An online notebook
TechCrunch announces that Yahoo! Mail now offers unlimited storage – obviously a better deal than Gmail’s 2.8–odd gb.
One feature beaten – now all Yahoo! have to do is get rid of the horrible graphical adverts, allow pop access to other accounts, add tagging…
I launched the latest project under the LGNewMedia banner yesterday, a social bookmarking site for local government called LGKnowledge. It’s based on Pligg and works just fine – the only issue will be getting enough people using it to make it worthwhile. But I’m working on that.
I’m pretty excited about this. LGKnowledge is a new site I’ve developed to try and provide a solution to the problems that search engines produce, which I discussed in this post.
In a nutshell, that problem is that search engines – even targetted ones like LGSearch – don’t have any kind of quality control built in. It’s all done by algorithms and sheer computing grunt.
LGKnowledge aims to create a resource of web documents that have been individually selected by local government workers. That is, a link is only included if someone has previously found it useful. You can also vote on links, to ensure that the really good stuff always floats to the top.
Essentially, LGKnowledge is a bit like Digg, and to a lesser extent, del.icio.us. You can submit a link using either the site or a bookmark, add comments and tags to it, and it’s then displayed on the front page. Others can vote on it, and it will be found using the search too.
Metacalfe’s Law applies to LGKnowledge in a big way. This means that the usefulness of something increase with the number of users it has. The more people visit this site and add links, the more there will be to attract others, who then add their own value to it. So please spread the word about LGKnowledge!
I thought it might be of use to people as an introduction to social media tools if I produced a list of some of the stuff I use on a regular basis. So here goes.
I use FeedDemon to read my RSS feeds. It’s a desktop based application, rather than the browser based offerings like Google Reader or Bloglines.
BlogJet is an offline blog editor. It means you don’t have to use the one embedded in your blog engine, whether it be Typepad, WordPress or Blogger. I find the inteface easer to use, and generally find composing blog posts – especially lengthier ones like this – a more comfortable experience offline. Similar tools include Qumana and Zoundry – but I have always found BlogJet the easiest to use.
WordPress is the best blog engine there is. Whether installed on your own server or hosted on WordPress.com it offers the best blend of features, speed and ease of use when compared to the others, such as Blogger and Typepad. It’s also very flexible and can be used to generate a standard website – you aren’t confined to the blog format.
FireFox made much of social media possible. The open source web browser has countless advantages over the competition, being more secure, extensible and small than, say, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Google Mail, or Gmail as it is more commonly known, is the best email service that has ever existed. It does so much more than any of the opposition, and does it better and faster. Just for starters: 2.8gb and rising of space to keep your emails in, tagging emails rather than putting them in folders (so you can have more than one tag per email), being able to pick up emails from other accounts, and reply from that address so the receiver doesn’t know the difference, inbuilt integration with the Google Talk IM client and instant editing of emailed documents with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. There’s more, believe me.
Basecamp is an online project management environment. It’s free for one project (so you just have to open lots of accounts if you don’t want to spend money) and provides shared to do lists, milestones, writeboards (a bit like wikis) and uploading and sharing documents (if you have a paid account). You can also chat live with other people on your project with an online instant messaging type environment It just works really well.
Flickr lets you upload your photos, share them with friends, family or everyone and then post them to your blog or other website. You can comment on other people’s photos, respond to their comments to yours and join onlien groups of interest. Also, given that the option is there to publish photos under a Creative Commons licence, it’s a great resource for photos for web and other projects. Just remember to be polite and give credit where it’s due.
YouTube is like Flickr, only with videos. You must have heard of this!
WikiSpaces is a lovely, simple hosted wiki solution. Let’s you upload files to your wikis, amongst other things. I use this for tonnes of stuff, including the LGNewMedia wiki.
Lots of people use instant messaging these days, and there are loads of different systems out there: MSN/Live, AOL, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk, ICQ, Jabber… With Meebo you can use them all with one login and one system. Even better, that system runs inside a web browser, meaning you can use it anywhere – assuming you have a decent connection and browser…
There are a few different web office applications out there. That’s right, an office application (word processor, spreadsheet, etc) inside your browser. Google is getting there with Docs and Spreadsheets, but at the moment Zoho are streets ahead.
Omnidrive will let you have 1gb of online storage space for free! Also, as they let you link directly to files on the web, it makes it a perfect service for hosting podcasts and video that isn’t suitable for YouTube. Also, if you store documents on Omnidrive (like spreadsheets or word processed files) you can open them up instantly in Zoho for editing online. Nice one! Honourable mention goes to Box.net in this category.
The blog search space is an increasingly crowded one, but for me, Technorati still does the business. A great way to find out who is talking about the issues you are interested in and what they are saying about you.
So, that’s a pretty quick run through of some of the stuff I use. Fellow bloggers, why not let us all know what you use? Tag your post in Technorati with ‘whatiuse’ so we can find out!
Scribd is a cool service which acts as a YouTube for documents. To quote their FAQs:
Scribd lets you publish and discover documents online. It is like a big online library where anyone can upload. We make use of a custom Flash document viewer that lets you display documents right in your Web browser. There are all sorts of other features that make it easy and fun to publish, convert, embed, analyze, and read documents.
Part of the idea behind Scribd is that everyone has a lot of documents sitting around on their computers that only they can read. With Scribd we hope to unlock this information by putting it on the web.
Nice! It certainly gets over the problem of sharing stuff online which isn’t a photo or video, say.
What’s extra cool about this service is the fact that you don’t even have to log in to publish stuff, you can just chuck it up anonymously if you choose. OK, so it’s not a great choice for sensitive information, but if you want to be able to share a document across the web, and you aren’t too fussed who sees it, it’s a great quick and dirty solution.