Event Details

Date: Tuesday 19 August
Time: 6:30pm for 7:00pm start
Where: Australian Museum – 6 College Street Sydney
Cost: $10 per head (pay at the door)
RSVP: http://webstandardsgroup.org/meetings/index.cfm?event_id=156

Presentation 1: “Findability: going beyond SEO”

Presenter: Radica Raeves

Search engine optimisation is usually the first subject that comes to mind when thinking about ways to improve the visibility of your organisation online. But it’s only a piece of the puzzle. In order to help the intended audience find, use and reuse your information, we need to look beyond SEO. Findability could help complete the puzzle. It’s a much broader concept, touching on almost every aspect of the web design and development process, where specialist fields intersect and overlap. We need to try and identify these elements of findability and “plug” them into the user-centred design workflow. It’s a big challenge… Can we connect the dots and bridge the gaps?”

Presentation 2: “One Web, No Go”

Presenter: Oliver Weidlich

With the improvements in mobile browsers and in the overall mobile user experience, what do we expect will change for mobile web users? Will we see a ‘one web’ approach? Oliver will talk about why the mobile and PC web experiences will increase in similarity, but still remain very different.

Presentation 3: “Building web apps for iPhones”

Presenters: Tim Lucas & Pete Ottery

Where to start when making a website targetted at iPhone users, including “Should you be?”. Frameworks…Javascript…Dev environments… and more. Tim Lucas & Pete Ottery share some experiences about creating iphone.news.com.au.

RSVP for this event.

But first, what is Twitter?

That’s a difficult question as it has many different applications and means different things to different people. Here’s a brief description that will hopefully mean something to you…

Twitter is a kind of mini blog whereby you get 140 characters to write something attention grabbing/informative/profound, or simply answer the question “What are you doing?”. Along with your short statement you might post a link to “further information” on a website, or whatever it is you’re twittering about. The messages are posted in date order, you can’t edit a post but you can delete one should you have second thoughts. You can add your website address and a short explanation of who you are to your profile, and you can upload your photo or logo and even customise the colours of your Twitter channel to your liking or to match with your organisations branding. Once you’re setup you can follow other people’s twitters and they can follow you back.

Twitter is not just about telling people what you are doing, you can connect with friends and colleagues, your piers, or politicians, and they could be from anywhere in the world. As well as individuals you can follow tweets from commercial organisations, events, emergency services, government and news corporations. A crucial part of its adoption is its convenience to fit into your everyday life, you can post and read tweets via SMS on your mobile, Instant Messaging, email, as well as via your browser.

More info: Here’s a good article which explains more about what it is: Twitter Guide Part #1: What is Twitter? And this is a great online video from Twitter CEO: Jack Dorsey Presents Twitter.

Posting news as it happens via Twitter

An application for Twitter in Local Government is to follow in number 10’s footsteps and use it as a channel for media to provide news updates as they happen. The traditional methods of communicating with the outside world have been via media releases with contact phone numbers for media comment – this still needs to exist but it’s a bit one way communicative and not really making use of what online technology has to offer.

Twitter offers an alternative method to alert and converse with the media and the community. I noticed that Downing Street were getting some questions posted by their Twitter followers and number 10 were replying via Twitter. This means that if one person asks a question everyone can see the answer, it makes the communication to the outside world more transparent and means that at least with your Twitter followers you don’t need to answer the same question twice.

More uses for Twitter

Event updates: You could use Twitter to provide real-time updates and comment at events and conferences. This could be for media and/or conference participants, or informing people of major outcomes for those that can’t attend. Its extremely quick to post and reply, and if you are not online you can do it via SMS on your mobile phone (which is handy for your busy events and media staff). People do need an account to reply to posts, but they don’t to be able to view updates so you can direct people to your Twitter page or you can stream updates from Twitter to your own website.

Blog updates and project progress: You could post blog updates in Twitter (like us) providing your subscribers with another way to keep updated and comment and to direct more traffic to your blog. Or you could post updates from a project if you don’t have a blog. If you have an online photo gallery you could post links to that during the event or as photos are made available afterwards, or to show project progress, perhaps on a new building development or arts project.

For more ways to use Twitter read: 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners

Try it out, it’s free!

There are obviously many possible uses for Twitter, and it could be a good testing platform for gauging how popular this type of tool might be with your community, other governments, and the media – even if you end up building something more customised to your needs in the future. At the end of the day if it doesn’t work out its not such a big risk as it’s easy to setup and its FREE!

Yes we’re on Twitter!

So this is my take on how you might be able to use Twitter, if anyone else has suggestions please post a comment. And of course whilst I was testing all this out I made a twitter channel for this blog: www.twitter.com/lgwebnetwork

All the blog posts are directly fed to Twitter, feel free to follow us and even ask us a question.

Flickr, Twitter – work or play?

If you use any social computing tools such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, blogs or even Twitter, you may have considered how they might be used in the corporate environment, and may even have utilised them in some of your web projects. I certainly have and am always looking for ways to employ new technologies and use my learnings from using these social tools in my corporate work. The only thing that might hold me back is a reluctance from stakeholders who have a fear of these tools and see them purely as social activities. This isn’t helped when you hear horror stories in the press of things gone wrong. So I was very excited to see Matthew Hodgson’s presentation at the conference so that I could hear about some real success stories as well as learn from the not-so-successful.

Social computing for knowledge management – Matthew Hodgson

Matthew talked about how corporate knowledge can be managed intelligently using tools like a wiki – making an amusing reference to how many organisations fall in to the trap of “network drive syndrome” by which network drives become the store of corporate information. How this becomes an ever growing tree which few (if any) can navigate successfully, and each time they go to find a new document or folder they have to find their way through the maze again. Often the structure grows out of control and each staff member is only ever likely to remember a small proportion of where things sit. Some organisations might also use record management systems for document management, these systems are orientated to storing records and are not really an appropriate tool for providing staff with quick access to corporate information on a daily basis. Matthew showed how using tools such as a wiki might be a solution, and was one of the key topics included in Matthew’s engaging presentation.

If you’re interested in what Matthew has to say visit his blog: Matt’s Musings

What’s your experience?

I’m currently working on implementing a new intranet and so this presentation was very relevant to me. I’m in the early planning stages of the project and using a wiki is a strong possibility. My main concern is ensuring its easy to update and is soooo incredibly useful that people won’t be able to survive their working day without it.

I’d be interested to hear from any of you who’ve had experience in using a wiki or other social networking tools to implement as a corporate intranet, so please comment on this post or email me.