Public Sector Social Media Meet

Members of the Community of Practice for Social Media and Online Collaboration are meeting up at the Learning and Skills Council National Office in Coventry on 26th February 2008 between 10am and 3.30pm for a day of Web 2.0 fun and frolics, including:

  • The benefits of using social media in the public sector, real life examples
  • Building social web sites: blogs, wikis, forums and social networks
  • Making social online video
  • Group discussions on where the potential is for social media to make a real difference and a "how do I?" : Matching tools to problems
  • Future developments of the CoP

If you aren’t already a member of the community and you feel it would be worthwhile attending please join us here and sign up on the wiki to say you’ll come.

10 Great Firefox extensions

I love FireFox, because not only is it faster and more secure than Internet Explorer, it’s also a lot more powerful, especially when you consider the many extensions you can use to add functionality.

Here’s a list of some of the ones I use:

1. Del.icio.us bookmarks

This is a brilliant add-on which works in two ways. Firstly, it adds a button to your FireFox toolbar which allows you to tag a site with a small popup window and without having to visit del.icio.us itself. The second button it adds opens up a sidebar in the browser, showing your latest tagged links and a search box to hunt out stuff bookmarked years before.

2. Download statusbar

This makes downloads appear in FireFox’s status bar, rather than in a pop up window. Makes life much tidier, and offers more information on what’s happening.

3. Copy plain text

As a blogger I find this invaluable. Selecting text and right-clicking allows you the option of copying text, while stripping out any formatting, which makes copying it into a blog paste a breeze, without the fear of weird formatting messing things up.

4. IE Tab

I try not to use Internet Explorer wherever possible, but sometimes you just can’t get out of it – when, for example, the site you need to view doesn’t work so well in FireFox. This cool extension allows you to switch the rendering engine in a tab to IE, so you are running it within FireFox.

5. Colorful tabs

I don’t know about you, but I often end up with tonnes of tabs open, and sometimes it can be a nightmare telling them apart. But with Colorful tabs, they are all presented in a number of delightful pastel shades, making it easy to switch to the one you want.

6. BlogJet this

This is installed along with BlogJet, the desktop blog editor I use. It makes it easy to reference a particular web page in a blog entry, by pulling the URL and the text from the page in question into the editor for you.

7. ScribeFire

This is an honourary mention, because I don’t currently use this. ScribeFire is a blog editor that runs as a Firefox add on. It works really well, but I’m a dedicated Windows Live Writer guy these days…

8. Twitbin

Integrates Twitter into your FF sidebar, so you can keep up to date with your friend’s tweets without having to leave your favourite browser!

9. Evernote Clipper

This plugin makes life much easier when copying snippets of the web to Evernote for future reference.

10. Search extensions

The search box in the FF toolbar can be added to so it becomes even more useful. I’ve added GodDaddy, Wikipedia and Mahalo to mine so far.

Can anyone recommend FireFox extensions that they couldn’t live without?

The University of Wikipedia

Mike Butcher at Techcrunch UK reports on a University tutor banning her students from researching essays on the web:

The education world has pursued new technology with an almost evangelical zeal and it is time to take a step back and give proper consideration of how we use it.

Too many students don’t use their own brains enough. We need to bring back the important values of research and analysis.

Too right. Now, I’m a fan of Wikipedia and believe that, as a tool for getting a quick overview on the subject, it’s invaluable. I look stuff up on, and link to, Wikipedia time and time again. That doesn’t mean, however, that I would use it as a part of academic study. That’s no different from using Britannica as a basis for an essay or thesis, and surely nobody would do that?

The issue here isn’t Wikipedia, or Google, but the fact that the students in question are idiots.

Universities make incredible resources available to students through web catalogues in libraries, etc. However, maybe there is a lesson to be learned in terms of the ease of use of these systems – is that why students are turning to less academic sources? Or are they just being lazy?

Replacing Notepad

notepad Notepad, as I am sure everyone knows, is a text editor that comes free with Windows. It’s very, very basic, but that’s part of its charm. I use it quite a lot, for quickly editing HTML or PHP pages, or sometimes just to strip the formatting from some text I am copying and pasting.

The trouble is that Notepad is sometimes a little too minimalist, and there are a number of free (as in beer, though sometimes as in speech too) replacements out there vying for your text. They offer functionality such as allowing much larger file sizes than Notepad can, having more than one file open at a time, and some fancy scripting markup effects. Here’s a couple of examples of what text editors are out there.

(Please bear in mind that I am not wanting to generate some kind of mad Vi vs. Emacs text editor flame-war here! But please do leave a comment letting everyone know what your favourite text editor is 😉 )

Use Google CSE on your blog

Google’s customised search engine service is really cool, useful and dead easy to use. It’s what I used to create LGSearch, which is one of the most successful bits of online work I have done. What Google CSE does is allow you to create a ‘whitelist’ of sites you want to limit your search to, so it’s a way of guaranteeing relevance in search results.

Another use of it is to replace your default blog search functionality. For example, it’s better than the WordPress standard search because it searches pages as well as posts; and it allows you to run contextual ads next to the results – taking people away from your blog but providing you with a little income, which is always nice.

The functionality is improved even more by using the new AJAX results overlay, which means there is no need to create a results page. Try it out on DavePress using the search box on the top right.

To get this on your WordPress blog, all you need to do is head over to Google CSE, create your search engine, remembering to only add your blog’s URL to the whitelist, and then copy the search box code into a text widget. Easy!

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