Tag Archive for mike rawlins

hypARlocal demo at Nesta event for makers of tech for community good

September 5, 2012 No comments

Talk About Local got the opportunity to spread the word about the hypARlocal prototype we’ve been working on at a Nesta organised event for people working with innovative tech projects in London last night.

The hypARlocal work takes a different look at the potential that augmented reality platforms offer for content with a public service emphasis such as local news and information.

So far we’ve worked with a number of hyperlocal publishers, including the Edinburgh Reporter, to showcase local content via AR (you can read more about this at the dedicated blog here).

During the event, William and Mike gave a demo of the two differ types of AR – the geo-tagged content from the hyperlocal publishers and then object-triggered AR where a physical object triggers an interactive experience via a mobile device.

Will Perrin presenting at Nesta

Using this technology the demo showed how information from public health posters can be instantly displayed in a different language or take the reader to further resources.

Earlier in the evening the group – all makers of technology aimed at supporting communities – heard about the #wewillgather project. Its founders were inspired to create the platform after starting the riot cleanup using nothing but twitter. They realised the organising power technologies offers despite there being no organisation and are now rolling out a beta service which helps people locate and volunteer to ‘do good things’.

See it in action using the hashtag, via twitter @wewillgather or at www.wewillgather.co.uk.

Blog, Events, Talk About Local , , , , , , , , ,

Twitter – Verified or not?

March 9, 2012 No comments

Every now and then I come across a Twitter user who puts a ✔ after their user name or uses the words Verified Account in their profile. They do this to add an air of legitimacy to the account, to make them more plausible. I have seen an increase in and reported spammers over the last week who are using these ‘tricks’ to make them appear to be legitimate accounts.

The spam users have been trying various phishing tricks to get people to part with various bits of information, usually with a link to a legitimate looking webpage for a bank or courier firm. Pretty much what you see in the phishing e-mails, I guess you can say it is evolution.

Twitter verifies very few accounts in the great scheme of things, they did at one point have a public verification system in Beta test but this has now been closed and now they only verify things like, brands, partners, major celebrities, bands, politicians, law enforcement & government departments.

If you are using twitter.com when you look at a legitimate verified account from Twitter it will have this icon

after the user name like this

it won’t be in the profile, it won’t be after the @staffspolice user name, it will be clearly shown at the end of the bold user title at the top.

If you are using one of the desk top Twitter clients the verified logo may look like the one above or it may be more subtle like this.

in the iPhone app the same account looks like this

with a tick in a blue cut away corner denoting that the account is verified by Twitter.

If the Twitter account doesn’t have this icon next to the user name then it isn’t verified by Twitter, which means that they have not had to provide whatever proof Twitter require to prove legitimacy. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t necessarily an ‘official’ account, just that Twitter haven’t given it their stamp of approval.

Thanks to the work done by @nickkeane all the main accounts for UK Police forces are verified with Twitter, most of the ‘sub’ accounts for specialist units like Dog Units, Air Support Units & Neighbourhood Policing Teams aren’t, but you could check the validity of these by looking for a page like this from Staffordshire Police that lists all their official social media channels on your local force website.

If you want to check any twitter account yourself, you can do this by going to https://twitter.com/ to get to the Twitter home page (make sure you use https and not just http) then in the address bar enter the user name, without the @ after the / and press return.

https://twitter.com/staffspolice

this will return the user home page for that account and you will be able to see clearly on there if the account is verified or not. As I said earlier if the account isn’t verified, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t an official account, just that it isn’t verified by Twitter.

As ever the usual safety rules apply with Twitter, if some person or company contacts you out of the blue asking you to provide them with personal details or sending you links to pages where you have to enter personal details then ignore them.

 

 

Advice and Guidance, Blog, Quick Tips , , , , ,

Adding Tables To A Post

January 4, 2012 5 comments

We occasionally get asked about how to create tables in posts like this

column 1 Coumn 2 column 3
row 1
row 2
row 3
row 4

It is easier than it looks, you could create your table in your favourite word processing package and just copy and paste it in to your blog, but this will probably give you some strange results with fonts & text sizes that may break in different browsers.

The more elegant solution is to create the table manually so you get just the bits of code you need.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to do this in the in built editor on a wordpress.com site so you have to hand craft the code, but don’t panic this is not as daunting as it sounds.

To create the table above I used this HTML code:

<table width=”90%” cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”0″>
<tr>
<td>column 1</td>
<td>Coumn 2</td>
<td>column 3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>row 1</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>row 2</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>row 3</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>row 4</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>

 

To get it to work and so the code does not look like it does above, you must paste it in to the HTML tab of the create / edit post or page window. If you don’t then you will just see the code as it is above rather than the table at the top of the page.

