Here. Download it while you can!

[tags]jimmy wales, wikipedia, bbc, 5live[/tags]

Simon Dickson reports on Digital Dialogues, of which the DD website explains:

The purpose of Digital Dialogues is to assess the capacity of ICT to support central government’s communication and consultation activity (principally with the public but also with internal stakeholders).

Digital Dialogues takes technology as its focus and seeks to build the capacity within central government for setting up, managing and evaluating digital technology’s contribution to promoting public participation in the policy process. Digital Dialogues has the additional objective of promoting collaboration and exchange between departments.

Just before Christmas, the Hansard Society released a report, which you can read here.

Dickson notes that:

The good news is that, perhaps predictably, the online world comes out of it pretty well. Public engagement is a good thing, and the majority of those drawn to online channels were not previously ‘engaged’; but it should be seen as a complement rather than a replacement for conventional offline methods. There’s also a fair bit on the importance of appropriate planning and ongoing management / moderation.

It all makes interesting reading.

Technorati Tags: social media, digital dialogues, hansard society, simon dickson

Technorati Tags: second life, open source

Counterize II is a cool WP plugin that allows you to track site stats within the WP dashboard. Nice and simple.

Have installed it here and on hyprtext.

[tags]wordpress, counterize, plugin[/tags]

Have been back online for a few weeks now, though much of my attention on local government and new media matter has been focussed on the IDeA Communities of Practice platform, run by Steve Dale. I’d recommend that anyone interested in this space heads over there and signs up.

LGKnowledge, the social bookmarking service, is currently being spammed into oblivion. I need to figure out a way to stop this happening. In the meantime, please don’t expect much from it.

Thanks to Daniel Champion for his recent email, correcting the URL I had down for Clackmannanshire Council. I’ve updated it. Remember – check if we have the right address for your authority by checking the list on the wiki here.

Just a quicky this one. Zoho Show will now let you upload ODP files. What are they? Well, it’s the open format that OpenOffice.org uses.

As the Zoho blog says,

With the current update, Zoho Show now has full OOo support.

Who needs Windows Live?

Technorati Tags: zoho, odp, openoffice.org

Mike Arrington posts that the Performancing Metrics deal is off:

It’s not often that a company announces the acquisition of another company and then subsequently walks away from the deal, but PayPerPost isn’t a typical kind of company.

In a post on the PayPerPost blog today, the company said “We…dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn’t what we were looking for right now.” That came just a week after the official announcement of the acquisition.

Generally speaking, responsible companies “dig into” the acquisition target before they announce a deal.

Nick Wilson at Performancing puts a slightly different spin on it:

After much discussion, we’ve decided that the deal proposed by PayPerPost just isnt right for us or our community. It’s regrettable that we should part ways as I still feel that Dan and Ted are stand up guys breaking new ground, but in the end, the deal was just not right for them or us.

On his personal blog (which is wonderfully profane, as are his expletive-ridden podcasts), Nick is a little more candid:

It’s a huge relief not to have to lose Performancing.com.

We’ve made our mistakes, now it’s time to crack on…

Chris Garrett, another guy involved in Performancing – though not a shareholder – gives his view, again seeming relieved that the deal is off:

• I am pleased because I don’t think the two communities, Performancing members and PPP members, actually overlap or make as good a fit as PPP assumed they would.
• I’m looking forward to an open source Metrics and I will work on it given time
• For me the best news is that Performancing.com is staying with Nick. We put a lot of work into building the site and community, with a terrific group of members. The Performancing domain and brand is hopefully still a valuable asset

Good news though, rather than find a new buyer (which might be hard now anyway), Performancing Metrics is being opened up to the community and made open source. Cool.

What form it will take will be unknown for a while, but I reckon a small metrics service that each site hosts for itself would be a good route to go down.

Performancing for Firefox will remain ScribeFire – excellent news, it’s a much better name and can give focus to the blog editor as a project in its own right.

Two things come out of this. One is that not only is PayPerPost a crappy idea for a company, it’s a pretty crappily run place if this mess is anything to go by. Second, the breakdown of this deal will be good in the long term for Performancing, Scribefire and the bloggers who will use the future open-source metrics.

Technorati Tags: performancing, payperpost

Google have removed their controversial ‘tips’ feature, according to FireFox dude Blake Ross:

Google has removed the tips feature. Perhaps it was always intended as a test; I don’t know the official reason for its removal. In any case, thanks to Matt Cutts and other Googlers who listened and responded to feedback with an open mind, and over the holidays no less.

Nice to know they’re listening.

