Social Communications

Some stream of consciousness thinking here about the opportunities that may (or may not) have opened up with Twitter lists.

I look after the open university twitter account and today put out a tweet asking followers what lists they wanted creating / or wanted to join. I got a massive response and although the majority of the lists currently contain only one or two people I hope that will change over time.

The types of lists that I was asked to create fall into one of two categories: either a course list DD101 or a subject list Law. The first of these is great because it enables students / alumni of particular courses to come together in a way which is a little more formal than following a hashtag.

I wonder if it’s the second of these (law / psychology etc) which holds real promise for the organisation using twitter in terms of developing partnerships with other organisations in order to create extra value.

Already students have asked me to add the law society gazette , the law society for england and wales and the law society scotland to the law list and this made me wonder about how this might encourage us (as twitter accounts or even organisations) to work together to create extra value for people who use the list. I’m sure we all have resources available to us that each others’ followers would appreciate.

On a related note, if we are to build up really valuable subject-specific lists I really need a way of feeding content into specific lists using hastags. Anyone know of a way?

EDIT: I also need a way to sync list followers with people in the list – kind of like an automatic follow for people who follow you. I think this is the right approach to take (is it?!?) since the value of the list is created by the people in it. you follow the list because it is something you re interested in / tweet about. If that is the case other people on the list want to know about that content.

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Yesterday was a happy day; I was one of a lucky 100,000 to get an invite to try out Google Wave. Seeing as I’ve given over almost every aspect of my life to Google I suppose this is probably the least they could do in return!

So, what’s it like? Well I suppose the answer is ‘I’m not sure yet’. This is what it looks like though!

The first problem you come across when you start up your account is that you can’t import your existing contacts list (cos they’re not using wave) and so you don’t actually have anyone to communicate with! A quick post to twitter of your address (jinky32@googlewave.com – add me to your contacts list!) and all of a sudden you have LOADS of people to talk to – hence the ‘drowning’ part of the title!

The big wow moment for everybody that I’ve spoken to is that you can actually see people’s messages appear on screen as they type them!. Ok, so this isn’t a killer feature in terms of functionality, but I think something that claims to be as revolutionary as Wave needs something new and shiny that people haven’t seen before.

Wave also allows you to add a (currently small) number of widgets so that you can add them to your waves. By default you have a polling app installed (’yes’, ‘no’, ‘maybe’ for respondents) and a google map app which doesn’t work for me; it works for others tho so presumably i’m being dumb.

One of the problems I’m finding at the moment is that it’s quite difficult to stay on top of what’s going on in a wave since communication happens at all levels

People can reply to the wave, reply to individual wavelets (particular ‘posts’ in the ‘thread’ to use old fashioned terminology ) and can also edit wavelets that you have posted! It’s a bit artificial to criticise over this at the moment tho I think cos the early waves i’ve been involved with have included about 15 people all doing all sorts of crazy stuff within waves simply to test out what they can do. Once we all get used to using Wave as a tool rather than a plaything it’ll be easier to assess how the new features stack up.

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I’ve long been a fan of services such as Scribd and Docstoc which allow people to share their (or in some cases, other peoples’!) material and enable a whole load of those lovely web2 features that we’ve become so used to that we expect to be almost everywhere.

Obviously given my overwhelming enthusiasm to give my entire life data to H.A.L I’m also a huge fan of Google docs so I was pleased to get an email from another of everyone’s favourite embeddable service Slideshare telling me that I can now upload and share my Google docs via their service.

The process is reasonably slick. Choose the ‘upload google doc’ option and you’ll be asked to give slideshare permission to access your Google docs account. Once done you can choose to upload al or some of your docs and change the titles by which they will be known on Slideshare.

It took a fair old while to convert the doc into Slideshare format (about 12 minutes), but the end result is pretty satisfying. Here’s a copy of the OU Boxee submission document.

Boxee submission

View more documents from jinky32.

Hmm, there seems to be some issues with embed code on the page, but you get the idea!

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Great title huh? You can take the boy out of SEO…etc etc

So, it’s been pretty much radio silence from me over the past few months – essentially I suppose because my role has changed a little and I’m involved in more long term projects than quick win ones.

One of the major things I’ve been working on at the OU is the mainstreaming of Drupal at the OU as the CMS of choice (for non-learning sites). There’s a whole load of work around the environment, security, update strategy, single sign on, theming etc that we’ve had to get to grips with but I’m reasonably confident that come October time the OU will have a great Drupal infrastructure in place. The aim is that it will be both manageable from a support perspective and flexible enough to give developers what they need in order to build the sites they want.

