Thursday, 21 August, 2008

Bookmarks for August 20th

Stuff I have bookmarked for August 20th:

  • URL Rewriting for Beginners – Apache – Added Bytes – Useful guide. Thanks to Pete Ashton for the tip.
  • Citizenscape – The CitizenScape eParticipation Programme Trial Project will integrate and test state-of-the-art Web 2.0 social networking ICT-based tools and solutions in a socially purposeful way in concrete legislative and decision-making processes – specifically looking at engaging Citizens to debate and engage with the implementation of EU environmental legislation at a local level.

Tuesday, 19 August, 2008

Monday, 18 August, 2008

Social networks, or beefed-up blogs?

I have been looking around recently at social networkings systems, focusing on freely available ones, such as Elgg (which powers the rather lovely UnLtdWorld, and which has its proper v1.0 release out soon) and PeopleAggregator. The other option I had thought of would be to fashion something out of Drupal.

A post at Read/WriteWeb, however, has made me step back and think a little:

Platforms like WordPress and Movable Type democratized the process of self-publishing. With these tools, everyone could be a publisher and it didn’t require advanced technical expertise to do so. Now, the next revolution for publishing is to bring that same ease of creation to the process of building social networks. With Six Apart’s recent release of Movable Type 4.2, that revolution has begun. The new release provides DIY tools for building your own social networking platform which includes member profiles, forums, friending capabilities, rating of content, and more. WordPress isn’t too far behind, either – a new platform called BuddyPress, is being built on the WordPress core. Is this the future of blogging? Or is this the future of web publishing altogether?

I had been aware of BuddyPress for a while, but whilst I have noted Moveable Type’s development, I’ve never really go into that platform, for some reason. I think the Buddy/WordPress approach is sound, though, not building up the core functionality of the platform, but adding the social networking features as add-ons. If you want it, it’s there to use, otherwise you don’t need to be troubled with it.

BuddyPress is sadly some way from being production ready, so for now I’ll stick with the dedicated social network platforms. But in the future, rather than learn a new system, it will be a lot easier to use one I am familiar with to develop exactly what I need.

What are other folks’ views?

Google gives an insight into search

One of the key things for any website is findability – in other words, it’s great having a site packed full of useful content, but it’s pointless if no one knows where it is. So, it’s about having good navigation on your site, but also being search engine friendly. Many people’s first port of call will be a search engine, and more often than not, that search engine will be Google. If you want people to visit your site, then, it’s a good idea to know how your site fairs in searches, and to find out how you can improve its performance.

This stuff can be called SEO, of course, although findability is a nicer, if clunkier term, that doesn’t make you think of black hats and registering thousands of Blogger blogs. There are some notes I took at an interesting talk at WordCampUK on the issue of SEO/findability here – essentially the message is “if you write it (well), they will come”.

To help monitor how well your site does in search engines, there are a number of tools to use, including traditional webstats services such as the remarkably free Google Analytics, amongst many others. Google has just released another, though, which looks like it could be really interesting to use, especially on high-profile, high-traffic sites.

Google Insights for Search is a tool to allow you to track and analyse the use of search terms in Google, allowing you to filter by location, date ranges or categories. So, you can whack in the name of your organisation, and track how many times it has been searched on over a number of years, comparing each year. This is useful because you can identify seasonal spikes – and the reverse – so you can anticipate demand, for example.

You can also compare the performance of two keywords alongside each other, again allowing you to track the two and see which are most popular in the searches people are performing. This is a better bet than using traditional metrics, which tend to show what search engne terms people use to find your website – it’s useful to know what related terms people use to find other website, to see if you can include content to pick up some of that traffic.

As I said earlier, this tool really is best used on sites with lots of traffic, as smaller site searches (like “DavePress” as a keyword) don’t register at all! I can certainly see value here for local authorities and government departments though, to see what people search for within their area of interest.

It will be interesting to see how people put this service to use, and how much value is does add in the end. Anyone tried it yet to track their organisations results?

My Top Twitter Tip

Twitter is great, it really is. Even with the downtime, the dropping of SMS updates in the UK and other places, and all the other little irritations with the service, it still manages to inspire a considerable loyalty among those that use it.

