Reboot Britain
Reboot Britain, an event happening on 6th July, is looking at how the radically networked digital world we live in can help us take a different look at the major social and environmental challenges we face.
There are lots of inspiring people involved in the event, including some people involved in the Big Green Challenge - Andy Hobsbawn of Big Green Challenger Do the Green Thing, as well as Lee Bryant of Headshift (who built this website). I’ve just scanned the Reboot Britain website to see who’s signed up so far, and the participant list is full of really creative and practical people working on great projects.
Reboot Britain is being run by NESTA and 2gether, produced by germination and policy unplugged .
Ashden Awards 2009
Last week I attended the Ashden Awards ceremony. As ever the evening provided much hope and inspiration, through the ethos of the Awards themseleves and through the winners and runners up. Do take a look at both the national and international projects.
The key note speaker for the evening was Prince Charles, who stressed the importance of not pinning all our hopes on big technical fixes and praised the humilty, courage and long term thinking of the winners. He gave a strong nod to innovation in saying that we have very little time to respond, and must move away from our tendency to stick to the norm despite the urgency of the challenge. He warned that despite the opportunities presented by the challenge of climate change to tackle economic problems, there is a danger that people will still pursue a short-term focus, which in turn will create even bigger future problems. He also stressed the importance of highlighting good practical examples in order to help build the confidence necessary to enable greater ambition. Finally, he advocated a different, more holistic look at the way we live - something that we know that community-led solutions do well.
Green Valleys event
I recently attended an event held by The Green Valleys. They are no longer the Three Green Valleys due to interest and participation from many more communities in the region!
The event, held in Brecon, was very well attended by a mixture of National Park officials, active participants in the Green Valleys project, and other interested people from across the Brecon Beacons.
I enjoyed listening to the other speakers. Grenville, Michael and others from the project talked with passion about what they’ve achieved so far and where they hope to go next. The group is certainly not without commitment and they have some exciting ambitions. Then Jane Davidson, Welsh Assembly Government Minister for the Environment, Sustainability and Housing, talked about the importance of community groups leading on solutions to climate change. There were also some great quotes from the Minister on Wales Online following the event.
Using RSS to keep track of your web
If you are interested in regularly consuming content from a particular website, or want keep track of keyword searches without having to input them time and time again, the topic of my guest post this week, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), may very well be of interest to you.
Most people view web based content through a browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer. If readers don’t want to miss newly published content, they have to remember to frequently check each site they want to follow. Sometimes there is new content, other times there isn’t - a colleague of mine likens it to chickens walking around in circles pecking at whatever is on the ground in front of them, an analogy he makes to point out that this is almost certainly not the most efficient or affective way of finding, keeping track of and consuming new content.
A more efficient way is to put yourself at the centre of the flow of information by subscribing to RSS feeds, sometimes called “web feeds”, of the websites and other content sources you’re interested in monitoring. An RSS feed looks like a stripped down version of a website - the design and formatting isn’t normally visible in the feed, only the text, images and other content elements. As an example, here’s what the RSS feed (will open in a new window) for this, the Big Green Challenge Blog, looks like.
RSS Button
Many times, where content is available as an RSS feed, a distinctive orange button (as seen to left) can be found on the page. Other times, an RSS logo appears next to the URL in the address bar at the top of a browser.
Subscribing to an RSS feed is like ordering a subscription to a magazine or newspaper although, in the case of RSS, it’s nearly always free. Everytime new content is published, a copy is sent out to all subscribers, meaning those with a subscription needn’t ever miss anything.
In order to subscribe to an RSS feed, you’ll first need to sign up for an RSS reader. The two web based readers I’m most familiar with, Bloglines and Google Reader, are both free and easy to use.
To subscribe to an RSS feed, users can click on the RSS button found on a page or in their browser’s address window, which should open a new page showing the address of the RSS feed to be subscribed to and, often, a pull down menu of different RSS readers so that the subscription can be made with just one click. The other way to subscribe to an RSS feed is to copy the URL of the page or feed you want to subscribe to and paste it into the “add feed” form within your chosen RSS reader.
Once subscribed to a feed, each time there is new content it will appear in your reader. Most readers also allow users to mark content as read or unread, to share content with others, and to bookmark any content they might want to return to later.
