Dissident World

Dave Briggs has posted details of an event being arranged on 26th February as part of the Community of Practice for Social Media & Online Collaboration. This will be of potential interest to anyone working in (or for) the public sector who is using - or thinking of using - social media/social networking applications to support improved collaboration shared learning. The event is both an opportunity to see and learn how others are applying Web 2.0 technologies in their departments and as a showcase for anyone wishing to contribute information about their pet project. I’ve been a member of this particular CoP since Dave started it off and can highly recommend it to anyone who is currently struggling with the breadth and scale of the technology options available to them in this particular domain. Full details of the posting here:

Members of the Community of Practice for Social Media and Online Collaboration are meeting up at the Learning and Skills Council National Office in Coventry on 26th February 2008 between 10am and 3.30pm for a day of Web 2.0 fun and frolics, including:

• The benefits of using social media in the public sector, real life examples
• Building social web sites: blogs, wikis, forums and social networks
• Making social online video
• Group discussions on where the potential is for social media to make a real difference and a “how do I?” : Matching tools to problems
• Future developments of the CoP

If you aren’t already a member of the community and you feel it would be worthwhile attending please join us here and sign up on the wiki to say you’ll come.

ame across this today, which seems to be gathering a body of support. I like the sentiments; pity it’s not enforceable!Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington have authored a bill of rights for users of the social web. The bill states:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

I’ve recently seen a flurry of blogs about the merits (or not) of Facebook as a social networking environment. I was stirred to action when I read Elsua’s blog this morning, which in turn refers to the question posed by Mitch Joel “Can you claim to be in social media without having a Facebook account”.

Now, whilst I don’t disagree with many of the points made by Elsua, or for that matter Euan Semple, who writes about Facebook being all froth and no substance, I would like to pose the following question:

If you’re serious about Social Media, and profess to be an ‘expert’, where there is a major gathering of like-minded socially-active individuals, can you afford to NOT be there?

Yes, there are a lot of shortcomings with Facebook, but if you want to comment about it with any authority, you need to be a part of it, not a bystander watching on the periphery.

My colleague Dave Briggs has put together an excellent summary of the various Google social media applications on his LGNewMedia blog. Things like Reader, Google Groups, Docs and Spreadsheets, Blogger, Google’s customised search service, Google Maps, Gmail, Google’s calendar, iGoogle, Google Apps, Notebook etc.

I think most Web 2.0/social media gurus will be familiar with the breadth and depth of Google’s freebies, but Dave also identifies the various rival products. Whether or not we consider the Google versions to be the best of breed, there’s no escaping the fact that you’re likely to get a far better and more consistent user experience through the seamless integration of many of these applications than many of the rival products. Particularly so if you’ve also personalised your browser with the various buttons and plug-ins available, such as the Google toolbar.

Yes, Google’s softly-softly, stealth-like approach is gradually taking over the user’s desktop, and personally, I don’t think it is such a bad thing.

Just picked this up from Euan Semple’s blog - a new Facebook application called Blog
Friends  lets you track blog posts by your Facebook friends on topics that interest you, and displays those posts on your Facebook profile while they help you grow your blog readership for you in return.  Cool.

Another great video from Common Craft. This one is about Social Networking. Enjoy!

I read with interest that my old employer - Reuters - has chosen Blogtronix as the social media platform for their recently launched Green Market Social Community. I’ve been pondering which platform would best suit the social media network I’m planning for the Information Authority, which will be supporting data providers across the Further Education system. Knowing how rigorous Reuters are in their procurement process, I’d be foolish not to include Blogtronix in the short list.

Came across a blog from Collective Intelligence on the topic of social bookmarking (tagging). I was at the Blogs & Social Media conference referenced in the article, where Keely Flint presented on the Bupa experience using Cogenz as the social bookmarking application. It occurred to me how much more successful these initiatives could be if Librarians were out there evangelising the merits of personal tagging, and how this would support more effective search and retrieval, a point also picked up by Helen Nicol. Maybe I’m reading the wrong blogs, but my perception is that most Librarians remain wedded to structured, corporate categorisation and file management systems, and haven’t yet grasped that the world is changing around them.  Sorry if I’m over-generalising, but  I’ve seen very few  articles/comments/blogs from Librarians in support of social bookmarking. Someone prove me wrong?

Thanks to my friends over at Studio 501c I was alerted to another excellent video presentation from the Common Craft Show, this time explaining clearly and simply what a Wiki is. I thought the  RSS  presentation  was a one-off, but  I realise I need to look out for new stuff from these folk.  Definitely worth a subscription.