John Naughton on Flickr

From his column in Sunday’s Observer:

Flickr’s designers also displayed a shrewd grasp of the essence of Web 2.0 thinking – namely that the big rewards come from making it easy for other developers to hook into your stuff. So they were quick to publish the application programming interface (API), the technical details other programmers needed to link into Flickr’s databases. This then made it easy for bloggers and users of social networking sites to create links to their Flickr ‘photostreams’. The results are clear for all to see. On 12 November last year, Flickr images passed the 2 billion mark. At present, between three and five million photographs are uploaded to the service every day…

Dead tree web 2.0 reading list

There are a number of books out there which are covering a lot of the stuff I am interested in with regard to the web and collaboration. It might be worth coming up with a reading list – how about a challenge to read them all by the end of the year?!

These aren’t necessarily all web 2.0 specific books: some cover background and the history of the technology too.

1. Here Comes Everybody – Clay Shirky

2. We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity – Charles Leadbeater

3. A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet – John Naughton

4. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything – Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams

5. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder – David Weinberger

6. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual – Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, and Doc Searls

7. The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand – Chris Anderson

8. Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date – Robert X Cringely

9. Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers – Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

10. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy – Andrew Keen

Are there any classics that I have managed to miss? Or are some of my picks utter dross that shouldn’t be touched with a bargepole?

Disclosure: the links to Amazon are associate links, which provide a bit of money towards Palimpsest, the arts and politics discussion forum I run.

The culture of collaboration

Steve Dale writes about the need for organisations to consider the cultural as well as the technological issues around collaboration and communication using the web”

An excellent posting from Shawn over at Anecdote about fostering a collaboration culture. A good corollary to my recent postings about what I see as growing and misplaced belief that Web 2.0 is the solution to more effective knowledge sharing. They key point I was trying to make is that technical solutions (blogs, wikis, RSS) by themselves do not create, nurture or develop learning and sharing communities, or improve engagement between government and citizens. I emphasised the importance of people in the equation, both in terms of skilled facilitators (those who support and encourage conversations and collaboration) and the willingness of the users themselves to actively engage (e.g. a shared domain of interest). Shawn refers to fostering a culture of collaboration, which I think is quite often overlooked by those who are rushing headlong into implementing Web 2.0 facilities in order to achieve better knowledge management.  To put this into perspective, the investment (time, cost and support) for the ‘people and process’ side of the communities of practice being developed across local government exceeds the cost of the technology by a factor of ten or more. Furthermore, this is recurrent cost and not a one-off capital expense.

I’m delighted that Steve is already signed up with the etoolkit project wiki, as getting this balance right is key to the success of the project. The toolkit we are developing will make clear the complete costs of implementing a social media solution to a problem, including people’s time and training, as well as the financials. Social media and web 2.0 are quick and easy to do, but not so quick, and not so easy to do well.

Twitter – awesome source of blog traffic

It was interesting to see the results of the little poll I have been running in my sidebar recently regarding how people read posts on this blog. Out of the 25 votes cast, only four people responded that they read posts via the links that appear on Twitter. The thing is, my blog’s stats show that the largest referrer of traffic to this site every single day is Twitter.

My blog automatically pings my Twitter account with a short message telling everyone that follows me that a new post is up on DavePress, and the title, so they know what it is about. There is a link there, so all people have to do is click that and they’re here. Magic – and much quicker than RSS. This is all done with the plugin TwitterTools by Alex King, and you can download it here.

Well worth it for anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog.

Prologue+Wiki=collaboration

etoolkit

I wondered last week about the ways we can use online tools to collaborate on projects – I had on my mind the etoolkit that David Wilcox (and now Beth Kanter, Emma Mulqueeny, Alex Stobart, Nancy White and Steve Dale…) and I are developing in the open.

My issue was that while wikis are perfect for putting stuff together and bringing together thoughts and resources, they aren’t that great for conversations or throwing out ideas, which is where group blogging can have a great impact. The trouble is that a standard WordPress (say) blog is rather an unwieldy beast for this task, making you sign up for the blog, log in, go to the admin panel, then click write post etc etc…

There’s an obvious solution here, and that’s the Prologue theme for WordPress. Makes it dead easy for people to contribute ideas, with the possibility of threaded conversations using the comments. Perfect. I have started one for the etoolkit here. It’s hosted at WordPress.com which means that while allowing others in to contribute is a little clunky, there’s little harm done or money lost if nobody uses it.

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