Thursday, 6 January, 2011

More-a about Quora

I first wrote about the social question and answer site Quora last June – I mention this to point out that I am considerably dorkier than you.

Anyways, something has made Quora very, very popular in the last week. This has manifested itself in the form of huge numbers of notification emails being sent out to users as new accounts are opened and people exercise their option to automatically add Twitter connections and email contacts to their Quora lists.

(Paul Clarke covers this issue nicely on his blog.)

Since signing up last summer though, I’ve done precious little on Quora. All the fuss made me go back and have a bit of a play.

I started out by asking the question How could Quora be used in UK local government? just to get started, and created a topic (like a folder or category) to put it in, which hopefully others will use too.

The creation of the topic is an interesting example of how Quora works – it’s all very collaborative. My original topic was called localgovuk which probably wasn’t terribly descriptive. So somebody came along and changed it, to Local government in the UK which makes much more sense!

Three people responded to the question (thanks, Noel, Benjamin and Andy!) so do go and have a look at what they said.

I think the potential use falls into two categories: firstly the use of Quora as a knowledge (and ignorance!) sharing tool for folk working in public services delivery; and secondly as a way for citizens to ask questions about what the public sector are doing.

However, while I have been trying to remember to check back into Quora to see what’s happening, it is yet to obviously stake its space in my workflow. It’s an effort to go there and use it, and until it finds a way of becoming part of my routine it will struggle I think.

Also, there’s too much of it. I think it needs better filters, because it is often too hard to find things and also it’s a real time sink – you can spend hours there without doing anything particularly productive – and I already have Twitter for that.

I’d be interested in the views of others who have used it. Is it a real game changer? I’m a skeptic right now.

Update: The FCO’s Jimmy Leach blogs his view on whether government interaction with Quora is necessary.

#More-a about Quora

Wednesday, 5 January, 2011

Some innovation reading

Not so much dead tree reading, for me anyway, as I tend to read books on my Kindle these days (they’re awfully good), but here’s a few books that I’ve found really useful on the topic of innovation. All those who have had their interest piqued by the talk of skunkworks on this blog recently should find them worthwhile:

Not to forget the classic:

And yet another pimp of the excellent and delightfully short

Another other great innovation book recommendations?

Disclaimer – the links to Amazon are affiliate ones – if you buy something after clicking them I make a few pence.

#Some innovation reading

Tuesday, 4 January, 2011

Drink! Feck! Girls! RSS!

The world it seems is full of blog posts about RSS – really simple syndication, for the non-dorks. Apparently it’s dead. Or dying. Or very much alive.

RSS is a standard for publishing the latest content on a site with regular updates – such as a news site, or a blog – in a machine readable form which can then be used by other sites or applications to republish it.

Here’s an example of the sort of panicky things people are saying:

If RSS isn’t saved now, if browser vendors don’t realise the potential of RSS to save users a whole bunch of time and make the web better for them, then the alternative is that I will have to have a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, or some such corporate-controlled identity, where I have to “Like” or “Follow” every website’s partner account that I’m interested in, and then have to deal with the privacy violations and problems related with corporate-owned identity owning a list of every website I’m interested in (and wanting to monetise that list), and they, and every website I’m interested in, knowing every other website I’m interested in following, and then I have to log in and check this corporate owned identity every day in order to find out what’s new on other websites, whilst I’m advertised to, because they are only interested in making the biggest and the best walled garden that I can’t leave.

Anyone still awake?

Here’s the thing for me: RSS cannot ‘die’ because it is a standard and not a service. Even if every website on the planet stopped producing an RSS feed, it wouldn’t die. It just wouldn’t be used much. There is no RSS corporation and so talking about its death is, well, exaggerated.

The other point is that this is a discussion about consumer use of RSS, which tends to be in the form of using an aggregator to pull in the latest content from all your favourite sites into one place. I use Google Reader to subscribe to about 750 sites, for instance.

I said ‘tends to’ but if I am honest a tiny number of people actually do this. Most get their links from Twitter or Facebook and by having bookmarks to their real favourites. Indeed, quite a few people who used to use an aggregator are now relying on social networks rather than managing their own list of feeds.

To this I respond, so what? People move on. I’m still in love with Google Reader, but there are plenty of others who are just as connected and up to speed as me (if not more so) who have given up. The world won’t end.

It’s also irrelevant for the future of RSS, which will continue to be an important part of the infastructure of the web. Lots of sites and applications use RSS feeds as the source of their content. This won’t end soon.

