Monday, 18 August, 2008

Google gives an insight into search

One of the key things for any website is findability – in other words, it’s great having a site packed full of useful content, but it’s pointless if no one knows where it is. So, it’s about having good navigation on your site, but also being search engine friendly. Many people’s first port of call will be a search engine, and more often than not, that search engine will be Google. If you want people to visit your site, then, it’s a good idea to know how your site fairs in searches, and to find out how you can improve its performance.

This stuff can be called SEO, of course, although findability is a nicer, if clunkier term, that doesn’t make you think of black hats and registering thousands of Blogger blogs. There are some notes I took at an interesting talk at WordCampUK on the issue of SEO/findability here – essentially the message is “if you write it (well), they will come”.

To help monitor how well your site does in search engines, there are a number of tools to use, including traditional webstats services such as the remarkably free Google Analytics, amongst many others. Google has just released another, though, which looks like it could be really interesting to use, especially on high-profile, high-traffic sites.

Google Insights for Search is a tool to allow you to track and analyse the use of search terms in Google, allowing you to filter by location, date ranges or categories. So, you can whack in the name of your organisation, and track how many times it has been searched on over a number of years, comparing each year. This is useful because you can identify seasonal spikes – and the reverse – so you can anticipate demand, for example.

You can also compare the performance of two keywords alongside each other, again allowing you to track the two and see which are most popular in the searches people are performing. This is a better bet than using traditional metrics, which tend to show what search engne terms people use to find your website – it’s useful to know what related terms people use to find other website, to see if you can include content to pick up some of that traffic.

As I said earlier, this tool really is best used on sites with lots of traffic, as smaller site searches (like “DavePress” as a keyword) don’t register at all! I can certainly see value here for local authorities and government departments though, to see what people search for within their area of interest.

It will be interesting to see how people put this service to use, and how much value is does add in the end. Anyone tried it yet to track their organisations results?

#Google gives an insight into search

My Top Twitter Tip

Twitter is great, it really is. Even with the downtime, the dropping of SMS updates in the UK and other places, and all the other little irritations with the service, it still manages to inspire a considerable loyalty among those that use it.

As I have written elsewhere, it’s the fact that Twitter works as a service which makes it so cool. Rather than try to please everyone, all the time, through the use of its API Twitter has outsourced a lot of the user interaction stuff to other people, whether Twhirl, Tweetdeck, Twitterific, Hahlo or many others. Twitter is therefore the wholesaler of the service, rather than necessarily the retailer.

One of my favourite services built upon Twitter was the search engine Summize, which was so good that Twitter bought it. Now found at search.twitter.com, the service will tell you exactly what is being said about a particular keyword or phrase. I found it really useful recently at WordCampUK, using it to track what people were saying on Twitter in a much more effective way that with, say, Hashtags.

Anyway, after all that preamble, here’s my top Twitter tip, which uses Twitter search. Simply run a search on @yourusername, and then subscribe to the RSS feed. You’ll never miss a reply again!

I hope people find this useful – it would be good to hear other people’s Twitter tips!

#My Top Twitter Tip

Sunday, 17 August, 2008

Blog Action Day 2008

Blog Action Day is happening on October 15th this year, with a theme of ‘Poverty’. What’s Blog Action Day?

Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.

Here’s a video with some more info:

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So now you know. Like Tom Watson, I’m thinking what I can plan to blog on that day…

#Blog Action Day 2008

Friday, 15 August, 2008

Thursday, 14 August, 2008

Creating an email newsletter

Partly to be helpful, and partly to do a bit of profile-raising, I have been thinking of putting together a regular (weekly or fortnightly) email newsletter, full of social web news, views and other tidbits. It might go some way to filling the need for the govweb group blog I mooted earlier, though I should imagine it would be written in sufficiently broad terms to make it applicable to non government folk too. I think there are a number of valuable things about email lists like this, as opposed to a site:

  • People use their email all day everyday, pretty much, so if they register, they will always see the emails in their inboxes
  • If I stick to plain text, I don’t need to worry too much about accessibility and whether things render well in Internet Explorer 4
  • People see email as work, the web as play

My newsletter will feature a few regular sections:

  • A feature on a recent cool bit of webbery from a public or third sector organisation
  • A roundup on news and development in the social web space
  • An introduction to a social web site or service
  • A multi-part how-to guide (eg setting up a blog, or a wiki)

There are a number of ways of setting something like this up, and I have been playing around with some of them. Here’s what I have found.