It’s not just content sites that offer RSS feeds - many social media and search sites also do. So, for example, if you’re interested in getting an alert every time a user on twitter mentions the name of your organisation, you simply input that search once and subscribe to the feed. You can also subscribe to feeds from, to mention just a few, flickr tags and technorati blog searches - meaning that everytime posts a photo or blog post about the topic you’ve defined in your original search, you’re alerted to that content.
If you’d like to learn more about RSS, there’s an excellent, easy to follow video on the Common Craft Show that’s well worth viewing.
RSS isn’t just useful for subscribing to web feeds, it’s also the delivery mechanism used by many social tools and social networks to share content. So, for example, when I author a blog post on one of my own blogs, it uses RSS to alert a service called twitterfeed that I’ve done so. Twitterfeed then fires out a twitter tweet with the title and link of that post. The RSS feed of my blog also feeds into facebook and linked-in so that my contacts on those services can see what I’ve written. I also used to use another service, talkr, which took my RSS feed and created a computer generated audio file of the content. This made it possible for me to offer a podcast of my blog on Apple’s iTunes Store without ever having to actually record a thing myself.
It’s also possible to aggregate and remix RSS feeds using services such as xfruits and Yahoo Pipes to create custom feeds of content, for example all news stories from ten different UK based news sources which mention “Big Green Challenge” or any other keyword you define.
RSS is a really powerful tool in that it helps users to better organise the flow of content around them and, for those creating content, offers an extremely flexible stream of content for use by other people and services.
Why mention it here, in a series of guest posts about social media? Because not only do most blogs and social tools offer RSS output, it’s also - in my books at least - an indispensible tool for helping bloggers to keep track of the conversations their contributions are part of. Finding, subscribing and reading what others are saying is the first step towards making successful contributions yourself. Quoting and linking to that content is the next step and, once you’ve gained confidence and understanding, you can begin to add value by contextualising those quotes and links, or voicing an opinion about them. Joining into an already active conversation by listening and contributing, at least initially, with gestures such as a smile or nod is, in most instances, far more socially acceptable than bursting into the conversation by interrupting with strong views of your own. And this is exactly how you can use RSS - to listen, to inform yourself, to help you keep track of the views and contributions of others, to provide material to link to and to, later, contextualise or comment upon.
This is the eighth post in a series I’ve been publishing here on the Big Green Challenge Blog. Other posts have looked at a range of social tools and techniques for telling stories, finding new audiences and engaging with stakeholders. You’ll find an index on last week’s post, which provided an indepth guide to blogging.
Key techniques for successful blogging
Over the past few weeks, I’ve published a number of posts here to help organisations and individuals to get started using social media tools and services to inform and engage. This post will discuss blogs, both as a tool and a technique, for pulling it all together.
My previous posts discussed various ways of creating and publishing content of various types, and making it available on services where audiences are pro-actively seeking out and consuming that type of content - so, for example, using the photo-sharing service Flickr for photos and the video-sharing service YouTube for video. Here’s an index to those posts:
- Introduction: social media and the whole web as your canvas
- Reaching new audiences with photo-sharing
- Sharing your videos online
- Getting started making google maps
- Taking the internet everywhere
- Live and direct with your mobile
The approach I’ve suggested, using the whole web as your canvas, is a clever way of getting your ideas in front of new audiences. My view is that it’s more important that people consume and interact with my content, wherever that content is, than to put all my eggs in one basket by creating a single, destination website that is viewed only by those who are already engaged.
A blog, which is essentially an easy to use, template based content management system where posts, sometimes called entries, are typically arranged in reverse chronological order. Because they allow content to be pulled in or embedded from elsewhere, including many of the services I’ve previously discussed in this series of posts, blogs can be used to pull all your web based content together in one place so that, once people do find a photo or video or other piece of content out on the web, you have a central place to link them into should they wish to know more.
In my previous role as Head of Blogging at the BBC, I used to run one day workshops to help bloggers and other editorial and production staff learn how to use their blog. Almost the entire day was taken up with discussion of technique and creating content rather than step by step instructions on how to actually create a blog or post an entry. I continue to believe that understanding blogging as a technique, rather than as a tool, is the best way to approach blog training. None of it’s hard, but getting the techniqueright is by far more important.
There are a number of free or low cost tools which can be used to create a blog including Wordpress, which is the platform used by this blog, Blogger and Typepad. Once registered, users can very easily create a new blog. All that’s normally required is a name for the blog and, once that’s been decided, there are usually a number of predefined design templates to choose from. Look and feel is controlled independently of content so, in most instances, the design can be changed at the click of the button at any time without affecting the actual content of the blog.