At the end of the day, RSS was never going to be a consumer technology, and it didn’t take off in the enterprise either. It just wasn’t good enough at tackling the issue of infobesity, and people have turned instead to using their friends and contacts on social networks as their filters.

Fair enough.

Update: Thanks to @baskers who pointed out I had missed the ‘Drink!’ out of the title originally.

#Drink! Feck! Girls! RSS!

What would a local government skunk works look like?

So my post about whether local government needs skunk works got quite a reaction both in the comments and on Twitter, so it’s obviously something people are interested in discussing.

How can we move the debate forward?

Let me sketch some ideas on how it might work – feel free to comment, criticise, abuse me in the comments. I’m genuinely making this up as I go along.

1. A local government skunkworks would best operate on a networked basis – a loose central organisation of more localised groups. That way you keep small groups concentrating on local issues but sharing is still possible.

2. Due to the nature of local service delivery and related issues, it would need to be run on open innovation lines, so that people who aren;t local government officers can still get involved, eg other public services, those in the civil sector, universities (thanks Rupert in the comments) and the private sector.

3. Skunkworks operate best with specific projects to work on. Some method of identifying projects would be needed.

4. Is there a need for some kind of ownership by the local council, or at least a body responsible for service delivery? No point having an active skunk works if nothing ever actually happens!

5. Depending on the project, financing is going to be needed at some point. Where would that come from in this model?

6. Involvement of local residents will be vital – they ought to be able to join teams where they have value to add, and be kept up to date with progress and be able to comment (added thanks to Harry in the comments).

7. This isn’t just about IT or the web – it’s about any kind of innovation. Though tech likely to play a role in many innovations (added thanks to Harry in the comments).

8. Skunkworks is probably a terrible name and something friendlier is undoubtably needed (from comments on the Twitters by @anthonyzach and @dominiccampbell).

Have I got anything badly wrong? What have I missed out?

#What would a local government skunk works look like?

Do we need skunkworks in local government?

Simon Dickson has been doing his best to keep us up to date with the government skunkworks, the project to form a tight group of innovators in central government to work on new ideas.

If you’re new to the idea of a skunkworks, here’s the Wikipedia page. Basically, a skunkworks

is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organisation given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.

Steph also recently posted a couple of interviews with two public sector skunkworks style outfits, which is well worth a read.

This got me thinking: does local government need something similar? If it does, should it be a central body, or perhaps something that individual councils should have? Maybe it could be a shared service between groups of councils.

I’d be really interested in what people think.

I do wonder where innovation fits in to local government this year. After all, theoretically, it ought to be a time when organisations try new things and new ways of working to improve efficiency and reduce costs. However as Ingrid alluded to in her recent post, retrenchment might be more likely.

A quick reminder about the brilliant Little Innovation Book by James Gardner that you can read for free online and is a great primer on innovation matters.

#Do we need skunkworks in local government?

Monday, 3 January, 2011

Back up your Flickr photos!

Following the announcement that Yahoo! don’t care too much for Delicious anymore, I’ve been worrying away about Flickr. I know a few others have been too.

Phil Bradley points out that a great tool exists for backing up all your Flickr photos, so if Yahoo! decides to flickr the switch to off, you still have all those memories.

It’s called Flickredit and is an open source effort, and well worth trying out.

While you’re at it, think about the content you have on other services and have a look for ways of backing it all up, just in case.

#Back up your Flickr photos!

Sunday, 2 January, 2011

A good social media policy is a good idea

Newcastle United, in an apparent break in their usual culture, appear to have done something sensible:

Newcastle United’s players will shortly be given guidelines about their tweeting habits. Alan Pardew was annoyed last Tuesday when José Enrique, his Spanish left-back, informed Twitter followers he would miss the team’s game at Tottenham through injury. As Enrique, happily restored to fitness for tomorrow’s trip to Wigan, is a key player, Pardew had intended keeping his absence quiet until the teamsheets appeared.

OK, so maybe a policy just for Twitter is over the top…

In an ideal world, no organisation should need a policy setting out the dos and don’ts of online interaction. After all, all the compliance stuff ought to be covered in existing policies on bringing the organisation into disrepute, communications, information security and that kind of thing.

But with new and emerging technology, sometimes you just need to spell things out a bit more clearly.

After all, it’s a potentially messy and complicated situation, especially when a member of staff is using a personal channel to communicate with friends and family.

The golden rule for me is that if someone can be in any way connected back to their employer, then they have to start thinking about how what they say might be traced back.

Even better, assume everyone knows and can see everything about you – friends and family but also your boss, and the media too.

