Tag: twitter

Things I've spotted June 14th from 17:10 to 21:15

Here are some o the things I’ve been reading June 14th from 17:10 to 21:15:

  • One Page Guide to Google Groups E-mail Lists : Tim’s Blog – Even with all the amazing social web tools available out there – e-mail remains a key communication tool for most people.
  • CHANGEit IdeasFund for Young Creatives | VCS Matters – CHANGEit, which is an organisation that recognises, supports and rewards young people who want to, or have already spoken up and taken constructive action about something they want to be improved, changed or created in their community has announced that it is seeking applications to its new £50,000 IdeasFund.
    The aim of the Ideas Fund is to support creative enterprise and seeks to promote new and exciting ways of working between young people and organisations that are driven by and for young people
  • Imagine: School Design for the Future. – Imagine’ is a database which captures school design best practice from around the world. Architects and researchers from the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield [BDR] have conducted a critical analysis of over 150 schools, highlighting excellence in design according to different themes. It considers integrated ICT, environmental design and flexibility for space and learning.
  • The growth of social lending – Third Sector Foresight – Anyone heard of Twollars? Well they're a new online 'currency of appreciation' that you can use on Twitter to reward positive actions. Each Twitter user automatically has 50 Twollars in their account. So they're great news for VCOs as people can give Twollars to the charity of your choice and once the charity has created an account, they can sell their Twollars to businesses and people who support their cause and want more Twollars. So, Twollars are designed to go back into circulation.
  • ASH-10 » A Local Blogs Blog for Birmingham – Over the weekend it became apparent to me that I couldn’t keep all the local blogs that have sprung up in Birmingham straight in my head. I was also aware that what defines a “local blog” is somewhat, well, ill defined. so I started Local Blogging Birmingham, a quick and dirty Tumblr blog to record them as I find them and add a bit of commentary.
  • ASH-10 » Towards a Theory of Yurtification – I superimposed a photo of a yurt on a volcano but fits current thinking about the digital divide and needs to be considered when thinking about these things.

    So that’s my Yurtification theory. In short, the pyramid will be softened, Mongolian style.

  • Videopress | DavePress – Well, VideoPress looks like it might be worth looking into. It’s been created by Automattic, the guys behind WordPress and various other cool things. It’s a video upload and hosting service that uses WordPress.com as its back end, as far as I can tell. But you can embed your videos wherever you like.

Stuff I've seen from May 2nd to May 6th

These are my links for May 2nd through May 6th:

  • twittl | Twittl – Chat Catcher is a simple script that you can install on your website or WordPress blog and it will pull in all conversations related to your blog post from Twitter, Friendfeed, and Identi.ca. These conversations get posted as comments/trackbacks on your blog post. http://tr.im/kCji
  • Working Together – Public Services on your side. – Working Together – Public Services On Your Side details the steps the Government is taking to give people, communities and frontline staff the information and real power they need to personalise public services. Reflecting their local and individual needs will create a richer, fairer and safer society.
  • Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky – “It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”
  • Pixelpipe – Free your content, post, upload and share anywhere – Pixelpipe is a content distribution gateway that allows users to publish text and upload photos, video and audio files once through Pixelpipe and have the content distributed across over 75 social networks, photo/video sites and blogs, and other online destinations. We provide a number of mobile & desktop applications for users, liberating their media and sharing their life.

Don't tell the COI but every government news stream now has it's own twitter account.

Some of you will have mixed feelings about this but every major news feed out of the UK government now has it’s own twitter account. What’s interesting about this is the whole process is unofficial.  I’ve no doubt Tom Watson will be delighted, but what will the COI make of this unofficial use of information?  -They’re already working on improving websites, hopefully they will understand this as an improvement in their web presence.

I’m going to quote Geof Cole, who has done this deed:

The Central Office of Information run a rather good website called the News Distribution Service, formerly the Government News Network. Below the fold are the RSS and Twitter feeds in three groups – aggregate, departmental and regional.

Unfortunately, no-one knows about it as the COI doesn’t do much to promote it despite being “the Government’s centre of excellence for marketing and communications”. It consists of news updates for all the big bits of government – departments, agencies and regions – that you could want. It’s a good way of keeping an eye on what they’re all up to an finding the occasional hidden gem of a press release. They’ve had RSS feeds for ages and now they’re on Twitter (thanks to yours truly).

I do hope someone in government picks up the admin for this. If you want to see a full list of the feeds, including your regional one, then here’s a link to Geoff’s blog.

—

Update, others on this:

Neil Williams: “It’s likely there will be lots of crossover between Dave’s NDS-fuelled feeds and these civil servant powered accounts, so choose wisely which to follow. The human-edited tweets will offer more than just press releases but they might also be selective about the news they deem tweet-worthy.”