Here are the slides from a presentation at the Information Authority:

The next project for Change2 is to be a search engine for the not for profit sector. Please can anyone with sites to suggest do so in the comments for this blog post.

Thanks!

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.

Am also moving all my email across to dave@change2.org. Given the number of accounts I have spread over the web, it’s going to take a while to get sorted. Thankfully, I can pop all the mail from my Gmail account into the Change2 one, which makes life easier.

Tags: change2

Google is working on a new social network with Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institut called: Socialstream. Video below.

It seems like it will be more of an aggregator, bringing content together from across different social networks and services.

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?