Five on Friday - five fabulous web tools of the week (05.06.09)

June 5th, 2009

Hi guys

Me again, your five on Friday sub. Your usual Five on Friday host will be back next week, but until then let’s take a look at this week’s selection.

First off, we have:

1. Photoxpress - If, like me, you use images to spice up your posts and comments, this free photo finding tool will come in very useful. It’s a quality image bank providing you with a vast and legal image library for both personal and professional use.

2. Almost.at -This tool allows you to follow people at real world events in realtime. Simply choose an event from the list provided and track the conversations and pictures. Content will be displayed in realtime but you can pause as required. Currently in beta but a very nice idea.

3. Moogo - The time when you had to shell out thousands of pounds for a website has long since passed, and yes this isn’t the only option to get a free website, but it’s easy to use, quick and offers some nice features such as web stores, blogs, photo albums and mobile pages. It’s aimed at small companies, associations and individuals, so give it a go, even if it’s just for an event or service that you are launching.

4. TypingWeb - Embarrassed about your typing speed? Still only use two fingers to bash out your documents? Come on, everyone would like to type a bit faster and this app could be the help you’ve been looking for. It’s a free online typing tutor for typists of all ages and skills.

5. AlmostMeet - This is a very useful service for collaborative group meetings, allowing everyone to talk and see each other, using peer-to-peer technology, which also enables visibility of participant’s desktops, whiteboards and file sharing. And of course, it’s free!

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I’ll follow who I like on Twitter, thanks!

May 13th, 2009

Our guest academic, Lorraine Warren follows up a post earlier this week on her Twitter journey. This is Dr Warren’s fourth post for us and we hope the conversation continues! Dr Warren is Director of Postgraduate Education and senior lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at the University of Southampton.

In an  earlier post I commented that a really important feature of Twitter for me is that I can see debates and conflicts taking place that show different points of view evolving in the field.

Of course, a series of exchanges in 140 characters and a cluster of links are unlikely to give the full picture – these are fast-moving, conversational interchanges that indicate where tensions lie, rather than fully-fledged rational arguments.  Yet for me, this is invaluable in sensing what’s going on, what issues are important to people and where the next questions that shape my research might lie.

Inevitably, sometimes useful interchanges arising from different, but quite legitimate, points of view degenerate into personal feuds and name-calling, but that’s part of life generally, and like at a conference, or party, you can either walk away, join in, or maybe say ‘hey, folks….’ if it starts to get too nasty!

I saw an instance of this last month in my Twitterstream.  As I only followed one of the parties involved, I didn’t really understand what was going on at first, but I could see that a technology correspondent, @YYY, from one of the mainstream UK papers had posted something on his blog about a writer, @ZZZ that others found offensive.

This didn’t surprise me, as I have seen @YYY post some controversial stuff in the past, perhaps reflecting more right-wing views than my other connections are comfortable with.  By the time I looked, the post seemed to have been taken down, so I was on the point of forgetting about it, when I received a Direct Message (DM) in my email from a third party, @XXX who appears very popular and well-respected in the social media space: “why do you follow @YYY..? this is a slanderous pop at @ZZZ”.

A link to a jpg file of the now-vanished blog was included, that turned out to be a short piece of childish name-calling, referring to an ongoing dialogue indicating bad blood between the two.  Looking at the Twitter interchange between @YYY and @ZZZ, it seemed like they were both standing up for themselves quite well without any help needed from me.  So, I responded by DM to @XXX that overall, it was important for me to see a mix of views, and in this case, perhaps the hue and cry that had gone on had contributed to the piece being withdrawn, surely a good thing. 

That was on April 27, and I haven’t heard from @XXX again, although I have had quite a few pleasant interchanges with him in the past both in the Twitterstream and by DM.

@XXX’s intervention raised some interesting issues about the norms and values set within and by the Twitter community.  Did the message mean that I should explain myself for following @YYY, perhaps engage with the debate publicly (though it was nothing to do with me, and was by then, it seemed, over) or stop following @YYY?

Further, how I had been identified so quickly as a follower of @YYY, as I’d never interacted with him on Twitter except as a follower.  Why was I being singled out? Why was @XXX taking on this role?  It would be silly to over-interpret one DM, and I decided to let sleeping dogs lie.

Following doesn’t mean complicity or agreement, and if a tweet bothers me, I’ll deal with the author direct.  It’s hard to see how Twitter will grow, and whether antagonistic factions and clusters will emerge.  I hope not!

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Who should I follow on Twitter?

May 11th, 2009

 

A welcome return for our guest academic, Lorraine Warren. This Dr Warren’s third post and we look forward to more! Dr Warren is Director of Postgraduate Education and senior lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at the University of Southampton.

