An online notebook
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An online notebook
Am currently beavering away on my latest project in the LG* stable. Let me know in the comments if you would like to be involved in development testing, or would just like to know more!
[tags]lgspace[/tags]
Zoho are one of my favourite web 2.0 companies. They provide pretty much best of breed web applications: cool stuff like a word processor, a spreadsheet, presentations, online meetings, wikis, and oodles of other stuff
Anyway, their latest little number is Notebook, a web based notetaking application. This isn’t just Windows Notepad online though: with Zoho’s Notebook you can add just about anything to a note: text, images, videos, audio, chunks of HTML, RSS feeds, entire web pages. Your notebook can also include word processed pages, or spreadsheets using the relevant Zoho tool.
I really get can’t across just how feature rich Notebook actually is. Try this video, instead:
[youtube sfJFBcF_6cE]
All the other Zoho apps, taken together, provide a great platform for transferring your productivity to a web based approach. Notebook, though, is something else – probably the most comprehensive web application I’ve come across.
[tags]zoho notebook[/tags]
There has been a mini-storm this weekend in the UK public sector blogosphere about whether or not it’s actually possible for people working for the government can actually blog in any meaningful way without fear of reprisals, whether from their employer or in the press.
The issue in question is about a post written by one Owen Barder, a Whitehall civil servant who wrote a post that has been picked up by the Mail on Sunday in, one might say, typically hysterical fashion. You can read some views on the debate here, here and here.
My personal view is that Barder’s post, which compared George Bush to Hitler, was ill-advised for a number of reasons. One is that comparing anyone to Hitler outside a 6th form debating society is pretty daft; another that when one is blogging about an issue close to one’s day job, it’s important to be careful with the way one words things. This links into the eighth blogging tip I wrote about here:
Don’t blog about things you shouldn’t. Don’t leave yourself or (even worse) others open to personal criticism because of what you post. If you don’t fully understand an issue, don’t blog on it – yet. Read more, take in other people’s views. Don’t make yourself look an idiot. Don’t flame people. What’s the point? You can disagree with others while remaining polite. It isn’t hard. Don’t deliberately take an extreme stance to provoke reactions. The most likely effect this will have is that people will ignore you.
It’s important that people working within the public sector have the opportunity to share their knowledge and experience through blogging, if they choose to. But, just as with any employee, they have to ensure that what they blog about, and the tone in which they do it, won’t impact negatively on their employer.
There’s possibly an issue here about whether public sector blogs work better behind a password, like those on IDeA’s CoPs. Of course, this means the general public misses out.
I’m planning a local government blogging platform, and in it blogs can be set to be private or public on a post by post basis. But at the end of the day, the best method of ensuring that blog posts don’t cause an unwanted publicity storm is simple common sense.
Update: A couple of comments have revealed the truth of what was in Owen’s post – which I haven’t had the chance to see because his blog is down. It turns out that all he did was quote a Guardian article, where the offending comparison was made. Given this turn of events, it’s clear that the Mail had a particular axe to grind with this particular blogger.
Would such a blatent and inaccurate smear have been made against someone writing within the mainstream media? I guess not. The question in my post is still valid – but takes a different tone, I think. Is it possible for public sector workers to blog when their words are twisted in such a fashion by those who have an interest in discrediting them?
The Local Government Glossary wiki project is going well, with four volunteers already adding content.
As this is an ever growing, and potentially significant resource, I’ve added the wiki to LGSearch.
Bubbl.us is a great service. It allows you to create mind maps within your web browser. You can share them with other people, and collaborate on them too. A great way of mapping out projects with people who aren’t geographically close.
I’ve created a quick map to show how it can work. It’s about social media, but is only for demonstration purposes: I know it isn’t comprehensive or probably even accurate. Here’s a link to the exported .png image file:
Which is very nice. But I can also embed it into a blog post, or any other site:
Which you can whizz around with your mouse and zoom in and stuff. Nice!
Nice article from The Guardian:
This week came the news that “William Wales” had joined the social networking site Facebook. Yesterday there was much argument about whether it was a hoax or not. Would Prince William really post a profile on the net? The answer is: well, why not? After all, this is how most people his age keep tabs on their mates.
