Category
Technology
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06.11.07Women, Business and Blogging. And cake.I spent last Friday at the Women, Business and Blogging conference at DMU in Leicester, at which I was giving a talk about new ways of thinking about content and publishing in the era of the social web. My presentation essentially covered the different sorts of content activities and their established and emergent forms online. This then provided a context for talking about...well, context, actually, as well as publishing models and control and the lack thereof. I wound up by talking about community, and more specifically, user engagement and community management, including the ways that communities can be nurtured and supported for growth. ...
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06.04.07What Seth Godin Would DoA while back, while searching for something else entirely, I saw a WP plugin in use on someone's random site which welcomed visitors arriving via search engine referrals specifically, saying "Hello, you got here looking for..." which I thought was a neat (in the British sense) way of supporting & managing all those random one-off visitors who find there way in through searches for particular phrases or places, or names. Of course, when I tried to look for the plugin itself, I couldn't find it. Oh, the irony. So in the background, I've been trying to write a snippet of code which ...
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06.01.07Watching the world go byWhen Google launched their new Street View overlay for its mapping service the other day, I thought "how cool!" And spent a happy breakfast-time wandering the streets of San Francisco, picking out the place in Cow Hollow we stayed back in March, the cafe in North Beach that served the city's best latte and the view from Cliff House, which we never quite made it to during our spring visit. It's such an obvious and smart enhancement - forget sightseeing: a panoramic view makes giving directions a doddle, not to mention scoping out new neighbourhoods to see if you could fancy ...
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05.24.07There’s a hole in your TwitterYou know Twitter, yeah? And you know how people love it because they can stay in touch with their friends and communicate privately what they're up to? Well. If you use it like this and are happily twittering away about people you work with, or fancy, or both, or whatever, you probably ought to know that everything you think is protected (private) within Twitter actually isn't. Due to (I assume) some quirk of the API, things can be protected within the twitter.com realm, but available for the whole world to see via Twittervision, regardless of their privacy preferences. That means that someone ...
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05.09.07Soapboxes in Cyberspace eventTomorrow night (Thursday 10 May), I'm participating in a panel (and audience!) discussion entitled Soapboxes in cyberspace: how can the media facilitate debate online? The focus of the event will be to consider some of the challenges and (sometimes missed) opportunities for mainstream media in making (or letting?) online debate and Weblog-based commentary happen around politics and current affairs. This is another in the series of Innovation Forum discussions initiated by Nico Macdonald, aimed at bringing together people from different disciplines to share knowledge, and I'm chuffed to be appearing alongside such an interesting bunch of people, including Lee Bryant from ...
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04.12.07Twitter Ye Not (or, Further Twitter Thoughts)As everybody's network grows, does Twitter run the risk of becoming less and less relevant to individual users? When my network was just 5 people, I could craft my Twitters in a way that was pertinent (or at least, contextually relevant) to all of them. As my network has expanded along with everyone else's: a) I find myself wanting to push out different status updates to different people (or different groups of people) - this is where granular permissions would be handy and b) I find other people's updates to be less relevant, especially the ones which reply to others publicly. In ...
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03.30.07What GTalk status messages are really forIt's not for letting people know you've popped out for lunch, or are in a meeting. No. It's for reliving David Bowie in frightwig and tights, as evidenced by this little interlude this morning. No conversation required - you don't need to talk and you can get on with other things quite happily. Just let your status do the talking. Because it's all about status. anna's new status message - you remind me of the babe Meg's new status message - what babe? anna's new status message - the babe with the power Meg's new status message - what power? anna's ...
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03.27.07Twit by name…Since I last wrote about Twitter and usage classifications, it was showcased at SXSW and that's caused an explosion in a) users b) usage c) media coverage d) site problems and e) inevitable navel-gazing. To add to the latter, I've also observed the emergence of a bunch of new services which feed the Twitter beast - in much the same way that the last 18 months or so have seen a whole host of services and applications which feed the MySpace beast. Two thoughts about this: 1. It's an interesting business model: being reliant on the success of someone else's business. I've heard people say that it hasn't ...
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03.16.07Funny-Ha-Ha, not Funny-PeculiarIn 1989, I made a birthday card for the second red nose day, and ran around collecting signatures and money for it, with visions of being able to present the card live on air - you know, like they do with those big charity cheques. (In this archive photo, above, you can see me aged 15 - I think Red Nose Day was actually on my birthday that year, which is why the birthday card seemed appropriate), my friend Melissa holding the card, and my sister Anna (who would have been 12), raising money by being sponsored to wear her ...
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03.12.07Future of Web Copyright?Now, I don't mean to whinge, really I don't, but I recently got a broadcast list mail from those nice people at FoWA, thanking me (and everyone else) for attending the recent conference in London. At the bottom of the mail was a little montage of pictures of the event, which I've screengrabbed and reproduced below: I couldn't help but notice that the montage contained an image which I took - the one in the bottom right hand corner, which can also be seen on my Flickr stream, here: When I uploaded the image to Flickr, I tagged it (as requested) with the ...
