Thursday, 16 October, 2008

The first London Net Tuesday!

Amy Sample Ward has already arranged the first meeting of the London Net Tuesday group, which you can find out all about at Meetup.com. For the pathologically click-lazy, it’s on November 4th at the Charity Technology Trust.

Here’s the official announcement on NetSquared.

It looks like it is going to be a really fun event, with the focus of the first meet being blogging:

The 4 Nov. event topic is blogging. But not just some folks talking about blogging who already use it, or only want to talk about their own blog. This is going to be a bit more fun: we will have a select group ‘representing’ their preferred blogging platform go head-to-head over the capabilities, functionality, and general goodness of their chosen platform. This way we can hear the ins and outs of platforms in a way we may not usually experience. This discussion will be followed by a conversation with questions and answers about the various ways nonprofit organizations can introduce and utilize blogs to connect with communities.

A good time is guaranteed for all!

Twitter too little, blog too much?

Twitter is quite a nice way into online publishing. It’s quick and easy to both contribute to, listen to others and expand your network of readers.

However, I can imagine that, for quite lot of people, just using Twitter could rapidly get pretty limiting. It would be like only communicating with text messages, and never using email.

However, starting a blog can be a big ask. They are easy enough to get up and running but can consume hours of tweaking the way it looks, or the way certain things work. Then there is the ‘pressure’ of producing regular posts, which can seriously put people off!

Twitwall might just be the answer for these people. It is an extension of Twitter, using its API to enable people to write longer posts, post video or photos on your Twitwall, which pings your twitter feed each time you publish.

This video helps explain a little about how TwitWall works:

For someone like me, who uses Twitter already, and also has a blog, there isn’t much use for Twitwall. But for those who are comfortable with Twitter, but not quite sure about jumping into the blogosphere, it could be perfect.

Contribute to DigitalMentor.org!

A few new pages have been created on the Digital Mentor wiki which are screaming out for content to be added, and it’s really easy to do so!

All you have to do to add to the wiki is click the ‘edit’ link on the relevant page, and then type in the site-wide password, which is printed on the top left of every page. No need to create an account, or think up a password to remember!

The pages that are open for contributions right now are:

  • What is a digital mentor? – Give your thoughts on what you see as being the important parts of the digital mentor role
  • Links – list where you have seen web pages and blog posts about digital mentors, or related stuff
  • Online tools – where have you seen online resources which could be used either by digital mentors, or by those mentoring the mentors?

If you don’t like using wikis, you can still contribute! Leave your thoughts in the comments here, or email them to me, and I will do the wiki bit.

Wednesday, 15 October, 2008

PollDaddyPress & Automattic reliance

Matt Mullenweg, the irritatingly youthful founder of WordPress, has announced that his company, Automattic, have purchased the internet polling service PollDaddy, and immediately integrated in into WordPress.com and made a plugin available for self-hosted WordPressers.

I took a secret trip to Sligo and put back a few pints with the team and we decided to make things work. They went to bed every night and woke up every morning thinking about polls and surveys, and were iterating at a great pace. By plugging into Automattic’s experience at creating internet-scale services and the distribution of WordPress.com, I knew we could take Polldaddy to an entirely new level in a relatively short amount of time.

It’s certainly interesting that Automattic are acquiring stuff at the moment in what are testing times for any company, let alone relatively young web startups. Especially when the whole WordPress platform is potentially reliant on this company to keep it on the right tracks, and to keep the development moving forward.

WordPress the platform is open source, which means that the code is available to anyone to use, modify and sell on for themselves – as long as they published their version under the same terms. However, much of the organising of the project, and the hosting of the websites, forums, bug trackers etc is done by Automattic, a company whose main motive, one must assume, is profit. Many other open source projects work in similar ways: much of the development of Linux has been done with the help of big companies like IBM and others, for example. But where a platform is so reliant, as I believe WordPress is, on one company to provide direction, does that company have an obligation to the people that use that code?

Now, I doubt very much that the amount of money that PollDaddy will have cost Automattic will have been that big a deal, and I am sure that Matt, Toni and the other Automattic guys would do anything deliberately to jeapordise their company. I’m just thinking hypothetically – do companies involved in open source have to be more risk-averse, because their failure could potentially damage a far wider group of people that just specific clients.

Or for those using open source, is it a case of downloaders beware?

How do you start yours?

Browser, that is.

I was rather interested to hear what people used as their ‘home page’ in their browser – ie the page that loads when you first open your browser. Firefox makes this more interesting with its tabs, which allow you to start several sites immediately, each one in a different tab.

