Great article from David Wilcox:

Does it matter whether politicians who talk up the Internet’s potential for re-inventing politics, education, employment actually use it hands-on for the purposes they present, and join in? Or should we just be grateful if they have a good script from their researchers, have met the right people, and can engage in sensible conversation about social networking? What coverage do they get with that good script, but no online presence?

Ning is a great platform for creating individual social networks or communities of practice. It allows you to have your own site to which people can sign up and leave blog posts, have forum discussions, upload photos and videos and publish RSS feeds. I had a play here.

It’s another example of being able to get a social site up and running quickly and freely. The only ads are Google text ones, so they aren’t really intrusive.

Another reason to pay attention to Ning is that it is backed by Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame – a man who knows his stuff.

To find out more, Scoble has a couple of videos up.

Tom Foremski over at Silicon Vallery Watcher points out the things that annoy him about search:

– There are many publishers that try to make sure their headlines catch the attention of the search engines rather than catch the attention of readers. The same is true for content, editors increasingly optimize it for the search engines rather than the readers.

– Why should I have to tag my content, and tag it according to the specific formats that Technorati, and other search engines recommend?  Aren’t they supposed to do that?

– Google relies on a tremendous amount of user-helped search. Websites are encouraged to create site maps and leave the XML file on their server so that the GOOGbot can find its way around.

– The search engines ask web site owners to mask-off parts of their sites that are not relevant, such as the comment sections,  with no-follow and no-index tags.

– Web sites are encouraged to upload their content into the Googlebase database. Nice–it doesn’t even need to send out a robot to index the site.

– Every time I publish something, I send out notification “pings” to dozens of search engines and aggregators. Again, they don’t have to send out their robots to check if there is new content.

– Google asks users to create collections of sites within specific topics so that other users can use them to find specific types of information.

– The popularity of blogs is partly based on the fact that they find lots of relevant links around a particular subject. Blogs are clear examples of people-powered search services.

It’s my view that web search has come as far as it can based on algorithms and sheer grunt alone. There needs to be a human element in terms of whether or not a result is actually a) relevant and b) useful to the searcher.

This is the thinking behind the Search Wikia project which Wikipedia and Wikia’s Jimmy Wales is running. I wrote a little about this on my personal blog here and here.

It’s also why I am working on a human generated ‘search engine’. The aim will be for people to submit links they have found useful, tag and categorise them, and allow others to vote them as useful. This database of links will then be searchable, producing fewer results, but ones which have been recommended by others. I think it is going to be really useful, but it will need the committment of other people to make it work.

Watch this space.

Feedable is a nice online news aggregator. As well as having your own feeds, it also provides information on hot topics of conversation in a variety of subjects.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing it out.

Tags: feedable, steve+rubel

Hmmm. FeedDemon has starting playing up all of a sudden. It claimed not to be able to connect to my NewsGator account a couple of times, despite the credentials being correct, and refused to do anything.

So, I removed the sync between the two and gave it another go. Now all sorts of old feeds and posts are popping up from nowhere. Most annoying.

Thanks to Steve Dale for pointing me in the direction of Blueberry Software and their BB Flashback range of screencasting tools. Steve has just finished a screencast of the IDeA’s Communities of Practice platform using the full blown version of BB Flashback.

At £99, that’s too steep for me. But I am trialling the ‘Express’ version, which will cost £20, and it seems to do everything I want it to. I’m putting together some videos showing how the various bits of LGSearch work. My only issues at the moment is how to display and host the video. Am experimenting with self-hosted .swf files and uploading AVIs to YouTube.

I’ve started a new page on the LGNewMedia wiki, called the Local Government Blogger Directory. I’m working from a pretty liberal definition of what ‘local government’ means so feel free to chuck in anything that comes even close to the LGNewMedia sphere of interest!

Thanks to David Wilcox for pointing me in the direction of nfp 2.0, Steve Bridger’s blog about ‘How not-for-profits can benefit from blogs and social media’.

A great addition to my blogroll.

Since cobbling together all the various posts from my previous blogs into this one, I came across a few posts that surprised me by being quite interesting!

• My Top Ten Websites and services
• Living without the Desktop
• Things I Use
• My 10 thoughts on successful blogging
• Clear your desk(top)

BlogJet was always my favourite blog editor when I used Windows regularly. I was pretty annoyed when version 2 was released not long ago, as by then I had made the transition to Ubuntu. I’ve so far failed to find anything even remotely as good in Linux, and have been blogging using the inbuilt WordPress editor and the Performancing for Firefox plugin since.

