Email

Telegraph switches to Google Apps

Been busy at WorkCampUK so haven’t been following my feeds that closely, but my eye was caught by a post written by Shane Richmond, Communities Editor of the Telegraph’s web presence:

I’ve been testing Google Apps within the Telegraph for the last few months so I’m delighted that we’re now switching over entirely. The speed, accessibility and flexibility of Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Docs make them much better to work with than the programs we used before.

Interesting news. After all, if an august institution like the Telegraph can make such a move, why not any other organisation?

I do have a few issues with the Google Apps offering though. For a start, the version of iGoogle that comes as standard is a seriously crippled version which, amongst other things, only lets you have one page of stuff. Also, sharing forms using Google Spreadsheets doesn’t work for people without an account on the Google Apps domain. It also doesn’t make sense to me that Google Reader isn’t a part of the package too.

But just in terms of email, as someone who has used various versions of Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, Lotus Notes and other enterprise email systems, Gmail is better than any.

Go ColaLife!

One of the best sessions at 2gether08 was Simon Berry’s on his ColaLife project, to try and gather as much support as he can for his idea to use the Coca Cola distribution network to get dehydration salts to those that need them in the developing world. It was also frustratingly short – another argument for greater flexibility to be built into conference agendas.

Simon has been leveraging the social web like no tomorrow in an attempt to drum up as much support as possible, making regular posts on the topic to his blog, and creating a Facebook group which has, at the time of writing, 2,934 members. In this video, Simon chats with David Wilcox about the campaign’s development:

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One of the key challenges facing the campaign is how to actually get the huge Facebook interest to transfer into real action. Facebook is notoriously a walled garden – it is hard to get outputs from it.

So, to help continue discussions and open things up a bit, Simon has started a Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/colalife. This means that folk can chat via email, rss or web, pretty much however it suits them. It also means that information and documents can be shared online too.

Anyone can sign up to the Google Group by entering their email address in the box below:

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Please do so and get involved with this incredible campaign.

Posterous

Posterous

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.

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