Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Here’s something new for you, dear readers

As always, I am trying to be helpful.

No, really! I am.

So, here’s a new thing. Every so often I will answer some questions put to me by visitors to this blog.

All you have to do is ask a question, about a topic big or small, in the comments below.

Then, once I have come up with an answer, I’ll record a video or something and publish it here on the blog.

It could be about anything to do with online innovation, so could be external digital engagement, or internal online collaboration. Something small like what sort of content to use to engage people on Twitter, or something big, like the best way to implement a strategic approach to social media in an organisation.

So, go ahead! Ask a question in the comments, and then I’ll pick one to answer in a few days.

Public service messages with a smile

I’ve been a bit serious lately on the blog. Sorry. Here’s a bit of whimsy to lighten the mood.

Worcestershire County Council have produced this video to inform the public about what they are doing about pot holes. As you’ll notice, they haven’t gone for the usual talking head interview approach.

I rather like it – and I do think that to make the most of the internet as a marketing channel, more humorous stuff like this is needed.

Here’s another great example, this time from Lincolnshire County Council, using the fairly new short video service from Twitter, called Vine. Click it to watch if it doesn’t play for you.

Open or closed – does anything online ever last?

It’s only now, a couple of weeks after the announcement, that I feel I can talk about the demise of Google Reader. Up til now, the whole thing has just been too upsetting. Reader is the site I turn to first in the day, before email or Twitter, and the one I check last as well.

I have about 600 odd feeds pouring into my Reader account which I skim through everyday – some I read in their entirety every time, others I’m happy to just dip into now and again as the fancy takes me. It’s ok – RSS isn’t email, you don’t have to read it all.

Reader is also an important part of my publishing workflow. A lot of people find the links I tweet and the regular posts of links on this blog to be helpful. That’s all driven by Reader and by the stupidly simple act of clicking once to ‘star’ a post. Then, thanks to IFTTT, they get sent to my blog and to Twitter, like magic.

Reader was an app that used RSS feeds, an open standard – excellent! It’s because of this that we can move our subscriptions to one or more of the many possible replacement services that exist or are springing up.

What’s more, Reader was also an API that other apps could hook into. The most used purpose for this was to synchronise the read status of feeds between apps – for example between a desktop and a mobile interface.

For instance, on my laptop I use the Reader web app, but on my phone I use Reeder which always picks up where I left off thanks to Google’s API.

The trouble comes because people came to rely on Google’s Reader API to deliver a service, and development around similar services just stopped. So when Google decided to take their ball home, it meant nobody could play with it any more.

Still, the fact that RSS and OPML are open standards means we have other software options to move our feed lists to, and while they may no longer rely on Google’s vast infastructure and databases, they ought to work well enough to meet most of our needs.

But the point is worth making again – we can only do this because the open standards existed and we all use them – deliberately or not.

The second point is that even when a piece of software like Reader operates using these standards, if people come to rely on them, then control is surrendered in exchange for convenience. That’s fine, as long as we know this is happening and can take steps to regain control when it’s needed.

So, I’m not saying that we should all stop using other people’s services, that we should abandon convenience in favour of control. Just that we should have back ups in place – of our content, sure, but also backup plans so that our activity can carry on even when our favourite tools disappear, as they surely all will do.

We held the latest UKGovCamp at IBM, a venerable old technology company. Will Facebook last as long as IBM? Will Google? Will Amazon?

Best be prepared by assuming probably not.

The dream is fading fast

John Naughton:

Because we’ve all bought into the techno-utopianism of the early Internet, we tend to assume that it’s always going to be open to everyone. But as more and more of the world goes online, it’s clear that we’re heading in a very different direction — towards an online world dominated by huge, primarily foreign-owned, corporations which are creating walled gardens in which internet users will be corralled and treated like captive consumers, much as travellers are in UK airports now. The dream that the Internet would make everything available to everyone on equal terms is fading fast.

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Let’s do the LocalGovCamp again

Photo by Mark Braggins.
Photo by Mark Braggins.

It’s probably about time we sorted LocalGovCamp out again!

For various reasons it’s going to be running after the summer rather than before, as has previously been the case.

So, the two potential dates are 21st or 28th September. Let me know if you feel strongly one way or another in the comments.

Location will be Birmingham as usual, although I am on the lookout for another (cheaper) venue than Maple House, which rather busted the budget last year and made the vein on the side of my forehead swell to an unpleasant degree.

It will be an interesting time to run the event, as cuts bite deeper into local authority budgets. I’m hoping there will be some discussion about how digital can help councils deliver better services for less, and also how we can tackle some of the digital inclusion issues that will emerge around welfare reform.

As always, I’ll be on the lookout for sponsors once I have an idea around costs – the usual benefactors will get an email soon, but if anyone new wants to chip in, just let me know. An Eventbrite page will be up once the details are all confirmed.

Fragments

Donald Barthelme, in See the Moon?, in 1968:

Fragments are the only forms I trust.

Italo Calvino, in If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveller, in 1979:

…the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

Gordon Burn, in Born Yesterday from 2008, writing about the erstwhile Eastenders actress Susan Tully:

A colleague had logged her onto YouTube for the first time that very afternoon, and the fact that just tapping the words ‘Michelle Fowler’ into the thing could back so many moment of the past crowding back – a pandemonium of fragments (an aggregation of fragments is the only kind of whole we have now)…

Jaron Lanier, in You are not a Gadget in 2010:

Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sty or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.