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.

Twitter stumbles, and there goes the neighbourhood

Witness the emotional committment of Twitter users.  Wow, people love it, really want this thing to work, and really love to moan about it as the fail whale displays more and more often.

Twitter looks back on track after a shaky few days back there, which shows that all is not well in microblogging land, and there’s something wrong with the microblogging model, but that’s a topic to take up later.

Having Twitter get slow, turn off features, or just not respond has started to get really annoying.   We’re inclined to include Twitter as an emerging tool to use to build and attract community. But without stability, it’s not going to work predictably . How can we recommend building twitter into a social media campaign?  Well, we can’t really.  Or we have to accept Twitter as a somewhat flaky, sometimes useful tool.

And worse, with Twitter going up and down, there goes the neighbourhood.  People pick up and leave to one of the fifty other microblogging services that are growing up in the shadow of twitter and waiting for users to fall out of the Twitter tree.

Trouble.  We’re never going to find each other if we’re spread across tens of different services.

But then again, we want Twitter, in its lovely cuteness, to work.  But that makes it a monopoly with a secret or currently secret business model.

Tricky.

So, my big needs in microblogging are:

1. I want something reliable that works
2. I want something that accesses most people (that want to be involved)
3. I want it to be long term sustainable, not a monoculture or monopoly with a secret business model

To meet these three, we’re going to need to do some internet-level architecture work to support microblogging and ambient status.  Basically, we’re going to need to:

1. Develop some standards for microblogging messaging
2. Develop standard ways to connect microblogging services together
3. Allow users to migrate from one service to another easily– and use more than one service at once
4. Ensure some level of reliability in messsaging
5. Make sure the whole thing can scale up to the current level of global SMS usage and beyond

This looks a lot like what we have for the internet email architecture.  It took a long time to get organised, and it has some problems, but it is a mostly universal service with lots of servers, providers and clients.

There are a bunch of people talking about these sorts of standardisation. I’ll review the efforts in a later post and see where we are headed.  My guess this is going to take a while and we are going to have some early-adopter pain in the meantime.

Key point:  At some point Twitter is going to have to open up and interwork with other microblogging services.  And that is the moment, in my opinion, when they will really succeed.

Scholarships available for next course

30 June, 2008

5:00 pm

Our Social Media for the Third Sector course is starting soon. Keep 11 July free for the group learning day, and make a commitment before early July so we can work with you on your learning needs analysis.

That’s if you want a taste of a truly educational, capacity building package, and not just a quicky training day.

We are looking for two motivated people / organisations to award 80% scholarships for Part One (and potentially, Part Two).

If you ‘get’ that social media is essential knowledge to:

• build stronger relationships with your stakeholders
• get attention online and in real life
• raise funds
• collaborate creatively and build innovative approaches to social and environmental challenges

.. then apply here.

Find out all about the way we give and support real learning here.

Any questions, just pick up the phone and talk to Libby on 07968 687 107.

As of today, there are still places available, and we won’t decide on the sponsored places until 30 June. But the earlier you apply, the better.

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…

Social media is dying. Long live social media!

So social media has truly hit the mainstream. It even has it’s own comic strip. Are we all onboard and up-to-steam? Thing is, this new way is meant to be real. It’s meant to come from a genuine desire to connect with others (customers, stakeholders… fill in the blank).

I’m starting to cringe about the whole thing. The hype. The hyperbole. Sure, Google’s algorythms (currently) love blogs. Sure we can optimise search and get “seen”. But who’s actually going to be listening?

Some emerging thoughts here about how the cream is going to rise to the top.

Many early adopters are already screaming for the off switch.

We are reaching a new point in the adoption of social media. Something’s gotta give (she says joining Dopplr). There is another tipping point approaching.

Time for some great editing and aggregation. Time for some trusted sources to filter it all for us, and I don’t mean the USA Today Bloggers & Podcasters Guide (even if we do keep ranking 1). Or even cool geek individuals like Scobelizer. I’m looking for something all about my interests, the blogs I want to follow, but more visual. Definitely NOT Google’s Blog Reader.

What do we think Gra… time for a chinwag. Oh look, there’s my husband blogging in the room above me. Time to STOP all this and go find him.

Sussex Digital

Sussex Digital is a new focus for the digital community in Brighton, Hove and surrounding Sussex.   It is beginning with a focus on local events.  We are so lucky here in Brighton. We have a geek event on almost every day or night of the week, making it a very vibrant place for web startups to develop.

Rich talking about Scouta in 1 Minute

Here’s my mate Richard Giles, Scouta’s CEO, giving a one-minute interview. One minute isn’t long, but he managed to fit a fair bit in there.

I’ll be at Hack Day

I just got the word that I’m accepted into the BBC/Yahoo Hack Day. Which sounds like a phenomenal event.
So, now to cook up something interesting to do. Hmm. Something with Pipes and BBC content and a recommendation engine or two perhaps… I wonder.
[Update: I've added the Python language category to the unofficial hack-day wiki to see what sort of group forms there.]

The startup CTO/COO

So, these web ventures sure do a good job of using up all the slack time, which is why posting here has been normally infrequent.

Perhaps I’ll write a bit here about just what’s going on in Scouta for me and just what sorts of things I end up working on day to day wearing my two hats, technical and operations.

Here’s kind of a list off the top of my head:
Tech

• Manage new development. That means:

• getting some consensus amongst the team about features we need to do next;
• trying to pick stuff that is doable so things get moving, avoiding the really hard stuff or invisible stuff;
• working out what we can do later;
• keeping focus in the team on the next goals;
• trying not to get sidetracked by things that don’t really matter;
• keeping development linked to the community/member/customer need;
• Try and maintain a technical vision that is longer than a few weeks away;
• Test things before release and encourage the rest of the team to do that too;
• Be aware of standards and technologies out there; work out if they are important and need to be incorporated;
• Work with industry and standards bodies (like APML working group)

Operations

• Make sure lots of things happen, like:

• Backups
• Servers get paid for
• Stats are collected
• Logfiles are kept
• DBs are backed up/replicated
• Automated email logs are scanned
• Check site security

• Check things like:

• Can people join up?
• Are outgoing emails working
• Are servers up
• Are response times reasonable

Manage:

• setup and config of new servers
• relationships

Wow, that’s enough. That explains why i’m busy :-)

Actually, I don’t do all of this on a daily basis and I do get to dip into the code itself a fair bit. At the moment I’m doing a lot of work on Scouta’s incoming and outgoing RSS. Metadata. It is all about metadata.

Scouta to Twitter: “G’Day World”

Given all the current Twitter madness and the fact they have a nice easy API, it was time to get Scouta talking to twitter.

And a couple of hours later it was done.

So, now, once in a while, currently hourly, Scouta picks a random newly-added fave media item and sends a link to twitter.

You can follow scouta on twitter to see the updates there.
And one of the first things it posted to twitter was a newly added podcast interview that Rich and I just did for Cameron Reilly’s G-Day World podcast.  As it should be :-)

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