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

Moving links in WordPress

WordPress never fails to astound me with its brilliance.

I still haven’t finished putting this blog together properly yet, but today thought I ought to at least cobble together a mini blogroll of some of my favourite fellow bloggers. I’d already got a blogroll at my old blog, and the thought of copying and pasting them across was not, to be honest, a pleasing one.

A quick Google later though, and I had been alerted to the page residing on every WP blog, at http://yourblog.com/wp-links-opml.php. All you have to do is chuck this into the "import" option on your control panel, and you’re away.

OK, this could be made easier by allowing you to download the OPML file straight from your originating control panel, but I expect it’s not there to avoid cluttering things up with rarely used functions. But it is at least still there, and pretty easy to use.

#Moving links in WordPress

links for 2008-01-10

#links for 2008-01-10

Wednesday, 9 January, 2008

Help! WordPress tag clouds

My tag cloud (on the right of the screen on my blog’s homepage) is a complete mess. I need to edit the font sizes used, and maybe limit the cloud to tags which are used more than once, say.

I can’t find anything in the widget options – I am using the default one which comes as core in WordPress.

Any ideas, anyone?

#Help! WordPress tag clouds

Open source is best

Simon Dickson muses on the advantages of using open source platforms, as opposed to proprietary ones, in the light of the Interesource debacle.

It’s funny. Not so long ago, the question was ‘why should I be using open source?’ Increasingly, I’m left wondering why anyone would use anything other than open source.

True. As Simon points out, one of the Interesource developers has mentioned the fact that none of their clients had escrow agreements in place to mitigate against this sort of risk. But when you are providing a service like a community based web platform, which people are wanting to access 24/7 escrows don’t supply the solution in an adequate time-frame, in my view. They may make managers feel happier, but don’t really give you the protection you need.

With open source, there’s bound to be someone in the office who knows about the innards of your system. Failing that, there are experts a-plenty out there on the web, easily accessible through blogs, forums and mailing lists. WordPress, the favourite of both Simon and myself, is a great example of the wonderful support communities that exist for open source systems.

So here’s a challenge: why not use open source? Well, recently Telligent – a company providing a great (if proprietary, and (worse) .NET based) community portal system called Community Server – released some information about a blogging/lightweight CMS platform they are developing. WordPress is the clear competition, which they make clear on their landing page:

Finally, a WordPress Alternative

Install and setup is easier…You don’t need to know PHP…Of course Graffiti is built on .NET and truth be told any good developer can make either PHP or ASP.NET code perform. However, we think there are more long-term advantages in Microsoft’s platform…

Hmmm. I, for one, am not convinced!

#Open source is best

Newsgator RSS apps now free!

The Newsgator family of desktop RSS applications are now available for download free of charge! This is great news, and I would heartily recommend that anyone who hasn’t tried it before gives the Windows application, FeedDemon, a try. I have been using it for three years now, and while I have flirted with online services like Bloglines and Google Reader, I also come crawling back to FeedDemon. There are other products in the range too, like a plugin for Outlook and NetNewsWire, which is the desktop reader for the Mac.

They are still charging for TopStyle though – boo, hiss. It’s a great CSS editor. If you are thinking that’s a strange app for an RSS company to be selling, you’re right. The story behind it is that when Newsgator bought Nick Bradbury, the guy behind FeedDemon, he brought his other project with with, which was TopStyle.

Here’s a nice post explaining why FeedDemon is so great.

When I was at the Online Information conference last year I had an interesting chat with the guys from NewsGator. They have some cool enterprise products, which focus on making SharePoint actually useful, all through the magic of RSS.

#Newsgator RSS apps now free!

The ‘Lazysphere’?

Steve Rubel has posted about "The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging".

Somewhere circa 2006 the tech blogger mindset shifted – at least among the majority. People who used to work hard creating and spreading big ideas resorted to simply regurgitating the same old news over and over again, often with very little value add. It’s almost like we stopped the real work of reading, thinking and writing in favor of going all herd, all the time.

So is this true? Is there really less value in the blogging that’s going on right now? I’m not so sure.

One issue is that the level of noise has increased – there are more bloggers. Therefore, there are more rubbish bloggers, and more crappy blogs. After all, 98% of everything is pretty crud. So that’s a factor. Attention loggers like TechMeme are bound to display large numbers of bloggers regurgitating news, because that is what a lot of bloggers do. That doesn’t mean to say, though, that the quality bloggers aren’t out there, nor that they are in decreasing numbers in real terms.

The other is that many of the best bloggers like to be on the bleeding edge – they like to be early adopters, especially those who blog about tech and web innovation. Quite rightly so: if they weren’t engaging in new technology, we’d be questioning why we bother reading them. Now, one of the trends of recent developments is that stuff is getting smaller, shorter. Twitter is blogging, reduced. Seesmic is YouTube, reduced. If people are playing with these toys, then their output is bound to be reduced. That’s not being lazy, it’s just taking part.

