Twitter lists gathered on a wiki blog or forum August 2, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : blogs and community, web2.0, tools, Wiki , 3commentsAs the use of twitter continues to spread despite the restricted service and downtime, a commonplace event for communities is to start compiling lists of links to each other’s twitter accounts. These are handy for anybody who hasn’t already built up their network because you can quickly add a bunch of people who are all involved in the same interest or practice. Acting as a kind of jump start into twitter for groups, it feels like a community indicator of some sort.
If the community is based mainly on a web forum or email list then it can start with a message from one member who is a twitter enthusiast, that turns into a long thread with the same message re-quoted and a new line added at the bottom. That’s not ideal, but it works for a while and builds up a volume of attention to the activity.
Over on one bloggers’ forum we tried compiling the list of member’s twitter links and putting it into a new service called “dropio” where anybody could upload new files and links, but that service proved problematic.
When the same process broke out at E-mint, a community for online facilitators, ‘community managers’ and moderators it wasn’t long before somebody - Ed Mitchell - said “Definitely a wiki job, this one” and so here we have the ….
E-mint twitter list on DARwiki
The advantage of having the twitter list on a wiki is that you can link to what will be always the latest version and that members can easily add themselves or make corrections.
If it’s a person-centric or blog-centric community such as Darren Rowse’s pro-blogger readers, the twitter list is gathered from the comments left on an invitation post and then published on the blog.
If the community is forming in a friendfeed room then there’s probably no need to compile a twitter list at all because the aggregator sort of does that automatically in that each member’s tweets are in their own streams and twitter links in their services page - which stands in as a profile page on friendfeed.
What other formats and processes have you seen out there for gathering twitter lists?
More Friendfeed tips - video 3 May 30, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : friendfeed, social objects, web2.0, tools , 3commentsFour more tips for getting to grips with FriendFeed
In this third video of the series I show four simple techniques for delving further into the productive use of Friendfeed as a social media tool.
So this being a Friday, you’re now all set for an exciting weekend experimenting and exploring the fast growing conversations in Friendfeed Rooms. Seeya there.
Note: due to a misunderstanding of Blip TV episodes you might have failed to view video 2 in this series which is here: Friendfeed and Social Objects
And if you can’t access video at all for some reason, there are some transcript notes included below and over on edocr.com at Friendfeed video transcript. Thanks to Allison Reynolds 100 eggs post for that idea.
Friendfeed and Social Objects May 28, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : friendfeed, internet, social objects, tools , 5commentsIn this second screencast video about Friendfeed, I talk about the way Friendfeed uses social object theory to add stickiness to imported feeds. There’s also a discussion of Friendfeed rooms, and a reply to Linda Hartley’s question about the first video in this series: Friendfeed for Microblogging.
Warning: This screencast is hosted on Google video Blip.TV because I overshot the length limit of ten minutes for youTube - oops.
Social Object theory or Object Centred Sociality has been explained by Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku.
If you are trying out Friendfeed yourself, you might subscribe to mine here: Andy Roberts Friendfeed
Friendfeed for microblogging - a screencast video May 26, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : friendfeed, social objects, web2.0, tools , 6commentsFriendfeed is more than just a clever lifestream aggregator for all your other applications, it’s also a micro blogging platform in its own right. Here’s a screencast video I made to show how.
In the next screencast video of this series, I’ll show how Friendfeed microblog entries can be social objects, and the use of “rooms”.
Meanwhile, I’d be interested to hear how you think the future will unfold in this area. Twitter has the best community at present but can it hold on to it? Friendfeed has some of the elements of Facebook but without the apps. Have you tried migrating to Jaiku or Pownce? Can’t understand what’s the point of microblogging is anyway?
