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My interview at Civil Service Live

I caught up with the Amplified team at Civil Service Live recently and got interviewed by the lovely (and uber-talented) Steve Lawson about the work I’ve been doing on Monitoring Dashboards at Ministry of Justice (amongst other things).

Listen!

23/08/2009No Comments
Filed under: Blog, Communication, Conference, Government, Social media, Twitter

Veni, Vidi, Fodi

And so the wonderful twitter updates from MarsPhoenix have come to an end.

The Mars lander sent her last message on 10 November with the binary for ‘triumph’:

01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3
http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix/status/999383469

I can’t help feeling a little sad.

The tone of the updates generated a genuine relationship between the lander and her followers. Her tweets were – in the truest sense of the word – delightful.

Using Twitter in this way was inspired. The audience was ideal and the tweets were perfectly pitched to be informative, geeky, funny and often very cute.

As I tweeted when I first started following her:

I HEART the @MarsPhoenix tweets.. imagining a little wide eyed robot scurrying over the surface pointing, jumping and squealing with glee
http://twitter.com/jennybee/statuses/827012873

Read more about the mission and the social media strategy here: Mars Phoenix Lander Runs Out of Juice.

Oh and in case you were wondering; ‘veni, vidi, fodi’ means ‘I came, I saw, I dug’.

11/11/2008No Comments
Filed under: Blog, Communication, Extra-curricular, Favourite things, Interactive, Online persona, Social media, Space, Twitter

Blogging and other platforms

I finally got round to reading that Wired article that everyone’s been talking about. The one where they said:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

And I agree. Sort of.

What the article identified is a shift towards seeing the web as offering myriad ways to communicate and participate.

I enjoy reading blogs and I like having the opportunity to comment. But for most of the blogs that I read, their authors also have a Twitter stream, their photos are on Flickr, they stream video to Qik (amongst other things). And this content is becoming more valuable to me than the stuff on their blogs. It’s valuable because it’s instant and it allows me to participate in a conversation much more easily.

Platforms

I was wondering the other day why it is I don’t religiously scan my Google Reader subscriptions every lunchtime anymore (see?). And I’ve come to realise it’s partly because I’m already getting updates and ideas and comments from the bloggers I’m subscribed to from their other web activity.

This is not to say that blogging is dead but we’re in an age of platforms now. Where we are no longer identified by our blog but by the sum of our web activity. It’s what FriendFeed attempts to facilitate – although it’s worth noting that the way FriendFeed is designed can make an entire feed of one person’s web activity appear overwhelming.

For me, I feel a redesign of this blog coming on to truly reflect my web activities on the platforms I currently describe as ‘Social habits’.

05/11/20085 Comments
Filed under: Blog, Blogging, Twitter, Writing

Collecting twits

I’ve decided to start collecting twitter feeds.

Feeds that have something interesting about them – linguistically or visually.

I’m going to create a page on this website to display them at some point. But for now, here are the first artifacts to be added to the collection:

@towerbridge
“I am opening for the SB Hydrogen, which is passing downstream.”

@shippingcast
“Shnn, Rckl, Mln SW bckg S or SE 5 2 7, phaps gale 8 l8r. Ruf or v.ruff. Shwrs then rain. Gd, bec. mod or pr”

@fireland
“The video poker machines burble. The casino carpet blurs into a 3D dolphin. The waitress’ lipstick, Tokyo Gutter, is smeared across my neck.”

@andy_house
“electricity meter reading: 31550 KWH”

09/05/2008No Comments
Filed under: Art, Blog, Design, Twitter

Twitpitch: what a good idea!

Stowe Boyd recently invited startups to ‘Twitpitch’ him in order to arrange to meet with him at a conference…

  1. All companies who would like to have a meeting with me, need to send me a Twittered description of the product. Yes, please Twitter it to me at www.twitter.com/stoweboyd. Yes, one tweet, 140 characters less the eleven used for “@stoweboyd “.
  2. Optionally, send a supporting twitpitch with one link, and no other text. Could be to anything: website, video, press release, Rick Astley, etc.
  3. Then, twitter me one or more suggested times/place to meet at the event, using the times on the calendar, and a location in the conference building I won’t have time to visit your nearby hotel or offices.

Nice. If you’ve got a brilliant idea it really should be communicable in 140 characters. And I’m all for using words sparingly and in a considered fashion. Any application that encourages that gets my vote.

21/04/2008No Comments
Filed under: Blog, Innovation, Twitter

Twitter games

There’s a war going on on Twitter and it has a hue.

Color wars 2008

We used to play color wars at summer camp. Near the end of the year the entire camp would split up into colors, red, green, black, blue, etc… and compete in a series of events: tug of war, egg toss, basketball…

zeFrank

I LOVE the idea of playing games on twitter.

So I started a thread using the concept of chain stories which I think would work really well within the 140-character medium.

