Web 2.0 Round-up

Compiled and edited by Karen Blakeman karen.blakeman@rba.co.uk

Web 2.0 Round-up is a compilation of recent postings and comments to the UKeiG Web 2.0 blog at http://ukeig.wordpress.com/. The primary purpose of this blog is to link to support materials for UKeiG's Web 2.0 workshops and seminars, and to provide news and updates on Web 2.0 applications. The RSS feed for the blog is http://ukeig.wordpress.com/feed , and the comments feed is at http://ukeig.wordpress.com/comments/feed.

You can also view the feeds on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ukeig . This is mainly a Twitterfeed of the Yahoo! Pipes combined UKeiG RSS feeds, supplemented by comments and updates on UKeiG activities. Comments and chit chat are welcome.

We also have a Twitterfeed for the 2009 UKeiG Conference at http://twitter.com/ukeig2009 .

Web 2.0 in general

How to Delete Accounts from any website

“I'm sorry.. sob..it was not meant to be. We seem to have grown apart over the last few months. It's not you, it's me – I've moved on. I hope we can still be friends, but perhaps not. It's good-bye I'm afraid and I hope that you can forget all about me and find someone else….”

If only ending relationships with social networking sites were that easy. PC Magazine's “How to Delete Accounts from Any Website” http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2342599,00.asp takes you through the steps you need to take to delete your ‘stuff' from 23 services. You may have thought it was hard enough trying to stop Facebook being your friend but, as many of us have discovered, Google Blogger is in a class of its own:

"This Google-owned blogging service has accounts that can't be closed. What Blogger does offer are steps to “create the same effect.” First, delete all blogs associated with the account, and remove any personal info from your user profile. Blogger even suggests you enter false information in the required fields to get around them. That's all you can do."

Thanks to Phil Bradley http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2009/03/how-to-
delete-social-network-accounts.html for the heads up on this one.

Wordle – Obama Inauguration Speech

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/452883/Obama_Inauguration_Speech – someone had to do it!

A few words of explanation for those who do not know what Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) does. Wordle is just one of many tools that analyse a chunk of text and produce a graphic showing which words are mentioned most often. You can either paste a chunk of text into a box or point the tool at a URL. See also “Tag clouds for analysing documents” (http://ukeig.wordpress.com/2008/06/29/tag-clouds-for-analysing-documents/)

Blogs

A Guide to Corporate Blogging

A Guide to Corporate Blogging (http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/
10/15/a-guide-to-corporate-blogging/) looks at why blogging is crucial to corporations, and outlines 13 Steps Fortune 500 companies take to create a blog. Cisco, Intel and HP share their experiences and approach to blogging.

The first two steps are the most important. Number 1 is to determine if blogging is a good fit for your company – it may not be. Remember just because other similar organisations are doing it does not mean that you have to follow suit. There may be other, more appropriate channels of communication for your company. Number 2 is to determine if your company is willing to invest in a blog. Although blogs can be built on free platforms, time and money will be needed to customize it. Then there is the cost of allocating staff hours for blogging, maintaining the blog and managing comments and feedback.

Jeremy Wright, CEO of b5media, noted, “A bad blog is worse than no blog. A dead blog is worse than no blog. But an engaging blog is one of the best things in the world that you can do for your business.

The remaining steps are:

3. Create a strategy
4. Ensure that everyone is on the same page
5. Determine the Involvement of PR
6. Select Bloggers
7. Train the Bloggers
8. Write Posts
9. Realize that the Blog doesn't need a tone
10. Edit
11. Establish a Comment Policy
12. Develop a Promotion Strategy
13. Establish a Measurement program

The comments to the posting take up more room than the article itself, but are worth reading. A couple of them mention the initial time involved to get started, but that it is worth it in the long run in terms of increased traffic and business.

Facebook

Why local government shouldn't be on Facebook

This is an interesting post from Simon Wakeman (http://www.simonwakeman.com/2009/02/25/why-local-government-shouldnt-be-on-facebook/), who is Head of Marketing at Medway Council in southeast England, as well as a freelance communications consultant. It voices concerns that many of us have in using Facebook, not just within the public sector but also for commercial, private sector organisations. Although he says that he does not believe that Councils should have a presence on Facebook, he thinks it is better that councils are trying Facebook rather than avoiding it altogether.

I suspect that the following from the posting will resonate with many people's feelings about using Facebook in the professional environment:

The oft-repeated adage about “build it and they will come” is as wrong on Facebook as it is anywhere else on the Web.

Just because you have a presence on Facebook (whether it's as a corporate body or for a specific service area), that doesn't mean you're automatically using Facebook to its greatest potential as a communications tool.

Try searching out people in your area using Facebook already. Look for groups that are concerned with your area. Try to spot activists among the groups – who seem the most active and vocal?

Once you've done this think about how to engage with these people appropriately – and I don't mean send them a message saying “I see you're from XXX, why not join our group?”

The discussion between readers and Simon in the comments at the end of the article are also worth serious consideration.

Status of UK Local Councils' Facebook Fan Pages and Groups

Another useful listing from LizAzyan Research on what UK local councils are doing with respect to social media. As well as detailing which local councils are doing what on Facebook (http://www.lgeoresearch.com/status-of-uk-local-councils-facebook-fan-pages-and-groups-as-of-16th-january-2009/) there is a good table showing the difference between Facebook Fan Pages and Facebook Groups.

