Tuesday, 22 May, 2007

Zoho Notebook (beta)

Zoho

Zoho are one of my favourite web 2.0 companies. They provide pretty much best of breed web applications: cool stuff like a word processor, a spreadsheet, presentations, online meetings, wikis, and oodles of other stuff

Anyway, their latest little number is Notebook, a web based notetaking application. This isn’t just Windows Notepad online though: with Zoho’s Notebook you can add just about anything to a note: text, images, videos, audio, chunks of HTML, RSS feeds, entire web pages. Your notebook can also include word processed pages, or spreadsheets using the relevant Zoho tool.

I really get can’t across just how feature rich Notebook actually is. Try this video, instead:

[youtube sfJFBcF_6cE]

All the other Zoho apps, taken together, provide a great platform for transferring your productivity to a web based approach. Notebook, though, is something else – probably the most comprehensive web application I’ve come across.

[tags]zoho notebook[/tags]

Monday, 21 May, 2007

Is Public Sector Blogging Possible?

There has been a mini-storm this weekend in the UK public sector blogosphere about whether or not it’s actually possible for people working for the government can actually blog in any meaningful way without fear of reprisals, whether from their employer or in the press.

The issue in question is about a post written by one Owen Barder, a Whitehall civil servant who wrote a post that has been picked up by the Mail on Sunday in, one might say, typically hysterical fashion. You can read some views on the debate here, here and here.

My personal view is that Barder’s post, which compared George Bush to Hitler, was ill-advised for a number of reasons. One is that comparing anyone to Hitler outside a 6th form debating society is pretty daft; another that when one is blogging about an issue close to one’s day job, it’s important to be careful with the way one words things. This links into the eighth blogging tip I wrote about here:

Don’t blog about things you shouldn’t. Don’t leave yourself or (even worse) others open to personal criticism because of what you post. If you don’t fully understand an issue, don’t blog on it – yet. Read more, take in other people’s views. Don’t make yourself look an idiot. Don’t flame people. What’s the point? You can disagree with others while remaining polite. It isn’t hard. Don’t deliberately take an extreme stance to provoke reactions. The most likely effect this will have is that people will ignore you.

It’s important that people working within the public sector have the opportunity to share their knowledge and experience through blogging, if they choose to. But, just as with any employee, they have to ensure that what they blog about, and the tone in which they do it, won’t impact negatively on their employer.

There’s possibly an issue here about whether public sector blogs work better behind a password, like those on IDeA’s CoPs. Of course, this means the general public misses out.

I’m planning a local government blogging platform, and in it blogs can be set to be private or public on a post by post basis. But at the end of the day, the best method of ensuring that blog posts don’t cause an unwanted publicity storm is simple common sense.

Update: A couple of comments have revealed the truth of what was in Owen’s post – which I haven’t had the chance to see because his blog is down. It turns out that all he did was quote a Guardian article, where the offending comparison was made. Given this turn of events, it’s clear that the Mail had a particular axe to grind with this particular blogger.

Would such a blatent and inaccurate smear have been made against someone writing within the mainstream media? I guess not. The question in my post is still valid – but takes a different tone, I think. Is it possible for public sector workers to blog when their words are twisted in such a fashion by those who have an interest in discrediting them?

Friday, 18 May, 2007

Wednesday, 16 May, 2007

Bubbl.us – online mind mapping

Bubbl.us

Bubbl.us is a great service. It allows you to create mind maps within your web browser. You can share them with other people, and collaborate on them too. A great way of mapping out projects with people who aren’t geographically close.

I’ve created a quick map to show how it can work. It’s about social media, but is only for demonstration purposes: I know it isn’t comprehensive or probably even accurate. Here’s a link to the exported .png image file:

Bubblus_Social_Media

Which is very nice. But I can also embed it into a blog post, or any other site:

 Which you can whizz around with your mouse and zoom in and stuff. Nice!

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Are You Connected?

Nice article from The Guardian:

This week came the news that “William Wales” had joined the social networking site Facebook. Yesterday there was much argument about whether it was a hoax or not. Would Prince William really post a profile on the net? The answer is: well, why not? After all, this is how most people his age keep tabs on their mates.

With websites such as Facebook and MySpace constantly being talked about in the media, it must be easy to feel like a 20th- century luddite if you aren’t already part of the in-crowd. Here lies a great disconnect at the heart of 21st-century socialising: either you’re in (and use every social networking website you can) or you’re out (and don’t use them at all).

WordPress 2.2

WordPress

There’s a new version of WordPress out for those who host their own blogs. The main change seems to be the incorporation of the widgets plugin as a part of the base code. Dougal Campbell lists the main changes:

  • Atom feeds updated to Atom 1.0
  • Preliminary support for Atom Publishing Protocol
  • Widgets are now supported in core
  • Protection against activating broken plugins
  • “Deactivate All Plugins” button. Sadly, my “Reactivate All Plugins” patch didn’t make it into this release. Hopefully you’ll see it in WP 2.3.
  • Improvements to comment management
  • Code optimizations and speedups
  • Future WYSIWYG support for the Safari browser
  • Post Preview moved into a popup window, rather than an iframe on the Write page
  • WordPress-specific XML–RPC API
  • JQuery support

This is a great advance for WordPress, as drag and rop layout editing is a feature of other blogging systems. Am nervous about upgrading though – as I already use the widgts plugin – will this just override everything I have already set up?

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Monday, 14 May, 2007

Virtual Communities

Right, the virtual community is now live, kinda. You can find it at http://virtualcommunities.eu. Be warned: it isn’t pretty.

Virtualcommunities

But prettiness can come later.