Alongside this work there’s also been some pretty deep thinking about how Drupal can serve as a web publisher for our Content Management System Documentum. Now I’m no Documentum expert so for those of you like me, think of Documentum as basically a big file repository (docs, images etc) where instead of 10 people each having a copy of a single document, the document exists in one place and ten people (if they have the right permissions) can work on it. This obviously means that there is a lifecycle to the document (i.e a version is no longer current) and that there is a LOAD of metadata associated with it.

The challenge in linking the two systems has been around how and where Drupal publishes the files, how Drupal accesses these files, how metadata is handled and how the lifecycle of a document is managed (e.g. how do i ensure that the version of the document on the drupal site remains the right one when the document is updated x number of times in Documentum?).

I’m not entirely sure how much detail I can go in to on this (at least one member of the team is hoping to do the conference circuit for a couple of years on the back of this work ) but it involves some nifty XML work and a rather cool OU custom Drupal module (which we will hopefully be sharing back to the community once we’re finished).

If everything goes well I’ll be able to show you the first live site with all this working by October. Fingers’ crossed!

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Twitter is obviously one of the big online success stories of the past couple of years. Driving to work I’ve even heard Radio 4 talking about it, and various BBC 5 live ‘phone ins’ now actively ask people to tweet them messages. Seems like it’s becoming a recognised channel of communication.

About a year ago enterprise versions of twitter started cropping up, most notably Yammer. These are a great idea in principle because they offer a company all the advantages of twitter but also provide the nice cuddley blanket which is a feeling of control over the environment.

The big problem with these offerings of course is that hardly anyone used them. If you ‘got’ twitter (and are therefore a target audience of Yammer etc) then you have a twitter account and you don’t really want to have to go elsewhere to re-enter your 140 character aphorisms. If you don’t ‘get’ twitter then you are unlikely to be interested in Yammer either.

Back in the dim and distant past I set up the open.ac.uk yammer account. As suggested above some of those OU folk who get twitter created an account and then never used it! no-one who didn’t get twitter created an account (tho admittedly i think i only told people about it via twitter )

Anyway, today (or yesterday perhaps – I have no idea what the date is) Yammer announced Twitter integration by using the #yam tag. I’ve given it a quick test and it works perfectly. Whether it’s enough to reach the tipping point I don’t know, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction!

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The BBC has joined the embed party and announced that BBC News videos will soon be available for UK bloggers to include in their posts.  There are details here on the hows around this, as well as details on the all important T&Cs.

Here’s an example of how it looks in the flesh – pretty nice huh?

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I got tagged by Liam at Online Sales to take part in this 7 things you don’t know about me meme. I guess Liam is typical of loads of people I ’sort-of-know’ in an onliney-type way. It’s great, so much expertise on tap from people all over the world! On the flip side sometimes IM goes mad with people asking you to Digg this, SU that, or Reddit the other – speaking of which – can you take a minute to vote for Bletchley park here?

Anyway, back to the meme!

The Seven Things

1. I was massively into herpetolology from the age of about 6. I guy came to my first school with a garter snake and a fire salamander and I was amazed. I asked my mum if I could have a snake and she said ‘no’, but that I could when I was 12. I remembered and ended up with 2 leopard geckos, a royal python, 2 boas and corn snake. I had to get rid when I went to uni
2. I got tattooed by some random hippy in montezuma, Costa Rica c.1998. It’s in a pretty hidden place so it’s unlikely you’ll ever see it….
3. I’m a theologian by training (to postgrad level) and when I win the lottery I’m doing my PhD!
4. I have three chickens at home who were liberated from a battery farm. Anyone know any recipes that involve lots of eggs?
5. I’m a horder by nature. i keep stuff ‘just in case’. I hoard books and random facts, but sadly not money
6. I think music peaked with drum & bass and that kids these days listen to rubbish
7. I LOATHE people who park in disabled spaces just so they have to walk 10 metres less to get to the supermarket

Who’s Next?
Matt Jukes – backpass.org
Documentally – Our Man Inside
Lauradee – Open Air
The Waving Cat – The Waving Cat
Barnstormed – Barnstormed
Wordia – blog.wordia
Billy the Kid – Billy the Kid

The Meme Rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

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I’ve been meaning to blog about Wordia for ages; firstly cos it’s the brainchild of a good mate of mine and I want to see it succeed, and secondly because I think it’s a great idea!

So, essentially Wordia is an online visual dictionary except that in true read/write web style it’s democratised: Anyone can create ‘their’ definition of a word, wrap it in a context that is meaningful to them (and hopefully others) and upload it to the site for the community to vote on. For example, here’s Dwain Chambers defining ‘challenge’.

