An online notebook
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An online notebook
Bookings are flying in for ReadWriteGov, the social media shindig I am organising along with Fran Paterson, which will be held at Peterborough City Council on 29th October.
Responding to a bit of feedback I have received, I have added an option to pay the (miniscule) cost of the tickets by requesting an invoice, which should make it easier for some folk to come along. So now nobody has an excuse!
Stuff I have bookmarked for September 16th:
10 Social Media Steps is a guide to how people with very little experience get get engaged with social web tools. Taking in a whole range of different services, from social networks to photos sharing to social bookmarking and blogging, I’ll be introducing each tool in an easy-to-understand way, using as many different types of media as possible. It’ll be fun!
The steps will be as follows:
If you want to follow the 10 steps, or (even better) pass them on to people who might get the most benefit, then just point your browser towards here, which will present all the posts.
So, I think that is probably that for this introductory post. You could always amuse yourself watching this video from Common Craft explaining what social media is all about:
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Teacamps are the bi-weekly get togethers of people interested in government and the web, which emerged from January’s Barcamp.
I don’t get along nearly as often as I would like – something that will hopefully change now I have a bit more control over my time – but I will be heading down to the House of Fraser cafe on Victoria Street this Thursday. Hope to see plenty of folk there!
Next Saturday (September 20th) is Software Freedom Day:
Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere!
There are various get togethers happening around the world to celebrate – here are all the UK ones. If you’d like to know more about free software, this video from Stephen Fry is a pretty nice start:
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Other things you might like to do include tracking down your local Linux User Group – who can help and advise you on any issues you are having – and actually installing some open source software on your computer. Here’s some quick suggestions:
How else could you support or celebrate software freedom day?
Stuff I have bookmarked for September 13th:
Another local online community, using Ning. Spotted by Steve Dale.
Recently it was announced over at WordPress.com that a new feature had arrived – the ability to have ‘sticky’ posts on your blog homepage.
Regular updates are what blogging’s all about, but sometimes you want to keep hot topics or other static info at the top of your posts. This feature has existed as Sticky Topics in the forums, but hasn’t been available on blogs. Until now.
These are posts that exist outside the normal chronology of your blogging, and stay at the top no matter what.
There are a number of uses this feature could be put to – from introducing your blog to new readers, to highlighting important information to your readers.
However, people who manage their own WordPress installs needn’t be dismayed as there is a plugin which provides this functionality to self hosted blogs, which you can find here, courtesy of Lester Chan.
Stuff I have bookmarked for September 12th:
One of the features of a blog is that the posts appear in reverse-chronological order – that is to say, with the latest content first. But there are times when that might not always be appropriate. Let me give you an example.
I’m planning a series of blog posts on a certain topic. Current subscribers and regular readers will spot them as they come in, but what about comers to the party? One way of grouping all the posts would of course be to stick them all in the same category. But all the posts will be displayed in traditional reverse-chronological order, meaning folk have to work their way from the end to the beginning, or dig around for the first post in the set.
There is a way around this though, which can be achieved by fiddling around with the URLs you use. Let’s take the posts on DavePress within the blogging category as an example. The traditional view of the posts can be found at http://davepress.net/category/blogging/ which has the latest at the top. Compare that with the results of http://davepress.net/category/blogging/?order=asc (note the ?order=asc at the end). This view of the posts put them in chronological order, starting at the beginning.
You can apply this to any view of your posts, including the home page, and tag and author views. There are other options too, including sorting posts or pages alphabetically. If you really wanted to, you could also incorporate it into your theme, making such presentation an integrated part of your blog.
I’ll be using it to help promote the blog series I’m planning. By circulating the URL including the extra bit to reverse the post order, people will be able to find themselves at the beginning and work their way through without excessive scrolling just to get started.
Am sure there are other uses this could be put to – any thoughts?
Stuff I have bookmarked for September 10th through September 11th:
Nice post from Steve Rubel, comparing the approach taken by two hugely innovative companies to engaging with their customers:
Google isn’t exactly known as the most transparent company in the world, but they’re light years ahead of Apple – a company that in some ways they share a kinship with when it comes to their reputation for innovation. Apple (or for that matter any big company) can learn a lot about radical transparency, customer service and PR from Google, even though they’re hardly perfect here.
The post is worth reading in full as Rubel analyses some of the good stuff that Google does (open about improvements to their products and lots of blogs) – and compares it to the lack of such activity by Apple.
I dare say that many public sector organisations are behind even Apple in this regard. Would you even want to be as open as Google about this sort of stuff? My view would be yes, but I would imagine that the idea would scare a lot of folk to death!
LGSearch is something of an anomaly in my ‘portfolio’ of stuff I’ve made in that is actually works and is useful. I built it a couple of years ago while working as Risk Management Officer at a County Council. Essentially, I found it a pain in the neck to find relevant material online using traditional search engines, so I put my own together.
It’s based on Google’s Customised Search service, which requires you to provide a list of sites you want the search to be limited to. What I did originally was find an online list of all local authority sites and plug that in. This way, searching for a term generated results only from local government.
Later I developed things a bit further, adding in a variety of other public sector sites, such as those in central government, police, fire and health authorities and some of the organisations in and around government. Google helps here too: by categorising sites under the headings mentioned, users can then drill down into results by clicking a link to produce results from just, say, central government. Nice one.
