Posting links

Since delicious upgraded itself, the automatic posting of stuff I have bookmarked has stragely stopped on DavePress. Not at all sure why.

Anyway, to improve things, I have installed the Postalicious plugin for WordPress, which will handle all this for me, on the recommendation of the social media John Virgo, Jon Bounds. There are quite a lot of options and configuration to be done, so I might have to tweak it a bit over the next few days, but hopefully normal service will now be resumed.

What do people want to know?

I am planning a series of posts on this blog that will go right back to basics on a number of social web topics, partially just to be helpful but also to help develop the documentation for some workshops I am planning.

What I would like to know is what sort of topics people would like covered in terms of social media tools and services. Which services could be of most use in your organisation, but are really hard to explain?

Some ideas I had were for simple stuff like RSS, tagging and social bookmarking.

What would you like to see me write about here?

I’ve Gotta Knol

Knol is a reasonably new service from Google, which has been described as their attempt to kill, or at elast steal some traffic from, Wikipedia. It’s basically a way for people to publish information about what they know in the form of ‘knols’ – Google’s term for a single unit of knowledge. These are tied to your Google account, so you are pretty much responsible for your own content on there and which kind of answers the problem of Wikipedia, where you might have no idea who has produced the content. I’m thinking that it is kind of a mixture of Wikipedia and Squidoo.

I’ve been having a bit of a go myself, adding knols on collaborating with wikis and getting started blogging – effectively just copy and paste jobs from some of the bigger posts on this blog. A few thoughts on my experiences doing this:

  • The URLs for the knols themselves aren’t very friendly, which is a shame
  • The editor is reasonably friendly to use but the Knol site seems to have a problem remembering whether or not I am signed in, which can be a pain
  • I don’t think you can embed flash stuff like video or presentations, which is a pain
  • Some kind soul has given the wiki knol a five star rating! But who? It would be nice to know
  • There has been quite a bit of discussion about where knol entries will appear in Google searches – so far neither of my entries are appearing anywhere near the first page of results, but I am going to monitor this
  • It would be nice for groups of authors to be able to form, and to group entries together as well, making it easy to find entries by authors that know each other, and for knol-writing projects to be kept together

I have set both my knols – and any future ones I write – to be editable by anyone with a Google account, so if you fancy having a go at improving them, or just having a play with Knol, go ahead. I think I am going to continue to cross-post relevant things to there. Whether I will ever go searching on Knol to find something out for myself, I’m not so sure.

Scripting Enabled

Scripting Enabled looks like a really worthwhile couple of days out, if you can make it:

Scripting Enabled is a two day conference and workshop aimed at making the web a more accessible place. We are planning to achieve this by making those in the know about accessibility barriers meet hackers that know how to retrieve information from APIs and display them as alternative interfaces. Together these groups can make any system out there more inviting, accessible and available to people that are currently blocked out.

It’s taking place on the 19th and 20th September. Day one is finding out about accessibility issues, day two is a hack day to fix them. Book your place here, and sign up for the discussion group here (it runs on Yahoo! – old skool!).

FriendFeed fun

I have been playing with FriendFeed today. It’s an interesting service that I first wrote about back in February, but haven’t paid a massive amount of attention to since. For those not in the know, FriendFeed is a service that performs three main functions:

  1. It allows you to aggregate the content you put online using different services into one place, such as your blog posts, flickr photos, YouTube videos, delicious bookmarks, Google Reader shared items, etc etc
  2. It allows you to subscribe to your contacts’ friendfeeds too, and presents all of their items, along with yours into a single timeline, so you can follow what people are up to
  3. It allows you to comment on items in people’s feeds, as well as marking whether you like them or not. So it becomes another place where conversations might happen, though with Twitter Friendfeed will add your comments to that service too.

This last point is one which would bother me a little, I guess, because I would prefer it that comments about what I do (mainly on this blog) all appear in one place. Perhaps I am already being overtaken by how distributed conversations can now become, who knows. But at the moment, other than a few very high profile folk, not that many people appear to be spending a lot of time in FriendFeed.

I’m starting to see some of the value, especially now I have reduced the number of people I follow. This is not like twitter, with short messages, people can have loads of different things reported into their FriendFeed and the noise can be deafening. Better to keep FriendFeed as the place you track your most preferred sources of stuff, I reckon. If you would like to follow me, I am at http://friendfeed.com/davebriggs.

One other bit of functionality of FriendFeed, though, is rooms. These are separate pages on the site which allow groups of people to recommend content to each other, whether in the form of short messages or posted links, photos, videos, blog posts etc etc. It seems like a cool, easy way of sharing and discussing online resources. I have started a room for government webby stuff at http://friendfeed.com/rooms/govweb – do join in and let’s see how useful it actually is!

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