With websites such as Facebook and MySpace constantly being talked about in the media, it must be easy to feel like a 20th- century luddite if you aren’t already part of the in-crowd. Here lies a great disconnect at the heart of 21st-century socialising: either you’re in (and use every social networking website you can) or you’re out (and don’t use them at all).
There’s a new version of WordPress out for those who host their own blogs. The main change seems to be the incorporation of the widgets plugin as a part of the base code. Dougal Campbell lists the main changes:
This is a great advance for WordPress, as drag and rop layout editing is a feature of other blogging systems. Am nervous about upgrading though – as I already use the widgts plugin – will this just override everything I have already set up?
Right, the virtual community is now live, kinda. You can find it at http://virtualcommunities.eu. Be warned: it isn’t pretty.
But prettiness can come later.
So, the point of this site is to create a community platform using different social media services. The point being that I already have a blog, and a flickr account, so why would I want to bother logging into another one in order to contribute? Through the wonder of widgets and RSS, Virtual Communities tries to create this online utopia.
Let’s go through the various media and talk about how each can be contributed to.
1. Photos
There is a Flickr group called Virtual Communities. All you need to do is join the group, and then add some photos to it. The content is displayed on the VC homepage through a Flickr ‘badge’ which displays the latest 5 images. The ones there now are just some random ones I chucked up to test things out.
Check – is this the right way? Could we just use a particular tag, thus making it even easier?
2. Video
This uses a VodPod pod called (guess what?) Virtual Communities. This works best as you can add video from a number of providers to it, and it produces a nice widget. All you need to do is join the Pod, and start adding video to it.
3. Events
An Upcoming widget for the Virtual Communities group displays upcoming relevent events. Of which there are currently none. This was added after the screenshot above was taken, by the way.
4. Blogs
This is an RSS feed which aggregates a number of blogs (those of Messrs Wilcox, Dickson, Mitchell and, er, me). This is done through the rather mega FeedJumbler. This combined feed is then spat onto the page with MagpieRSS.
Check: Do we want all blog posts? Or could we use a category or tag based RSS feed? Both WordPress (hosted and non-hosted versions) and TypePad are both capable of this…
Also – would it be better to display cotent from blogposts, and give them a bigger and more central lump of the screen?
5. Links
MagpieRSS once again comes to the rescue, this time chucking the latest del.icio.us bookmarks that have been saved with the tag ‘virtualcommunities’.
Check: this probably needs to be changed to a more specific tag that people aren’t likely to use by accident…unless the accidental is actually more fun?
6. Slides
There is a group on SlideShare called Virtual Communities. Oh yes! Anything added to it is republished on the VC homepage with a rather marvellous widget. Anyone can join the group and any presentation can be added to the group.
Next Steps
It obviously needs a redesign, and a decent stylesheet putting together. But it works, I think. It needs a central combined RSS feed, but FeedJumbler can do that. Maybe another combined feed to track comments on all the different services would be cool too (if possible!).
Other services that could be included are something like a shared box.net account, which can be added as a widget for sharing uploaded files. There isn’t a wiki, and I am not sure how one could be incorporated into this model, other than through tagging wiki pages in del.icio.us. What about audio?
If this is a model that people are interested in, I’m quite happy to package up the various scripts it uses and make it available. Another option might be to host other communities of this type at (say) http://virtualcommunities.eu/anothercommunity. The bandwidth on my side wouldn’t be much as the services are the things taking the hits.
Creating some kind of web based framework around the whole thing, allowing people to create communities and add stuff to them using a web interface would be really cool, but waaaay beyond my capabilities.
Please do provide feedback, especially those involved in the earlier discussion – is this the sort of thing you were thinking about?
Warning: mildly incoherent rambling ahead…
I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently to what the best way of creating online communities are. This is partly Simon Dickson’s fault.
Back in March, Simon wrote, in a post titled “Because you can’t do bettr than Flickr”:
I’ve just started work with a local community group keen to build a civic website. I’m looking at open source CMS solutions like Drupal as the base system… but I must admit, I’m wondering if the best idea isn’t simply to aggregate stuff from elsewhere…
Take the example of photo sharing… you won’t find a better website than Flickr. So why not just create a group, and let the members feed into it. Let Flickr take all the pain of hosting, user access rights, etc etc – not to mention the expense. That’s why they’re there. Meanwhile, you just consume the various RSS feeds (or whatever) back at base.