#The ‘Lazysphere’?

barcampUKGovWeb hotting up

Jeremy Gould has been hard at work getting the barcamp for UK Government web types sorted out. We’ve got a venue – the Google offices in London. Cool. All the details are on the wiki and Jeremy’s blog.

The Google Group mailing list has also seen quite a lot of action. One thread I started was on bringing together the conversation. In other words, people are going to be blogging, tweeting, adding photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube before, during and after the event, and it would be good to have one place where they are all brought together. It would also be really useful for people who can’t attend, but would like to interact from their desks, say.

I was going to cobble a quick web page together using MagpieRSS to parse the various feeds. I then had a rethink and realised it would be so much easier to use a public start page. For no reason other than it was the first one I thought of, I chose PageFlakes. And it did the job perfectly.

ukgovwebpf

You can find the site at http://www.pageflakes.com/barcampukgovweb/

#barcampUKGovWeb hotting up

links for 2008-01-09

#links for 2008-01-09

The Innocents

The Innocents

Just finished watching The Innocents, the 1961 film based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. Here‘s the IMDB link to find out more, or there’s always Wikipedia.

It really is one of the scariest things I think I have ever seen. There’s a great thread on Palimpsest discussing the movie.

#The Innocents

Tuesday, 8 January, 2008

links for 2008-01-08

#links for 2008-01-08

Monday, 7 January, 2008

Wikia Search Launches

There has been a flurry of largely negative postings about the newly launched alpha of Wikia Search – Jimmy Wales’ human powered search engine. I’ve bookmarked quite a few at del.icio.us, which will pop up on this blog around midnight tonight.

Phil Bradley has a nice little summary though:

Results are fairly basic, with a title, summary, URL, cached version and some sort of rating. Here’s the one for the top ranking site relating to Web 2.0 – see if you can work out what it means! That is so going to keep the SEO bods intrigued. There’s also a star rating system, which you can click on, but you get a message saying that they don’t actually do anything yet. Please – either make them do something or take them away until they are ready to do something.

#Wikia Search Launches

A grand day out

Had a lovely day yesterday in the glorious sunshine. We visited the Suffolk coast, at Dunwich Heath and Southwold, and had a marvelous time. Here’s some photographic evidence. There’s more, should you want it, on my Flickrstream.

#A grand day out

Sunday, 6 January, 2008

Ning and Porn

Ning founder Marc Andreessen has posted a response to the discussions about the fact that quite a bit of Ning’s traffic is as a result of ‘adult’ communities. Ning, remember, is the service that allows you to create your own social network. Andreessen says:

First, we have built Ning to be a broad-based service — people can use Ning to create social networks and social experiences around any topic area they want and then contribute content and engage in any activity they want, as long as what they do is not illegal and fits within a pretty general set of terms of service…

Second, due to this inherent flexibility, some people have chosen to use Ning to create social networks and upload content around adult topics, including porn. It is true, there is porn on Ning…

Third, adult topics and content are a relatively small percentage of the total activity on Ning. We have various ways of quantifying this, and all of them show this to be the case.

However, my view is that I would now be much less likely to encourage someone to use Ning within the public or third sectors because of the heavy amount of adult content. I think that one of the key factors in encouraging people to engage with social media in a professional capacity is that it needs to be safe – and part of that is being free from association from undesirable content, like porn.

Ning is a great service, and could continue to be without the one-handed content!

#Ning and Porn

links for 2008-01-06

#links for 2008-01-06

Saturday, 5 January, 2008

Swinging

Swinging

Originally uploaded by DavePress

Ben didn’t want to go on the big slide thing at Fermyn Woods today, so I felt the need to uphold the Briggs family honour. I think I did so well.

#Swinging

links for 2008-01-05

#links for 2008-01-05

Friday, 4 January, 2008

Organising my feeds

I recently undertook the task of organising all my feeds into folders in FeedDemon – before this I had just the one (very) long list of sites I checked, not broken up in any way. This had become unmanageable.

So, here are the folders I have created, in order of the attention I give them.

  • Must Reads
  • UK
  • WordPress
  • Search
  • Software
  • PR, etc
  • Blogs about blogs
  • News, etc
  • General
  • Books
  • Software
  • Del.icio.us (also including other links feeds such as Google Reader shared items)
  • Flickr

If a feed falls into more than one category, then generally I stick it in the one that appears the highest on the list above. So, for example, Neville Hobson‘s blog could fit into PR, etc or UK but I in fact have it in Must Reads.

The General folder is heaving though – I need to go through that again, I think!

#Organising my feeds