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.

I’ve created a new logo for LGNewMedia as part of the redesign of the site, so it’s a little more along the lines of that used for LGSpace.

I use the ‘Crystal Clear’ graphics set as a source, which can be downloaded from Wikimedia Commons for free under the GNU Free Documentation Licence.

I certainly hope it goes down better than the logo for the London 2012 Olympics, which was launched today. I think it’s pretty awful:

But I suppose it at least comes in several colours.

Via Neville Hobson.

Tags: london2012, logo

I’ve been redesigning the layout for this blog, using a cool new theme by Andreas Viklund.

I like the fact that the whole width of the screen is used, and having two sidebars means that I can pack in some more useful widgets. Still no ads, though, yet!

I’ll be writing about some of the new stuff I’ve put on the site in subsequent posts, rather than cramming loads into this one. In the meantime, please do visit the blog and let me know in the comments what you think about it!

Some great notes on what you can do to make your wikis a success.

Via Beth Kanter.

Google’s been doing plenty of work, and buying, to create an office suite which runs online. Those who see it as a potential Microsoft killer are always challenged on the fact that the online tools are great while you have a live web connection, but are not so cool when you are stuck somewhere without one.

Desktop applications, of course, don’t need a web connection to work, and so are of far more use when one isn’t available. Microsoft triumphs again.

But Google has released something which might change all that. Gears is a system whereby online information can be downloaded and used offline. As the home page so succinctly puts it:

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Amen to that!

There’s only one Gears application at the moment, but it’s a cool one. It’s for Google Reader, the best of breed online RSS aggregator, which lets you download your feeds and read them even when not connected to the web. Excellent!

The potential with this is significant, of course. Being able to use Docs and Spreadsheets, and the forthcoming Presentation app whilst offline will seriously increase their usefulness. Indeed, wiki editing whilst offline would be very nice, and even blogging, using the built in editors that come with WordPress and Blogger, rather than third party applications should be possible. Exciting times.

Two fairly similar services here, brought to my attention by the ever reliable TechCrunch.

Demofuse allows you to create ‘tours’ of your websites, to demonstrate functionality, say. It looks very useful indeed, and will be something I will be using for some of the services I’ve put together.

Screencast-o-Matic is a service that lets you create screencasts – that is, the recording of what happens on your PC screen – within the browser for free. Cool! Screencasts are great for recording demos of how to do stuff on the PC, whether online or not.

Jason Calacanis has launched Mahalo, a human edited search engine, based on the MediaWiki platform used by, amongst others, Wikipedia.

It’s funny, I remembered immediately the blog post Jason wrote about buying the Mahalo domain and not knowing what to do with it back in November last year.

Here’s how the FAQ page explains the model:

Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.

Interesting – so it’s Google crossed with DMOZ crossed with Wikipedia. Kind of.

A flare-up of my blood sugar levels meant I had the pleasure of spending a couple of nights at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital last week, leaving me with stacks of RSS feeds to get through today, when I could face them.

Still, there’s been some good stuff going on, which I’ll be posting about later.

Now, this is the future of web search:

How can you really claim to explore the web when your search engine only returns the results you are looking for?

You can’t. That’s why ACrappySearchEngine.com returns results from all across the web regardless of what you search for…

Now some people will say our service isn’t useful but to that we say, “Look Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis and every venture capital company we pitched this too – what people really want is to discover what they weren’t looking for! Heck, Columbus was searching for India when he found America and that seemed to work out for everyone didn’t it?”

Just what we all need!

CoRank is a site which lets you create your own social bookmarking sites, which are hosted at yoursite.corank.com – a similar kind of thing to what Ning does with social networks.

This is a great way for small groups to share information through weblinks between each other, without going to the trouble and expense of setting up something like Pligg on a server.

I’ve set up a CoRank at http://virtualcommunities.corank.com/ – feel free to join it and have a play. I’ll still be using del.icio.us as my main bookmark repository though.

Operator11 looks like a truly groundbreaking social web service: it’s a social television network.

It’s like a live version of YouTube (though you can upload preproduced video if you want) but what makes it a real killer for me is that other people can request to be involved in your show, you can have them on the air instantly. This is, as far as I can see, all through a web based flash interface.

Jasaon Calacanis hits it on the head:

It’s like giving a CNN newsroom to a MySpace dude

Yet more of the walls separating those who create media and those who view it are being torn down.

Tags: operator11

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).