RSS – Dave Briggs

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Blogging – writing and reading

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.

What is RSS?

View more documents from Kind of Digital

What I’ve been reading

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

What we talk about when we talk about RSS – A useful bit of background to the future of RSS debate.
Media Trust explains how local news hubs will work – David Wilcox follows up the story.
Civil Servant 2.0 (PDF warning) – Interesting ebook on 'practical tips for working in government 2.0'
Arrested for filming a public council meeting – What a mess.
Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication – An academic version of the debate on whether or not trolls ought to be fed.
NESTA Neighbourhood Challenge – Nice blog covering this hyperlocal project.

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

Bookmarks for September 10th through September 14th

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

MindQuilt – "MindQuilt is an enterprise knowledge management platform with intelligent question and answer matchmaking and gaming achievement dynamics."
Tiny Tiny RSS – Host your own Google Reader clone.
Challenge.gov : The central platform for all US Government challenges, contests and innovation prizes. – "Challenge.gov is a place where the public and government can solve problems together."
The future of digital public services – "The key to this is that Directgov should continue to move to be the facilitators not owners or delivers of the content and apps, they should establish the proper governance, standards and quality assurance for app providers, setting minimum standards that ensure quality and interoperability."
WordPress › Email Post Changes plugin – Potentially spectacularly helpful WordPress plugin.
Beyond Access – a "Public Consultation on access to information and open government data"
Forking is a Feature – Anil Dash – "Moving forward, there are a lot more lessons we can learn if we build our social tools with the assumption that no one version of any document, app, or narrative needs to be the definitive one. We might even make our software, and our communities, more inclusive if we embrace the forking ourselves."
Resources for exploring social media participation – Brill stuff from @timdavies on online youth participation.
The Social Network: Facebook’s intriguing world revealed – "How did Mark Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist father and a psychologist mother, from a comfortably middle-class background, become one of the most powerful men in the world?"
Hand Made from Social Spaces – "Hand Made is a beautiful collaborative book with 26 innovative perspectives and projects from around the world, over 230 pages, about new ways of creating connection and community. The projects have been carefully selected because they have all been developed with new thinking and methodologies and involve Learning, Sharing or Making."
A Brief Guide To Reaching Unbelievably High Levels Of Participation In Your Online Community – Some great tips in here.

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 July 28th through August 5th

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

NHS spends millions on websites that fail patients, says government report | Society | The Guardian – "The NHS spends up to £86m a year on thousands of websites that are difficult to find, badly designed and irrelevant to patient needs, according to a leaked government report."
Open data on the cheap at Helpful Technology – "…without the cost and complexity of building and mantaining a full API to their database, a corporate public sector organisation has been able to support reuse in a quick and simple way."
Retooled — Retooled is a place to find and share experiences of the rollercoaster of redundancy. – "This site was begun by a group of employees who were all made redundant when our company MG Rover closed. We hope by sharing our experiences, Retooled will be valuable to anyone who is going through redundancy."
Straight Statistics – "We are a campaign established by journalists and statisticians to improve the understanding and use of statistics by government, politicians, companies, advertisers and the mass media."
Data.gov.uk chief admits transparency concerns – "Cabinet Office official Richard Stirling, who leads the team that runs Data.gov.uk, said that if he was at the Office for National Statistics he would have concerns about statistical releases and people making assumptions "that aren't quite valid"."
i-volunteer.org.uk – "i-volunteer is a social network that connects volunteers, charities and volunteer managers across the UK."
Does Outsourcing Destroy IT Innovation? – "…those that outsource IT on a wholesale basis "struggle to use IT to drive value and have limited strategic flexibility as the business context evolves and hardware prices plummet.""
The community right to build – do we know if it will work? – "We think that when these reforms come out in the wash at the local level, it will often be the role, and the responsibility, of local (parish and town) councils and their committed volunteer councillors to make planning work positively for local places."
All systems (about to) go – "[the knowledge hub] will be a place to discover a wide range of materials and content to support the development and improvement of local public services."
Council stages CovJam to help shape Coventry’s future – "In what has the potential to become a blueprint for cities around the globe, the council staged the world's first city-wide online conversation with nearly 900 local residents, businesses and public bodies."

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 June 17th through July 3rd

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

Digging digital government: recent major works and what they mean – "But now, and for the first time, it’s starting to feel like we can retire some of those old soapboxes and get out our toolboxes instead."
Newsroom: the backstory – "Early feedback on the prototype from journalists was positive, the Press Office got a nice-looking tool which required literally zero additional work beyond emailing over their contact list, and Neil got one of his much-loved quick wins – and within SiteCore too."
What do 25% cuts look like? Like this….. « Whitehall Watch – "There is zero chance cuts of this magnitude can be implemented without affecting “front line services”."
Gephi, graph exploration and manipulation software – "Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs."
How to Secure Your WordPress Site From Getting Hacked: WPSecurityLock – Useful site.
9 signs you know you shouldn’t bother with innovation – Great stuff as always from James Gardner. How many of these can you tick off for your organisation?
Innovation: Who Else Is Doing It? – "I'm often amazed at the lack of courage exhibited by so-called leaders who profess to value innovation."
When Public Servants Make the Difference – "However, as one of the secret sauces of Singapore’s success is trusting its own employees, so almost all gov 2.0 success stories in the Western world share the same ingredient, i.e. they come from the intuition and the willingness to innovate of people who work in government."
Enterprise 2.0 2010 – Enterprise 2.0 TV – Videos from the keynote speeches at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. Some good stuff here.
A timeline of open government data – Great work Tim Davies – this is really interesting!

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.