1. Do It Yourself

It would be the most simple option to gather in email addresses via a HTML form on a page on this blog, store them in a text file, then write the emails in my mail client, and paste in the email addresses to the BCC field and hit send. Unsubcribes would have to be done manually, and any analysis of subscriber numbers, etc, would have to be done in a spreadsheet or something. Also, there may be issues with the emails getting past spam filters, etc, as I use gmail to power my emails. I would also have to make sure I don’t use any funky formatting in my emails so that they can be read easily in different mail clients. So, this option is easy to get up and running, but difficult to manage and maintain, and there may be access problems. It’s cost free, though.

2. Use Mailman

Mailman is a remarkably configurable mailing list manager, and (like all the best things in life) is open source. I could set up a one-way mailing list, allow people to sign up to it as they pleased, and likewise unsubscribe. One of the problems with Mailman, though, is the interface which is used to manage the service and through which users can change their settings, which can seem a little unfriendlyto the uninitiated. To set it all up as a one way service would mean quite a bit of messing about to remove certain options from view, etc. So, whie this option might make some things easier, it will add complications elsewhere. Again, though, this would be free for me to use.

3. Use a dedicated service

The third option would be to use a service to manage my list of subscribers and to handle the sending of the emails themselves. They provide statistics, too, so I can track which newsletters are more popular, etc. These services also provide the ability to send HTML or rich text emails, making them easier on the eye and easier for most people to navigate. Given my target audience, though, I am tempted to stick to plain text – ugly but pretty much guaranteed to work! Some of the services I have looked at include MailBuild (suggested by Steph), AWeber (recommended by Chris Garrett) and Blue Sky Factory (used by Chris Brogan). All look pretty good. The obvious disadvantage is that they will cost me money, but they all need quite a bit of time dedicated to them to get set up properly.

So there we are. I think I am going to go for one of the dedicated services, but not sure which just yet. Of course the real challenge will be to produce regular, quality content that people will want to read, but by wittering on about which tools I am going to use I can put that one off for a day or too!

If anyone has any feedback on the ideas I have set out here, please leave them in the comments. And if you would like to be a recipient of the inaugral newsletter, say so in the comments or drop an email to newsletter@davepress.net and I will add you to the list. Ta!

#Creating an email newsletter

My UKYouthOnline session?

Tim is inviting people to put forward ideas for sessions at the upcoming UKYouthOnline conference on the event’s social network.

I have put forward mine: a social web surgery:

My idea for a session at the unconference is to run a surgery on how youth web projects might work. If people have ideas but aren’t quite sure how they could be put online then I can help out.

This could be an all day session, taking place wherever there is space, or maybe as a more formal designated slot on the programme.

I’m hoping that people are going to be walking around, buzzing with ideas for new ways of using the social web to engage young people. I’ll be on hand to do some digital enabling and help them decide which will be the best tools to use, and how they might go about getting things up and running.

I have already has some positive feedback on the idea. Any more thoughts or suggestions? Leave them in the comments below or on the thread at UKYouthOnline.

#My UKYouthOnline session?

Wednesday, 13 August, 2008

Yahoo! Launch Fire Eagle

Yahoo! have launched Fire Eagle, a ‘geo-location platform’. Covering the launch, TechCrunch says:

Fire Eagle allows users to syndicate their positional data to any partner service after updating from a supported device or website. This means that after sending a Pownce message with a geo-tagged photo, I could have Fire Eagle automatically update my current location on my blog and social network profile. Users can opt to disable updates whenever they’d like, and for the especially paranoid, you can even lie about your location.

Sounds interesting, though for me there really are questions around whether I actually want everyone to know where I am all the time. Not that I have anything to hide, of course!

#Yahoo! Launch Fire Eagle

Building democracy with a bug tracker

Tim Davies is a busy boy right now. As well as organising the upcoming UKYouthOnline unconference, he is also flinging his ideas into Building Democracy, the new competition to fund exciting ideas to revitalise people’ interest in participating in UK democracy.

Tim’s idea is for keeping ‘Engagement on Track‘:

Drawing on ideas from bug tracking software and open source software projects this project would look to work with a local authority or public institution to help track the progress of ideas and input from the public through the policy process.