How to convert a Word doc or HTML to Wiki Markup April 5, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : mediawiki, tools, Wiki , 4comments
I came across some more tips for converting Word documents so that the content can be added to a wiki. That’s something which a corporate Knowledge Management pogramme is likely to require, and can be handy for individuals from time to time as well. The challenge is to avoid temptation to open up the wiki for raw HTML input and then putting the really bloated and non standard html code which Word produces itself into the wiki, because then nobody is ever going to really want to wade through all that rubbish in order to edit the content. That’s similar to the problem where one person likes to use one of the attempts at a WYSIWYG wiki editor for mediawiki to create pages, and then another person tries to develop the page further using the plain wiki text editor - it’s messy.
So any tool which generates nice plain simple wiki text from other inputs is going to be great for migrating content from out of email attachments and intranet databases and out onto the flat hierarchy of the open wiki space.
I generally use this one for converting from HTML pages into mediawiki syntax:
and the tip below for converting to html through gMail is a good one too. Did you know you can use that technique to convert pdf’s into editable text as well?
Convert Word doc or Webpage to wiki - A Consuming Experience
For me, the two ways which worked the best were:
- Convert Word to HTML via Gmail, then convert the Webpage’s HTML to wikitext with Emiliano Bruni’s excellent HTML2Wiki Converter (where you paste the raw HTML code into the top box, and the wiki code appears in the bottom box which you can copy and paste into your wiki). Or (less good in its conversions, I found) -
- Convert Word to wiki direct using a Word macro - Word2MediaWikiPlus worked OK, though nowhere near as well as the above, for a MediaWiki wiki and PBWiki wiki that I tried them on (and those are probably two of the more popular wiki software platforms around); the results needed quite a lot of tidying.
The Jelly Art Club movie March 18, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art, Community, tools , add a commentTwitter profile pictures are on the change, largely as a result of “something-friday” events involving people, body parts and peas. So my regular pic which I use in lots of places suddenly starts to looks as if I forgot to change it back after chinposin friday. So for a short while I put one up of a tiny little me standing on a rock in the Aberglasyn pass near Beddgelert, then changed it to the one from my long standing Flickr account.
Karyn asked if there’s a story behind it which got me remembering where the drawing came from. I originally drew it very quickly in flash to represent myself in the prototype of an animation I started playing with. I was quite pleased with the rough and ready resemblance and I decided to keep it for the movie and repurpose as an avatar in some discussion boards, most of which are now defunct except for flickr where it remains. The ultimate accolade occurred at a face to face gathering of online friends who’d never met before when Tom, who’d been wandering around Tate Modern trying to find us, said that he recognised me from my avatar.
So here’s the story of the jelly art club:
Critique of this blog February 4, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : 31daychallenge, distributed research, blogs and community, tools , 2commentsNing Group
I went to the better blog Ning group which is kind of a community of practice for some bloggers, and asked for a critique of my blog, from the point of view of a new reader. It’s one of the tasks in Darren Rowse’s 31 day challenge. Then I hid under the duvet and waited to see what, if anything, might arise. Christine Martell responded with a screencast which is a great way to review any website.
Screencast
The screencast is hosted at screencast.com which means I can’t at present embed it here, so here’s an ordinary text link to go and listen to Christine as she explores this blog and remarks upon it, followed by my response below:
http://www.screencast.com/t/GrQpa0kXhC
Response
Many thanks for the screencast Christine, you gave me several things to think about and work on there. That was a great way to communicate about a blog’s functionality and hopefully took up a bit less of your time than typing up a critique. You also hit the nail exactly on the head straight away by exposing the central problem that I’m grappling with - the combination of several seemingly unrelated themes or niches into one blog. The only thing that ties them altogether is the common author, myself. So I have diverse target audiences, apart from the very small audience that may be interested in me, friends and family so to speak. So I’m always trying to isolate the categories and pages into slices that can be consumed on their own. What I discovered from Google Analytics is that certain individual posts can gain an audience of their own, coming from the search engines and then moving onwards. This is in fact how I’ve started to derive a small income from the blog, to recoup expenses, through some individual posts in the archive. But a series of individual disconnected posts does not a blog make. Which is why I set myself the goal of increasing RSS subscriptions and joined in the current 31daystoabetterblog group, to see if I can bring it all together a bit more. One thing I’m considering is to see if I can provide a selection of RSS feeds for the main categories. That’s better than having separate blogs, although I do have some of those as well!
