Change2

For a while I have been wanting to put all the bits of work I do on social media into a little basket, just to organise it and let people know that the same person is behind them all.

In addition to that, I have been playing about with Google Apps and wanting to find an excuse to start using it.

So, I merged these two and set up Change2 on Google Apps. My experience of Google Apps has been good so far, despite some trouble with putting a basic site together with Page Creator. What I have looks ok, and I have set up a blog on WordPress.com to cover the other bits.

Another role of Change2 is to publicise the fact that I am willing and able to help anyone out with social media type web stuff, and am happy to give my time up to charities, community organisations or any other non-profit organisations.

Am also moving all my email across to dave@change2.org. Given the number of accounts I have spread over the web, it’s going to take a while to get sorted. Thankfully, I can pop all the mail from my Gmail account into the Change2 one, which makes life easier.

Tags: change2

MySpace Party

…but not at MyHouse, thankfully. The BBC reports:

A 17-year-old girl has been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage in connection with a house party which left a family home wrecked.

About 200 youngsters damaged Alan and Elaine Bell’s home after the party was advertised on the website MySpace.

Guests are alleged to have urinated on a wedding dress and stolen jewellery from the house near Houghton-le-Spring, County Durham, on Easter Monday.

Durham Police said the girl had been questioned and released on police bail.

Tags: myspace

LGKnowledge

I launched the latest project under the LGNewMedia banner yesterday, a social bookmarking site for local government called LGKnowledge. It’s based on Pligg and works just fine – the only issue will be getting enough people using it to make it worthwhile. But I’m working on that.

Tags: lgknowledge, pligg

Every way up

Euan Semple on the advantages of social media for everyone:

What I find interesting is that some people leap to the conclusion (both for and against) that social computing in business is bottom up. It isn’t. It is potentially as liberating for the middle and the top as it is for anyone else.

How many managers do you know who feel really listened to by their staff at the moment?

How many managers feel really understood by their boss?

Wouldn’t even your control freaks benefit from a better platform on which to influence their organisation?

Are you Twittering?

Lots of people are talking about Twitter right now, and a lot of them are pretty high profile and influential. Twitter is pretty big, and it’s going to get bigger.

What is it? The best way to describe it is as micro-blogging. You can only write posts of 140 characters or less. Hardly the medium for composing massive essays on the future of the web, then. But pretty useful if you just want to let people know where you are and what you are up to.

To make posting more accessible, you don’t have to visit the Twitter homepage everytime you want to post. Instead, you can activate your instant messaging client to send messages to Twitter. That 140 character limit is important too – because you can post via SMS as well.

Another cool feature is that Twitter works as a kind of social network – you can subscribe to other’s Twitterings, and they can yours. Everything is RSS-ified as well.

What are the applications here, though? Apart from inanely keeping people interested in the minutae of your life? Marc Orchant notes some benefits:

I’ve been using Twitter for a while now and must admit that it has stuck in a way many social tools have failed to for me. Part of the reason, I suspect, is that it’s very low effort. But more to the point, many of by online buddies are using the service as well and that makes it a very convenient way to keep up to date on what they’re doing.

Yes, there’s an inevitable noise level inherent in this sort of thing. And the volume has gone up (way up) since Scoble, Pirillo, and Rubel decided that Twitter was cool. But all in all, there’s little not to like and the conversations are often quite interesting.

It is in the conversations that the benefit lies for me. Massive, disparate communities could grow up around Twitter, making it a great platform for discussion and sharing.

Tags: twitter

Open Source Politics

Great article from David Wilcox:

Does it matter whether politicians who talk up the Internet’s potential for re-inventing politics, education, employment actually use it hands-on for the purposes they present, and join in? Or should we just be grateful if they have a good script from their researchers, have met the right people, and can engage in sensible conversation about social networking? What coverage do they get with that good script, but no online presence?

