I am just researching Government 2.0 and I was looking at the New Zealand Digital Strategy website. I thought I should subscribe to the RSS for this site so I looked at the URL field in 'FLOCK" where it tells me about the RSS fields available and to mu horror there isn't one!! It just struck me that the digital strategy web site for the county doesn't have an RSS feed, I hope this is an oversite!
I have just returned from the first International Conference on Computer Mediated Social Networking ICCMSN . It was a really interesting conference. I will blog on aspects of the conference in later posts but for this post I want to focus on Virtual Worlds. First of all I want to highlight the press release from IBM about a pilot project between IBM and Linden Labs. I think the value to IBM in doing this is it allows them to experiment with Virtual worlds as another communication channel that will sit next to Video, Voice , IM conferencing. I believe that it will also be used to provide a construct to deliver education and training.
During the ICCMSN Telecom and Otago announced a partnership whereby Telecom would provide the hardware to allow Otago and other New Zealand universities to run anOpenSim server implementation and utilising KAREN for the network infrastructure. This looks like an exciting development and seems to be comparible to the IBM and Linden Labs announcement.
Clearly the ideal situation for New Zealand Universities would be for Linden Labs to allow them to run their own instance of SecondLife. As an obverser it looks as though the battle between SecondLife and OpenSim has truely begun. I don't believe that this is a great division (Corporate Vs Open) as it goes against the ideals of modern IBM.
Here is a video of Australian Open in SecondLife as an example of some of IBM's Second Life initiatives.
I have finally caught up with the rest of the Social media folk and joined Flock and I have to say that I am really enjoying it. The main reason being that I don't have to log onto loads of sites everyday, its all done for me.
Have a look at the flock video and join up if you fancy it.
I was looking at the post on Facebook going open where I added an MTV "Mashup". I forgot how much I liked the song Tupac Vs BIG remixed with the Police "Walking on the Moon" riff so I hunted out the full track on YouTube as sung by PDiddiy. Not my usual post but thats blogging!
My primary laptop at work (T60p) has a problem in that the screen is Kaputt. I have now switched to my secondary laptop (T60) which has the company build loaded onto it. Now comes the task of configuring it for my usage. This really means that I have to go and get the Firefox plugins. I just wanted to share with you the plugins I use with firefox:
- Scribefire for blogging - Meebo for Public Instant Messaging - Dashblog to grab content - Del.icio.us - Video Downloadhelper for downloading videos - Schrink URLs using Shrinkify - Better Gmail2 for - Twitterbar for twitter - Theme - Linkedin and Facebook
I also use a bunch of internal IBM plugins such as
- My Activities (Lotus Connections) - Cattail (document sharing aka. slideshare) - Dogear this (Lotus Connections)
I was looking at the press that Facebook delivered some open source components it is all very interesting. The front runners in this space are Facebook, OpenSocial and IBM Mashup Central - I am wondering how or if organisations will jump into bed with Facebook and OpenSocial to deliver Social Networking sites. Gartner certainly thinks that they will and points out that the collaboration space will see more niche players entering the market to the detriment of IBM and Microsoft. I think Gartner may well be right but we still hit the same old problem of how do I aggregate many services in one place? Outside of the IBM wall I can see LinkedIn and Facebook really delivering a mashup environment but the question will be how agnostic will they be? As a mashup standard is developed will they follow? who knows but it is fun to see how this technology area progresses.
Lets have a love in and mashup together. - enjoy the MTV music mashup vid.
I have joined the IBM internal group called BlueIQ. This group is committed to helping IBM personnel get better use from their tools and make their day-to-day working live easier. One of the tools that we use extensively is Sametime Unyte. Sametime Unyte is a SAAS which allows uses to web conference and audio conference. Within IBM using this service is free (as you might expect) but it is really a service that anyone can use. Check out this cool video on this service.
So it looks like Yahoo have released Fire Eagle a geo location service. It is essentially a storehouse for personal information that you can share with sites and services.
This service feels good and helps us take small steps to an integrated user profile or persona. Certainly OpenID has a lot of potential but we still have a way to go in order to blur the work and personal personas.
I was trying to decide whether to continue to use blogger or move over to Wordpress. I have had a play with Wordpress and I really like it as there is the option to move to a hosted solution which really appeals.
I have also been looking for a way to update my blog without logging onto blogger and joy I have found scribe fire which seems to be a great tool. So this is my first Scribefire posting.