The site has been pretty popular, with usage increasing as word gets around. Some councils have even embedded it in their own sites. There is a Google Group set up to manage requests for change, etc, which if you visit it, will show how terrible I am at keeping on top of it. Now I have some more time for this stuff, that will improve. There is also the list of sites searched, which could well be out of date. If you need changes made, email the list or just me.
Anyway, after all that introduction, I have today made a significant change to the site, long overdue, which has included various bits of social media to the search, including a load of blogs. These have all been added under the category of ‘social media’ so if you just want to search these sites, you can. The blogs added are (just pasting URLs as I am lazy):
Any heinous ommissions, let me know.
Stuff I have bookmarked for September 8th:
Am very late in writing about this, but am only just getting round to reading the third report produced by the Digital Dialogues project. This bit, from the Guidance and Recommendations section, is very nicely put:
From our research we have identified four conditions that lead to a higher probability of success with online engagement:
- Engagement is embedded within the processes and culture of the organisation, it does not just happen as an afterthought or on the periphery.
- The choice of engagement tool is driven by the need, not by the technology.
- Engagement works when organisations are prepared to listen – risk aversion and a fear of exposing the organisation to the outside are the biggest inhibitors of good listening and, therefore, of successful online engagement.
- Reflexivity is vital to success and organisations that are adaptable – able to listen, reflect, learn, respond and change – prove better at engagement.
Stuff I have bookmarked for September 7th:
I’ve always been a little uncertain of Ning, the service that allows you to create your own social networks. I’m not sure why: possibly a comination of them looking rather samey (certainly in the early days), and being – to me – a little unintuitive to use. Plus there’s always been the fact that you share a service with a bunch of porn barons.
However, recent uses of the platform have made me rethink my position. Firstly, there is Tim Davies‘ UKYouthOnline network, started as a way of communicating with people attending the upcoming unconference, but now developing into something rather bigger than that. Tim’s customisation of his network turned it into a really nice looking site, and while I still have reservations about having blogs and a forum on one site, it doesn’t look too busy.
Next up, a Sunday tweet from Steph alerted me to a Ning network that had been created for his local area, Beckenham. Originally put together to discuss issues around parking in the area, people are using blogs to raise and chat about other topics, too. I had never really thought about Ning for local networks, to be honest, always thinking that a reporting style blog, and use of common tags, would be the best way to go about things. But with Ning, you can allow people to upload stuff directly, or aggregate it from other places, whether through built in services or just by hooking up to the RSS feed.
For a local residents’ network, then, Ning is pretty good. One issue is that I haven’t tested it out on legacy browsers, like ancient version of Internet Explorer which could still be residing on people’s computers. It’s certainly made be reconsider some of the stuff in my plan for building local online communities though.
A couple of pieces of advice though, if you are planning to use Ning:
One issue I still have with Ning though: when am I logged in and not logged in? If I log in at ning.com, I still have to re-enter my credentials to get into individual networks. And sometimes I have to enter a master key, and sometimes not. It’s confusing!
Shane has posted at CivicSurf the two parts of the online video version of the CivicSurf video, which I have included below, too. Why not email and ask for some actual DVDs you could show to your local councillors?
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Stuff I have bookmarked for September 4th:
A short while ago, I wrote a little piece about a possible idea to enter into the Building Democracy competition, which was to create a social ‘directory’ of online community groups. I put directory in inverted comments because that isn’t really what it is, but I could think of a better word. Anyway, I’ve come up with a working title for the project: Communicosm – it’s like a microcosm of communities. Or something. I dunno.
Anyway, for the Building Democracy site, I need to answer some questions about the project. Here’s my draft responses, which will hopefully give more detail on how this thing might just work. Once again, all feedback gratefully received! I need to get this up on the site next week really, so chop chop people.
What is your idea’s name?
Communicosm.
A short description of your idea (in twenty words or less)
A socially generated directory of online communities, tagged by areas of interest, that organisations can use to find people to talk to. (This is 22 words. Dammit.)
Describe your idea. What will you do?
Create a wiki based site which will contain details of online communities, which organisations such as central and local government can use to find the people they need to get in touch with for consultations, etc. Each community will have a page describing it and its interests, with tags describing it with keywords, which can then be used by organisations to find the right communities quickly whether through a search engine or a tag cloud. Time will be spent at the beginning researching and finding communities and adding them to the site so that when it launches, it is full of content for people to get their teeth into. After this initial burst of activity, it will be a community generated job. Further additions to functionality might be for people to make lists of communities that they have found on the site, which can be emailed to them or shared on the site.
What will the benefits be?
The site will save time for those searching for groups to contact and engage with. Searching online for communities is a time consuming business, not least because some human research element is required to judge activity levels and how relevant the community is to a project.
Who will you target?
Online community groups will be targetted and encouraged to add themselves to the site. Non-online community group could also be added, though if they have no online presence this could be tricky. It will also be publicised amongst government and other organisations to encourage use.
Is your idea linked to a particular town or region? If so, where?
No, it’s a national thing. A local version already kind of exists with GroupsNearYou.
What kind of assistance would you like from others?
Help in identifying, adding and tagging communities on the site once up and running. Encouragement of organisations to make use of the site’s content.