I think this is useful for a number of reasons:

1) I have a dictionary well within arm’s reach on my desk but I never use it. I just type the word into Google and see if I’ve got it right (shocking, I know but there you are!). If the wordia definition of the word features highly that will help me and also provide me with a number of other contexts in which the word might be used.

2) It’s a great way to capture neologisms. I, for example, have invented the term web5.0 (I’m playing the long game ) so I should really get on Wordia and define what I mean so that when everyone else catches on they will know that I was the first to use the term and praise me for my originality and insight……….(or flame me)

3) It might help to get people interested in language. I’ve always been more interested in English language than English literature (I like both, but the hows and the whys of the language intrigue me a little more).

4) Related to point 2, I think Wordia could be a great way for academics to reach a new audience. It would be great if a few science types define some often used but less often understood words for the rest of us. Even better if some Business School people got on there and guided us through the lexicon of the recession: it would make academia relevant in a way that sometimes it isn’t.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a great video from Quentin Blake defining ‘illustration’.

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For the last 9 months (ok that’s a complete guess; let’s just say for a while) I’ve been the cold dead hand guiding the ou’s twitter account @openuniversity.  Historically this account has pulled in OU news feeds via Twitterfeed and has tweeted OU / BBC co-productions about an hour before they are due to be aired on TV and Radio (which is pretty cool I think and achieved thanks to the work of the good folk at Open2.net who also feed their twitter account in the same way.

Now the big thing about Twitter (and of course most other soshul medja) is that it’s two-way, it’s a conversation – it’s part of the read/write web.  This is one of the reasons that I hate the BBC’s Testmatch special twitter account which just broadcasts random things and NEVER gets involved in a bit of banter.  It’s also the reason I’ve been feeling a bit unhappy about what we were doing (or rather weren’t doing) with @openuniversity.

As part of day-to-day ’sentiment monitoring’ I keep an eye on twitter mentions of the open university – there’s actually quite a lot. Potential students pondering new courses, existing students bitching about / praising  OU courses – basically the sort of stuff that people discuss in the normal world.  Anyway I’ve always held off following these people on twitter (as @openuniversity) in case they found it a bit uncomfortable, but about ten days ago I decided to give it a go.  Since then I’ve been having a bit of back-and-forth banter (both with students and other universities) and helping out students who send questions to @openuniversity (’can i get an iCal feed of my tutorial dates?’ etc).  All of this has lead to an increase in followers (I started ‘talking’ c.5 feb).

which hopefully suggests it’s become a more useful service for people.  Obvious right?!

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For the past year or so I have use Gmail as my email client for work and personal email (in fact I’ve moved away from Outlook completely, and only use Office when I have to share documents with colleagues who don’t use Gdocs).  I like to think that had my setup pretty well configured, so much so that when i saw this tweet from @problogger

I thought that there was pretty much nothing I could be taught: The rest of this post is about how wrong i was!

Getting Things Done is (according to the Wikipedia page) ‘action management method created by David Allen’, but more inportantly for me, it’s firefox/gmail plugin written by  Andy Mitchel. So, What does it do?

Well, the idea is that you forget about your email inbox as being a mass of information relating to everything you’re working on and separate it out  so that it becomes a project management tool.  You do this by setting up special gmail labels.  Everything you prefix P/ (e.g. P/Platform) is designated as a project (you set up as many P/ labels as you have projects).  Labels beginning S/ are stauses (Next action, Actions, Waiting For, Finished etc) which you attach to emails and which allow you to create custom to-do lists based on projects.  C/ labels are context (e.g. work, personal etc) and R/ labels I use as resources (meeting minutes, contracts, agendas etc).

The time consuming bit is going through you existing emails and assigning each one to a project (if it is related to one), labelling it a resource (if it is), and giving it a status.  I only went back to Dec 08 on this cos I just don’t have time to do it all.  Now when you receive emails into you inbox you action them immediately (if they’re 2 minute jobs), or you label them up (perhaps they are something you want to add to a particular project’s to-do list so the label is S/Action P/my project – all available via a handy drop-down) and archive them.

Similarly GTD GMail makes it easy to send emails to yourself or others that are prelabelled so that when you get replies they are preconfigured to be neatly filed away.

One of the real powers of GTD is the custom searches that it allows you to create (which again are available via drop-down).  So, I have custom searches that show me the to-do lists I have on each project and I can easily create a search that shows me all the minutes for a particular project – nice!  Thanks to the stupid amount of GB gmail gives me I never have to print these off and file them away – they’re just easily findable via my email client.

There’s loads of other good stuff (custom filters, to-do list print options etc) I could get into but I only started using GTD on Wed so I’m still getting to grips with its more arcane aspects.  Anyway, if you have any questions or tips gime a shout!

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