Google Docs

Google Docs suffers privacy glitch

Google has discovered a “privacy glitch” (http://news.cnet.com/google-docs-suffers-privacy-glitch/ ) that inappropriately shared access to a small fraction of word-processing and presentation documents stored on Google Docs.

“We've identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document,” Google said in a note they sent to affected users.

So the data was not shared with the world at large, only with those with whom you have collaborated in the past. But that person may have left the company or not have permission to access that particular document. Google estimates that the problem affected only 0.05 percent of documents stored on their service. Although that might seem a small number, given the increased usage of Google Docs, it could represent hundreds of thousands of documents.

This highlights potential security issues of Web 2.0 and cloud computing. However, local storage is not necessarily more reliable. There seems to be no end to the list of privacy, security and data protection breaches resulting from stolen or lost laptops, USB sticks and even hardcopy documents left on trains.

RSS

Ten Reasons Why ‘Enterprise RSS' Has Failed To Become Mainstream

This article by Mike Gotta (http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=659) is a response to an article that appeared in ReadWriteWeb and which declared Enterprise RSS to be dead ( http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rip_enterprise_rss.php ). He disagrees that feed readers are the main reason for this, and says that “Enterprise RSS has not taken off yet – as opposed to actually having ‘died.' ”

He goes on to list what he thinks are ten reasons for the slow take-up of Enterprise RSS.

Richard Hare comments on the posting:

"At some point you have to stop focusing on the technology and give people tools which fit with how they work. At British American Tobacco, instead of an IT-style RSS launch which overpromises on functionality irrelevant to 80% of users, we quietly placed a feed on the intranet homepage, and linked it to the Twitter-style updates in our Facebook-style social networking tool/internal directory. At no point did we mention “feeds”, “RSS” or any other jargon that could potentially create barriers. "

This confirms my own experiences of Enterprise implementation, not just of RSS but also of other Web 2.0 technologies. Those that have been particularly successful have not used terms such as wiki, blog, feeds, nor have they required the user to switch applications to view the information. Instead, services are integrated seamlessly into the Intranet pages. Easy for the user but admittedly not always straightforward for the Intranet development team to implement.

Twitter

Twitter Search – 20 alternative search engines

This list of 20 alternative Twitter search engines (http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2009/03/twitter-search-20-alternative-search-engines.html) is a must for Twitter addicts. Personally I still think that http://search.twitter.com/ and its Advanced Search is by far the best, but Phil gives some interesting alternatives that have unique features.

There are times when you shouldn't be tweeting

This item from the The FASTForward Blog (http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2009/03/13/yes-there-are-times-when-you-shouldnt-be-tweeting/) concerns a juror on a civil trial against a building materials company, who was caught tweeting some of his musings, resulting in calls for a mistrial. I assume that the US has similar regulations to the UK in respect of jury service, in that you are not allowed to discuss the trial with anyone other than your fellow jurors. I would have thought that tweeting would come under “discussion” but perhaps the instructions to jurors need to include social media such as Twitter and Facebook messaging in the ban.

As Joe McKendrick says:

"Along with legal proceedings, occasions such as driving, job interviews, performance review sessions, religious ceremonies, and first dates come to mind as times to hold off on the urge to tweet. The world will wait for you."

How to tweet yourself out of a job

Unless you have locked your updates, your Twitter tweets are public . I shall repeat that – unless you have locked your updates, your Twitter tweets are public . And even if a company or person is not following you they can still pick up your derogatory comments about them, as one person found to their cost.

Many organisations now monitor Twitter as part of their market and competitor intelligence. Set up search alerts on your organisation's name and products and you can see what people are saying about you within a few minutes of their tweets leaving their iPhone, Tweetdeck or whatever.

How to Tweet Your Way Out of a Job (http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2009/
03/17/ how-to-tweet-your-way-out-of-a-job/) recounts the sorry tale of a person who had received a job offer from Cisco. Unfortunately, after hearing the joyful news the potential employee tweeted:

"Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work."

timmylevad from Cisco responded:

"Who is the hiring manager. I'm sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the Web."

There are further details and comments at Careers – Big Brother – How Not to Get a Job Via Twitter (http://blogs.eweek.com/careers/content001/big_brother/how_not_to_get_a_
job_via_ twitter.html) but it really is stating the obvious. If your updates are public, then anyone can find and view them. I would go further: even if your Twitter updates are private and you have to approve people to follow you, when it comes to Twitter you would still be well advised to keep your thoughts about the merits of future employment to yourself. It is all too easy for your followers to RT a comment into the public Twitterverse.

Note: RT stands for re-tweet, not Radio Times as I first thought! Caused me no end of confusion when I first saw the abbreviation.

YouTube

Cambridgeshire Council uses YouTube to encourage new councillors

Article from Dave Briggs blog looking at how Cambridgeshire County Council is using YouTube to encourage new councillors (http://davepress.net/2009/03/05/cambridgeshire-county-council-uses-youtube-to-encourage-new-councillors/). The videos are of the leaders of the three main political groups on the Council saying why it is important for people to become involved in local government.

UK Local Councils on YouTube

This list of UK local councils on YouTube from LizAzyan Research (http://www.lgeoresearch.com/local-councils-on-youtube/) is a table giving information on UK local council YouTube channels (as found on 10th February 2009). Information includes the channel name, date joined, number of subscribers, number of videos and the video title with the highest views.