Docstoc, currently in private beta looks very interesting as a competitor to Scribd, the ‘YouTube for documents’. The video below shows how Docstoc works.

[youtube GLWhgu1trpA]

Tags: docstoc, srcibd

Following up on previous posts about Google Gears, the web service that lets you bring your online world offline, I thought I ought to post about a couple more examples of it being used. Both have popped up on the Wikipedia entry for Gears, which is worth keeping an eye on for new developments.

The first one is SQLAdmin for Gears, which I cannot pretend to understand, though there is some explaination here.

Second is the far more straightforward Gearpad, which explains itself succinctly:

Gearpad is a simple notepad you can access from anywhere, even offline.

When you return to the network, your notes will be synchronized with the server automatically. Hooray!

Hooray indeed.

For a while I have been wanting to put all the bits of work I do on social media into a little basket, just to organise it and let people know that the same person is behind them all.

In addition to that, I have been playing about with Google Apps and wanting to find an excuse to start using it.

So, I merged these two and set up Change2 on Google Apps. My experience of Google Apps has been good so far, despite some trouble with putting a basic site together with Page Creator. What I have looks ok, and I have set up a blog on WordPress.com to cover the other bits.

Another role of Change2 is to publicise the fact that I am willing and able to help anyone out with social media type web stuff, and am happy to give my time up to charities, community organisations or any other non-profit organisations.

Tags: change2

I like FaceBook, though I don’t log in nearly as often as I ought to, so as to make the most of the service.

One of the reasons that I don’t, though, are the tonnes of invitations I get to have some application or other added to my profile. I know that the thir party developers are what makes Facebook cool, and some of the apps are really useful (or just fun, like the Graffiti one).

But having to wade through the invites and the interminable options that follow them really does get me down, and turns me off the platform to a certain extent.

Heh. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one that hates Comic Sans:

Apologies for the lack of updates lately, have been busy doing other things. Here’s the latest video from Common Craft, to make up for it. It’s a plain speaking guide to social networking. Cool!

[youtube 6a_KF7TYKVc]

I’ve been adding plenty of video’s to my VodPod, but of course they don’t appear in the RSS feed, so those that don’t regularly visit the site won’t know they are there.

So, here’s a list of some of the video’s I’ve recently added:

• Stephen Fry on Web 2.0
• Getting a Community Online
• Rise of the Prosumer
• New Plaxo features

Have you got some favourite online videos you think other LGNewMedia readers might be interested in? Join the VodPod and post them!

Here’s a presentation I have put together to explain some of the whats, whys and hows of creating a Google Customised Search.

Evan Davis, BBC News’ economics guy, has a pretty good blog called Evanomics (nice). Yesterday he posted on the hot topic of the moment, private equity. And as a blog post, for me it is pretty close to perfect.

For those that do not feel they know what private equity is all about, let me offer a few arguments on both sides.

First an explanation. Private equity is quite simple. Investors borrow money (from banks); they usually add a little of their own and use the cash to buy companies. Often the companies they buy were publicly-owned – in the sense that a large number of relatively anonymous shareholders buy and sell shares in them on the stock market – and once bought, they become privately-owned, in that their shares are no longer traded.

Davis provides explanation and opinion, facts and commentary. Despite reading articles every day in the papers about private equity, I never understood as fully as I do know after reading this post.

It’s a great template for new bloggers in terms of style and content.

The latest stage of my attempt to take over the world of vertical search is KMSearch, which focuses on knowledge management resources.

As well as the search engine, there is a wiki to manage the site, which includes the list of sites searched. Please get involved if you have sites you would like to see added.

Big thanks to Lucas McDonnell, whose post on 46 KM resources kicked things off for me.

Simon Dickson points out that the latest Beta of Safari, the web browser for the MacOS operating system, has now been ported to Windows.

I’ve just installed the new public beta of Apple’s Safari browser on my Windows PC. It works, it looks like a Mac app, and it seems pretty quick. Will I be switching from Firefox? Er, no. And I can’t imagine many others doing so either, speed boost or no speed boost.

I’m going to download it and have a play, as Simon says, it’s good for testing if nothing else. But I’m a FireFox man through and through.

There is a big, long post brewing inside me at the moment about browsers and their use within local government. I feel it’s one of the major things holding back the use of new web technology in the sector.

We need to get Firefox into local government – or at the very least, IE7.

Tags: safari, firefox

Marc Andreessen, one of the trailblazers of the web – he was the co-author of Mosaic, the first mass market web browser, as well as a founder of Netscape (find out more at his Wikipedia entry) – has started his own blog. I suggest you subscribe ASAP.

His posts thus far have been notable by their length, as well as their quality. His latest is a really useful list of resources on HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript. One for reading now and future reference.