But a good social media policy isn’t really about what staff shouldn’t do. It’s role should be to encourage and promote the right behaviour online. Don’t put something online that you wouldn’t say in a meeting, to a journalist or to your mum. If you do, then be aware that you’re taking a risk.

The civil service guidelines are a good starting point here – brief, and positive:

  • Be credible
    Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.
  • Be consistent
    Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.
  • Be responsive
    When you gain insight, share it where appropriate.
  • Be integrated
    Wherever possible, align online participation with other offline communications.
  • Be a civil servant
    Remember that you are an ambassador for your organisation. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency.

I would add Be aware to this list – make it a part of people’s duties to keep an eye on what is being said online and to take the web and online communities seriously.

Don’t clog your policy up with lists of rules about what to do and what not to do on the internet. Instead, encourage staff to be open and transparent, and confident that they are doing the right thing.

#A good social media policy is a good idea

Friday, 31 December, 2010

Themes for 2011

2010 has been an interesting year for the internet. Where will 2011 take us? Here’s a slightly apocalyptic set of thoughts.

Wikileaks, privacy and security

Anybody who has thought for even a moment about the implications of the internet and the web will have known that something like Wikileaks was always going to happen. It was a case of when, not if.

What Wikileaks tells us is that the internet makes information free – as in speech, not necessarily as in beer. When the tools for publishing content to a worldwide audience are free, and the channels for promoting it as fast and efficient as the likes of Twitter and Facebook, it becomes pretty clear that something significant has changed.

As John Naughton wrote recently,

The only rational attitude to online systems is cautious scepticism about their security.

It forces us to question how we define security and privacy online. My take is to assume you have none, and proceed on that basis.

Culture

A further theme, in addition to questions about security, privacy and identity will be culture and the sociological effects of the information revolution.

There are a couple of elements to this. One is the idea of cloud culture, which Charles Leadbeater explored in his pamphlet. The other is along the lines of Nick Carr’s book The Shallows, based on his idea that Google is making us stupid.

I already outsource an awful lot of my memory to the internet. My dad asked me the other day if I was ok with some plans we’d arranged. I didn’t know what he was talking about. “But I emailed you about it the other day!” he exclaimed. Because I had an email, I’d forgotten all the detail within it.

Is this any different to outsourcing arithmetic to pocket calculators? I’m not sure. But when the cloud could disappear at any time, it’s good to have a backup of your online memory somewhere.

Cloud culture will continue to have an increasing role in our lives, whether we notice or not. Books are moving to the cloud, whether we read them on Kindles, phones or tablets. Services like Spotify mean we don’t even bother downloading music tracks any more.

Where next? Particular set in focus next to the cuts, where do libraries and museums fit into all of this? Can they be moved into the cloud? Sure, seeing a painting or a sculpture in real life is a better experience than seeing it on a screen, but is it so much better that people will pay for it? How do we feel about our cultural heritage being managed and curated by Amazon, Google and Apple rather than governments or charities?

It ties in neatly with one of my favourite, if very short, bits of writing about the internet and culture by the late Gordon Burn, in his book Born Yesterday:

…an aggregation of fragments is the only kind of whole we have now.

(This post gives a little more context.) Are we really only collections of shards of personality and culture? Does it matter? Even if it doesn’t, it’s good to be aware of what is happening to us.

Relevance

The cuts brings me onto my third and final theme. What do the cuts and the internet have in common? They question relevance. In a world of instant publishing, limitless availability of content and always-on connectivity, and where budgets will be cut wherever not cutting them cannot be justified, how do you stay relevant?

The circle closes here, because the Wikileaks story is a great example of how the internet reduces the cost of the distribution of information to zero, which has a significant impact on those organisations which depend on information distribution as their raison d’être.

Think of newspapers, television, and record labels. They thought they made news, programmes and music. Actually, they were in the logistics business.

The same is true of a number of roles and functions within public services, who will see a twinned and overlapping attack as a result of both the internet and the cuts. If the internet can do what you do cheaper, why are you needed?

To stay relevant, in 2011 public servants will need to reassess what they do and why they do it. Learning and Development people, for example, might currently spend a proportion of their time training people – but why, when all the information anyone needs is online? Why do we need communications professionals, when, with the tools at our fingertips, we are all communicators now?

The same could be said for an awful lot of roles within councils and other organisations. It’s going to be up to individuals to start defining their relevance over the next few months, to become facilitators and enablers, not merely doers.

Those that successfully figure this one out will come out on top, I think.

#Themes for 2011

Where does social media belong?