Action points from the critique:
- Explain Social objects at the beginning of the jump-off page
- Tweak the RSS “Full” panel ( built in to theme)
- Explore moving the comments link ( also theme)
- Keep grappling with the challenge of serving unrelated niches
Is it time to consider changing themes? Probably not in the middle of all this other activity.
Thanks again Christine for giving great feedback.
Oh, and I’ve also wondered about the feeling of being ‘watched’ and spotlighted by mybloglog as we surf around each other’s blogs, not at all anonymously. I suppose we are assumed to have taken that on board when we join that service. I’ve tried three of these type of things and ditched the other two. I also upgraded mybloglog for the better stats, which I find very useful in combination with Google Analytics.
Now over to other readers:
What did you think of Christine’s screencast and my response? Can you help me understand better some of the issues raised, or maybe add your own points please? I promise not to turn it into a blog all about blogging, there are enough of those already.
Movable Type and WordPress January 25, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wordpress, tools, Wiki , 8commentsVictor Acquah wrote to me asking about blogging software. I can’t answer his request to recommend a blogging tool which has a robust wiki module incorporated into it. I use a combination of WordPress and MediaWiki but does anyone know of a good “Bliki” combination?
To explain why I migrated my own blog from Movable Type to WordPress a couple of years ago I said that my Movable Type blog was hosted for me by an organisation which now no longer exists, so a move to my own domain was a sensible step to take. At the time, MT was the best blogging software available, but it was overtaken by WordPress several years ago. What is the current situation though?
WordPress is getting ever more popular but there may be signs that the core code is getting slightly over ambitious, with successive new releases breaking established plugins and themes. People are sometimes frightened to upgrade.
And Movable Type 4 has been developed, released as Open Source with maybe some of the fancy features from Vox incorporated, but I don’t have direct experience of that.
If you were a new blogger with no baggage or archive to lug around, starting completely afresh what would be your choice of platform and why?
NetNewsWire is now free January 10, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Mac, tools , add a commentNetNewsWire Lite is a great client RSS reader for the Mac but there was also a “pro” version called NetNewsWire for a small registration charge.
Now the full version is free as well.
http://inessential.com/2008/01/09.php
( via Tom Morris )
So will I switch from Google Reader? Well no, not completely but I’ll use this as an opportunity to start afresh with a new list of RSS subscriptions grouped into folders. Then again, I had intended to do that with Vienna the open source reader which languishes unused in my applications folder.
Give this man a job building a wiki September 29, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Microjobs, tools, Wiki , 9commentsI wouldn’t mind a job myself facilitating wikis for communities of practice but this is about building a new piece of wiki software, a platform if you like, and Tom knows what exactly what he wants to make:
what I really want to do is create a fork or version of MediaWiki that has all the features I’ve blogged about previously. Yes I want WYSIWYG but I want it to integrate with the wiki when it comes to making links. I want to be be able to create (orphan) pages without creating a WikiWord, saving, clicking to create the page. I want a great design(s). I want a beautifully clean syntax that I never actually use. I want a GUI editor that can interface via XML RPC. I want a super simple installation that asks me what sort of wiki this is to be, personal, shared. I want this wiki also to be a blog (or bliki). I want another million small improvements I’ve developed to do with information design, usability and IA.
In short I want to make MediaWiki for the masses and I want someone else to pay me to make it and give it away for free.
I think it would be great if somebody is willing to put up a bounty for Tom Smith to build the wiki software he’s been imagining for years. It only needs one viable project to make it worthwhile, and then after that it would be open and available for improvement and implementation on any number of others. One possible implementation could be an open community for microjobs exchange.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
