Pukka: an answer to my prayers

I’m making quite a lot of use of the social bookmarking service Delicious at the moment. Luckily, it is mostly using my own account, but on one or two projects I am using specific accounts.

This can be a pain in the neck. I’ve installed the Delicious extension for Firefox which makes bookmarking a dream – but that only works with my usual account. Logging in and out all the time is a faff and not really an option.

What I have been doing recently is using different browsers for different accounts. It’s cumbersome and sometimes tricky to remember which browser works with which account!

However, I’ve now found the answer to my multiple delicious account problem prayers. It’s called Pukka.

pukkaPukka is a piece of software from some guys called Code Sorcery which makes it a breeze to manage all your accounts in one go.

Effectively, it is a client for Delicious. You load it up with the credentials for all your accounts, which you can then choose from a drop down menu when creating a bookmark.

There is also a bookmarklet which lets you call up the application straight from the browser and which fills in quite a few of the details of the page you are viewing for you.

It isn’t perfect – I can’t find an option to be able to post a bookmark to multiple accounts, for instance – but for roughly a tenner you can’t really go wrong.

Sadly for Windows and Linux users, it is Mac only.

A new collaborative community

Helen has launched a new community blogging project over at digtialengagement.org which aims to be:

a collaborative space for all those interested in digital engagement to share ideas and agree priorities for action around digital engagement

This is of a much wider scope than digital mentors, and has the potential to be a real hotbed of interesting and vital debate. Helen writes:

By digital engagement we mean the use of social technologies for social good. What do you think we should do on digitalengagment.org? In the immediate future, we want to use this site to create a digital manifesto, what more could we all do, and do together to get more people online and engage in the right tools for them to help them in their lives.

I’ve helped out by setting the blog up, and will be adding my thoughts on digital engagement in due course. The aim is for the site to be as inclusive as possible, so see how you can get involved.

We are going to have some interesting announcements coming up, including how we are going to try and get this conversation going en masse at the Digtial Inclusion Conference in April.

Timetric

Timetric is a Cambridge based startup that, in their own words, is

here to help you make sense of data. If you think about it, most of the numbers we come across every day are things like temperatures, prices, rates, volumes: numbers which vary over time. That’s what Timetric focusses on: graphing, tracking and comparing the movements of data over time.

The fancy name for this sort of thing is time series analysis. We’re building tools to make it as easy to build models on top of time series — updated whenever the data they’re based on is updated — as it is to use a spreadsheet.

Which sounds pretty cool. I have to say, what I know about statistics and time series can easily be written on a stamp with a carrot, but even I can see some of the benefits of this, especially as Timetric makes it easy to embed graphs into blogs and websites. Like this, which I chose at random from the Timetric site:

With all the recent work in and around government to open data up and make it reusable, we are going to need the tools that will help us make sense of it all. It look like Timetric is going to be one of those tools.

Got an iPhone? Get AudioBoo

Neville writes about the latest service from Best Before – the guys behind the awesome turn-your-macbook-into-a-videobooth service Videoboo – which is Audioboo.

What you do with Audioboo is simple: record audio on your iPhone and publish the recordings to your Audioboo account on the web, complete with your geo-location data if you choose to include that via an option on the iPhone when you first use the app.

Your account has an RSS feed so anyone can subscribe to that feed and get all your boos.

I’ve been playing with Audioboo for the past few days and, frankly, I’m addicted. I do have an affinity for recording audio, I admit, far more than with video, so if I find something appealing in this area, I’m probably predisposed towards wanting to like it.

Here’s a video showing just how easy it is to record quick podcasts and get them online with Audioboo:

Hello AudioBoo from Mark Rock on Vimeo.

I’m hoping to be using this service a lot – especially when social reporting at events. Will people be more willing to talk into a phone than a video camera? Let’s find out!

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