Well done Ingrid, whose post has caused a number of interesting discussions to kick off. One is around where social media activity belongs within an organisation. She writes (on her newish personal blog, which you really ought to subscribe to)

2. Social media in local gov become the domain of Comms

A lot of comms people in local government have been resistant to social media, but 2011 marks the end of that. Hurray, you say. Danger! I say. Social media works best where it’s a conversation between real people. Comms teams work under a model of communication that facilitated messages going between monolithic entities – the council and the local newspaper. Or where it was a more disperse model, it’s the council and broadcast only mechanisms like advertising and newsletters to a passive public. This is the year that councils comms catches on to the free to use (but labour intensive) social media scene, but attempts to control the messages even more tightly.

Of course central communications must play a role, but the benefits of social media can only really be achieved when there’s a more federated model of communications. Councillors communicating more easily with their constituents. Local people sharing information among themselves and council officers sharing matters of fact and pointers to more information with local people.

Ingrid is broadly right here, and I don’t mean to be, well, mean to any of the loyal DavePress readers who work within communications teams.

The thing is, the value of social media isn’t just about communicating – it’s also about sharing, collaborating and being open. The danger in putting responsibility for all this activity in one department is that it threatens to make it a silo, something that isn’t the job for anyone else in the organisation.

This is another reason why I think the occasional appointments of ‘social media officers’ is probably misguided.

A handy analogy would be from my work in local government as a risk manager (yes, really). What I found was that an awful lot of people thought my job was to manage their risk. In fact, it was supposed to be about enabling them to manage their own risks, by providing tools and training.

The same I suspect would happen with a social media officer, or where people within a specific department (comms or elsewhere) control social media activity.

It’s vital to have champions of this activity, but try to have several, and for them to belong to different parts of the organisation to ensure no one department is seen to be in control.

There is an awful lot of good that can be done by communications teams with social media, but the opportunities in emerging web technology go far beyond marketing, PR and the like. For an organisation to get the most out of it, a more holistic approach is needed.

#Where does social media belong?

Thursday, 30 December, 2010

Top posts in 2010

As is customary at this time of year, a list of the most popular posts I’ve published here is probably in order.

  1. Oh dear, Andrew Marr…
  2. Adventures in open source land
  3. Why chief executives should blog
  4. Where next for digital engagement?
  5. That was the ukgc10 that was
  6. Social media resources for Local Government
  7. Councillors! Here’s how not to do Twitter
  8. See, local gov *can* do Facebook
  9. Google jokes
  10. Google goes for Twitter

Not a particularly interesting list, if I’m honest. The list is by the number of hits the post got, and I suspect that skews things rather.

What is interesting is that by a mile, Twitter was the biggest source of traffic here over the year, more than six times the referrals than I got from the second largest, Google Reader.

#Top posts in 2010

Parliamentary online petitions

So, online petitions for Parliament?

In an attempt to reduce what is seen as a disconnection between the public and parliament, ministers will ensure that the most popular petition on the government website Direct.gov.uk will be drafted as a bill. It is also planning to guarantee that petitions which reach a fixed level of support – most likely 100,000 signatures – will be guaranteed a Commons debate.

I haven’t read much online that is particularly in favour of this idea. I suspect it’s one that can be filed in the ‘doing the wrong things righter’ cupboard.

Glen Newey on the LRB blog is particularly scathing:

Now the coalition plans to outsource law-making as well. On Tuesday it signalled that it meant to bring in ‘X Factor-style’ online petitioning for new laws. This latest wheeze hails from the same stable of Mutt and Jeff populism as John Major’s cones hotline and Tony Blair’s ‘Big Conversation’. The Gould-era Blair government was hexed by the popularity of Big Brother and saw political dividends in pretending to smile on government by mouse-click. So, after the focus-pocus of the early years, in 2006 Blair launched interactive petitioning on the Number Ten website. Not much happened, apart from a little ministerial consternation when petitioners gave Douglas Alexander’s road-toll scheme a mass thumbs-down. But in general the demos itself seems to doubt whether it needs more chances to vote. John Prescott’s proposal for a North East regional assembly in 2004 drew an impressive 78 per cent ‘No’ vote.

This time, 100,000 online signatures will win a debate on the floor of the House. A new era of democracy beckons: you name it, we’ll go through the motions of considering it. Safeguards will be installed to stop the virtual parthenogenesis that, for example, allowed Christian zealots to inflate their numbers when browbeating the BBC over its screening of Jerry Springer: The Opera. Petitioners won’t be able to clone themselves, impersonate the dead, or give the dog a vote. But this won’t be enough to insulate the process from fruitcakes and jokers in the population at large, let alone in the blogosphere. Adherents of the Jewish religion registered by the 2001 UK census were easily outnumbered by some 390,000 self-confessed Jedis, a figure bloated by online gerrymandering. Hartlepudlians repeatedly elected H’Angus the monkey as mayor after he had committed an act of indecency with a blow-up doll in Blackpool.