The more I consider it, I think this use of best-of-breed web services to add content to a community is the best way of doing things. The problem is with what you use as the ‘base’.
For example, VodPod is a great way of aggregating community chosen video content in one place. It also provides neat tools to display the content through the use of embedded widgets, which work within blog sidebars or within the bounds of a static web page.
It’s easy enough to create Flickr groups, or even just use tags, and use the RSS feed to republish the content and provide links back to source, as Simon points out.
But how to assemble it all in one place? You could have a central blog, which the community members contribute to – but then that kind of goes against the spirit of the enterprise. What would be better would be that members author their own blog posts, and choose in some way whether or not they make it to the community or not. WordPress blogs could manage this as it can produce feeds for individual tags, for example. Another option might be to use a specific de.icio.us tag and pull in headlines from that feed.
So, what about the base system? Drupal could do it, but it’s complicated! You could hack together a batch of pages using MagpieRSS, for example, but it would be a lot of work to get something looking professional.
One option would be to use WordPress and the FeedWordPress plugin to aggreagte blog content to fill the main page, with other media content in the sidebars. But there is a problem with this approach, which is that the RSS feed won’t include this supplementary media!
Perhaps something could be done with Yahoo!’s Tubes system, but I have to admit to not entirely understanding that.
Does anyone have any ideas on how various social sites could be pulled together successfully?
Thought it might be worth a quick plug of another little blog I write, called Free as in Beer.
All I do is post a link and a quick description of a zero-cost bit of software. Why not have a look – you might find something useful there!
VodPod is a really cool way of collecting and republishing video. The way it works is this: you create a pod, which is a library of video you have chosen as being particularly good, and then add to it using a bookmark in your browser. Easy. The videos can be hosted on YouTube, Google, blip.tv… anywhere!
The other cool thing that VodPod allows you to do is add a widget to your web site, allowing people to watch the latest things added to your pod. You can see the LGNewMedia version in the sidebar to the right of the screen. Just click a video to launch a pop up media player. Nice!
There is a social element to VodPod too. Anyone can join a pod and start adding material to it. So feel free to visit the LGNewMedia one and add some video!
Have no idea where this is from originally, it popped up in an RSS feed for a del.icio.us tag. Excellent stuff, though!
The Daily Telegraph have put together a great social element to their website – hosting user blogs at my.telegraph.co.uk. I have signed up and the interface is very nice and clean. There’s a social element too, where you can add other My Telegraph blogs to your blogroll and keep a track of comments and whatnot.
Also, on the posting window, some nice quick tips on writing blog posts are presented:
I’ve registered my blog there, but am not sure what I’m going to do with it. Just one thing has occurred to me: will each blog pick up the considerable google juice attached to the telegraph.co.uk domain?
Nice to see that Gordon Brown’s campaign site is running the latest version of WordPress…
Thanks to Simon Collister for the link.
…of this blog? To be honest, it’s turned into a bit of a mess. It’s useful to have if only because it makes a handy archive of all the various bits and pieces I have written since I started blogging in 2004.
But just recently it feels like the things I am writing about here don’t have much context to them. After all, I cover the social media and web 2.0 stuff over on LGNewMedia these days, freeware and other software stuff I post about on Free as in Beer or Living Without Microsoft. Book stuff really belongs on Palimpsest, any writing I do will soon be headed in the direction of The Interruption and I’ll be selling my soul and my wares at MediaZilla.
So why continue with this blog?
Well, apart from the historical interest, it might be nice to have a ‘hub’, around which all my online activities are centred. So, I have changed the layout here to start off with a static page, rather than the blog entries, which lists all my sites and the stuff I’m working on, along with some contact details. The blog is then just a click away.
I doubt too many more posts will be added here, maybe the occasional personal note that really doesn’t belong elsewhere. But it will still serve a good purpose as my homepage, which I can easily direct people to.
Presentation is the key to tip #7. This applies to both the appearance of your blog site as well as the standard of your writing.
Picking up the latter point first, I think a good standard of writing is vital. It doesn’t have to be brilliant, just competent. I’m basically talking spelling and grammar here. There is nothing worse than reading blogs full of weird spellings, txt spk, un-punctuated sentences and, my personal number one bugbear, errant apostrophe’s. So check your words before you write them. It makes you look more professional, and like you care more, as much as anything else.