You can read some of my words of wisdom about IDeA’s Communities of Practice platform and the CoP Facilitator’s day out at IDeA Knowledge. The interviews and articles were done by Ray Khan.

While Briggs found the fact that he now knew he was “not alone” a simple but valuable outcome of the day, he also felt he had more of a grip on what CoPs mean for local government.

“We’re trying to sell two very ambitious concepts with this platform. Firstly, we are asking people to tear down silos and start working together and sharing our knowledge – something that is an anathema to some elements of local government culture. Secondly, we are asking them to do so using the web, with blogs, wikis and forums!”

Tags: communities+of+practice, idea

BookZilla is another customised search site, like LGSearch, that I knocked together this afternoon.

I think it is pretty obvious what it does. I’m running it through Palimpsest, the books discussion site I facilitate, with any ad revenue going towards the maintenance of the forum.

BookZilla is another customised search site, like LGSearch, that I knocked together this afternoon.

I think it is pretty obvious what it does. I’m running it through Palimpsest, the books discussion site I facilitate, with any ad revenue going towards the maintenance of the forum.

Iain Dale points to something which I thought would be very interesting:

If you want to know why the NHS is in an administrative mess read THIS post on the 2020health.org site. It is a live ‘waiting room’ blog.

Although, it’s not quite that, rather a what appears to be a static news article at 2020health.org.

It certainly brings home the utter hopelessness of hanging around, waiting in hospitals:

It seems that in order not to breach the waiting time target, clinics like these are quadruple booked. 200 patients were booked in this afternoon with no increase in the four doctors usually on duty as when there are 50 patients. I’ve been handed a copy of the complaint form to fill in – they have a ready supply. Yet most people around me declined the form, preferring to moan rather than write.

Now here’s a thought, though. Rather than feedback or complaint forms, what if hospitals, and other public sector service deliverers, provided a platform for views to be provided, whether through a blog or some other medium, allowing for instant airing of views but also the opportunity for others to respond in real time?

Movable Type is the blogging engine used by TypePad blogs, and is available for download and installation on your own server. Think of the relationship between the two being like WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

Movable Type and TypePad (as well as LiveJournal and Vox) are owned by Six Apart, which was a pioneer in blogging platforms – TypePad was for a long time the ‘serious’ bloggers’ choice of system. That was until Six Apart introduced a licensing agreement which turned many bloggers off (check out some of the comments to this post) – and helped WordPress become the major player it is now.

Anyhow, Six Apart have now backtracked a little bit on this, and are opening up the Movable Type platform for version 4 of the software, launching a new site in the process. Their claim is that the position of the other Six Apart products means that this is now a viable proposition:

It will still be possible to buy Movable Type – a professionally supported version can be purchased.

MT4 has some extremely interesting features, including social networking elements, as discussed at TechCrunch:

MT4 as social media platform allows users to turn their readers into communities through Movable Type’s new community management features, with the ability to give users the right to post, add and share rich text and media posts with photos, videos, and audio. MT4 also includes a new ratings framework that enables a variety of recommendation features.

These are interesting times, and while I have never been tempted by MT (it runs on PERL, which I don’t understand) it opens up the possibilities for either individual bloggers, or those wanting to create blog communities.

Tags: movable+type

Google Gears is already being picked up by third party developers, as reported by LifeHacker. Remember the Milk is a nice online social task (or todo list) manager. Only now it’s offline too.

As reported on the Remember the Milk blog:

Anything that you do offline will be synchronized when you come back online. You can move seamlessly between online and offline modes — RTM will automagically detect when you don’t have an Internet connection, and will have your tasks ready for you. If you’re expecting to go offline (for instance, those fun-filled 14 hours flying from Sydney to San Francisco), you can also manually switch into offline mode. Then, when you’re bored of the repeating in-flight movies, you can pull out RTM and methodically tag and locate all of your tasks.

I was thinking that it would be good for someone to maintain a central resource of Gears enabled sites – and of course Wikipedia already has it. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the list as it develops.

Tags: google+gears, remember+the+milk

Whilst not quite making me a dotcom millionaire, it was still very gratifying and exciting to get a cheque from Google through the post – thanks to the adverts on LGSearch.

The amount was pretty small, but it pays for all the LGNewMedia hosting, making it a self sufficient enterprise. Very nice.

Here’s a few items that have caught my eye today:

• Ning – the do it yourself social networking platform – now makes it possible to add audio to your networks, something that was seriously lacking before. Now music, podcasts and any other form of audio can be uploaded or linked to.
• Richard MacManus of the excellent Read/WriteWeb blog, discusses the launch of version 1 of EyeOS, a web based ‘operating system’. It’s like a desktop that runs inside your web browser, and what’s more, it’s open source. Give it a try.
• Guy Kawasaki blogs how we went about setting up his latest social media project, Truemors. There’s even a slideshow on the subject.