Input from consultations and direct from the public would be logged on the system, with every time ideas are discussed, aggregated, discarded or turned into policy proposals and actions logged – so that the people who provided the input in the first place can come back at any time (or get e-mail updates) to let them know how their input has fed into policy making and change making at the local level.

Great idea! As Tim says, bug tracking works just fine on open source software development projects, so why not with local service related issues?

One point I would make is that just using a current open source bug tracker won’t be much use without a lot of work being done on usability, as they can be really complicated things!

#Building democracy with a bug tracker

Posting links

Since delicious upgraded itself, the automatic posting of stuff I have bookmarked has stragely stopped on DavePress. Not at all sure why.

Anyway, to improve things, I have installed the Postalicious plugin for WordPress, which will handle all this for me, on the recommendation of the social media John Virgo, Jon Bounds. There are quite a lot of options and configuration to be done, so I might have to tweak it a bit over the next few days, but hopefully normal service will now be resumed.

#Posting links

What do people want to know?

I am planning a series of posts on this blog that will go right back to basics on a number of social web topics, partially just to be helpful but also to help develop the documentation for some workshops I am planning.

What I would like to know is what sort of topics people would like covered in terms of social media tools and services. Which services could be of most use in your organisation, but are really hard to explain?

Some ideas I had were for simple stuff like RSS, tagging and social bookmarking.

What would you like to see me write about here?

#What do people want to know?

I’ve Gotta Knol

Knol is a reasonably new service from Google, which has been described as their attempt to kill, or at elast steal some traffic from, Wikipedia. It’s basically a way for people to publish information about what they know in the form of ‘knols’ – Google’s term for a single unit of knowledge. These are tied to your Google account, so you are pretty much responsible for your own content on there and which kind of answers the problem of Wikipedia, where you might have no idea who has produced the content. I’m thinking that it is kind of a mixture of Wikipedia and Squidoo.

I’ve been having a bit of a go myself, adding knols on collaborating with wikis and getting started blogging – effectively just copy and paste jobs from some of the bigger posts on this blog. A few thoughts on my experiences doing this:

  • The URLs for the knols themselves aren’t very friendly, which is a shame
  • The editor is reasonably friendly to use but the Knol site seems to have a problem remembering whether or not I am signed in, which can be a pain
  • I don’t think you can embed flash stuff like video or presentations, which is a pain
  • Some kind soul has given the wiki knol a five star rating! But who? It would be nice to know
  • There has been quite a bit of discussion about where knol entries will appear in Google searches – so far neither of my entries are appearing anywhere near the first page of results, but I am going to monitor this
  • It would be nice for groups of authors to be able to form, and to group entries together as well, making it easy to find entries by authors that know each other, and for knol-writing projects to be kept together

I have set both my knols – and any future ones I write – to be editable by anyone with a Google account, so if you fancy having a go at improving them, or just having a play with Knol, go ahead. I think I am going to continue to cross-post relevant things to there. Whether I will ever go searching on Knol to find something out for myself, I’m not so sure.

#I’ve Gotta Knol

Sunday, 10 August, 2008

Scripting Enabled

Scripting Enabled looks like a really worthwhile couple of days out, if you can make it:

Scripting Enabled is a two day conference and workshop aimed at making the web a more accessible place. We are planning to achieve this by making those in the know about accessibility barriers meet hackers that know how to retrieve information from APIs and display them as alternative interfaces. Together these groups can make any system out there more inviting, accessible and available to people that are currently blocked out.

It’s taking place on the 19th and 20th September. Day one is finding out about accessibility issues, day two is a hack day to fix them. Book your place here, and sign up for the discussion group here (it runs on Yahoo! – old skool!).

#Scripting Enabled

Friday, 8 August, 2008

FriendFeed fun

I have been playing with FriendFeed today. It’s an interesting service that I first wrote about back in February, but haven’t paid a massive amount of attention to since. For those not in the know, FriendFeed is a service that performs three main functions:

  1. It allows you to aggregate the content you put online using different services into one place, such as your blog posts, flickr photos, YouTube videos, delicious bookmarks, Google Reader shared items, etc etc
  2. It allows you to subscribe to your contacts’ friendfeeds too, and presents all of their items, along with yours into a single timeline, so you can follow what people are up to
  3. It allows you to comment on items in people’s feeds, as well as marking whether you like them or not. So it becomes another place where conversations might happen, though with Twitter Friendfeed will add your comments to that service too.

