The Official CASE Blog » Twitter

Making Links 2010, Perth. Workshop Day.

Sam — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 09:51:47 +0000

Today’s workshop “Building Websites From The Ground Up” has proven very valuable for us and I assume everyone else. We’ve had a range of diverse speakers from a wide range of backgrounds who have really covered building a website from the ground up from concept to delivery. Viveka kicked off the day with a hugely detailed presentation on the Victorian AIDS Council’s efforts to develop their new website. She let us into the finer details of the planning process including objectives, constraints, assumptions and a lot, lot more. The key thing to take away from their experience, I think, is that documentation and planning has to be paramount in the process of developing a site, if you’re to end up with what you want! Also critical to the process was ensuring Government accessibility standards were met and that the staff were adequately trained in using the new software backend (Drupal). Have a look at their site which was launched late last year – great effort! http://www.vicaids.asn.au

Following on from Viveka’s presentation we had Andrew Johnson from FII who detailed a developer’s perspective on processes and jobs very similar to Viveka’s. He really emphasised the personal aspect to developing a website, encouraging looking at the task as developing a relationship between the developer and the organisation you (they’re) developing for. Returned to frequently was the idea that it was a good idea to actually like the client you’re working for. If you don’t…consider not taking the job! FII are big on Joomla which is great to see. They’ve got a range of projects on the go and we can recommend checking out their site! http://www.footefrancis.com.au

If that wasn’t enough (and it could have been) Gary Barber from Radharc weighed in on all things Information Architecture. Detailed, to say the least! He offered suggestions on how to better survey and study a userbase so that more appropriate development decisions could be made. He also showed us multiple ways of considering content, how we might look at it differently and how we might spot patterns. Surprisingly, something as mundane as sorting cards turned out to be a great way (through discussion, not necessarily the final arrangement of the cards!) to organise information in way everyone can understand or at least is happy with. Survey, observations, interviews, analytics! Details about these and more can be found at Gary’s site http://www.radharc.com.au

A slightly re-arranged schedule and a relateively relaxed atmosphere after lunch resulted in an expert’s panel on web content management systems. Joomla, Wordpres and Drupal all represented (Silverstripe gets a mention), the importance of keeping ALL of your web software up-to-date was reiterated by myself a few times. Seriously, you’ll get hacked if you don’t stay up to date. Andrew and Vivecka got to field followup questions from an engaged audience and everyone seemed pretty satisfied.

Following afternoon tea an enthusiastic/passionate discussion about domain names in Australia and abroad ensued. Darrell’s position on the auDA policy review panel allowed everyone to get a bit of insight into the domains industry and the history that preceeded it’s current state. Do .com.aus get more traffic? Are they more appropriate than asn.au? What would happen if Australia’s domain policy ended up matching the American free-for-all? There were a range of diverse opinions and everyone came away with something to think about…

Overall a very valuable day and we’re glad we attended! This is actually an event that runs prior to Making Links 2010 proper which of course we’ll be attending. We’ll continue the coverage here and of course you can follow the Twitter stream at #ml10 http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23ml10

Cool Twitter services

Sam — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:01:05 +0000

There’s a large number of Twitter related services out there. Some cater towards the “power user”, others are just a great way to keep track of statistics relating to your Twitter account. At CASE we’ve been using Twitter in order to be involved in various conferences and events as well as communicating interesting bits and pieces to our members. The links below are some Twitter related web service we find interesting and or useful:

Twitalyzer: This website examines your Twitter account and then gives you scores in the following categories: Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity and Clout. These are measured by how many people follow you, how many times you re tweet, how frequently people are choosing to follow you and so on. The site makes recommendations on how you should improve your scores and gives you a whole stack of nice graphs to visualise the whole thing. This site is a must if you think your Twitter campaign is important. Great for stats!

Qwitter: This site offers a service whereby you’re notified when someone stops following you on Twitter, and shows you what your last tweet was before they canceled. This would be a very valuable tool for someone dealing with controversial material – you can effectively see visualise people turning their back on you on the Twitterscape! Simple, yet effective.

Whatthetrend: This site shows you the emerging trends on Twitter and allows users to post detailed descriptions on what those trends are, and why they’re trending. Great for seeing what’s popular and what people think of it. This is also a good place to keep an eye out for upcoming spam and scams.

ChirpCity: This is a handy website that searches for and then collates tweets by city. This means you can keep an eye on what’s emerging in your area even before it trends.

Connecting Up 09 Sydney Part 2

Sam — Tue, 12 May 2009 00:59:50 +0000

The second day of Connecting Up 09 is now in full swing. We’ve just had a talk from Alan Noble, engineering director of Google Aus/NZ. He gave a brief overview of some of their lesser known apps, cloud computing and answered some good questions. Just how green can cloud computing be? Can we get our information back out of the cloud if we place it there? He also detailed how adwords works and where community organisations can go to apply for grants from Google.

The wireless connectivity issues that plagued the conference seem to have been resolved (at this stage) so Twitter is still filling up with tweets. Elliott Bledsoe who gave the talk on Creative Commons yesterday also has a great blog post that explains how hash tagging in Twitter works and would be a valuable read for anyone new to Twitter.

More to follow after today’s roundtable discussions have finished…

Connecting Up 09 Sydney Part 1

Sam — Mon, 11 May 2009 02:17:30 +0000

We’re coming up on lunch in the first day of Connecting Up 09 – there have been some highlights so far including a great talk by Mark Pesce where he explored ideas surrounding the gradual change of our social fabric. An incredibly comprehensive online version of his presentation (plus much much more) can be found at his blog here.

Elliott Bledsoe’s talk on creative commons and copyright was very informative and ultimately, very important. Learning more about creative commons can be done (quite easily!) through their newly revamped website at www.creativecommons.org.au. A very important tip is to make sure you generate creative commons licenses specific to your country, even though CC applies worldwide.

The official Twitter feed has been getting a healthy workout despite generally poor wireless broadband at the venue! You can follow the twitter conversation here.

More to follow…

CASE Podcast Episode 3 – Kate Lundy

Sam — Sat, 09 May 2009 05:19:23 +0000

We’re pleased to release the next episode in our occasional podcast series. This time I head out of the studio to visit ACT Senator Kate Lundy. We discuss using Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter, WordPress and Joomla, get her views on the proposed national broadband network and how she feels about funding to community organisations.

To listen to this podcast head over to the official CASE podcast page!

note on Public Sphere event held today @ ANU

Sam — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:53:35 +0000

The first Public Sphere event has just finished It’s been an information packed, thought provoking few hours. Here’s a brief rundown of material that has resulted:

Official Public Sphere event details on Senator Kate Lundy’s site.

The Twitter feed from the morning.

Craig Thomler’s liveblog from the event.

Tom Worthington’s blog (Including links to the slides of the morning’s presentations)

More posts to follow, just need to let the dust settle!

Kate Lundy 2.0

Sam — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:45:56 +0000

CASE’s patron Senator Kate Lundy has been online since 1996. While holding a variety of portfolios she’s use the Internet to her advantage, allowing constituents a closer connection to their representitive in a way that politicians worldwide have only just begun to embrace (the emerging Twitter fad, for example). Now she’s had her site updated and has amalgamated her online presence at http://www.katelundy.com.au. It’s worth checking out as it’s full of content and very useful links.