Paul Clarke covers some of the issues around identity with his customary élan.

I’ve noticed that a few councils are now starting to go live with their own online petitioning systems, including my local council, South Holland District, with what looks like the MySociety system.

Not sure if any readers have experience of either using or administering such a system, and are keen to share them?

I spent many an unhappy hour moderating petitions on the Number 10 system, which was a generally very depressing experience, with the petitions submitted bearing a very direct correlation with the headline in the dailies Mail or Express that morning.

#Parliamentary online petitions

Whither open government in 2011?

Ingrid has published a set of five rather grim predictions for next year. Go and take a look, and make one of your new year resolutions to stop them from happening.

Here are some thoughts from me on what might happen next year. These certainly aren’t predictions, and are more hopes really.

1. Collaboration grows up

Big changes within organisations, lots of layoffs, knowledge retention becoming a big issue, a growth in partnership working and shared services, greater involvement of the civil sector in service delivery and a focus on making the most of existing talent should all point government organisations towards making better use of social technology as part of operations, through social intranets, collaborative extranets and the like.

It’s certainly something we at Learning Pool are hoping to support people with in the new year. We’re working with the Improvement Service in Scotland, supporting a project to promote agile and flexible working in councils north of the border and will be contributing to a knowledge management seminar in Scotland in February, amongst other events.

I’m also in the process of writing a guide to the use of social technology within the organisation, which I am hoping to have finished in early January!

2. Online communities are taken seriously

I’m increasingly convinced by the arguments put forward by Catherine Howe on her blog about the idea of online civic spaces. There needs to be some structure around online conversations in democracy and public service delivery – albeit not too much.

Where a number of government organisations in an area want to engage with people on a reasonably regular basis, I’d like to see them either getting involved with an existing online communities, or developing one platform for all such interactions to take place. Keep it informal, barriers to entry low, but enable a community to be built up, relationships to be formed and a body of evidence to be developed.

Rather like Let’s Talk Central, the project we worked on this year with Central Bedfordshire Council. I’d love to work on one of these on a local or regional basis, with councils, health, police, fire and rescue and other organisations on board and contributing.

3. Technology and innovation works its way up the food chain

I’m getting more requests to talk about social media and related technology to groups of senior managers and chief executives. It seems like if Ingrid’s fear that this stuff is going to get siloed into communications departments is to be prevented, it is by ensuring interest at the top of the organisation.

Language is a vital thing here. People at the top are going to be less interested in means and far more engaged by the talk of ends. Focus on benefits rather than operational details. It’s easy (but wrong) to label this activity as a frippery that’s inappropriate for these austere times – convince those at the top that it is necessary and hopefully stuff will get done.

4. A much needed focus on public sector employees

There’s much that one can disagree with Andrew DiMaio about, but one thing he has consistently got right is the need for those with an interest in reforming government to focus on the role and needs of the people who work for government, or at least those that will be left after the cuts.

A much maligned group, especially in certain sections of the media, public servants do an incredible job in increasingly difficult circumstances. They aren’t perfect, and it’s fair to say that some are much more able than others, but nonetheless they all require support and credit.

5. A revolution in local democracy

A real one from the left field from me here. This isn’t going to happen next year, or any year soon, but it’s something I have been increasingly thinking about during the last few years. The way our local leaders are selected and operate is broken and I don’t think real change can be effected until a new way of running democracy at this level is found.

It strikes me that the way things are currently done is profoundly exclusionary both in terms of the requirements of the role of councillor and the way that they do business.

Firstly, the workload of a councillor is far too great, and means that the only people with the time to do it justice are those who are retired or who for some other reason do not have to work. In other words, people are getting elected because they have the time to do the job, not because they would be good at doing it.

Another aspect of this is that councillors are expected to have an interest and knowledge across a huge range of different policy areas, which is, I think, somewhat unrealistic.

So, right now we have too few people doing too much. We need more people doing less each. So, more councillors please, who each cover fewer issues, concentrating on the stuff they are good at.

Whilst we’re at it, let’s change the way the whole thing works, with fewer meetings, more online decision making and conferencing. Fine, there are gazillions of points of process and procedure that would need working out, but it strikes me at the moment that local democracy and governance isn’t terribly strong, nor interesting, and it could do with a thorough overhaul.

