Tag Archive for information

New feature for WordPress.com sites – add Google docs and calendars

May 30, 2011 4 comments

The announcement from WordPress that users can embed Google calendars and docs is great news.

We often get asked whether we can add calendars to blogs and there hasn’t been a very simple way until now. Google calendars can be a bit clunky and fiddly, but is still better than nothing. The rest of the Google Docs suite is incredibly useful for things like collaborative spreadsheets and documents if you need a quick and simple way to pull together information.

Read the announcement and tutorials for more details and we’d be keen to hear about any creative or inspiring ways that you could use this new feature.

Quick Tips, Wordpress Guides and Tips , , , , , ,

Browsing for people on Facebook

April 30, 2011 2 comments

Discovered via this very funny Gawker guide to dating on Facebook, the friend browser really shows what Facebook has got: ie nearly everyone in your town.

Assuming you’re signed in and have started filling in your profile it will start unfurling friends of friends straight away. You can add different search terms to refine your search and find everyone who adds their location.

< Talk of the Town: Facebook hyperlocal handbook contents

 

Quick Tips, Using Facebook ,

Keep track of your bookmarks and your friends’ bookmarks, and their friends’ bookmarks (etc)

April 28, 2011 One comment

Jargon warning: there’s no need to be a specialist for what follows, but it does assume knowledge of the inner workings of the web. If it’s incomprehensible, ask a friendly geek to guide you :)

I’ve written a couple of quick tips about Google Reader before, suggesting that it is a powerful tool to follow multiple RSS feeds and to make fast slideshows.

Delicious is a bookmarking tool I’ve used for many years to aggregate and share local content into a tag cloud, a sort of rough map of the local web. As well as my own links, I use delicious to follow the links of other people who I trust, giving myself a better chance of not missing anything useful.

However, in the last few months a lot of people were moving over to other bookmark providers because Yahoo threatened to close delicious down. For example, Dave Briggs and Mike Rawlins moved to Pinboard and Andrew Beekan went for Diigo. All work in similar ways. If you really want to get into the pros and cons of bookmarking services, this crowdsourced Google spreadsheet has it all.

Now that they’ve sold it, I can stick with Delicious to see what happens, but I realised that as a lot of people were moving to other tools, my nice neat network page was going to become fragmented.

Avoiding visiting too many websites is the goal of all of this tedious stuff, so I created a folder to merge all the bookmarks in Google Reader. Now all I need to do is paste the URLs of all the people and networks that I want to follow and Google reader will find the RSS feeds and put them all together for me.

Google Reader allows you to create public folders (see settings), so if you want to see all that I just aggregated, visit this page, and if you want to see it in Google Reader, open an account if you haven’t already got one and then copy and paste that same URL into ‘Add a subscription’.

Quick Tips, Using Facebook , , , , , , ,

Finding public streams about your area on Facebook, Twitter and the wider web through Google

April 23, 2011 One comment
What are people saying about your local area?
Facebook: You can use search to find out, bearing in mind this will only find status updates by people who have not set them to private.
Type your placename into the box at the top (or use this link to the Search page) and ‘Search results for [place], or the Magnifier icon. Then click Posts by everyone on the left to see the public stream.
Twitter: Go to search.twitter.com and type in the placename.
Google: Go to www.google.co.uk/alerts and type in your placename. You can search for ‘realtime’ which will mainly bring up Twitter results, or ‘everything’ which will bring up most new content added to the web. This alert can be emailed to you at intervals that you specify.
The vast majority of results won’t be useful, but scanning them regularly is a really good way of making connections with people talking about your area and widening your sources of news and information. Selectively linking to content that is most useful or taking the trouble to alert people about opportunities you spot is also a good way of developing your website’s reputation.
Other Tools and Tips, Quick Tips, Using Facebook , , ,

What can we do with all these words?

December 10, 2010 4 comments

I love reading minutes and meeting notes. They don’t give you the full picture – the best bits of meetings are normally when someone says “please don’t minute this” – but they tell us a lot.They give us insights into process, debates, promises made, community bugbears.

We also have a lot more discussions going on through our community websites and forums now, involving new people. Blog commenters are sometimes not averse to helpfully giving out phone numbers and names of council staff and relating their conversations in detail. You can have an absorbing time searching through council PDFs trying to pin down particular bits of information, should you be so inclined. Newspapers, of course, have much more space for interaction and viewpoints and their archives are often searchable. The written record is becoming ever-richer and historians will have a good time with all this ephemera.

I’m interested in asking the TAL community: what can we do with it all? Last week data.gov.uk released Your Freedom data, in which every taxi driver and digital economy activist piled in with their own thoughts back in the honeymoon period of the coalition and this caused some interest amongst the developer community but at the time of writing nothing has been posted on its page about what can be done with it.

In a period of massive change and restructuring, all these words are our collective memory. It is the material that could stop us from reinventing the wheel and ignoring community opinions, knowledge and experience. This is a good example of hyperlocal data that needs clever solutions in order for communities to make sense of it all. Useful pictures of the landscape of words would also give more people an entry point to get involved and stimulate new conversations. Paradoxically, the tools, whatever they might be, probably need to be less wordy, otherwise we become paralysed trying to plough through them all.

What are your ideas?

Blog, hyperlocal labs ,
 

  • Newsletter sign up

  • New posts sign up