Personally, I start with my webmail (Gmail running through Google Apps for your Domain), Google Reader, FriendFeed, and the admin dashboard for this blog. I asked others on Twitter what they like to use, and here are the responses I got:

  • @dominiccampbell iGoogle
  • @rohan_london my ‘fox fires up with gootodo list and googlereader. I then have facebook, twitter and gmail addons so I can scope updates
  • @simonwakeman gmail, blog admin, statcounter, ping.fm
  • @justingsouter I use Session Manager in FireFox, and invariably have web pages from previous browsing session…
  • @paulhenderson 6 tabs BBC news, Cricinfo, Bloglines, ruralnet|uk, delicious & twitter
  • @watfordgap igoogle can access everything else from there
  • @citizensheep With all the tabs I had open in the previous session. Usually includes Gmail, Twitter and MonkeyGTD

Interesting mix… what do other people use?

Macbook Wireless Problem

I love my MacBook, I really do (although I am rather tempted by one of these). However, of late I have been having a really annoying problem it and my home wireless broadband.

I generally turn off the router during the night, to let it cool down and whatnot, then switch it on again at about 8 in the morning. The mac gets turned on then to deal with with any email etc that has come in, then I get the lad ready and do the school run. When I get home, the mac is fired up again and I start work.

Then we get to around three in the afternoon, when the Mac suddenly gets disconnected from the wireless, and any attempts to reconnect are doomed to ‘time out’. There’s nothing wrong with the router, and when I start up my lumbering Acer Aspire, which runs Ubuntu, it connects fine. If I am lucky, the Mac will be talking to the router again by about eight in the evening.

This is profoudly annoying. Does anyone know what might be happening here?

Hacking domains

Domain hacking is defined by Wikipedia as:

an unconventional domain name that combines domain levels, especially the top-level domain (TLD), to spell out the full “name” or title of the domain, making a kind of pun.

What does that mean? Well, it means taking the elements of a domain name (that is, the thing you type into your browser’s address bar) so that it spells out a word, or something similar.

For example, Delicious used to be found at del.icio.us – with the last element (known as the ‘top-level’) of the domain (.us, for the United States) forming part of the name of the site. Sadly, it’s plain old delicious.com now.

I recently registered a domain from the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands – which ends in .gs. The domain is vebrig.gs – can you see where I am headed with this? 😉

I’ve created an email address on my domain which is simple ‘d’ – so in full it looks like d@vebrig.gs which kinda spells out my name. I know this is very sad, but I like it!

By adding a sub-domain to vebrig.gs of da I can get the web address da.vebrig.gs/ which again is quite a neat hack. Not doing anything with the site right now though!

So, the main point of this post, other than making it clear to everyone what a total dork I am, is to let everyone know that the best email address to get me on now is d@vebrig.gs. My old one still forwards onto me, though, so don’t worry too much.

Now all I have to do is update all my social networks with the new address…

Bookmarks for October 12th through October 15th

Stuff I have bookmarked for October 12th through October 15th:

5 years of MySociety

I had an enjoyable time at the MySociety shindig last night at The Hub in King’s Cross. There were lots of cool people there, and I got the chance to bend people’s ears about digital mentors, which was fun for me if not for them.

David Wilcox has a great post about MySociety, including a video from Tom Steinberg back in 2003, pushing the idea of a ‘Civic Hacking Fund’. I think I prefer the name they ended up with.

Simon Dickson likewise muses on the impact MySociety has had on the development of government webby stuff in the UK:

You can do a tremendous amount of good with relatively little money, as long as you have good people involved. People who understand the context, who have a feel for the technology, and who have a passion for what they’re doing. That’s been the very basis of MySociety’s success, and (I hope) my own here at Puffbox.

I also got the chance to catch up with Amy Sample Ward, who works with NetSquared in North America helping non-profits get the most out of technology. She’s now based in London and will be doing her best to help UK NFPs catch up. It’s difficult not to be caught up in her enthusiasm to make things better, which is great. Again, David Wilcox has don the interview, which I’ve embedded below.

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Monday, 13 October, 2008

Digital mentors are unorganising themselves…

To pick up on the thread of Digital Mentors – the role outlined by CLG to help disadvantaged communities find a voice online – I have started a new site along with a growing bunch of collaborators to develop the role online, gather stories and resources together and maybe to unorganise a tender bid when the funding for the pilot projects becomes available.

I’d encourage anyone interested to get involved: check out the blog, sign up to the mailing list and throw some stuff up on the wiki.