LocalGovCamp, an unconference for local government, happened this last weekend (Saturday 20th June) - what an astonishing turnout -more than 130 people from Local Govt came along on a Saturday to talk about the future of local government, citizen engagement, smarter working and more…
Here is an interview by @davidwilcox with @carlhaggerty and @robgray (me) at #localgovcamp - Carl is talking about Devon’s Internal Social Networking initiative using blueKiwi.
Ever since I bought my Canon HV10, I had assumed that you needed to use the HD branded mini-dv tapes if you wanted to get uncompromised HD -quality recording. This was probably down to the guy in the shop telling me that I needed HD tapes (in order to sell me some) and I’d never really questioned it until a recent trip when I needed more tapes and I couldn’t find any “HD quality” tapes… which prompted some research. To give you an idea of price difference, the “premium” sony mini dv tape costs about £3 and the “HD” tape costs about £14.
It turns out that you don’t *really* need “HD quality” tapes, they are just higher quality tapes that may have fewer frame dropouts than lower quality tapes, but your actual recording quality is the same. I guess it comes down to how important your shoot is, whether or not you can afford a few frame dropouts to happen in a year. Personally, I’ll probably use the cheaper tapes most of the time as I always shoot more footage than I actually need, so a dropout (which I’ve never had) is not the end of the world. On the other hand, a part of me thinks it’s silly to spend £600 on a camcorder and then concern yourself with saving £10 per tape (although the marketing and branding folks at the manufacturers probably realise this, hence the steep price in the first place - “reassuringly expensive”)
Here are some links to what others have said about this…
I found this great wordpress plugin called WPTouch from Brave New Code which automatically creates an iPhone interface for your wordpress blog.
It’s brilliantly designed, clean and also shows the number of comments for each post.
You can easily browse categories, search and subscribe to RSS feeds directly from your iPhone.
If you are browsing this from your iPhone then of course you are already experiencing it.
Installation is easy it took about 30 seconds via “plugins, add new” on the wordpress admin dashboard. There is no config required - it will automatically detect an iPhone or iPod touch and render it accordingly.
The screenshot in this post shows what my blog looks like on an iPhone.
I’m looking for a freelance web deisgner with experience in Joomla, for a possible short term piece of work. If you know of anyone please leave a comment (which would be publicly visible and might also lead to other work for them), or if you want to send me a private message find me on twitter (robgray) or email me “rob” at, well, this domain.
Ideally I’d prefer to give the piece of work to a freelancer or someone that needs the work, rather than a design agency.
Good, clear presentation from the straight-talking analyst David Tebbutt on why social networking for business is a useful thing.
The actual presentation notes are also quite useful - click on the little slideshare icon if you want to view the notes. It’s a pity I can’t embed them…
These days, if I’m attending an event related to social media or innovation, pretty much everyone there is on twitter. Therefore the only thing they need in order to contact me is my twitter name… so my cards now look a lot simpler. I also carry “normal” cards just in case but I’ve got a good reaction from these so far…
The first card shows the front, the second card shows the back… although they can be a bit confusing to people who are not familiar with twitter…
I recently did a short piece of work with the exec team of a large global organisation that is very knowledge centric. Although they have a desire to become more innovative, their sheer size means that this is a long-term undertaking. At the beginning of this project, we were gathering some information and ideas about their current way of working, and how this could be improved, when I noticed that some staff had set up a yammer group. If you are not familiar with yammer (www.yammer.com) - it’s a twitter-like microsharing tool aimed for use within organizations. Basically the way that it works is that it allows you to join a private space for your organization, based on your email domain. All users that share the same email domain can communicate in this group. Within this “global” group, people can also set up private groups (where they can share private info).
In my opinion, the main point of using a tool such as Yammer, is to open up communication across groups that may not know what each other are doing. What I saw in practice, was people creating far more private groups than open groups, mainly because of the fear of exposing information. While this is understandable, it defeats the purpose of using such a tool doesn’t it?
I have found that what works best is to have a much higher % of open groups, and as few private groups as possible. Private groups should only be used for things like maybe board level discussions etc. If you have too many private groups, you just end up reflecting the organizational silos that already exist, with a tool that should be used to break silos down?
What I take from this: I doesn’t matter if you have great tools if there is not a culture of sharing and openness.
Changing the culture to one of openness can be tough! Anyone managed to make some progress in this area of cultural transformation - got some real world stories? I’d love to hear them.
It turns out that you don’t *really* need “HD quality” tapes, they are just higher quality tapes that may have fewer frame dropouts than lower quality tapes, but your actual recording quality is the same. I guess it comes down to how important your shoot is, whether or not you can afford a few frame dropouts to happen in a year. Personally, I’ll probably use the cheaper tapes most of the time as I always shoot more footage than I actually need, so a dropout (which I’ve never had) is not the end of the world. On the other hand, a part of me thinks it’s silly to spend £600 on a camcorder and then concern yourself with saving £10 per tape (although the marketing and branding folks at the manufacturers probably realise this, hence the steep price in the first place - “reassuringly expensive”)
