Stuff I have bookmarked for January 4th through January 5th:

• Back in the office, back on PM « Policy and Performance - "We won’t be gearing up with a big project on PM like we did before, but we will be looking at how we can gather knowledge across the sector. As a start and with the help of Dave Briggs, we’ve set up a social learning space that we’ll be using at two seminars in January and beyond. Don’t go and visit www.ideaperformance.com just yet (’cause it’s still pretty much empty) - but it won’t be long before we should have some great content there. I can’t wait to start building and sharing."
• 6 Concepts That Matter - "Don’t be distracted by any book with a focus on Social Media. Instead focus on concepts that matter for building communities."
• Multiply - Secure, Family-Friendly Media Sharing - Multiply is taking over all the communities from the soon-to-be defunct MSN groups
• Co-op - "Stay in tune with your co-workers. Ask questions, share knowledge, track time, and update agendas all in one place"
• Life With Alacrity: Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds - "We often think of communities as organic creatures, which come into existence and grow on their own. However, the truth is they are fragile blossoms. Although many communities surely germinate and bloom on their own, purposefully creating communities can take a tremendous amount of hard work, and one factor their success ultimately depends upon is their numbers."

Stuff I have bookmarked for January 1st through January 3rd:

• Thriving too: Leadership in a Paradigm of Respect - "we now have the means to group and voice in potential numbers never before dreamed of, how do we ensure that the overall system remains balanced, and really intelligent?"
• Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies - Freesouls - "If I had to reduce the essence of Homo sapiens to five words, "people do complicated things together" would do. Online social networks can be powerful amplifiers of collective action precisely because they augment and extend the power of ever-complexifying human sociality."
• WhosTalkin? - Useful looking tool to track what people are saying online, via Beth Kanter
• 5-Part Social Media Process - Amy Sample Ward shares her tips on how to form a successful social media strategy.
• 100+ More Wiki Tools and Resources - "Wiki engines are some of the most versatile platforms for creating websites out there. MediaWiki (the engine that powers Wikipedia) is probably the most widely used, but there are literally hundreds of other wiki engines."
• SaaS Business Intelligence with Google Apps - "Panorama Software has partnered with Google to provide new capabilities to Google applications and Google docs via the strongest suite of analytics, reporting and visualization applications."

Stuff I have bookmarked for December 30th through December 31st:

• 27 Blogging Secrets to Power Your Community - Chris Brogan shares some blogging magic
• TDO Mini Forms Wordpress Plugin (v0.12.5) [thedeadone.net] - "This plugin allows you to add a form to your website that allows your readers (including non-registered) to submit posts." This could be INCREDIBLY useful.
• dotproject - Open Source Project and Task Management Software
• Cambridge Carbon Footprint - "Cambridge Carbon Footprint is a local, voluntary organisation concerned with climate change. Our aim is to help people work together creatively to make real reductions in their CO2 emissions."
• The Akashi Project - "The Akashi project works with community and faith groups (via social gatherings at your church, mosque, village hall, community centre, youth club or even with a group of friends at a local café!). We can run discussions and group activities that will help you to consider the future of our planet in a fun, interesting way, that is relevant to your lifestyle and values."
• McMillanChavis.pdf (application/pdf Object) - "This article holds more useful advice (and a great practical framework) for developing an online community than any other." - Richard Millington
• Sueetie - "The Future in .NET Open Source Online Community Development" apparently.
• Measure how the media is portraying your company or organization - A 'web based media management platform'
• Not all online community members are created equal - "Do you know who your most important members are? You should be able to name them all right off the top of your head."
• ThoughtFarmer: Intranet 2.0. Wikis, blogs, social networking. - "ThoughtFarmer is next-generation intranet software: wikis, blogs
  and social networking for effective internal collaboration."

Stuff I have bookmarked for December 28th through December 30th:

• Oxite - Lab - MIX Online - Microsoft's open source blog platform / CMS?
• Front Seat - Software for Civic Life - "Front Seat is a civic software company and incubator. Our software connects people to the places we live, the resources we consume, and our communities." Via @AlbertoNardelli
• Podnosh Blog » Archive » Why doesn’t government have reservists? - "The role of government is going to change. As individuals find it easier to collaborate and solve problems, traditional government structures will need to be reshaped and rewired. So how do we start this change?"
• www.patientsknowbest.com - Welcome to Patients Know Best - "An open source personal health records project"
• PHPizabi - Create Worlds - "PHPizabi is one of the most powerful social networking platforms on the planet. With literally thousands of websites powered by PHPizabi including everything from simple friends sites to the most complex networking super sites out there. Easy to install, use, and raising the bar on what it is to provide a reliable, fast, social networking package to raise your business to the next level."
• Predictions for Google’s 2009 - What might happen at Google over the next 12 months…

Stuff I have bookmarked for December 21st through December 28th:

