aggregation – Dave Briggs

Blogging – writing and reading

January 5, 2014

Inspired, as I often am, by Lloyd and his various experiments in reusing media, finding new ways to use old stuff, and continuing to prod at blogging as a medium.

Thanks to him, I’m drawn back to Tumblr. It strikes me that the follow and post model that Tumblr embodies harks back to the original blogging tools like Radio Userland that combine reading and posting, and facilitates the easy (b)logging of other people’s content.

It is a closed system of course, which is a bit of a bad thing, but tools like IFTTT can be used to ensure a local backup of content is stored somewhere. But it feels better than – say – Facebook, which really is another follow and post type system. As is Twitter, of course, albeit with greater limitations.

WordPress – at least in its .com incarnation – seems to be following Tumblr by enabling users to follow blogs within a dashboard. But with these platforms, you can only (I think) follow blogs within that platform. It would be nice to be able to pull content in from elsewhere too.

The separation between a reading application and a writing application – which happened when? 2003? – was an error, as it enabled platform players to provide that holistic experience, and there doesn’t seem to be an open equivalent, unless anyone else knows of one.

Introducing Kind of Digital Exchange

August 7, 2012

It’s not the most exciting bit of technology in the world, but it could be very useful.

I read an awful lot of stuff on the web – thanks to Google Reader, it’s made really easy. Lots of people don’t have the time to do so, and are quite grateful to have useful items pointed out to them. I usually do this by putting links up on my Twitter profile, and the occasional link round up post here on the blog.

The trouble is that Twitter is a very ephemeral medium, and if people miss links, or don’t record them anywhere, then finding them again can be very tough. I’m also slightly uncomfortable that someone else has a hold of all this data! What’s needed is a way to record these things for posterity, and perhaps create a conversation around them.

So, in about an hour of fiddling, I made the Kind of Digital Exchange. It simply publishes links to stories I find interesting, with tags to enable easier searching, and the ability for people to leave comments.

As well as the main site, you can grab the RSS feed, get the results by email or follow the firehose on Twitter.

It’s very basic – just a bog standard WordPress instance and the free, open source, P2 theme. The interesting bit takes place away from the site, where I have set up the wonderful IFTTT to pump items I star in Google Reader into Exchange as posts within WordPress. This means that for me to share something via the site, I just click a single button.

It doesn’t have to be just me though. I’d be delighted if others could contribute. Using IFTTT as the spine, it’s easy to pull content in from other sites, whether Google Reader as I do, or maybe through Delicious bookmarks.

So, if you’re keen to start contributing links to the site, let me know and we can get it sorted. Of course, you can start commenting on links right away!

Will this become the digital engagement equivalent of something like the awesome Hacker News? Probably not. But it didn’t take long to put together, and if people find it useful, then that’s alright with me. Of course, if lots of people find it useful, I’ll throw some resources at it to give it a makeover and start to add some functionality. Stuff like:

user liking or upvoting of the best content
user tagging of articles
ability to reshare links on other networks

…and I am sure there’s a lot more too. There’s a page to share ideas.

So do please go and have a look, and maybe get involved. I was asked the other day where people in government can go to find examples of innovation and creative ideas. Other than say ‘look on Twitter’ it was hard to muster a proper response. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to say – ‘look on the Kind of Digital Exchange!’.

Bookmarks for March 21st through March 29th

March 30, 2010

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

Would Anyone Ever Say that Open Government Isn’t Great? – "Let’s not demonize good old e-government and let’s not overhype open government or government 2.0. Because what they have both in common is the willingness to help government become better."
Bristol City Council – blogging our web presence development work – "Us folks here at Bristol City Council have decided that as we continue to develop our web presence, in support of our wider business objectives, it’d make sense if we listened to the collective wisdom of our local digital community."
3 principles of innovative organisations – 100% Open – "As if we needed reminding, this exponential increase in connectivity and information sharing is fundamentally changing the way organisations operate and innovate."
Posting information online could preempt FOIA requests (3/18/10) — GovExec.com – "Taking advantage of technology and preemptively posting frequently requested information online could help agencies address new Freedom of Information Act queries and tackle backlogs"
The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators – "I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world."
How Not To Tender For e-Consultation Software | Delib Blog – "This is an issue that’s vexed us for some years here, but having just seen the most ridiculous tender process we’ve ever come across, we really have to say something for the good of all. After all, if we ignore history, we are bound to repeat it."
Coding Horror: The Opposite of Fitts’ Law – "If we should make UI elements we want users to click on large, and ideally place them at corners or edges for maximum clickability — what should we do with UI elements we don't want users to click on? Like, say, the "delete all my work" button?"
Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers – A Phd dissertation on blogging in the workplace. Not read it yet.
my_$publicservice.org – "What really matters in the end is that we listen, and having listened respond and improve."
Gordon Brown and Tim Berners Lee: Back to the Future? – "The result may be for the UK to remain stuck into its ambition to be seen as a leader in e-government (and now government 2.0) without ever really making it."
Public Sector Transformation Summit by Michele Ide-Smith – Great post with an awesome embedded slidedeck.

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 March 8th through March 13th

March 13, 2010

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

Roundup: Social Media Monitoring Tools – WebWorkerDaily – Useful list of dashboard-like monitoring tools.
It is not about our App, It is about the User’s Data and Context | Zoho Blogs – “…whichever app the user happens to be, it pulls relevant information from other apps, and displays it in the right context”
Google Apps Marketplace – “The Google Apps Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate directly with Google Apps.”
Google Reader – Play – “elcome to Google Reader Play, a fun, fast way to browse the most interesting stuff on the web, personalized just for you. We’ll keep track of the things you star, like, or share, and we’ll show you more stuff you’ll like the next time you use Reader Play.”
Plan for Welsh councils to work together collapses – “Local government reorganisation which cuts the number of councils is the only realistic option.”
Crown Copyright switches to Creative Commons – Information World Review – “Click-Use, the licence that for the last decade has authorised anyone to reuse government and Parliamentary information, is to be phased out by May.”
Google – public data – “The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate.”
Steve Bridger › Putting your people at the heart of your social media strategy – “This was the title of a talk I gave at the end of February and I think it is important, and frankly, worth repeating over and over.”
Social Media Resources – The Altimeter – Useful wiki, full of lots of social media goodness.
publicSIRO – Public Sector Information Security News – New blog from Ian Cuddy cataloging public sector data losses.

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.

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