Defining Social Media

This is nice, via Neville Hobson:

‘Social media’ is the term commonly given to websites and online tools which allow users to interact with each other in some way – by sharing information, opinions, knowledge and interests. As the name implies, social media involves the building of communities or networks, encouraging participation and engagement.

Digital Dialogues

Simon Dickson reports on Digital Dialogues, of which the DD website explains:

The purpose of Digital Dialogues is to assess the capacity of ICT to support central government’s communication and consultation activity (principally with the public but also with internal stakeholders).

Digital Dialogues takes technology as its focus and seeks to build the capacity within central government for setting up, managing and evaluating digital technology’s contribution to promoting public participation in the policy process. Digital Dialogues has the additional objective of promoting collaboration and exchange between departments.

Just before Christmas, the Hansard Society released a report, which you can read here.

Dickson notes that:

The good news is that, perhaps predictably, the online world comes out of it pretty well. Public engagement is a good thing, and the majority of those drawn to online channels were not previously ‘engaged’; but it should be seen as a complement rather than a replacement for conventional offline methods. There’s also a fair bit on the importance of appropriate planning and ongoing management / moderation.

It all makes interesting reading.

Technorati Tags: social media, digital dialogues, hansard society, simon dickson

CoPping Off

I’ve recently started my own Community of Practice over on the I&DeA communities platform, entitled ‘Social Media and Online Collaboration’. It will be a good way of getting the message across to people who work in local government that the internet isn’t just a distraction, it’s a tool that can have tremendous benefits in terms of sharing information, experience and best practice.

The CoP is a pretty nice platform. Using a bespoke system built by a firm called Conseq, it provides simple wikis, forums and blogs as well as a calendar and a space for uploading documents for sharing.

Of course, the issue is getting people involved. With a pretty minimal amount of effort, the Social Media CoP is one of the most active. I’ve created a few wiki pages detailing some of the stuff the CoP can do, my top ten blogging tips and a few other things on starting blogging and a Web2.0 site directory. It will be interesting to see how many others jump in.

The CoP platform is pretty similar to the site I have been working on, expanding the remit of my original LGSearch site, which is called LGNewMedia. It too has a blog, a wiki and a forum, along with LGSearch and the latest effort, which is a del.ico.us clone called LGKnowledge. Again, will anyone ever use this stuff? I don’t know. I know that they are already using LGSearch, which is cool, if unsurprising as it doesn’t need much effort to do so. The wiki serves a purpose as a documentation library, if nothing else, and the blog has a few subscribers, probably for news on LGSearch.

But I do think that LGKnowledge could be hugely helpful to people as a kind of simple knowledge management system, with appropriate tagging people could point stuff out to people in a really useful way. But it needs the committment from users to actually put the content in there in the first place, and I am not sure how they can be convinced that it’s worth it.

[tags]idea, communities of practice, social media, local government, lgsearch, lgnewmedia[/tags]

Findless

Simon Dickson, a consultant ‘bringing new media thinking to UK news and government’, has launched Findless (pronounced Find-less, rather than Findluss, which was my original reading!):

a new editorialised search engine network. Why ‘findless’? Well, aside from hopefully being memorable, it sums up our philosophy that ‘less is more’ when it comes to search results. We’ve all seen the heatmaps: startling numbers of people instinctively click on the first search result in the list. All the more important, then, to strip out all the sites whose SEO may be great, but whose content may be lacking. Most people we’ve asked immediately think it’s an odd choice of name… but pretty soon, they get it.

We’re starting with two areas, chosen because we (my wife and I) have worked in the fields in question, and know the good sites without having to think too hard. One is health and safety, the other is education. Coincidentally, in both cases, the quality information is spread very widely, and you may not instinctively know where to look.

Very similar, then, to LGSearch. I’ve left a comment on Simon’s blog for him to get in touch. It’d be cool to figure out a way to link all this stuff up.

[tags]Google Coop, CSE, Simon Dickson, Findless, LGSearch[/tags]