Thanks to the ever-resourceful Peter Clark, Open Coffee has come to Cambridge.
Excellent!
An online notebook
Thanks to the ever-resourceful Peter Clark, Open Coffee has come to Cambridge.
Excellent!
Cambridge City Council’s Visit Cambridge tourism site has been hacked, with various unsavoury pictures and links added, reports the Cambridge News:
CAMBRIDGE’S official tourism website was still offline today after pornographic images were posted in place of pictures of the historic city…
It comes after horrified bed and breakfast owners were shocked to log on to the site, run by Cambridge City Council, to find hardcore images of couples having sex and people exposing themselves for the camera.
Ooops. Here’s a screenshot from Cambridge News’ site:
TinyChat is a really cool new service that lets you create simple chatrooms on the fly within your browser.
Why is this useful? Well, say you want to get a bunch of people together for a chat, but you don’t know what technology they all have available. Some are on Skype, some not; some are IRC fans, others not; some have access to internet instant messaging, but not all.
Tony chat uses a really simple web interface to allow you to create your chatroom with a couple of clicks. You can then send the URL to the people you want involved, and you’re away.
Afterwards, your room and its contents disappear, so it really is disposable! It might be an idea for someone to copy and paste the contents of the chat before closing it down in case you want a record.
Another cool feature is to assign your Twitter account to your idenitity within your chat and which pings your followers with a link to the chatroom you have just created.
I like the idea of having impromptu online discussions using this, inviting people in via Twitter, to discuss an issue in a more ‘live’ environment that Twitter normally allows.
What other applications can you think of for TinyChat?
Yesterday morning, the Conservative Party launched a new campaign for ‘honest food’ – which is all about labelling food with its country of origin. They do have a rather nice video:
I don’t usually drift into party political stuff on this blog, and I’m not really going to start now. For some reason though, this campaign caught my eye and I’m just going to look at the online elements of it and see how they might be improved.
The campaign has it’s own URL – www.honestfoodcampaign.com – which just diverts the user to a sub page of the main Conservative Party website. This is mistake number one for me, for a campaign to engage with a broader range of people, it needs to avoid heavy branding from a political party. By all means make it clear who is behind the campaign, but don’t alienate potential supporters by making it all about the party.
On the campaign site itself, there are four tabs of content, which cover:
– some quotes from celebrities. There’s no interaction at all. Mistake number three.
At the bottom of each of these sections is a link to sign an online (Conservatives-hosted) petition.
That seems to be it.
Here’s what I would do to breath some life into this campaign:
What I think this makes clear is that whilst people have been critical of Labour’s efforts online, the other parties by no means have it licked themselves. Also, for a campaign to be really successful I think you have to let people feel like they are a part of it, and make it their own. Throwing PDFs at them and getting them to sign a petition does doesn’t real cut it.
The advert is up for the UK government’s Director of Digital Engagement. It looks like an exciting role with stacks of potential.
Steph has already started to crowd source what it is that whoever gets the job should start doing.
Dominic has also given his commentary on his ‘dream digital director‘.