This last point is one which would bother me a little, I guess, because I would prefer it that comments about what I do (mainly on this blog) all appear in one place. Perhaps I am already being overtaken by how distributed conversations can now become, who knows. But at the moment, other than a few very high profile folk, not that many people appear to be spending a lot of time in FriendFeed.

I’m starting to see some of the value, especially now I have reduced the number of people I follow. This is not like twitter, with short messages, people can have loads of different things reported into their FriendFeed and the noise can be deafening. Better to keep FriendFeed as the place you track your most preferred sources of stuff, I reckon. If you would like to follow me, I am at http://friendfeed.com/davebriggs.

One other bit of functionality of FriendFeed, though, is rooms. These are separate pages on the site which allow groups of people to recommend content to each other, whether in the form of short messages or posted links, photos, videos, blog posts etc etc. It seems like a cool, easy way of sharing and discussing online resources. I have started a room for government webby stuff at http://friendfeed.com/rooms/govweb – do join in and let’s see how useful it actually is!

#FriendFeed fun

Wednesday, 6 August, 2008

Digital Enabler

Since announcing that I am venturing into the world of self-employment, quite a few people have asked me the perfectly reasonable question of what it is that I am actually going to do. After much umming and ahing, I think I might be getting close to actually defining what it is that I can bring to a party.

It’s funny, that because this space is so new, and developing all the time, people are identifying new roles and niches all the time: we have buzz directors, social reporters, digital generalists… and plenty more besides, I am sure.

I’m plumping for ‘Digital Enabler’. The role as I see it is helping people figure out what it is that they want to do with the web, then equipping them with the skills and the tools they need to make a success of it.

Here’s an example: a policy team are planning a new project, and would like to get some public involvement in an innovative way. Rather than just jumping in at the deep end and starting a blog, or creating a Facebook page, they get Dave in to help. I guide them through what they want to do, using fun stuff like the social media game, so that the right platforms can be identified, as well as what resources might be required to do it. I then help set up any systems, whether blogs or wikis or whatever, and coach the people who will be using them on how it works, and what the best ways to interact with people are.

So it’s about making sure the right tools are picked for the right tasks, and that everyone knows what they are doing.

I’d be interested to know how useful people think this is as a role to be played, and whether ‘digital enabler’ is the best description of it!

#Digital Enabler

UKYouthOnline date and location confirmed

Tim Davies has confirmed when and where the UKYouthOnline unconference will be taking place: 27th September at the HQ of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, on Victoria Street in London.

The event promises to be a fabuolous opportunity for people to get together to talk about youth engagement and participation, especially following the good reception Tim got at 2gether08. Am hoping there is some way I can contribute on the day!

Do join the event social network and the discussion group and get involved.

#UKYouthOnline date and location confirmed

Tuesday, 5 August, 2008

Yay! Another Govblogger!

A big welcome to the blogosphere to Neil Williams, all round good government web egg, who has started a blog called Mission Creep. He says in his opening post:

It genuinely feels like exciting, important things are starting to happen in government’s use of web right now. It just got really interesting, and I’m going all in.

Neil has done a stack of cool stuff, like getting David Miliband started with his blog, for example, so I really do recommend folk subscribe to him and listen to what he has to say.

He’s on Twitter, too, by the way…

#Yay! Another Govblogger!

Monday, 4 August, 2008

ColaLife.org

Simon Berry’s ColaLife campaign is a truly wonderful thing, a real example of using the groundswell to develop an idea into a campaign and then, hopefully, into action.

I was always at a bit of a loss, wanting to help out more than just joining the Facebook group, but not knowing really what I could do. Other than build websites, of course…

So that’s what I did. ColaLife now has an external web presence, so people can find out about it without being a Facebooker. I made the site deliberately simple to navigate, hiding the blog bit away and relying on images to help get the message across. Another great example of WordPress as CMS…

We’ve imported all the posts from Simon’s personal blog onto the site, so it can become the central repository for all things ColaLife. In the meantime, do register your support by joining the FB group and the Google email group.

#ColaLife.org