Once you’ve set up a blog, you’ll probably want to create your “about” page where you tell readers who you are and what you’re aiming to achieve. You might also want to add contact details.
Next, you may want to add links to other websites or blogs - your organisation, your pages on other social media services, other people or groups saying interesting things, etc. In Wordpress, you do this by going into the dashboard and adding a links widget. In blogger this functionality is called a blogroll and in typepad is called a typelist. Linking is one of the most important things a blogger can do. Not only does it introduce your readers to other sites they might be interested in, but it also alerts - because most bloggers look at statistics showing how many visitors they’ve had and where those visitors have come from - other bloggers to you existance of your blog. I refer to a link tap because it’s a bit like tapping someone on the shoulder to let them know you’re there.
Once you’ve added an about page and links, you will probably want to create your first blog post. A lot of people find it difficult to get started but there is an easy way to do so. Rather than creating an entire post from scratch, you might want to start off by writing “link wrap” posts that describe something you’ve read elsewhere online, quote a small section of that text, and point out why you think it’s interesting. You’ll also want to make sure you link to the source. The value you add in doing this is two-fold. Firstly, you’re introducing your audience to content you think they might be interested in and, secondly, by summarising or pointing to interesting sections of that content, you’re editorialising that link. The person or organisation who created the content originally will also benefit because users will click through to view the source. Also, because the algorythm used by google and other search sites often gives pages with more links greater authority, your link directly impacts the findability of that page for people who search for it later.
Most blogs allow users to comment on posts. There are pros and cons to the different methods of comment moderation. I’m not a solicitor, but have published a post elsewhere introducing some of the issues. If you do allow comments, you might want to create and publish details of your moderation policy, including your rules, so that users know exactly what’s expected of them.
A lot of bloggers talk about the importance of joining the conversation. You can do this by using the comments that come into your blog as points of discussion in subsequent posts. You may also want to post comments on posts on other blogs, particularly if you link to and discuss those posts. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t include a link to your own post, so long as it’s relevant, in your comments elsewhere but do make sure you’re linking to something that genuinely adds to the conversation rather than spamming the blog with irrelevant, and probably unwanted, links in a bid just to get some traffic.
Another way of participating in the conversation is to link prolifically from your own posts as a way of illustrating points and to alert the bloggers who created the content you link to of the existence of your posts. Because you’ll want to stay abreast of the conversation - the linking, quoting, and commenting across a number of topical blogs - you’ll need to use tools such as an RSS reader, which will be discussed in my next post here, and “buzz tracking” tools such as technorati to find and keep track of what people are saying within your niche and about your posts.
Technorati is a blog search tools. It usually picks up new posts faster than google or other traditional search engines because most blog platforms send technorati a notification, called a “ping”, each time an update is made. Technorati is useful for finding, based on keyword searches, blogs and posts about specific topics but the reason it’s used by most serious bloggers is because, if you input the URL of your blog, you can instantly see all the blog posts that link to your blog. Armed with this knowledge, you can go out and see what others have posted, and participate in the conversation your blog is part of wherever it’s taking place.
When you create a blog post, you’ll usually want to give it a title, create the body of the post, and then categorise or tag it so that readers can more easily find what they are looking for. When you name your blog and title your posts, as well as when you use categories and tags, you’ll want to think very carefully about the words you use, and ensure that they are terms people are likely to search for. One of my blogs, about St. Albans where I live, actually appears higher in the google results for St. Albans than one of the two local newspapers, precisely because I’ve used St. Albans in the name of the blog, in the title of most posts, and in each of the categories I use. It also helps that I link out to all the other St. Albans based bloggers I could find and many of them have reciprocated with links back to me, again reinforcing within the google algorythm the understanding that my blog is not only about St. Albans but is highly regarded as a source of good information by other websites.
Actually using the blogging tool you choose is the easy part. Find a blogging platform you like and play around a bit, learning to use the various options and tools, before you start heavily promoting it. You’re bound to make a few mistakes early on, but get your technique right and you’ll be 3/4 of the way towards successful blogging.
This post is part of a series of guests post I’m making here to introduce some of the social media tools and techniques people and organisations can use to inform and connect with audiences and stakeholders. In my next post, I’ll discuss using RSS to help find and keep track of intersting content that you can quote from, link to, and build upon.
