ajax – Dave Briggs

Bookmarks for April 19th through April 23rd

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

Open innovation, why bother? – 100% Open – "…if open innovation is to deliver sustainable business advantage then we need a better understanding of what motivates contributors to these initiatives, else there is a risk of a backlash against them…"
Docs.com – MS Office + Facebook beats Google Docs? Am not convinced!
TALKI – The easiest way to embed a forum – Embed a forum on your website – just like that! Users can sign in with Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts.
Government 2.0 Can and Must Save Money – "I think that the current shortage of resources and a sometimes dramatic budgetary situation can be a powerful incentive to make this change happen, to tap into the creativity of employees as well as external resources." YES!!!
Red Sweater Blog – Apple Downloads – VERY interesting – is Apple going to go down the App Store route for vetting Mac software now, too?
HTML5 presentation – "Slideshow-style presentation on HTML5 made using HTML5."
CDC Provides a Great Example of What Social Media Is About – "CDC’s strategy puts them in a better position to identify patterns where trust may be shifting elsewhere early enough to take action: many other agencies worldwide, which just care about publishing data and creating their Facebook pages, will be taken by surprise."
data.lincoln.gov.uk (beta) – Lincoln City Council start publishing data publicly – great work, and props to Andrew Beeken who must have driven this through.
Simplifying the social web with XAuth – "We think that XAuth can simplify and improve the social web, while keeping your private information safe. This is just one of many steps that Google is taking, along with others in the industry, to make the social web easier and more personalized."
Open Government and the Future of Public Sector IT – Great talk from Microsoft's Dave Coplin.

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 13th through March 15th

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

HR in the 21st Century – Collection of very interesting posts and thoughts on HR in the age of Enterprise 2.0
Opinion Space – "The U.S. Department of State is interested in your perspectives and input on a series of important foreign policy questions. "Opinion Space" is a new discussion forum designed to engage participants from around the world."
Nextgov – Federal technology news, best practices, and web 2.0 tools – Looks an interesting resource.
When It Comes to Open Government, Nobody is Perfect – "The journey toward transparency, participation and openness is not one in which government should travel alone."
100% Open – Interesting looking new body to emerge out of NESTA – will be watching this!
Under construction: behind the scenes of a government website (soft) launch – Great post from Neil on the soft launch of a new site for BIS – which will save money and hopefully be adaptable to any changes ahead.
WordPress › Use Google Libraries – This looks very clever indeed.
Forrester Blogs – Forrester's blog network has had a bit of a makeover – loads of good stuff in here.
Top 10 Google Apps Marketplace Apps – Useful list of the better additional apps you can get from the Google Apps marketplace.
ShiftSpace – "ShiftSpace is an open source browser plugin for collaboratively annotating, editing and shifting the web."

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.

Use Google CSE on your blog

Google’s customised search engine service is really cool, useful and dead easy to use. It’s what I used to create LGSearch, which is one of the most successful bits of online work I have done. What Google CSE does is allow you to create a ‘whitelist’ of sites you want to limit your search to, so it’s a way of guaranteeing relevance in search results.

Another use of it is to replace your default blog search functionality. For example, it’s better than the WordPress standard search because it searches pages as well as posts; and it allows you to run contextual ads next to the results – taking people away from your blog but providing you with a little income, which is always nice.

The functionality is improved even more by using the new AJAX results overlay, which means there is no need to create a results page. Try it out on DavePress using the search box on the top right.

To get this on your WordPress blog, all you need to do is head over to Google CSE, create your search engine, remembering to only add your blog’s URL to the whitelist, and then copy the search box code into a text widget. Easy!