Here’s how it went (read bottom to top):

Chain story

Some immediate issues surfaced:

  1. There has to be mutual follow-ship between the participants (the penultimate post on the above screenshot was tweeted by someone I wasn’t following and I didn’t see it at the time it was posted)
  2. Simultaneous posting from more than one participant (is likely and it…) breaks the thread (if facilitated by @replies)
  3. Likewise, delayed posting also breaks the thread
  4. It’s just generally difficult to follow the thread of the story

Possible solutions:

  1. Limit the game to two participants
  2. Set up a group and have people tweet to that somehow (this wouldn’t totally solve the simultaneous posting problem)
  3. Let the game descend into anarchy from time to time – use hashtags to follow the story rather than @replies

I’m inclined to take the latter approach. As long as an individual is monitoring the thread they could draw everything back together if tweets got out of control. Alternatively, the story could be allowed to branch off by changing the hashtag (#story, #story1, #story2 etc).

Ultimately for a game like this to work, it has to be spontaneous and simple. I’ll give it another try at some point and document it here.

Some other game ideas:

  • Word of the day: challenge people to include a specified (really obscure) word in their tweets
  • Web treasure hunt: clues build up a picture and participants have to identify a digital artifact and link to it
  • Degrees of separation: get from one person/thing/place etc to another in as few ‘degrees’ as possible
  • I’m NOT going to suggest Mornington Crescent as that would be far to geeky
27/03/20085 Comments
Filed under: Blog, Tagging, Twitter, Twitter games

lgSHOUT!

The irrepressible Dave Briggs has launched another really cute local government web app.

lgSHOUT! is a ’site that lets local government folk yell for help or holler about something fabulous’.

It’s very similar in concept to a much loved micro-blogging tool.

It’s tools like lgSHOUT! that will open up geek concepts like micro-blogging to a mainstream audience, making web 2.0 truly accessible to ‘normal’ people.

Good one Dave.

14/03/20083 Comments
Filed under: Blog, Social media, Twitter, User-generated content

I want it ALL (in one place)!

As anyone in the tech world who hasn’t been under a rock for the last few days will know, the SXSW tech love-in is currently taking place.

I’m not there but I’m trying to keep abreast with what’s going on. Fortunately, this is a lot easier to do than ever before. Twitter and Seesmic are updating me with observations from people who’s opinions I respect and my rss reader is busy gathering feeds. There are also a number of tools I can use to ‘manually’ find content – digg, del.icio.us, hashtags etc.

But sifting through the gossip, chatter, informed opinion, official texts, party videos etc etc to identify key themes, opinions and zeitgeist is a daunting task.

Established publishing channels such as Wired seem to be doing a good job of recording key moments and general observations. But I’m not totally certain their reporting is accurate. What if they are completely failing to notice the Twitter buzz around a new application?

What I’m faced with is my perception of trust and authority in the recording of this event. I need to employ a number of methods to build a complete picture of the conference as there isn’t one source to do that for me. I trust that I’ll be presented with well informed, intelligent, crafted commentary from the Wired blog, and I also trust my Twitter and Seesmic friends to reflect zeitgeist and offer their expert opinion.

What I need is a website where I can get a roundup of what the Twitterverse is buzzing about, what’s being discussed on Seesmic, what’s being blogged, rated, bookmarked and so on.

I’d still like to read ‘professional’ editorial and interpretation but this and the user generate content would complement each other in order to present a holistic vision of – in this case – SXSW.

I wonder if this is the approach established news publishers will need to move towards in order to survive changing perceptions of authority and the inevitable mainstream establishment of user generated content?

What do people think? Does anything like this already exist?

10/03/20085 Comments
Filed under: Authority & expertise, Blog, Communication, Conference, Dreaming of the future, SXSW, Seesmic, Social media, Twitter, User-generated content

The end of email?

Could we be witnessing baby-steps towards more appropriate personal communications methods?

We can spend up to half our working day going through our inbox, leaving us tired, frustrated and unproductive.

A recent study found one-third of office workers suffer from e-mail stress.

E-mail is ruining my life! (bbc.co.uk)

The article refers to Deloitte’s short-lived ‘no-internal-email-Wednesday’ which it reckons has made staff think more carefully about the email they send and whether there is a more appropriate communication method such as picking up the phone or talking face-to-face.

I agree, we should be more considered in our communications but our places of work on the whole haven’t even begun to embrace tools like IM, RSS, collaborative working, online project management, social networks etc etc.

My personal email traffic (both in- and out-bound) has significantly decreased since engaging with some of these tools. I refuse to subscribe to email lists – choosing RSS instead, and I use IM (if I can) to have quick conversations with friends. I use Google Groups to manage extra-curricular projects, Twitter keeps me in touch with friends and acquaintances and I use Facebook to organise my social life.

If only I could (or, more appropriately, was allowed to…) work more like this in my 9-5!

07/03/20088 Comments
Filed under: Blog, Communication, Dreaming of the future, Social media, Twitter

Twitter communities

One of things I struggled with when I signed up for twitter was the lack of easy way to find people to follow.

I remember (unsuccessfully) googling ‘twitter’ + ‘keyword’ in the hope I would find some like-minded twitterers. Eventually I found the twitter fan wiki which is a great resource but quite techy and requires patience.

My suggestion for solving this problem?

Twitter Communities

Twitterers could categorise themselves by subject-based community (technology, music, photography, food, politics etc).

As well as the public timeline each community could have a timeline, along with a list of members starting with most recently joined.

This would be great for newbies as they try and figure out what Twitter is all about and for old-timers and newbies alike as a way of finding people to follow.

What do people think? Is this something that can be set up as a stand-alone app? Does something like this already exist?

05/03/20089 Comments
Filed under: Blog, Twitter
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