OK, so this really isn’t going to happen in 2011. But I can dream…

#Whither open government in 2011?

Bookmarks for December 12th through December 30th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

#Bookmarks for December 12th through December 30th

Wednesday, 22 December, 2010

GovCamp 2011 update

So another 50 tickets were released for January’s Govcamp this morning, and they went within twenty minutes. Remarkable.

There is still space, but very limited. If you want to come along, please leave your name on the waiting list. There’s only the one list, so if you email me, all I’ll do is ask you to visit that link!

Don’t panic though, as there is often churn on the list, as with any free event, so you’ll probably be able to get a space.

Steph, my main man on the GovCamp organisation, has written up a post on sponsorship of the event, and how we are hoping to use this lolly to fund all the regional and local govcamps that happen during the rest of the year. Go and check it out, and if you have some marketing spend, please give it to us. Everyone will think you’re really cool if you do.

Steph writes:

The idea behind MoreOpen is frankly somewhat ill-defined, probably because Dave and I are the people behind it. But in our vagueness, we’ve got a plan that by using some of the platforms available including the January event, this online community, and the govcamp chat in social media, we can help commercial organisations large and small to get involved in supporting the community and showing us what they can offer, without turning UKGovcamp into a cheesy, sponsor-packed conference.

In return, we’re aiming to build up some cash that we can use to help self-organised local govcamps or thematic events which aim to promote public sector collaboration, participation or transparency. We’re aiming to be able to offer some seed funds to help these events get off the ground, pay for food, venues and AV stuff, as belts continue to tighten within public sector organisations.

To answer some questions: no, it’s not a for-profit enterprise (at the moment it’s nothing at all legally-speaking, so we’re collecting sponsorship monies for UKGC11 via my limited company). No, we don’t have cash to help you run events yet, but we hope to in the New Year. Yes, it does sound a bit dodge, doesn’t it – hence our plan to recruit a small independent Board of Advisors from the Govcamp community to keep an eye on it, and us. By all means leave a comment or question below and we’ll do our best to answer it.

This slidedeck (PDF warning) explains what is in it for sponsors.

Also, as with last year, Learning Pool will be hosting some drinks on the Friday night before the big day. More soon.

#GovCamp 2011 update

Saturday, 18 December, 2010

When clouds don’t taste so delicious

There appears to be a considerable amount of uncertainty about the future of Delicious, the web’s preeminent social bookmarking service.

Not sure what social bookmarking is? Here’s a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeBmvDpVbWc

It seems a shame that Yahoo! have been unable to find a way to make a service with plenty of active and dedicated users pay for itself. I know I would pay a few quid a month to keep it going.

Either way, the service will be sold on or shut down in the nearish future. Users are looking for alternatives, with the likelihood being that if everyone leaves, who cares what happens? It’s easy enough to export your data from Delicious, and I would recommend you do it right away.

The two options at the moment seem to be Diigo or Pinboard. The former is much more polished than the latter, so it’s a case of choosing what matters to you. There are other options discussed in this post on SearchEngineLand.

Personally, I use Delicious mainly as a publishing tool – to get the links posts published every so often here on DavePress. Most things that I save to read later go into Evernote.

Flickr?

The potentially more worrying issue here is that Yahoo! also own Flickr, the photo sharing site. Bookmarks and links are one thing, but photos entirely another. I’d always advise users of cloud services to back up your stuff locally just in case something goes wrong – it’s good practice anyway.

That’s fine for those of us who have PCs or laptops at home where you can store media locally. But what of the future of low-cost computing – like the ChromeOS netbooks I wrote about the other day, where the machines themselves have virtually no storage and everything is held on the servers of companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and, er, Yahoo!.

This is one of the implications of cloud culture, where increasingly our cultural artefacts – books, music, films, photos, art – are being stored and curated by tech companies rather than traditional publishers, museums, libraries etc. The medium is also changing of course, from physical objects to digital ones.

The book won’t disappear anytime soon, of course, nor will painting on canvas. But the everyday access and storage of this stuff will be moving online, and we all need to have a proper think about how we deal with that.

#When clouds don’t taste so delicious

Tuesday, 14 December, 2010

Guide to Facebook Pages for Government Organisations

My partner in crime at Learning Pool, Breda Doherty, has written an awesome guide to using Facebook pages. She introduces it below – do have a read and then download the guide!

