Just thoughts …

Category: Blogposts

  • Where do YOU blog?

    An interesting tweet exchange from @briankelly caused me to revisit an earlier post to this blog. The question is whether it’s good practice to host your blog off-site as in Brian’s UK Web Focus blog, or Andy Powell’s Eduserv Foundation blog, or whether if you’re blogging with the explicit support and encouragement of the organisation you’re working for, it shouldn’t be from an on-site platform, after all that’s what No 10 does – not to mention eBay and Yahoo – they all use the WordPress blogging platform.

    That is not to say that you shouldn’t be using an engine such as Typepad or WordPress, but rather whether you should be running it in-house. Thus we (in Cardiff University) currently look both ways. On one hand we have a WordPress Blog for a Library site, and support for our website authors is also provided off-site; on the other hand we’ve been working hard to develop an industry strength blogging platform using Roller to support “enterprise/corporate blogging”, and Confluence for our wiki platform.

    Is this a waste of time/resource? I think not! I believe we are very much following the IBM example of the multi-tiered approach to blogging.

    From the enterprise, to the collaborative developer, to the marketeer, to the individual, IBMers express their thoughts and make pronouncements. All on different platforms, but it is clear that the first-one is where the official message from the organisation emanates.

    Thus watch out for Cardiff Blogs, not to mention Cardiff Wikis (which will be kept as an internal collaboration environment and blogging platform for staff and students), it’ll be appearing in a browser window near you shortly!

  • Ever wanted to create Shared Tasks/ToDo Lists … ?

    Just discovered what could be a really neat Web 2.0 app. Remember the Milk allows you to have an active ToDo list that you can easily share and what’s more impressive you can add tasks by Twitter, from a Google Gadget, from an email and a number of other possibilities.

    It’s also mobile so if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch there’s a connector and from the BlackBerry just connect to m.rememberthemilk.com

    I found it as a result of wondering how to keep a track of domestic tasks which then have to be shared with Jenny and tracked through to completion. Now the easy bit has been finding some neat technology – the more difficult step will be the socio-cultural change … now where have I heard that phrase before.

    RTM allows you to share tasks or lists with another registered user (so Jenny’s already got an account – she doesn’t know that); it can mail out; it can also receive tweets assigning a task using “@twittername task” to another RTM registered user . I’m just dying to set up the tasks now … there’s still very little chance of them getting done, but my anxiety level will go down as I won’t forget what it was that I had good intentions to do.

    Watch this space