Is This Future Shock? » Web 2.0

What does your website look like to me?

SteveEllwood — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:07:19 +0000

The image above is what the website of Inventory magazine looks like, to me.

Like many others, I generally block Flash using Flashblock. Most Flash is an intrusion, and it slows up my machine and uses resources I could use to keep more tabs open… Yes, I can choose to see what is in Flash. Why does this site not want me to see anything?

If I can’t instantly get something from your site… I’ll likely move on, and any chance of sharing knowledge will have gone.

My attention was drawn to this site via a posting from Paul Downey entitled Polite Comment, about Web Design. He’s started looking at Web Design and is trying to encourage

standards based Web sites which work in any browser and which are truly inspirational and from which we can learn from using view-source

I fully support Paul’s campaign, and encourage others to support this.

As I said in Lessons from Jamie Zawinski

You don’t need stuff to be unreadable to be attractive.

One of Paul Downey‘s erstwhile colleagues, Phil Hawksworth, (@philhawksworth), is a passionate advocate of Unobtrusive Javascript and Progressive Enhancement – and made an explanatory site about this. You can see the site at unobtrusify.com, and read how unobtrusify works.

So, you can make stuff look good and read properly.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Thinking social media, ID and Facebook names

SteveEllwood — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 07:12:46 +0000

Two face

Having seen all the furore about Facebook names, I got mine.

Originally, it is http://facebook.com/steveellwood.

However, you can also find it – and me – at http://steveellwood.com/facebook.

Similarly, I’m http://twitter.com/steveellwood – but you can find me at http://steveellwood.com/twitter.

What’s interesting – to me in any case - is how I ended up with my “branded” pages.

I’d seen Paul Downey, @psd, make a comment about facebook names. I’d a while ago added Anil Dash, @anildash to my friendfeed list – to my shame, I’ll admit I’m still learning what I might do with Friendfeed, so I spotted the Facebook names post I blogged about the other day.

In the comments about that, I saw the approach Ross Rader (@rossrader) took, using the link to his domain.

I twittered about this, and a friend and colleague Rob Collingridge, @robcollingridge, took this up, and implemented it on his domain. I’m like “Wow, was that easy to do?”

Rob sticks up some instructions on his Facebook wall. Drat, my domain is hosted on wordpress.com. Maybe I need to selfhost. I’ll ask.

Another twitter friend, @akaSteve, encourages me, and kindly offers assistance. I already have hosting though, so a day later, my domain is moved, my blog is moved and upgraded – and I can point to Twitter and Facebook from my domain.

All because I saw something on Twitter.
Image Credit: larry&flo

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Things in transition

SteveEllwood — Sun, 17 May 2009 16:13:43 +0000

Back in October, I was reminding people to keep up with their social networks as the recession brought challenges.

While it was hardly prescient, it was brought home to me when my role at work changed; my operating division had what’s called a headcount challenge – basically, they needed less people to run the work – and I was placed in what’s called a transition centre.

Now, for years I’ve worked on an assignment basis – work comes up, I say I’m interested, and if suitable, I get to do the job… which might be for a month, a quarter, or even a year or two. You learn a lot of new skills, get to work with really interesting people and technologies and then move on.

This means moving to a new role is not a surprise, and nor is having to change what I do. Currently, I’ve been asked to manage some folk as they move from one role to another.

Nearly everyone realises as the business environment changes, the work we’re carrying out has to change – and we’ll need to be flexible to do this. What I’m looking forward to is using some tools rather more Enterprise 2.0 than spreadsheets to help people on their journey.

Whatever people like me do to help individuals, their new roles and assignments have to be found by them – and one of the best ways? Through their own networks.

So, I repeat my plea.
Keep up with your social networks.

Image Credit: ruSSeLL hiGGs

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

What's my blog about?

SteveEllwood — Sun, 17 May 2009 10:12:30 +0000

Image Credit:wordle

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office – social media experts?

SteveEllwood — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:59:23 +0000

I’ve just remotely attended a really interesting presentation in London [OK, I attended remotely], by Media Snackers who talked about engaging with the young, through social media and so on.

