October 15th #BAD09 – Blog Action Day 2009 – On Climate Change

Blog Action Day 2009 takes place on Thursday October 15th and Bloggers across the globe are asked to unite on that day in blogging about Climate Change. Will your Blog be ready for this challenge!?

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices.

Scribd – over 2,400 viewings of documents

This is the first in a series of articles about the services that operate behind the scenes on the BCN (Blackpool Community News) websites.  This series will look at Box.Net, Odiogo, Amazon Associates and WordPress services and those of TypePad. But we start by revisiting Scribd:

This website (and the BCN main website) first used Scribd back in July (2008). Since then over 50 BCN documents have been given the Scribd treatment and shared with a wider audience as iPaper documents. This has allowed us to offer a service to readers enabling them to view or download a document. There has been over 2,400 total views of documents shared by BCN on Scribd.  The single most popular document on BCN Scribd with nearly 200 views, is the Blackpool Local Area Agreement reproduced as an embedded document below. The same document can be viewed as a Scribd Document Page or as a Scribd Fullscreen Webpage document.

iPaper is a document format built for the Web. Virtually any document format can be converted to iPaper, which is embeddable into any website or blog (and just very recently into WordPress Blogs as well).

Above is the Control Panel for Scribd documents. The iPaper drop down menu gives you different publishing and viewing options (including viewing as a Book and as Slides). The – and + controls the zoom. You can view the page of your choice and can view single pages or all the pages. You can search the document. The final control allows you to view the document as a web page.

Important note: iPaper is built with Adobe Flash for creating animation and interactivity on websites. So if you can watch videos on YouTube, you won’t have any problems with iPaper. You must also have JavaScript enabled on your browser. If you can see the document below your browser is enabled.

You should see the embedded document here:

View this document on Scribd

Broadband – we could not live without it says Communications Consumer Panel research findings

Nearly three-quarters of people with broadband at home say that they couldn’t live without it and soon it will be essential for everyone, new research from the CCP (Communications Consumer Panel) has found.

The not online not included CCP Report report based on a survey of 2,000 adults identifies which services people use the internet for. 9 out of 10 (90%) internet users say that they use it for finding information, more than three-quarters use it for communications, 7 in 10 (71%) use it for transactions such as online banking and more than half (55%) use it for newer entertainment services such as downloading TV content.

In a significant comment Anna Bradley, CCP Panel Chair said:

“Government must make it clear what services and activities people will and will not be able to carry out with a download speed of 2Mb/s – and will need to keep this under review so that it does not become outmoded.”

The report is to be submitted to Lord Carter’s Digital Britain Review.

Source: The Hedon Blog

Other information: Communications Consumer Panel

Related blog post: Digital Britain – who pays?

Social Media Exchange Event

The Social Media Exchange is a series of masterclasses, discussion and debates to inspire  online collaboration and networking opportunities for 2009.

• Date: Monday 26 January 2009
• Time: 9am Registration. Prompt start 9.45am – 5pm
• Venue: The Resource Centre, Holloway Road, London N7 6PA

Part of the day will be dedicated to masterclasses on a range of topics related to social media. Participants will also get a hands-on opportunity to learn new skills from setting up a blog, creating a podcast, learning how to twitter etc

News from the Corridors of Power – through the power of WordPress

The UK Parliament Labs are developing the services they offer through customising their use of WordPress blogging software. This will make their news services more accessible – and more friendly – to use!

“WordPress is open source software that is free to use and customise. This is the first time Parliament has used the open source option. The main reasons for doing so are the ability to customise the look and functionality of WordPress easily, it’s economical, and inputting and publishing content is simple and fast. And it lets us provide RSS feeds. And unique, fairly friendly, URLs. Basically everything you’d expect from a website today.”

Parliament is not the first influential institution to use WordPress in the UK, indeed the Number 10 website uses it as well, but it will undoubtedly do a lot to promote WordPress and Free and Open Source Software across the UK – and the World!

Twitter – Getting started

It seems strange doing a blog post about Twitter (it ‘being the new blogging’) when Blackpool does not seem to have really got its head around the idea of blogging yet!? However (with thanks to Darren Rowse and TwiTip) – here we go……

Twitter is the ‘new’ blogging – albeit micro-blogging in 140 characters or less! But how do you open an account and get started? The following explains how to get up and running. For a print-ready version of these notes download Twitter – Open an Account from Scribd.

Step 1: Go to http://twitter.com.

When you get to Twitter.com, you’ll see this page:

Step 2: Click the Join the conversation! Green Box

Government seeks views on digital inclusion

The Yorkshire and Humberside Regional ICT Champion has reminded us that the Government is still seeking views on its ‘digital inclusion strategy‘

We have covered this earlier on BCN, but since then the government has adopted a more interactive method for views to be conveyed through online forums. You have to sign-up first.

Incidently the North West ICT Champion has recently been appointed. A warm welcome to Peter Dunn. We can expect to hear more from Peter in the New Year.

New ICT Magazine for 3rd Sector

Civil Society IT is a new quarterly magazine and active website about the effective use of ICT in all kinds of not-for-profit organisations.

The magazine offers:

• 4 information-packed issues per year
• A fully-interactive digital edition
• A regular e-newsletter with news, jobs and events
• Unlimited access to online-only content at civilsocietyIT.co.uk. What we can’t fit in the magazine will go on the website.

You can look at the magazine and associated material on their website now – the digitised page-turning version of the  magazine is quite funky!

They have a useful web page on Free stuff.

A one year subscription will cost you £39 for one year – however, subscribe before the 6th February and you will get two full subscriptions for the price of one.

New version of Blogging software

NOTICE: A new version of the software (WordPress) which powers most of the BCN websites is being released next Friday morning at 1am. There should be no disruption to services for readers/viewers. However, this is an early warning just in case….!!

Text-to-speech facility added

This Blog has now added a text-to-speech service through Odiogo, allowing readers to actually listen to blog posts on the website, and even on iTunes (as well as iPods and iPhones) as a podcast.

While this is a very ‘fun’ feature for readers, it could be a very valuable tool for the visually impaired and can provide benefits to readers with learning disabilities like Dyslexia.

If you have used and had benefit from the service please leave a comment and let us know.