• MoMB Labs | Twitter 100 - 100 of the best Twitter services
• How to make a Delicious “plugin” for Chrome - Simple bookmarklet to use delicious in Google's Chrome browser
• Pods - Pods is a CMS plugin for WordPress
• Favo - Smart bookmark management and collaboration - Cool looking visual social bookmarking service coming next year
• WP Theme: Credit Crunch | Smashing Premium Wordpress Themes - "Beat the credit crunch with this magazine style money and business theme. Features powerful customisation theme options, magic automatic image resizing, 4 page templates to choose from… This has everything you need for your online magazine." Costly, tho.
• Welcome to CitizenScape — Citizenscape - "CitizenScape is a 2 year eParticipation Programme Trial Project that is integrating and testing state-of-the-art Web 2.0 social networking Internet tools combined with offline outreach community activities in a socially purposeful way in concrete legislative and decision-making processes - specifically looking at engaging Citizens to debate and engage in the implementation of EU environmental legislation at a local level."
• Blubrry - Blubrry Powerpress - "The Powerpress Podcast Plugin has all of the elements needed to have you podcast RSS feed in complete compliance in order to obtain a iTunes listing, and is optimized for listings in podcast directories and the Zune Marketplace."
• Things Are Going to Change Around Here… - Guido is moving away from Blogger onto something new. Will be interesting to keep an eye on how this develops.
• Welcome to MuniGov 2.0! ‎(Exploring Government Collaboration Via Technology‎) - Interesting Google Sites based collaboration between public bodies in the US
• Ericulous - Free & Premium Wordpress Themes + Plugins - Nice looking set of themes found by @davebriggswife
• FutureGov » We are the government. Us Now. - "I intend to do everything I can to help get the film into the hands of some of the movers and shakers in government as I am certain that the film can be used to turbo boost institutional change and with it wider social good."
• List and status of UK Local Council Twitters as of 18th December 2008 « Local Gov Engagement Online Research - Excellent collection of information about UK local gov's use of Twitter
• List and status of UK Local Council Twitters as of 18th December 2008 « Local Gov Engagement Online Research - Excellent collection of information about UK local gov's use of Twitter
• FreshNetworks Blog » Blog Archive » So how do you measure ROI of online communities? - "The answer to this question is simple and complex. The simple answer is that you make sure you establish a set of criteria when you launch the community and then judge success against these. The complex answer come with some of the ways in which you may judge success."

Steve Dale writes about his uneasiness with a new Twitter mashup service, Twitchboard, which automates the posting of content from Twitter to other social web services. At the moment, all it does is links: if you post a URL to Twitter it also gets pinged to your Delicious account.

I may be in the minority here but I feel slightly troubled by apps such as Twitchboard that want to think for me. I’m perfectly happy to create my own bookmarks in Delicious, which are reasonably well organised and categorised, or to click on Stumble! to add a link to a particularly interesting article I’ve read to my Stumble!  These are conscious decisions I’ve made to provide the ’semantic glue’ for my personalised social web. I tend to Tweet about fairly trivial stuff and will occasionally link to an article or picture that I’ve found particularly amusing. I don’t necessarily want to store these links for prosperity, or worse, create my own personal tag cloud around a random stream consciousness.

I can see some of the value, just in terms of time saving, for cross posting links to Delicious from Twitter. But I think Steve is right in this case - having Twitchboard perform this service would make you think twice about what you post to Twitter, and that’s just no fun. Presumably you also still have to go into Delicious to add tags and stuff (which is where most of the benefit lies) - so it isn’t that much of a time saver after all.

I mentioned in a comment on Steve’s post that actually doing this in reverse makes more sense: links I save in Delicious get automatically shared on Twitter. This is fairly easy to get set up, simply by using the RSS feed from my Delicious account and Twitterfeed to parse each link I share into Twitter.

It will be interesting to see how this works…

Stuff I have bookmarked for December 7th through December 15th:

• World Economic Forum launches social media initiative | Media | guardian.co.uk - The World Economic Forum has launched a number of new several social media tools and is inviting web users to discuss key issues on the economy, US politics, business ethics and the environment in advance of its annual meeting in Davos-Klosters next month.
• Community Toolbox - Bringing Solutions to Light - Great set of resources around community building, H/T Steve Dale
• Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral » Blog Archive » Conference networking at Online Information 2008: report and lessons learned - Nice big summary from Ed about his and David WIlcox's activities at the Online Information conference
• Socialreporter | Plan to train thousands of local digital activists - Great post by David Wilcox on digital media and community. Two videos featuring Will Perrin, too, and plenty of links to digital mentors
• JayCut – Online video editing - Interesting-looking online video editor

Stuff I have bookmarked for November 26th through December 5th:

• Save the Planet and Win - Social network for carbon reduction
• European Citizens’ Consultations - The European Citizens’ Consultations are the first ever pan-European debate involving citizens from all 27 Member States to debate the future of the European Union across the boundaries of geography and language.
• http://camcreative.wordpress.com/ - A hub for the creative industries in Cambridgeshire
• On the road next week - speaking at… - Yay, Simon Wakeman will be sharing a stage with me at the PSF event on 4th December!
• Bare Bones Software | Yojimbo - Yojimbo looks like a really useful tool

Stuff I have bookmarked for November 12th through November 25th:

• Government Connect benefits realisation fund - The Government Connect network enables secure data sharing across local and central government, helping to make the process more efficient, and ultimately resulting in improved services for our shared customers.
• Voicebox - UK online centres new site (built by me) to manage their bid for digital mentors
• Digital Mentor » Moving forward - I'm doing some work for UK online centres on their new online collaborative site.
• Miro - free, open source internet tv and video player - Cool looking video feed aggregator
• Improving communication « Lords of the Blog - Lord Norton is leading a crusade to make gov't consultation better

Stuff I have bookmarked for November 7th through November 11th:

• Where Have You Wheelie Bin? - Share your photos of wheelie bins. Via Tom Watson.
• sipgate.co.uk - free phone service over your broadband link - voice over ip provider. - A free VOIP service that seems to offer a no cost telephone number to ring!
• Flax: find freedom - Open source search engine
• The Cambridge Network - "The Mission of the Cambridge Network is to link like minded people from business and academia to each other and to the global high technology community for the benefit of the Cambridge region. "
• Digital tormet - Tracey Todhunter explains her concerns about the digital mentor initiative