Technorati Tags: google, tips, blake ross

One of the earliest posts on hyprtext was about the proposed new community search engine proposed by Jimmy Wales. There was quite a lot of kerfuffle about it, largely due to confusion over Amazon’s involvement, and quite a lot of debate concerning the name of the project, which everyone assumed was wikiasari. Most people agreed that this was a terrible name for a search engine.

Since then, I have had a chance to have a good poke about the site where the engine will be designed, search.wikia.com. The first thing the site does is put right a few misunderstandings:

Amazon has nothing to do with this project. They are a valued investor in Wikia, Inc., but people are really speculating beyond the facts. This search engine project has nothing to do with Amazon’s A9, etc…

This project has also nothing to do with the screenshot TechCrunch are running (which belongs to Wikisearch), and this search project has nothing to do with Wikipedia…

Wikiasari is not and will not be the name for the free search engine we’re developing. It was the name of a former project.

So, search.wikia is the name of the wiki where the project is discussed. Wikiasari is the name of a previous attempt to get a wiki based search engine going, and WikiSearch is a search engine that searches Wikipedia and all sites that are linked from it.

The new engine as yet has no name. But it’s being talked about.

I have to admit, I’m interested in this project, and I’d like to see it work. So, I have done as Jimbo implores us to do, and joined the mailing list. The first thing to pop into my mailbox was a missive from Jimbo, entitled First steps to getting it right…

…For now I just want to point out that the largest amount of skepticism about what we are going to try to accomplish here is driven by the inherent issue of spammers. There are huge incentives for people to try to abuse our good will and we have to anticipate and expect that. But, unlike many of the skeptics who think that this is impossible, I am very confident that if we can build a genuine community and give ourselves as a community the tools we need, then we can deal with this issue without a lot of trouble.

Tomorrow I will write more about how I see the core design working.

I’m looking forward to it.

For some reason, whenever I have visited Google today, it has bounced me straight to http://google.co.uk/ig – in other words, the Personalised Google page. This happens whether or not I am logged into my Google account.

Is Google starting to abandon it’s ‘classic’ homepage? Clicking the ‘Classic Home’ link now takes me to this URL.

Update: this explains it.

[tags]google, google personalised[/tags]

For some reasons Google Analytics isn’t working properly on hyprtext. The background for the graphs are there, but no data appears on them!

This worked perfectly in FF on XP. Is there some sort of issue with Ubuntu?

[tags]google analytics, firefox, ubuntu[/tags]

Word Count Journal might be a good option if you would like to start a blog, but aren’t sure how you will manage the words. A blogging NaNoWriMo, anyone?

Sometimes a little bit really does go a long way. In Word Count Journal, by gradually building up your writing stamina and discipline, you will see just how easy it is to get a whole lot done. By simply writing a set number of words each day, every day, you will write a whopping 66,795 words at the end of one calendar year. Little by little, through the power of series, the total of your written words will add up to more words than contained in the average novel.

Quite frankly, the thought of reading a blog where the words have to be dragged out of the author in this way fills me with horror, but I guess for someone who isn’t sure about dipping their toes into blogging waters, it might just help.

But then…a WordPress.com account is free. Go there instead.

Technorati Tags: word count journal, wordpress

Of course they didn’t. But for a little while, it looked like they might have done:

Apparently Qatar has a single ISP, Qtel, with a single IP address
shared by the entire country. Wikipedia has blocked that IP address for
anonymous edits, but is allowing users of that IP address with actual
Wikipedia accounts to continue to edit articles. There’s one problem,
though. You can’t create an account if you enter Wikipedia from that IP
address.

Jimmy Wales quickly responded on the wiki talk page for the IP address in question:

Iff [sic] you came here from a news headline saying that Wikipedia has banned all of Qatar, please pop right back over there and post in the comments that the story is not true. This IP number was temporarily blocked for less than 12 hours, and a block of an entire nation would go absolutely against Wikipedia policy. In the English Wikipedia, such an action would require approval of at a minimum the English Arbitration Committee and/or me personally, and would never ever be undertaken lightly, nor without extensive attempts at direct negotiation with the ISP and/or nation in question.

To any and all reporters, from Slashdot, TechCrunch, mainstream media, etc.: You may email me and ask me for my personal cellphone number, which I will answer 24 hours a day to confirm or disconfirm any such story of this type.
–Jimbo Wales

Fair play to Wales, he does his best to put things right (he commented on the TechCrunch thread pretty quickly).

Once again, this ruckus has brought up the issue of Wikipedia requiring people to log in to edit. Wales seems set against it, determined that Wikipedia remains open.

[tags]Wikipedia, Techcrunch, Jimmy Wales[/tags]