I still have Windows available on a dual boot, and on popping in today I downloaded the trial of BlogJet 2, and it’s great. It retains the simplicity of the original, but packs in loads of new features. I like it a lot.

I’ve also always liked FeedDemon as an RSS aggregator. Google Reader is the best online newsreader, but I still prefer FeedDemon overall.

So, for the tools I use most on my PC, I prefer the Windows variants by quite some distance. The advantages of Ubuntu are that is has never crashed on me, and is lightening fast.

So what do I do? I could reinstall Windows and see if it makes any difference speed-wise… but would going back to XP be a retrograde step?

A couple of weeks ago, I noted the new Lib Dem’s manifesto website, which pleased me as it ran on WordPress. Well, thanks to Guido I have come across two more WP powered sites maintained by the Liberal Democrats.

The first is Corruption is a Crime:

For far too long, it’s been acceptable to turn a blind eye to corruption when it comes to foreign contracts. The Liberal Democrats believe that corruption is a crime and should be stopped. Allegations of serious corruption must be fully investigated.

The second is Home Office Watch:

Welcome to the Home Office Watch blog, a single repository of all the shambolic errors and mistakes made by the British Home Office compiled from Parliamentary Questions, news reports, and tip-offs by the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs team.

Interesting to see that a political party has cottoned onto the fact that you don’t need expensive bespoke solutions to get a social media site up and running. WordPress is free and fast.

The Guardian reports on ‘Conservapedia‘:

A website founded by US religious activists aims to counter what they claim is “liberal bias” on Wikipedia, the open encyclopedia which has become one of the most popular sites on the web. The founders of Conservapedia.com say their site offers a “much-needed alternative” to Wikipedia, which they say is “increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American”.

Although entries on Wikipedia are open for anyone to edit, conservative campaigners say they are unable to make changes to articles on the site because of inherent bias by its global team of volunteer editors. Instead they have chosen to build a clone which they hope will promote Christian values.

“I’ve tried editing Wikipedia, and found that the biased editors who dominate it censor or change facts to suit their views,” Andy Schlafly, the founder of Conservapedia, told the Guardian. “In one case my factual edits were removed within 60 seconds – so editing Wikipedia is no longer a viable approach.”

Of course, what one considers to be a fact depends on who you are, or rather, what you believe. Looking at the examples the Guardian provides, it also depends on whether or not you are a nut.

Dinosaurs

Wikipedia: “Vertebrate animals that dominated terrestrial ecosystems for over 160m years, first appearing approximately 230m years ago.”

Conservapedia: “They are mentioned in numerous places throughout the Good Book. For example, the behemoth in Job and the leviathan in Isaiah are almost certainly references to dinosaurs.”

US Democratic party

Wikipedia: “The party advocates civil liberties, social freedoms, equal rights, equal opportunity, fiscal responsibility, and a free enterprise system tempered by government intervention.”

Conservapedia: “The Democrat voting record reveals a true agenda of cowering to terrorism, treasonous anti-Americanism, and contempt for America’s founding principles.”

I can see myself becoming addicted to reading this site. It’ll be like picking a scab.

Wikispaces is excellent. I’ve moved the LGNewMedia wiki to there, from a self hosted MediaWiki.

Technorati Tags: wikispaces, wiki, lgnewmedia

I’ve moved the LGNM Wiki to Wikispaces, having had a look round the Social Media wiki that David Wilcox runs. All the existing information has been copied across.

The system I had been using, MediaWiki, is excellent,a nd I haven’t had any problems with it. The only issue is one of resources: I’m trying to cut down on my web expenditure and the wiki used a whole database and a big wodge of filespace. By hosting the wiki elsewhere I don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Also, wikispaces is a really good system, with a nice wysiwyg editor, so I think it’ll be better too for anyone who fancies helping out too. I know a few people registered on the old wiki, so apologies for any inconvenience.

I’m a regular reader of David Wilcox‘s blog, and if you aren’t at the moment, you should be. His posts are full of great stuff.

He’s also the editor of a wiki which is chock-full of useful social media information. A recommended bookmark for future reference for sure.

The wiki system David is using looks good: wikispaces. I hadn’t come across it before but it looks like a good competitor to the likes of Wetpaint, pbWiki, Stikipad and others…

I’ve been playing around a little more with Google Coop, and discovered that you can use wildcards when defining the sites you want to search.

The way the standard LGSearch works is that I provide Google with a list of the sites I want it to search. Every single one of them. It’s not fun. But it does mean I can tag them with the category of site it falls into, making the filtering possible.

