Everyone’s Blogging

These slides from the training session for the Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce last week. Let me know if you want us to come to your event or run a bespoke event or Masterclass.

More details on our Social Media for Good course soon (looks like next date will be Oct 3 in Brighton).

Covers a bit of an introduction to social media and blogging, plus some questions to get you thinking about your own context, opportunities and challenges.

Some good thinking in the room and animated conversations. Quite a few organisations ready to get blogging and exploring integrated social media in more depth.

A few of you made pledges are you walked out the door about your goals and intentions, so let me know how you get on!
Thanks to all for your warm feedback and to those who helped make it a positive event, especially Lorraine Bell (BCP), Tania “Radiance” Fullerton (Brighton Steiner School) and Fay McDonald.

That set of faces, top left: FaceMap

For the new nodestone banner, I made a little application that goes and builds that set of faces that you see on the top-left banner of the nodestone.com. This post is all about the why and how of that.

We were looking for a way to visually represent the human nature of social media. We’ve got the nice, nodey logo, but where are the people? All the people. All the faces, so that leads us to a bunch of avatars or icons with people’s faces.

Now there is a facebook app called FriendGrid which goes some way there:

But, too big and not enough faces for what we are looking for.  We needed something wide to fill that banner space.  Also, those question marks send the wrong message, no?

So, then, how hard is it to get that set of avatars photos, scale em down and place them in a single image?   Not hard at all, it turns out.

I turned to Twitter.  Twitter users are prety good at uploading avatars, and accessing them via the API is pretty straightforward, so I wrote a quick app with Google AppEngine to accept a twitter username and password and then fetch the avatar URLs and display them in a block.  It worked nicely, so I meddled with the display of the images, got them in a suitable sized block in a browser and screen captured them. I used the Gimp to manipulate the image a bit and make the fractured right hand end. Done.

Next features I’ll add:

• Add more source twitter IDs, so the starting set can be our friends, not my friends.
• Follow friends of friends until we have enough unique faces, this avoiding duplicates
• Remove the ‘no avatar’ images
• Do the actual image manipulation to build a single image from all these.
• Auto-update the nodestone banner once a week or something as friends change,

Sometime over summer I’ll tidy up and publish the app over to AppEngine and let you all know.

Bringing in the New

We are in the middle of adding redirects for authenticblogging.com and presencelabs.com over to our new home at nodestone.com.

Surprise!

Hopefully it isn’t a surprise that you’ve landed here, but if it is, let me explain.   Libby Davy (of authentic blogging) and I (Graeme Sutherland of presencelabs.com) are putting our work and blogs together into nodestone.com.  So, we’ve built a new blog with the content of both of them, and I’m just now cutting over to the new site.

Basically, it should be business as usual once the transfer is complete. In the meantime, there might be a few little issues wih locating your favourite pages. Bear with us for the next few hours on that.

We hope you enjoy the new site.  We’ve had fun making it.  (Except for the late nights and the hard bits :-)

Technical Stuff

Don’t read this unless you care about the technical details of the changeover.

We’re basically putting in permanant redirects (301s) from the old domains to nodestone.com, with a bit of special redirect magic applied to make sure that old url parts map to the new ones.  This means (at least in theory) that google will still like us in the morning, and all our old paths will go somewhere relevant.  Permanent redirects also mean that records get updated permanently, so things like feed readers should get the new feed address if they have half a brain.

That’s all.  I’m off to arrange the nameserver changes for authenticblogging.com.   Ciao.

Pros & cons of blogging - for social entrepreneurs

Some interesting analysis and discussion around this question at Social Edge - the Skoll Foundation online space for social enterpreneurs. Check it out, join in and subscribe to Social Edge is that’s your area.

See other Nodestone posts on blogging.

Power of You Tube meets Izzard

What must this 3 minute clip have done for Eddie Izzard! I loved him already, but after viewing and sharing this countless times, I have to wonder how Lego / Playmobile and other simple animation techniques could be used to create great, viral, social media. If you happen to have some genius talent lying around you can call on.

Enjoy!

If you one of the 4 million who have already viewed it and loved it.. enjoy all over again.

Social Media for the Third Sector

Learning Package: Social Media for the Third Sector

New dates coming soon…

Your chance to get > share > use radical knowledge for positive impact. More information…

Authentic Blogging Community

We’ve started up a Ning community for Authentic Blogging.

Lib pressed the button on this a few days ago and a bunch of interesting people have shown up and some very interesting discussions are taking place around authenticity, blogging and all sorts. If you are interested in the bigger questions around blogging, voice, authenticity and what it all means, then please come and join in.

You Think, I Think, We Think (Better) Together

Been reading reviews about Charles Leadbetter’s book We Think all over the place. Got to get my hands on a copy sooon (come on Rosie, hand it over).

If anyone is trying to get their heads around Web 2.0, social media, new paradigm thinking and all that claptrap - get a look at this. Lovely simple animation. I’m going to use it at the beginning of all my courses. Free event coming up soon to give people a taste of it all. Watch this space.

Guardian review here (including Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky) which also looks reeal good.

Shame The Big Issue review isn’t available online. A different and very valid take on things.

No wonder most journalist’s I meet are annoyed with blogging and What’s Going On with we-think.

No wonder I am compelled to work in and support this space.

So glad Rosie Sherry is in it with me (thanks for the video).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiP79vYsfbo&hl=en]

Blogging for Change Agents

Libby has just started putting up info for her next series of authentic blogging courses to run this year: Blogging for Change Agents.

These are focussed on entrepreneurs, social, environmental and ethical enterprises, charities and other third sector organisations that are looking to spread their wings in the blogging and social media area.

For more info please head over to authentic blogging for the course details.

Newbies Guide to Blogging

Nice simple, practical guide to getting you blogging right from Dustin Wax at the very useful lifehack.org. Mainly for individuals but the principles are the same for enterprises and others.

Follow the links to explore your own context and see the list at the end to extend your learning.

Highly recommended!

Check it out. 

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