 

 

As a Twitter enthusiast, people often ask me how I got going, how did I ‘know’ who to follow, to make it worthwhile spending time in this space.  Of course, they hope to repeat my strategies, to make Twitter as valuable to them, as it has become to me.  In some ways it’s a difficult question to answer.

If I look at what I actually did, it was an unplanned, serendipitous acquisition of around 350 people through a variety of processes and techniques, mainly follow-backs, recommendations from colleagues at work, and some simple detective work around who the people I liked were following.

 Sometimes the real and virtual worlds crossed over, as there is a social side to Twitter too.  I met (and now follow) the Liberate Media guys through Twestival, a Twitter-generated meet-up that took place in Brighton, one of many spin-off social gatherings.  

Interestingly, I’ve never used the Search facility in Twitter to look for people, as keyword search seems a little bit mechanical to me.

Looking back though, there are some themes that have guided my selections.  As an academic with research interests in innovation, particularly in the digital/creative industries, I need to be able to look ahead at what thought leaders and key influencers in this fast-changing and dynamic field are doing.

I use Twitter to check out the periphery, to see what people in the industry are working on, which way the wind is blowing and what current debates are setting the agenda.  Obviously, I follow practitioners and consultants in the industry (both creative industries and systems developers), mainly in the UK, but in Europe and the US too.

I also follow journalists, especially technical correspondents in quality newspapers, some Silicon Valley pundits, and a smattering of MPs.  A key aspect is that I also follow people who disagree with me (and each other) – for me this is about the debates, tensions and conflicts that drive change, challenging my views, sometimes reinforcing them, and sometimes changing them too.

Twitter really has added value for me, and I cannot think of any other way in which I could keep current so effectively.  And I guess I must add value for others in return, as I have a high proportion of mutual relationships.  Of course, I also follow fellow academics working in the social media space, and as a result of initial Twitter contacts, am currently working on two conference papers and a book chapter with a cluster of people at Birmingham City and Huddersfield universities whom I’ve never even met.

For me this organic process has been really enjoyable, I like the uncertainty of never knowing what or who might beam in next, and I can see that with some slightly different decisions, my trajectory could well have been quite different.

I am aware though that some people find this uncertainty a bit of a challenge in the early stages, and in some cases leave early without having found anything interesting or that adds value, as they are unable to find what they want.

I expect as Twitter matures, it may well become more and more structured as groups form, and also better understood, with a variety of applications generating information about the user base.

Certainly, that will make entry less daunting, and more accessible and inclusive; but it would be a shame if the spontaneous connections that make Twitter so exciting became less significant.  For me, that was the fun part!

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Five on Friday - five fabulous web 2.0 tools and sites of the week (08-05-09)

May 8th, 2009

Here is this week’s installment of my top web 2.0 tools and sites of the week.

1. TechNews.AM is first up today. As the name suggests TechNews.AM is all about technology news, it has a broad range of categories to view, from jobs to start ups. You can either select the latest stories to read or the most viewed. A great way to catch up on the latest tech news.

2. Omgili has been around for a while now but one feature inside Omgili is pretty neat. Omgili buzz charts lets you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. The Buzz is defined as the percentage of the term out of the total number of discussions Omgili covered on a specific date. You can also embed the Buzz Graph inside any web-page and monitor the buzz on a daily basis.

3. Tweetbio gives you a simple extended bio that gives your followers, potential followers, and the people you’re following a better sense of who you are. Quickly link to all your other sites, blogs, and Twitter Networks from your Tweetbio.

4. wikiAlarm is the first monitoring service to send email alerts when selected articles are edited on Wikipedia. It is easy to use and lets you track unlimited pages, monitor your products & brand names as well as competitors.

5. Finally, we have the  LinkedIn Companion. This Firefox add-on allows you to open doors and opportunities for networking and the facilitation of finding projects through LinkedIn’s connection to over 25 million experienced business professionals.

More of the same next week

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Five on Friday - five fabulous web 2.0 tools and sites of the week (01-05-09)

May 1st, 2009

Hi all, here are my five favorite web 2.0 tools and sites of the week.

1. First off today we have a Google product - Google News Time Line. The timeline organises search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources in a browsable, graphical timeline.

2. URL Zoom is a service that allows you to shorten long URLs and also create trackable tiny URLs. Another nice feature is that you can also see the referring site and the date and time that the URL was clicked.

3. PDF to GIF is a great little paid for service that, as the name suggests, converts your PDFs to animated GIFS. The package prices are all very resonable and dependent on the size and amount of pages you need converting.

4. Reshade offers you a way to create high-quality resized images online or offline maintaining image quality (edge and texture). This is great for creating avatars.

5. tmeet is a tweet to meet. You can send a tmeet about your location to tell your friends where you are. The site is based around Google maps and there is also an iPhone app available.

More of the same next week.

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