So, the point of this site is to create a community platform using different social media services. The point being that I already have a blog, and a flickr account, so why would I want to bother logging into another one in order to contribute? Through the wonder of widgets and RSS, Virtual Communities tries to create this online utopia.

Let’s go through the various media and talk about how each can be contributed to.

1. Photos

There is a Flickr group called Virtual Communities. All you need to do is join the group, and then add some photos to it. The content is displayed on the VC homepage through a Flickr ‘badge’ which displays the latest 5 images. The ones there now are just some random ones I chucked up to test things out.

Check – is this the right way? Could we just use a particular tag, thus making it even easier?

2. Video

This uses a VodPod pod called (guess what?) Virtual Communities. This works best as you can add video from a number of providers to it, and it produces a nice widget. All you need to do is join the Pod, and start adding video to it.

3. Events

An Upcoming widget for the Virtual Communities group displays upcoming relevent events. Of which there are currently none. This was added after the screenshot above was taken, by the way.

4. Blogs

This is an RSS feed which aggregates a number of blogs (those of Messrs Wilcox, Dickson, Mitchell and, er, me). This is done through the rather mega FeedJumbler. This combined feed is then spat onto the page with MagpieRSS.

Check: Do we want all blog posts? Or could we use a category or tag based RSS feed? Both WordPress (hosted and non-hosted versions) and TypePad are both capable of this…

Also – would it be better to display cotent from blogposts, and give them a bigger and more central lump of the screen?

5. Links

MagpieRSS once again comes to the rescue, this time chucking the latest del.icio.us bookmarks that have been saved with the tag ‘virtualcommunities’.

Check: this probably needs to be changed to a more specific tag that people aren’t likely to use by accident…unless the accidental is actually more fun?

6. Slides

There is a group on SlideShare called Virtual Communities. Oh yes! Anything added to it is republished on the VC homepage with a rather marvellous widget. Anyone can join the group and any presentation can be added to the group.

Next Steps

It obviously needs a redesign, and a decent stylesheet putting together. But it works, I think. It needs a central combined RSS feed, but FeedJumbler can do that. Maybe another combined feed to track comments on all the different services would be cool too (if possible!).

Other services that could be included are something like a shared box.net account, which can be added as a widget for sharing uploaded files. There isn’t a wiki, and I am not sure how one could be incorporated into this model, other than through tagging wiki pages in del.icio.us. What about audio?

If this is a model that people are interested in, I’m quite happy to package up the various scripts it uses and make it available. Another option might be to host other communities of this type at (say) http://virtualcommunities.eu/anothercommunity. The bandwidth on my side wouldn’t be much as the services are the things taking the hits.

Creating some kind of web based framework around the whole thing, allowing people to create communities and add stuff to them using a web interface would be really cool, but waaaay beyond my capabilities.

Please do provide feedback, especially those involved in the earlier discussion – is this the sort of thing you were thinking about?

Sunday, 13 May, 2007

Creating Communities

Warning: mildly incoherent rambling ahead…

I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently to what the best way of creating online communities are. This is partly Simon Dickson’s fault.

Back in March, Simon wrote, in a post titled “Because you can’t do bettr than Flickr”:

I’ve just started work with a local community group keen to build a civic website. I’m looking at open source CMS solutions like Drupal as the base system… but I must admit, I’m wondering if the best idea isn’t simply to aggregate stuff from elsewhere…

Take the example of photo sharing… you won’t find a better website than Flickr. So why not just create a group, and let the members feed into it. Let Flickr take all the pain of hosting, user access rights, etc etc – not to mention the expense. That’s why they’re there. Meanwhile, you just consume the various RSS feeds (or whatever) back at base.

The more I consider it, I think this use of best-of-breed web services to add content to a community is the best way of doing things. The problem is with what you use as the ‘base’.

For example, VodPod is a great way of aggregating community chosen video content in one place. It also provides neat tools to display the content through the use of embedded widgets, which work within blog sidebars or within the bounds of a static web page.

It’s easy enough to create Flickr groups, or even just use tags, and use the RSS feed to republish the content and provide links back to source, as Simon points out.

But how to assemble it all in one place? You could have a central blog, which the community members contribute to – but then that kind of goes against the spirit of the enterprise. What would be better would be that members author their own blog posts, and choose in some way whether or not they make it to the community or not. WordPress blogs could manage this as it can produce feeds for individual tags, for example. Another option might be to use a specific de.icio.us tag and pull in headlines from that feed.

So, what about the base system? Drupal could do it, but it’s complicated! You could hack together a batch of pages using MagpieRSS, for example, but it would be a lot of work to get something looking professional.

One option would be to use WordPress and the FeedWordPress plugin to aggreagte blog content to fill the main page, with other media content in the sidebars. But there is a problem with this approach, which is that the RSS feed won’t include this supplementary media!

Perhaps something could be done with Yahoo!’s Tubes system, but I have to admit to not entirely understanding that.

Does anyone have any ideas on how various social sites could be pulled together successfully?

Free as in Beer

Faib

Thought it might be worth a quick plug of another little blog I write, called Free as in Beer.

All I do is post a link and a quick description of a zero-cost bit of software. Why not have a look – you might find something useful there!

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VodPod

VodPod

VodPod is a really cool way of collecting and republishing video. The way it works is this: you create a pod, which is a library of video you have chosen as being particularly good, and then add to it using a bookmark in your browser. Easy. The videos can be hosted on YouTube, Google, blip.tv… anywhere!

The other cool thing that VodPod allows you to do is add a widget to your web site, allowing people to watch the latest things added to your pod. You can see the LGNewMedia version in the sidebar to the right of the screen. Just click a video to launch a pop up media player. Nice!

There is a social element to VodPod too. Anyone can join a pod and start adding material to it. So feel free to visit the LGNewMedia one and add some video!

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