A bit of information about the code to help you understand it better and to help you adapt it for your requirements.

<table width=”90%” cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”0″> <- this sets your table up to be 90% of the width of the page with no spacing or padding around the cells.

I always make the table less than the width of the page as it looks nicer, make sure you use a % and not pixel width. Pixel (a number without the %) is a set width and if you change your theme at any time the width of the table could be bigger than the width of the page and it will break and look ugly.
<tr> <- this tells the table it is a new row
<td> <- this creates a new column, what you put in here will show up in the first cell as long as it is before this -></td>
</tr> <- this closes the row

All you do is repeat the code for each row you need.

The number of columns on each row needs to be the same other it will start to cause problems.

Feel free to copy, adapt and use the bit of code above or you could ask Google to find you a HTML Table Generator.

You can of course go it to great detail with your tables and set rows to different heights or columns to different widths, add padding etc. You can find out how to do this by asking google

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

Advertising on your wordpress.com site

December 5, 2011 No comments

As we all know, we can’t advertise on our wordpress.com blogs, which is rather annoying as many of you have found out over time that adverts ‘do’ appear on your wordpress site. WordPress do place their own Google ads on your site, but the chances are you will never have seen them as they are only displayed to users who are not logged in to the service. This is all covered by their Terms of Service.

9: Advertisements. Automattic reserves the right to display advertisements on your blog unless you have purchased an Ad-free Upgrade or a VIP Services account.

Anyway that is changing, you can now display adverts on your wordpress site and urn revenue from them. Before you go dashing off to sign up Bill the butcher for a £5 a week ad on your site, I should make it a bit more clear..

WordPress have announced that they are launching WordAds, with their partners Federated Media. This deal will allow WordPress site owners to sign up to show brand ads from Federated Media on their own sites and earn revenue.

So you can’t go and get local ads which are relevant to your site but you at least will be able to earn a small return for the ads on your site.

You need to have a custom domain on your site and not the standard my site.wordpress.com URL. Buying a domain and having it mapped to your wordpress site currently costs £10 ($17) if you do it all within WordPress.

I can’t see what the rates are for site owners, so it isn’t possible to say if you would cover your £10 investment or make any income from the adverts but if you have a popular blog hosted on wordpress.com, already with a custom domain it might be worth a punt.

To sign up for WordAds you need to be signed in to WordPress and then go to http://en.wordpress.com/apply-for-wordads/

Signing up isn’t a guarantee that you will be accepted according to this statement on the sign up page.

Selection will be based on level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog. Some blogs may not be accepted. Entering the form below does not commit you to the advertising program. It just signals your interest in learning more.

It also doesn’t make it clear if when you sign up to WordAds if it replaces the Google Ads or is additional to them. If you do sign up, please let us know your experiences and what the revenue rates are.

Blog, hyperlocal, Quick Tips , , , , , , , , ,

Some useful links 17/09/2010

September 17, 2010 No comments

Here’s some links I spotted recently, which you might find interesting:

What’s beautiful to you? is a photography competition being run by Dezeen and The Photographers’ Gallery to find ‘Areas of Outstanding Urban Beauty’. ‘The idea behind the competition is to find out what people love about the places where they live’, so submit a photo of somewhere beautiful to you by 5pm on Monday 11th October 2010.  The winning photograph will get published in The Photographers’ Gallery in London.

Digital Birmingham on History Pin – Simon Whitehouse talks about using History Pin map of photos and stories to submit his images of the relatively recent tornado in Birmingham, and wonders aloud how local authorities might use their archived photographs with History Pin.

‘Meet The Communities is a free, one-off networking and discovery event where we’ll hear from some of the big online communities about the partnerships they’ve developed with public sector organisations and commercial brands.’ It’s on Friday 1st October in London.

MACE Full Circle may be of interest to those in the East and West Midlands regions – looking to ’realise the potential of films and videos currently hidden away in attics and sheds in your community’ and making it accessible.

The London Neighbourhoods Online Unconference 2010 is next Saturday 25th September – for Londoners running neighbourhood websites to ‘share experiences, learn from one another, network and maybe think about how to take things to the next level’.

Hyperlocal Govcamp West Midlands ‐ ‘a smallish midweek affair for West Midlands types taking place in Walsall’ on 6th October, which our very own Mike Rawlins has been helping Dan Slee, Andy Mabbett and Stuart Pezholio to organise.  The event is for people from the public sector, web developers and hyperlocal bloggers to get together and exchange and hatch ideas.  It’s sold out but there is a waiting list.

Blog, hyperlocal, Writing and Content Ideas , , , , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Entries  

  • Newsletter sign up

  • New posts sign up