to achieve social goals.
Tuesday, 6 November, 2007
Gordon Brown loves Countdown
It’s a fact:
[youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mHOAtgMqr5I]
Thanks to Simon Dickson for pointing out this oddity. I suppose it’s a difficult line to tread, but this definitely falls on the “has he nothing better to do?” side of things.
BarcampUKGovweb
Am very excited about the forthcoming BarCamp for UK government web types. In fact, I think the remit is probably going to expand beyond government into all areas of not for profit web work.
Jeremy Gould, of the Whitehall Webby blog, seems to have kicked things off with his post:
My proposal was to run a barcamp event, where those who want to participate in developing ideas, sharing their expertise and swapping tips can come together as a community. For those not familiar with the barcamp concept, check out the wikipedia page. The key point is that you come if you have something to offer and you participate, rather than simply observe.
I’m delighted to report that they agree, so I’m pleased to seed the message here that we aim to have the event run across the last week of January 2008 (Saturday 26th/ Sunday 27th). I say ‘aim to have the event run’ because it will only work with the input, energy and enthusiasm of the participants. We have suggested a proposition and date, we’re hoping that enough people will want to be part of this to come along and also to help organise the event.
The story was soon picked up by David Wilcox, who describes it very well, with Jeremy
inviting us to help transform government by sharing expertise in the use of social media tools.
As well as the traditional BarCamp wiki (hosted on the excellent, and free, PBwiki) today I set up an event on FaceBook and a Google group for mailing list discussions. Hopefully more social media tie ins will be possible once photos and videos are being taken at the event – they can be shared through the common ‘BarcampUKGovweb’ tag and maybe some groups and channels.
One of the cute things about Barcamps is the fact that every attendee is expected to present. I’ve put the hugely vague topic of online social tools, community building, using social media to improve engagement down as my area – lord only knows what I’ll actually say. Any suggestions, let me know.
Sunday, 4 November, 2007
Hello world!
I know, I know. It seems like I start a new blog every 5 minutes. But this is different. This time, I’m staying put.
The whole FEconnect thing didn’t work for me, in the end. This was a big shame, because the blog proved pretty popular quite quickly. But what I realised was that there wasn’t any FE content on there. When I thought about it more, I realised there probably never would be. I’m better writing generally about web 2.0 and social media, how it can be applied to community building and online collaboration, without the added hassle of tying it into a specific sector.
So, DavePress. Non-sector specific. It’s just about me, and what I think, what I am interested in. I’m hoping that all the people who read LGNewMedia, FEconnect, and the various other bits I have done will tune in here and find stuff that will interest them. I’m sure they will.
The blog is still being built, but I will start adding content from now. Hope it’s useful.
Saturday, 18 August, 2007
Friday, 17 August, 2007
Success!
Well, I was successful in my interview. So, from sometime in October, I will be a Change Manager at the Information Authority. My role is going to be a really exciting one:
Establishing, supporting and maintaining communities of providers and data users to support the development and management of information and data standards for the FE sector…
Provide online and face-to-face facilitation to enable and then manage the process of defining, assessing and agreeing changes to the information standards
It’s my first paid role in community facilitation, and probably the closest I have ever come to having a job about which I am truly passionate. Exciting times.
Of course, I’ll be leaving the local government sector, which raises a question about the future of LGNewMedia, which has always had an obvious lg focus – even down to the name and URL.
I’m going to be starting a new blog, with a focus on the further education sector. The content will still be quite similar to that here: the social media and web 2.0 news will still be popping up, for example, and much of the stuff about community building can be applied to any sector.
The new blog will be called FEconnect, which is already mostly built, though there are a few jobs still to do. The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/feconnect so please subscribe to receive updates as soon as the blog starts for real.
So where does that leave LGNewMedia? Well, I will certainly leave it up here until the domain expires, at which point I will probably archive all the posts at my personal and historical blog. That is unless there is someone out there in local government who fancies taking it over. I would be happy to continue to pay for the hosting and the domain in the future if there is someone who’ll take the time to regularly update the blog. You would be getting a well established blog with a number of regular readers by RSS and visitors to the site.
I’ll keep maintaining LGSearch myself, and will continue to coordinate the localgovglossary so it would only really be the blog that you would be responsible for.
If you are interested, please drop me a line at dave@change2.org. Thanks!
Success!
Well, I was successful in my interview. So, from sometime in October, I will be a Change Manager at the Information Authority. My role is going to be a really exciting one:
Establishing, supporting and maintaining communities of providers and data users to support the development and management of information and data standards for the FE sector…
Provide online and face-to-face facilitation to enable and then manage the process of defining, assessing and agreeing changes to the information standards
It’s my first paid role in community facilitation, and probably the closest I have ever come to having a job about which I am truly passionate. Exciting times.
Of course, I’ll be leaving the local government sector, which raises a question about the future of this blog, which has always had an obvious lg focus – even down to the name and URL.
I’m going to be starting a new blog, with a focus on the further education sector. The content will still be quite similar to that here: the social media and web 2.0 news will still be popping up, for example, and much of the stuff about community building can be applied to any sector.
The new blog will be called FEconnect, which is already mostly built, though there are a few jobs still to do. The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/feconnect so please subscribe to receive updates as soon as the blog starts for real.
So where does that leave LGNewMedia? Well, I will certainly leave it up here until the domain expires, at which point I will probably archive all the posts at my personal and historical blog. That is unless there is someone out there in local government who fancies taking it over. I would be happy to continue to pay for the hosting and the domain in the future if there is someone who’ll take the time to regularly update the blog. You would be getting a well established blog with a number of regular readers by RSS and visitors to the site.
I’ll keep maintaining LGSearch myself, and will continue to coordinate the localgovglossary so it would only really be the blog that you would be responsible for.
If you are interested, please drop me a line at dave@change2.org. Thanks!
Tuesday, 14 August, 2007
Every community needs a killer app
Tomorrow is a big day for me – I have an interview for a new job outside of local government but still in the public sector which is going to make me heavily involved in community building, both on and offline. It seems pretty much perfectly suited to what I want to be doing and I hope that I’ll be perfectly suited to it to. We’ll see.
Anyway, because of the interview, I’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking about community building, especially the online side of things. 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 targetted 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 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.
Lee Hopkins on Social Media
Great video of Lee Hopkins pouring forth his spot-on views on how social media can be used within corporate communications. Everything he says can be applied to inter-organisation communication and collaboration too.
[youtube bYrcY2Wc17o]
Sunday, 12 August, 2007
Social Bookmarking Video
Yet another classic from the CommonCraft Show:
[youtube x66lV7GOcNU]