An online notebook
Get posts sent to your inbox:
An online notebook
Had a lovely day yesterday in the glorious sunshine. We visited the Suffolk coast, at Dunwich Heath and Southwold, and had a marvelous time. Here’s some photographic evidence. There’s more, should you want it, on my Flickrstream.
Ning founder Marc Andreessen has posted a response to the discussions about the fact that quite a bit of Ning’s traffic is as a result of ‘adult’ communities. Ning, remember, is the service that allows you to create your own social network. Andreessen says:
First, we have built Ning to be a broad-based service — people can use Ning to create social networks and social experiences around any topic area they want and then contribute content and engage in any activity they want, as long as what they do is not illegal and fits within a pretty general set of terms of service…
Second, due to this inherent flexibility, some people have chosen to use Ning to create social networks and upload content around adult topics, including porn. It is true, there is porn on Ning…
Third, adult topics and content are a relatively small percentage of the total activity on Ning. We have various ways of quantifying this, and all of them show this to be the case.
However, my view is that I would now be much less likely to encourage someone to use Ning within the public or third sectors because of the heavy amount of adult content. I think that one of the key factors in encouraging people to engage with social media in a professional capacity is that it needs to be safe – and part of that is being free from association from undesirable content, like porn.
Ning is a great service, and could continue to be without the one-handed content!
Originally uploaded by DavePress
Ben didn’t want to go on the big slide thing at Fermyn Woods today, so I felt the need to uphold the Briggs family honour. I think I did so well.
I recently undertook the task of organising all my feeds into folders in FeedDemon – before this I had just the one (very) long list of sites I checked, not broken up in any way. This had become unmanageable.
So, here are the folders I have created, in order of the attention I give them.
If a feed falls into more than one category, then generally I stick it in the one that appears the highest on the list above. So, for example, Neville Hobson‘s blog could fit into PR, etc or UK but I in fact have it in Must Reads.
The General folder is heaving though – I need to go through that again, I think!
Drupal is an open source content management system which is fully extensible through a huge range of community developed modules. It’s the system which powers the demo site I put together for The Information Authority last year, and it is as happy providing a platform for personal blogs as it is multi-user social networks. I will be focusing here on how it can be used to create a social media based community, allowing the sharing of various types of media including text, audio, video and images.
The open source nature of the platform means that not only is it cost free, but you also have carte blanche to edit the source code however you see fit, as long as you are willing to make the changes available to anyone else who might want them. So, if Drupal doesn’t do what you want, all you have to do is edit it so that it does – or get someone else to.
Some well known uses of Drupal include The Onion and Spread Firefox.
Basic Functionality
Drupal comes with a number of functions which are operational without having to track down additional modules. They include:
On top of this there is a comprehensive user rights management system to ensure that only certain members can produce or view certain types of content, ensuring that your community is as secure as you need it to be.
There is, therefore, quite enough functionality available out of the box to get a community up and running very quickly.
Extra Modules
There is more that Drupal can do though, and all you need is to find the right modules to do it. Here are some of the ones I’ve picked out as being useful for community building:
Themes
You can also change the look of your community with the freely downloadable themes from the Drupal website. Those included by default are all pretty good, especially Garland, but if you want to have a more individual looking site it might be better to find a less well known theme and customise it. Some good looking themes include:
Note that some themes require certain modules, or ‘theme engines’ installed to work properly.
What’s Missing
Drupal lacks a proper wiki module, which is a shame. The one that does exist is Liquid, which allows you to make any content as a wiki – in other words, making it available to edit by other users. However, this is a confusing solution and not one that is recommended at this stage. The only other option is to use the books module to collaboratively author content, but again this isn’t really perfect.
Drupal is also rather confusing to administer, and the learning curve is pretty steep. The best option is to play around with it first, and take your time. Once you become used to the way of doing things will Drupal, you’ll be amazed at the power and versatility of the system.
Conclusion
Drupal is a free out of the box solution to creating online communities that will have you up and running in no time. The learning curve is relatively steep, but it is worth it for the power and flexibility of the system.
This post has been shamelessly regurgitated from my old blog, FEConnect 😉
Seariki (a conflation of search and wiki) is a new China based search engine which provides a way of finding information in Wikipedia. The Wikipedia search itself can be slightly frustrating, in that if it can find an exact match for your search term, it takes you straight to it, rather than returning a list of potential results.
Seariki provides a very Google-esque interface, and returns lists of results just as you would expect. It also provides a directory approach using categories on the home page. It’s also possible toview cached previews of content by clicking the “scrape” button next to a result.
It’s a pretty useful addition to ways of finding information within Wikipedia. Interesting that there are Google ads down the side of the results – people are finding ways of monetising Wikipedia content even if Jimmy Wales refuses to.