See if you can include some graphics or images to accompany your text to enliven the appearance of your posts. I’m pretty useless at this, as you can probably tell by the text based nature of this blog so far. The one thing I do do, though, is try and grab logos and things from other sites to use to brighten things up.
Templates and themes
How your blog looks is important. Don’t believe people when they claim otherwise. Often the argument goes that as people are going to be reading you through your feed anyway, what does it matter? The answer to this, of course, is that people have to visit your site before they can subscribe, and if it is some multi-coloured nightmare with scrolling text and other horrible c1997 type stuff, they aren’t going to be subscribing to anything. Here’s a quick list of stuff you might want to bear in mind:
The other issue is what your blog system allows you to do to tart up your blog to add a little extra content which might well enrich your readers’ experience. Why not consider:
There really are tonnes of options to have a look at – check out what your blog engine will let you do!
Number 6 out of the 10 tips on blogging is on keeping notes. Writing blog posts that are interesting and well-informed isn’t easy. Sitting down in front of your blog editor waiting for an idea to come is pretty hard. Ideas for posts, though, can hit you at any time. So you need to be ready, with a system for taking notes that you’re comfortable with.
While you are browsing the web, or reading through your RSS subscriptions, you’ll often come across posts you like and want to have another look at later, or maybe just save a quote from it and the link back to the post. I used to keep a copy of a text editor (like Notepad on Windows) open all the time to copy snippets into. This is still a pretty good system, but there are far easier ways of doing it.
Google Notebook is great for storing post ideas. You can select text on a web page and then insert it automatically into a notebook entry – no need for copying and pasting. You can have several notebooks (I have one specifically for this blog, for example, as well as my personal blog) and divide them up with headings. It’s possible to turn them into pseudo-wikis too, by inviting friends to edit them and making them public as web pages.
Similar ways of storing notes like Notebook are the other free wikis that are available, like WikiSpaces, BackPack, PBwiki or Stikipad. I use WikiSpaces myself and it’s a great, simple solution for those that are new to the world of wikis.
Your reader will probably provide a clipping, sharing or news bin type feature, where you can store or mark posts for future reference. You could also post interesting tidbits to your del.icio.us account.
The advantage of these solutions, being web based, is that they are accessible from anywhere. But if you would prefer a system saved on your own computer, or a USB key, say, then you don’t have to stick with the text file option. TiddlyWiki provides a full wiki experience inside a singe HTML file you can run on your PC without being connected to the web. It’s worth mentioning here, though wildly off topic, the GTDTiddlyWiki for fans of Getting Things Done, which is great.
Of course, you can always just write things down. Get a nice notebook, like a Moleskeine maybe. Or just fold a sheet of A4 into quarters and use the different sections for organising your notes.
So it’s really important to have a system you like for holding onto posts and information you’d like to use later. Part of the joy of RSS is the fact that you can access so much more information than before – but keeping a handle on it becomes harder. Fortunately the tools are out there to help you. So try them out and stic with the one that works for you. Your blogging will become much easier, and the ideas will flow!
Linking makes your blog grow in popularity. There are three reasons for this. One, it makes your blog posts more useful if they provide links to what you are talking about, rather than making people hunt stuff out themselves. Second, the people you are linking to will realise you are talking about them and come and check you out. Thirdly, doing plenty of linking will do your search engine profile no harm at all.
Links really are what drives the blogosphere. If you get linked to by one of the big boys, like a Scoble, or a Rubel, or even a Dale, then you’ll find your traffic goes through the roof. It will also give you a boost in the search engines. So if you are generous with your links, giving people credit where it’s due, providing readers with plenty of extra reading material, it’s got to be a good thing.
Sometimes, links to your blog can mean disaster. I’m talking about a link from a site like Digg, or Slashdot. Both these sites have an eponymous ‘effect’ that can spank your site’s bandwidth and possibly bring your blog down. This might not be a problem if you have a hosted blog, but if you pay for your hosting like I do, you could end up with a big bill! That this has never happened to me is testament to my policy of writing deliberately uninteresting and non-linkworthy posts. Honest.
