Dave Briggs – Page 302 – An online notebook

Bookmarks for December 21st through December 28th

December 28, 2008

Stuff I have bookmarked for December 21st through December 28th:

MoMB Labs | Twitter 100 – 100 of the best Twitter services
How to make a Delicious “plugin” for Chrome – Simple bookmarklet to use delicious in Google's Chrome browser
Pods – Pods is a CMS plugin for WordPress
Favo – Smart bookmark management and collaboration – Cool looking visual social bookmarking service coming next year
WP Theme: Credit Crunch | Smashing Premium WordPress Themes – "Beat the credit crunch with this magazine style money and business theme. Features powerful customisation theme options, magic automatic image resizing, 4 page templates to choose from… This has everything you need for your online magazine." Costly, tho.
Welcome to CitizenScape — Citizenscape – "CitizenScape is a 2 year eParticipation Programme Trial Project that is integrating and testing state-of-the-art Web 2.0 social networking Internet tools combined with offline outreach community activities in a socially purposeful way in concrete legislative and decision-making processes – specifically looking at engaging Citizens to debate and engage in the implementation of EU environmental legislation at a local level."
Blubrry – Blubrry Powerpress – "The Powerpress Podcast Plugin has all of the elements needed to have you podcast RSS feed in complete compliance in order to obtain a iTunes listing, and is optimized for listings in podcast directories and the Zune Marketplace."
Things Are Going to Change Around Here… – Guido is moving away from Blogger onto something new. Will be interesting to keep an eye on how this develops.
Welcome to MuniGov 2.0! ‎(Exploring Government Collaboration Via Technology‎) – Interesting Google Sites based collaboration between public bodies in the US
Ericulous – Free & Premium WordPress Themes + Plugins – Nice looking set of themes found by @davebriggswife
FutureGov » We are the government. Us Now. – "I intend to do everything I can to help get the film into the hands of some of the movers and shakers in government as I am certain that the film can be used to turbo boost institutional change and with it wider social good."
List and status of UK Local Council Twitters as of 18th December 2008 « Local Gov Engagement Online Research – Excellent collection of information about UK local gov's use of Twitter
List and status of UK Local Council Twitters as of 18th December 2008 « Local Gov Engagement Online Research – Excellent collection of information about UK local gov's use of Twitter
FreshNetworks Blog » Blog Archive » So how do you measure ROI of online communities? – "The answer to this question is simple and complex. The simple answer is that you make sure you establish a set of criteria when you launch the community and then judge success against these. The complex answer come with some of the ways in which you may judge success."

Links and Twitter

December 28, 2008

Steve Dale writes about his uneasiness with a new Twitter mashup service, Twitchboard, which automates the posting of content from Twitter to other social web services. At the moment, all it does is links: if you post a URL to Twitter it also gets pinged to your Delicious account.

I may be in the minority here but I feel slightly troubled by apps such as Twitchboard that want to think for me. I’m perfectly happy to create my own bookmarks in Delicious, which are reasonably well organised and categorised, or to click on Stumble! to add a link to a particularly interesting article I’ve read to my Stumble! These are conscious decisions I’ve made to provide the ’semantic glue’ for my personalised social web. I tend to Tweet about fairly trivial stuff and will occasionally link to an article or picture that I’ve found particularly amusing. I don’t necessarily want to store these links for prosperity, or worse, create my own personal tag cloud around a random stream consciousness.

I can see some of the value, just in terms of time saving, for cross posting links to Delicious from Twitter. But I think Steve is right in this case – having Twitchboard perform this service would make you think twice about what you post to Twitter, and that’s just no fun. Presumably you also still have to go into Delicious to add tags and stuff (which is where most of the benefit lies) – so it isn’t that much of a time saver after all.

I mentioned in a comment on Steve’s post that actually doing this in reverse makes more sense: links I save in Delicious get automatically shared on Twitter. This is fairly easy to get set up, simply by using the RSS feed from my Delicious account and Twitterfeed to parse each link I share into Twitter.

It will be interesting to see how this works…

Comments in the crowd

December 28, 2008

Photo credit: Greenboy

Great post by Steph on comments, community and moderation:

…as more people start to see the web as place for self-expression in their own spaces and other people’s, hearing the interesting voices in the crowd is only going to become more important.

Some Holiday Picks

December 28, 2008

Photo credit: Ravages

I’ve seen some interesting stuff pop up in my RSS over the last few days – here’s some of them:

Shel Holtz has a really interesting post about using Ning as a communication and collaboration platform for projects.
BookSprouts is an online community for readers. There are others.
MacMod will be a Mac only social network
Neville has been having problems with his iPhone. I’m waiting on a call from my local Apple Store for my second replacement. They really are the Alpha Romeo of smartphones.
John Self picks his books of 2008.
TweeTree is a new service that does what Quotably used to do: put Twitter conversations into a sensible, threaded order.

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