As I have written elsewhere, it’s the fact that Twitter works as a service which makes it so cool. Rather than try to please everyone, all the time, through the use of its API Twitter has outsourced a lot of the user interaction stuff to other people, whether Twhirl, Tweetdeck, Twitterific, Hahlo or many others. Twitter is therefore the wholesaler of the service, rather than necessarily the retailer.

One of my favourite services built upon Twitter was the search engine Summize, which was so good that Twitter bought it. Now found at search.twitter.com, the service will tell you exactly what is being said about a particular keyword or phrase. I found it really useful recently at WordCampUK, using it to track what people were saying on Twitter in a much more effective way that with, say, Hashtags.

Anyway, after all that preamble, here’s my top Twitter tip, which uses Twitter search. Simply run a search on @yourusername, and then subscribe to the RSS feed. You’ll never miss a reply again!

I hope people find this useful – it would be good to hear other people’s Twitter tips!

Sunday, 17 August, 2008

Blog Action Day 2008

Blog Action Day is happening on October 15th this year, with a theme of ‘Poverty’. What’s Blog Action Day?

Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.

Here’s a video with some more info:

[HTML1]

So now you know. Like Tom Watson, I’m thinking what I can plan to blog on that day…

Friday, 15 August, 2008

Thursday, 14 August, 2008

Creating an email newsletter

Partly to be helpful, and partly to do a bit of profile-raising, I have been thinking of putting together a regular (weekly or fortnightly) email newsletter, full of social web news, views and other tidbits. It might go some way to filling the need for the govweb group blog I mooted earlier, though I should imagine it would be written in sufficiently broad terms to make it applicable to non government folk too. I think there are a number of valuable things about email lists like this, as opposed to a site:

  • People use their email all day everyday, pretty much, so if they register, they will always see the emails in their inboxes
  • If I stick to plain text, I don’t need to worry too much about accessibility and whether things render well in Internet Explorer 4
  • People see email as work, the web as play

My newsletter will feature a few regular sections:

  • A feature on a recent cool bit of webbery from a public or third sector organisation
  • A roundup on news and development in the social web space
  • An introduction to a social web site or service
  • A multi-part how-to guide (eg setting up a blog, or a wiki)

There are a number of ways of setting something like this up, and I have been playing around with some of them. Here’s what I have found.

1. Do It Yourself

It would be the most simple option to gather in email addresses via a HTML form on a page on this blog, store them in a text file, then write the emails in my mail client, and paste in the email addresses to the BCC field and hit send. Unsubcribes would have to be done manually, and any analysis of subscriber numbers, etc, would have to be done in a spreadsheet or something. Also, there may be issues with the emails getting past spam filters, etc, as I use gmail to power my emails. I would also have to make sure I don’t use any funky formatting in my emails so that they can be read easily in different mail clients. So, this option is easy to get up and running, but difficult to manage and maintain, and there may be access problems. It’s cost free, though.

2. Use Mailman

Mailman is a remarkably configurable mailing list manager, and (like all the best things in life) is open source. I could set up a one-way mailing list, allow people to sign up to it as they pleased, and likewise unsubscribe. One of the problems with Mailman, though, is the interface which is used to manage the service and through which users can change their settings, which can seem a little unfriendlyto the uninitiated. To set it all up as a one way service would mean quite a bit of messing about to remove certain options from view, etc. So, whie this option might make some things easier, it will add complications elsewhere. Again, though, this would be free for me to use.

3. Use a dedicated service

The third option would be to use a service to manage my list of subscribers and to handle the sending of the emails themselves. They provide statistics, too, so I can track which newsletters are more popular, etc. These services also provide the ability to send HTML or rich text emails, making them easier on the eye and easier for most people to navigate. Given my target audience, though, I am tempted to stick to plain text – ugly but pretty much guaranteed to work! Some of the services I have looked at include MailBuild (suggested by Steph), AWeber (recommended by Chris Garrett) and Blue Sky Factory (used by Chris Brogan). All look pretty good. The obvious disadvantage is that they will cost me money, but they all need quite a bit of time dedicated to them to get set up properly.

So there we are. I think I am going to go for one of the dedicated services, but not sure which just yet. Of course the real challenge will be to produce regular, quality content that people will want to read, but by wittering on about which tools I am going to use I can put that one off for a day or too!

If anyone has any feedback on the ideas I have set out here, please leave them in the comments. And if you would like to be a recipient of the inaugral newsletter, say so in the comments or drop an email to newsletter@davepress.net and I will add you to the list. Ta!