An online notebook
I had an enjoyable morning today with a bunch of local government communicators, at an LGC organised conference. It was also a great opportunity to catch up with my buddies Carl, Dominic and Simon.
Here are my slides, where I discuss briefly what blogging and podcasting are about, and what some of the key success factors are:
I am rather excited to be live blogging the Digital Britain Summit tomorrow, providing one way for the many interested folk who were unable to attend to still find out what is being said, by who.
It’s a really good looking line up, with some big names present, such as:
I’m lucky that my notes will be joined by some live video streaming, thanks to Gavin and Shane at ConferenceXtra.
Also, the official Digital Britain twitter account will be providing updates and responding to people’s tweeted comments.
All the action will be happening on the Digital Britain blog, including the streaming. Make sure you check it out during the day.
Just to be completely open, I should disclose that I am being paid by BERR to do the blogging. But I promise to keep my toadying to a minimum.
As I mentioned in my previous post, in a few hours (must…sleep…) I’ll be running a couple of sessions at the Social Media Exchange.
I’ve now finished my slides, and have put them up on slideshare. Rather than make your life easy, though, I’m forcing you over to my posts on the Social Media Exchange site to get at them:
Would be good to have people’s thought on these in the comments over there!
The WordPress development blog has announced the release of a new version of the world’s best blogging software.
Some of the big improvements include: the ability to compare versions of posts, wiki-style, tracking who changed what – great for multi-user blogs; a new dynamic bookmarklet to help quick posting; the inclusion of Google Gears to speed up the admin interface; and new theme previews which include your content.
There is a video demonstrating the new version:
[HTML1]
Other, smaller changes include:
wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.That’s my morning sorted, then.
Posterous is the easiest blogging platform in the world to use. No, really.
All you have to do to get started is to send an email to post@posterous.com – no signup needed to begin with. I have given it a go here, and am pretty impressed with the way it handled Gmail’s rich text emails. Attachments like photos are added to your posts, and audio can be played with a flash player that’s automatically embedded when you send an mp3 to Posterous.
Also, if you include a link to, say, a YouTube video, Posterous automatically embeds the video in your blog, rather than just linking to it. Find out more about what Posterous can do.
If you take the time to register with the site, you can add a profile and an avatar, which is quite nice. Posterous is a good alternative to quick blogging tools like Tumblr, for example, and given the ease of use, maybe even Twitter.
The only concern will be around security. The site reckons it can spot spoof email addresses, but there have ben examples already of people posting to other people’s blogs. Hopefully this can be ironed out in the future, because Posterous has real potential, I feel, not least because of it’s reliance on email, which for most people is work, while the web is playing.