Facebook is now used as an everyday means of communication and information source for most people, well if you agree that over 500Million active users worldwide is a fair summary of most people… The fact that the Social Networking site has continued to grow and develop since its launch in 2004 shows that it’s not likely to join lapsed Social Networking sites in the sky such as Bebo or My-Space who simply haven’t been able to compete with Facebook’s constant innovative ways to keep people talking on their platform. Whilst friends use Facebook’s Personal Profiles; bands, businesses and those with a cause to promote often use Facebook Pages to market themselves to its millions of users.

What is a Facebook Page?

A Facebook Page is a public profile that enables groups like this to share their organisation with Facebook users. It is similar in layout and functionality to a personal Facebook profile but Facebook Pages have been created with the intention that it will be used for brand promotion and discussion between those with something to sell or promote and those Facebook users interested in showing their support of these.

Facebook Users show their support for Facebook Pages through Liking their page and adding the pages they like to their own personal Facebook profile, which in turn will be seen by friends who visit their profiles

The reason all these groups  use Facebook pages is because  it’s free, easy to use and offers the opportunity to connect with large numbers of people. If Facebook didn’t work, people would simply stop using it.

Facebook Pages and Government Organisations

Government Organisations are slowly seeing the benefits offered by Facebook Pages with effective use of this seen in the page maintained by Coventry City Council. However many are still unsure of how it can fit in with their wider communication strategies and are fearful that those staff assigned to maintain their Facebook Pages will take advantage of this and spend the time chatting to friends rather than the community members the organisation is eager to engage with. There is also the same fear which many Government Organisations have about Twitter in that with one status up-date on Facebook or one Tweet on Twitter the organisation will be called into irrefutable dispute!

Facebook: A Quick Guide for People in and Around Government

To try and rely some of the worries mentioned above and which we’ve heard about first-hand through our Learning Community, Learning Pool decided to create Facebook: A Quick Guide for People In and Around Government.  The guide provides a quick overview of how to set-up a Facebook Page, useful things to bear in mind as a Government Organisation when doing so and to highlight some of the legitimate ways in which Facebook, despite being labelled as a Social Networking site can be effectively used as an engagement site between Government Organisations and the public they are finding it increasingly difficult to connect with.

The Facebook Guide complements the Twitter Guide for Government written by Dave earlier this year and also looks at how the two can be used in conjunction. Download our Facebook Guide for free here.

#Guide to Facebook Pages for Government Organisations

Sunday, 12 December, 2010

101 cool tools: Doodle

I haven’t done one of these for a while, sorry! Here’s the third in my series of 101 cool social media tools, it’s Doodle!

Doodle

Doodle is a neat little tool for organising when to meet groups of people. Someone starts up a Doodle poll, and lists the dates and times that are possible. They then invite everyone who needs to attend to vote by clicking on the slots they can make.

doodle-example

Doodle then highlights the date and time that the majority of people can make, and that’s your decision made.

So much easier than pinging emails back and forth with suggestions!

Don’t forget, you can follow these tips in the future on Twitter…

#101 cool tools: Doodle

The network is the computer

Google announced a bunch of stuff last week, finally bringing to the mainstream some bits of tech that have been bubbling away for a few years now.

One is the Chrome operating system, a lightweight OS for netbooks that pretty much hand everything over to the web. So, the OS handles keyboard and mouse inputs and that sort of thing, but basically just boots into a browser and lets you do all your stuff online.

After all, with developments in web technology, who needs software anyway? Google Docs does most of the stuff people who need an office suite use, Picnik is a pretty cool image editor, Gmail is a far better mail client than Outlook is and tools like Huddle and Basecamp provide neat ways of organising your work and collaborating on projects.

Even big, enterprisey software is available through the web now. Salesforce provides a pretty comprehensive CRM offering, Kashflow does the same for accounting, and sites like Netsuite and SAP’s Business by Design provide boring ERP software in the browser.

This is the part of cloud computing known as software-as-a-service. Learning Pool‘s stuff runs on very similar lines: our customers have no software to install, and therefore no patches or upgrades to worry about. Everything can be accessed from anywhere with a browser and a connection to the net.

Anyway, back to Google and Chrome OS. Here’s a video with the skinny:

The idea of the online operating system isn’t new – here’s a review of a previous attempt called YouOS (now sadly dead) that I wrote back in March 2006 – but developments in cloud computing and the almost ubiquitous availability of decent speed broadband (ok, it’s not everywhere yet, especially in rural locations) make it a much more realistic proposition.