But with LGSearch.Gov.uk I just submitted one ‘site’ – *.gov.uk. In other words, every site that ends with .gov.uk! This means that as new sites are added, or taken away, the search engine will update automatically.

I don’t think this will be as useful as the standard LGSearch, but it might be a useful second option if you can’t find what you want first time round.

This is nice, via Neville Hobson:

‘Social media’ is the term commonly given to websites and online tools which allow users to interact with each other in some way – by sharing information, opinions, knowledge and interests. As the name implies, social media involves the building of communities or networks, encouraging participation and engagement.

This is nice, via Neville Hobson:

‘Social media’ is the term commonly given to websites and online tools which allow users to interact with each other in some way – by sharing information, opinions, knowledge and interests. As the name implies, social media involves the building of communities or networks, encouraging participation and engagement.

Welcome to my wordpress.com blog!

I’ve basically decided to cut right down on my web expenditure. Having the vebrig.gs domain was fun, but the renewal was going to cost £35, and the bill for my hosting is due next month too. So, I’ve cut right down by:

• Moving all the da.vebrig.gs/ content to this blog and letting that domain die
• Moving all the content I produced at hyprtext into this blog too, and that domain will also soon disappear

I’m also planning on moving some other things around to save time and money. For example, is there any need for the separate LGNewMedia and LGSearch domains?

This sort of rationing is sad, as it means a lot of links and things won’t work any more. But building it all up again will be fun, and after all, the best things in life are supposed to be free…

I’m a Second Life sceptic. Plenty of other people are too, like the author of this Valleywag piece. Interesting stuff in the comments, too.

So what accounts for the current press interest in Second Life? I have a few ideas, though none is concrete enough to call an answer yet.

First, the tech beat is an intake valve for the young. Most reporters don’t remember that anyone has ever wrongly predicted a bright future for immersive worlds or flythrough 3D spaces in the past, so they have no skepticism triggered by the historical failure of things like LambdaMOO or VRML. Instead, they hear of a marvelous thing — A virtual world! Where you have an avatar that travels around! And talks to other avatars! — which they then see with their very own eyes. How cool is that? You’d have to be a pretty crotchety old skeptic not to want to believe. I bet few of those reporters ever go back, but I’m sure they’re sure that other people do (something we know to be false, to a first approximation, from the aforementioned churn.) Second Life is a story that’s too good to check.

Second, virtual reality is conceptually simple. Unlike ordinary network communications tools, which require a degree of subtlety in thinking about them — as danah notes, there is no perfect metaphor for a weblog, or indeed most social software — Second Life’s metaphor is simplicity itself: you are a person, in a space. It’s like real life. (Only, you know, more second.) As Philip Rosedale explained it to Business Week “[I]nstead of using your mouse to move an arrow or cursor, you could walk your avatar up to an Amazon.com (AMZN) shop, browse the shelves, buy books, and chat with any of the thousands of other people visiting the site at any given time about your favorite author over a virtual cuppa joe.”

Never mind that the cursor is a terrific way to navigate information; never mind that Amazon works precisely because it dispenses with rather than embraces the cyberspace metaphor; never mind that all the “Now you can shop in 3D efforts” like the San Francisco Yellow Pages tanked because 3D is a crappy way to search. The invitation here is to reason about Second Life by analogy, which is simpler than reasoning about it from experience. (Indeed, most of the reporters writing about Second Life seem to have approached it as tourists getting stories about it from natives.)

Third, the press has a congenital weakness for the Content Is King story. Second Life has made it acceptable to root for the DRM provider, because of their enlightened user agreements concerning ownership. This obscures the fact that an enlightened attempt to make digital objects behave like real world objects suffers from exactly the same problems as an unenlightened attempt, a la the RIAA and MPAA. All the good intentions in the world won’t confer atomicity on binary data. Second Life is pushing against the ability to create zero-cost perfect copies, whereas Copybot relied on that most salient of digital capabilities, which is how Copybot was able to cause so much agida with so little effort — it was working with the actual, as opposed to metaphorical, substrate of Second Life.

Finally, the current mania is largely push-driven. Many of the articles concern “The first person/group/organization in Second Life to do X”, where X is something like have a meeting or open a store — it’s the kind of stuff you could read off a press release. Unlike Warcraft, where the story is user adoption, here most of the stories are about provider adoption, as with the Reuters office or the IBM meeting or the resident creative agencies. These are things that can be created unilaterally and top-down, catnip to the press, who are generally in the business of covering the world’s deciders.

[tags]second life, valleywag[/tags]