Couple of things:

The world’s changed, and it’s not turning back

used to be their strapline – but they’re now emphasising

cheaper, quicker, sexier

as what the social media stuff can do. Look at their site to see what they are about.
A couple of the points they raised struck me – the takeup of social media amongst the young is astonishing; they highlighted a Forrester report which segment the social media area into

Creators
Critics
Collectors
Joiners
Spectators
Inactives

and this is segmented by age – with the creatives and critics highly represented in 16-24, with spectators and inactives being preponderantly 50+ (like me!)

perhaps nothing too new for some of us – although there are scary figures about the change in media consumption, but something he said struck a chord. More or less:

… a lot of people seem to be getting into the space; I mean, look at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office – they’re a lot of suits, but they’re on Flickr, on YouTube, on Twitter, they blog… where are you? I mean, c’mon guys…

I thought, that can’t be right, can it?
Hmm…
So, I had a brief look, and found a Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and blog platform presence for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. It may not be exciting, but it looks like they do have a coherent social media strategy.

What are you doing?

If someone looks for you on Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter – what will they find? If they search for a blog presence or social media involvement – what will they see?

If you’re not taking part in the conversation… it will go right on. Without you.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Social Media & Knowledge Management

SteveEllwood — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 12:20:24 +0000

Social Media in the Enterprise

I wondered about the impact social media tools were making in knowledge management for the enterprise. We have got some very rapid growth in the takeup of the tools in my company; we have loads of wikis, internal blogs – growing use of Twitter.

I wondered about the difference between *Information* Management & *Knowledge* management.

Thanks to a tweet from @elsua I found my way to an excellent presentation on Knowledge Management given by John Bordeaux (@JBordeaux, since you ask).

What I Did

View more presentations from John Bordeaux.

As with many of these things, what you can take away from it depends to some extent on your organisational culture. I found it very interesting, particularly the view on

Basic information sharing infrastucture – just do it!
…

Enterprise search

Democratic web publishing

Social media! Everything 2.0

Image Credit: I am K.E.B.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

@SouthwestAir responds to questions to La Guardia

SteveEllwood — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:32:00 +0000

I’ve posted about corporate use of Twitter before. I like the way it can build a brand’s position and personality.

I really liked this use of a response to a question from Jaunted by the Twitter face of @SouthwestAir (Christi) – and of course, she tweeted about it. Now, that’s a great way to use your Twitter account. They get it.

Flock O' Tweets – sorts tweeters into flocks

SteveEllwood — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:13:37 +0000

Every now and then you find a little mashup that makes you go “Now that’s a good idea!”.

Flock O’Tweets is one.
Put a group of those you follow in, separated by commas: out pops a nice little RSS feed for you to consume at your leisure.

Give it a try.

Even Demos says allow Facebook at work

SteveEllwood — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 09:08:58 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

In an article on use of social networking sites reported on the BBC, a Demos report states that firms should allow the use of these sites at work.

“Banning Facebook and the like goes against the grain of how people want to interact. Often people are friends with colleagues through these networks and it is how some develop their relationships.”

When even the BBC and Demos are picking up issues @jobsworth was blogging about last year in Facebook and enfranchisement you figure this must be going mainstream.

Now, as long as companies can hold their nerve and not retreat into the comfort zones of “retrench/forbid/ban” – and revert to centralised command & control, maybe some of the innovation at the edges, and the contacts people build will help us get through the recession; if not, at least it will give their people some more human contact and stability in difficult times.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

The URI is the Thing (TUITT)

SteveEllwood — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:44:15 +0000

Paul Downey – also known as @psd – has done another one of his pen & ink masterpieces conveying the importance of the URI.

I’ll admit to my shame, than it wan’t until I started reading some of Paul’s stuff on Web APIs that I even realised what URIs were.

Of course, I soon learned how to identify a Cool URI thanks to Tim Berners-Lee

This shows shows the perils of ignoring the virtues of the URI…

You can get a clean high-resolution PDF from archive.org, and see the annotated copy at Flickr