What if you have seen an interesting story but don’t have much to add? There are two ways of dealing with these. One is to set up an account at del.icio.us – where you can bookmark pages for further reading. You can then set up a daily posting, so that your links appear in a bulleted list in a single post every day, thus making the stuff you are reading available to your readers too. The other method would be to create a link blog, a separate blog where you dump either full text or stripped down versions of the posts you read.
I prefer the del.icio.us method.
Playing tag
Another way of providing links is through tagging. You’ll notice that a lot of posts on this blog have tags, links at the bottom of each post that send you back to Technorati, a blog search engine, to look up a certain key word. These are a great way to get traffic as anyone who searches Techorati for those keywords will come across a link to your blog. It’s already the biggest source of traffic for this blog.
Comments
Comments are important. You must allow them on your blog, let people give you feedback or start a conversation. Receiving comments on your blog are a great sign that people are taking notice of what you are writing. Treasure the comments people leave – and always do the courtesy of responding, even if it is just with a ‘thanks!’.
When you link to someone else’s post, why not leave a comment there while you are at it, linking to your blog or even the specific post where you mention it? It’s a good way to get some more traffic. But only do it when you actually have something to say, otherwise you are effectively spamming people’s comments. That’s bad.
You can subscribe to comment feeds with most good blog engines (well, I know WordPress allows it). This can be a great way of tracking conversations you are interested in. You can use services like CoComment as well. Some blogs offer the ability to have email alerts when people respond to a comment you’ve made – why not see if such a thing is available for your blog?
Links and comments make the blogosphere go round. Make sure you’re fully engaged with them.
Off on my hols for a week, to somewhere in the North Yorkshire Moors. Am looking forward to it no end.
Still, readers of Free as in Beer and LGNewMedia hopefully won’t notice, as I’ve bunged a week’s worth of posts to publish during my absence.
Two quite quick items here, so I will cover them together.
Feeding frenzy
I discussed earlier the importance of the feeds which other blogs produce – so you must make one available for your blog. If you want to be read, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to do so. That means making your content available in as many forms as possible. RSS feeds have become the standard way for most people to read blogs, as it is just so much more convenient. So, make it clear you have one. Have a nice large orange badge on your site somewhere. Advertise your feed in your site wherever you can – put it near the top so people can subscribe quickly and easily without having to hunt for a link.
If you host your own blog, you can pipe the feed through a service like Feedburner, which allows you to much better monitor the levels of subscriptions and readers you have. it also lets you add little features to your feed, like links to add the post to del.icio.us and how many people have commented on it. I use this service on this blog, and it works like a dream. Feedburner also provides you with loads of little ‘subscribe’ buttons for specific aggregators to make it even easier for people to subscribe.
One feature that Feedburner also provides is the ability to distribute your feed via email. Some people like getting their information this way, and given that the service is free, there is no reason why you shouldn’t implement it. Even better, this is a service that will work with hosted blogs, like those at WordPress.com.
The importance of RSS can be seen in the way that the latest generation of browsers, such as FireFox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7, have RSS heavily integrated into them. For example, in FireFox, I just have to click a link to an RSS feed, and it immediately brings up FeedDemon so I can subscribe to it. Great stuff.
One last point on providing your feed. Some systems allow you to issue either a full feed, partial feed or even just a short summary. The aim is that people see the shortened version of your article, are interested and so click through to your site, increasing your hit rate and maybe visiting your advertising, if you have some. I think this is lame. I want to read a whole feed in my aggregator, not mess about clicking links and whatnot.
Nichely done
If you want lots of people to read your blog, it’s best to find a subject to write about. Something pretty specific that marks you out a bit from the crowd. Personal, journal-type blogs are nice, and can be interesting, but unless people know you, why are they going to read it?
Pick a topic you’re interested in, whether technology, or Web2.0 or something to do with your line of work. For example, my day job is working as the risk manager for a local council in the UK. Now, I’ve googled on the topic and I can’t find any risk management blogs out there, so that might be an interesting niche to blog about. Maybe some day I’ll get round to it.
It doesn’t even have to be a topic you know a lot about – blogs where the blogger learns about stuff as they go long can be cool too.
But when you start out, why not try out a few different topics. Widen your scope to start with, to find out which you like writing about the most. That way, you won’t annoy the people who subscribed to a blog about web based office applications only for it to change to being about toilet paper manufacturing after a month.