What’s interesting about the YouOS example is that it included native applications within the OS itself, rather than just pointing people to existing, external apps. I wrote at the time:

The notion of the online desktop is an interesting one, that conjures the image of computer boxes doing nothing other than handling the keyboard, mouse, display and internet connection; and where you can log in with any machine anywhere in the world and get your own desktop. I suspect, though, that the route that YouOS is taking is the wrong one. What the online OS needs to do is not provide the applications, just the means of accessing the applications, which can be developed by other people on other sites, and the means of storing data to be used and shared between those applications.

It seems like I was probably right about this one (it doesn’t happen often).

Chrome OS won’t be made available for existing netbook owners to download and install – although the fact that it is based on an open source project means that someone else could make it happen. This means that it isn’t possible to have a play with it to see how it works, which is a shame.

One thing that you can have a play with – assuming you have access to Google’s Chrome browser (currently my browser of choice, mainly due to the speed and efficiency of the thing) – is the Chrome Web Store.

A healthy proportion of people are pretty comfortable with the idea of app stores – we’ve used them with our iPhones and iPads, and Android phones and Blackberry users have their own stores – reasonably safe places where applications can be found for the device you are using. Linux users have had an app store like experience for years.

Where these differ with the Chrome store is that Google’s offering is all about web apps, those that work within a browser rather than being native applications that you have to download and install onto your computer, or mobile device.

This is something I struggle with slightly, in terms of understanding what the point is. I mean, when a web app is just an app that runs in a browser, and all you have on your system for accessing apps is a browser, what’s the difference between installing an app and just having a bookmark to it in your browser?!

I guess the answer is around a) making it easy for users to find apps, and providing a space for reviews and that sort of thing; b) enabling a more integrated experience between a web app and the system being used; and c) creating a marketplace where paid-for apps can be, well, paid for.

One neat feature is that by using your Google account, you can sync your Chrome web app setup across machines – so if you log into your account on a different computer, albeit still using Chrome, then your apps come with you, which is cool for portability.

Here’s the video:

The good news about the Chrome store is that folk using the Chrome browser on their usual computer can make use of it. There seems to be a couple of example of Chrome web apps which aren’t available for other browsers – TweetDeck being one.

I’m not quite sure why this is, nor indeed if it is a good thing. There’s the possibility of certain apps only being available to users of certain browsers, which isn’t great.

Still, it’s another step forward for the mainstreaming of cloud computing and software-as-a-service in general.

There’s been quite a bit of talk of a government cloud infastructure as well as an app store for public service use. Indeed, some of these ideas are present in the Knowledge Hub project. The USA government has had an app store for a little while now.

As we pass from the age of the stationary microcomputer and the software industry into a world of commodity computing, understanding the benefits of the approach will be vital – and not just for those working in IT. Indeed, the role of IT departments in organisations will almost certainly need a rethink.

#The network is the computer

Friday, 10 December, 2010

Bookmarks for October 30th through December 10th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

#Bookmarks for October 30th through December 10th

Thursday, 9 December, 2010

#testittuesday – public service use of twitter par excellence

I had a great day yesterday (Wednesday) at the FirePro seminar on social media use in Fire and Rescue Services.

I have a load of notes to type up and share here, but one thing really jumped out at me during the day – the #testittuesday campaign.

Basically, it’s a simple public safety campaign to get people to test their smoke alarms every week, on a Tuesday. The hashtag is used, and folk are encouraged to retweet it to get more coverage.

It was started by Elle from Norfolk Fire and Rescue Service, who gave an entertaining and informative presentation to the group about how it all came about. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a vast amount of planning – it just seemed like a good idea and Elle just got on with it.

Here’s why I think this is a great campaign, and an almost perfect use of Twitter as a public service campaign:

  • It’s completely within the existing culture of Twitter – all about the hashtag and the social nature of the message – it’s all about people passing it on
  • It’s simple – just a quick reminder to people to perform one straightforward action
  • Very low barriers to entry – no need to sign up for anything you aren’t already a member of. If you’re on twitter you see the message, and with one click you forward it on to your friends
  • It’s uncontroversial – nobody is going to take umbrage at being reminded to do something that’s easy to forget, and yet potentially life saving
  • It’s not about the fire service’s own twitter account – this isn’t some bid to get more followers. It’s about getting the message out to as many people as possible
  • It takes advantage of the trust people have in their networks. If a fire service asks me on twitter to check my fire alarm, I might do it – but I’m more likely to if some of my friends do so

I think there’s lots to learn here for all public services wanting to make the most of social media channels. Always consider the medium you are using, and what sort of behaviour works well. Don’t ask too much of people, keep it simple and straightforward. Above all, don’t make it about you or your organisation, but about the message you want to get out.

##testittuesday – public service use of twitter par excellence