David Terrar blogs atWikiConsulting.com

The ”micro-blogging” service Twitter is heading towards the mainstream as a means to connect with a network of people you trust and admire for advice, and as a source of information.   It gets mentioned on the BBC, or even Fox News, but there are still plenty in the business community, or even the traditional IT and Communications communities who need some help in understanding what it really is and why it’s useful.  I was presenting to 60 people at a CMA event last week, and less than 10 hands went up when I asked who knew Twitter. I’ve been meaning for sometime to write some form of guide, but now one of my twitter friends has written one, so I don’t have to.

As a quick introduction, Wikipedia says:

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”

Twitter’s own website “blurb” says the New York Times calls Twitter “one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet.” TIME Magazine says, “Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app,” and Newsweek noted that “Suddenly, it seems as though all the world’s a-twitter.”

Dennis Howlett, over on IT Counts has said:

“Laura Fitton has written extensively about this based on her own experiences. When I was in Boston earlier in the month we met and were looking for restaurant recommendations. She Tweeted her 5,300 person network and within a minute, four recommendations came back. Voila! This may sound like a trivial example but I see it repeated over and over every day. Everything from “How do I answer this issue?” to “Help, I’m in trouble!” turn up and within minutes, people receive useful responses, often in the ‘direct message’ channel cof their respective networks. “

My friend Luke Razzell has just written an 11 page paper, which you can download here. The paper explains Twitter, with several examples, like Dennis’s above, of how you can get value from the service and your Twitter friends. It has good quotes, and plenty of links. It’s provided in PDF form to make it easy for you to use the web 1.0 method of emailing it to your friends and work colleagues, or even printing it out as a handout. It’s provided under the Creative Commons share alike licence, so feel free to share and distribute it as much as you like, providing you attribute Luke as described in the terms.

I wouldn’t suggest that your company has a “Twitter strategy” in the way that a few years ago you wouldn’t have had a strategy for a particular brand of email service. However, l do think that plenty of products will be incorporating the Twitter concept, which falls somewhere between Instant Messaging and email, and has enormous potential as a collaboration tool. SocialText have incorporated the approach with Social Signals, and it’s already in the roadmap for our product. I’d be very interested to hear about people’s experiences with Twitter and use of Luke’s guide.

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Back on Wednesday 1 October we had a very successful London Wiki Wednesday meeting, combined with The British Computer Society’s London North Branch meeting . It was an interesting mixture of an audience - a full report to follow shortly. I’m pleased to note that we just seem to have continued the successful run of meetings from last year and the long break hasn’t made much difference. Initially we will be meeting once every two months until the community wants to increase the frequency.

I am delighted to announce that we have a great sponsor and a cool venue agreed for the next meeting, which will be special and the start of something new. The next London Wiki Wednesday will combine with a number of other meetups to become the first meeting of the Network of Networks. This is intended to be a regular, quarterly meeting connecting together London and South East based meetups like LWW, Mobile Mondays, Creative Coffee Club, Tuttle Club/London Social Media Cafe, London Girl Geek Dinners and any others who want to join us. The plan is to meet regularly, building up to a major “TED” style conference sometime in 2009.

For the first meeting we have a great sponsor - NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), at their London HQ - NESTA, 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE. Plough Place is located between Fetter Lane and New Fetter Lane. Nearest tubes are Chancery Lane and Farringdon. It will be on Thursday (not a Wednesday - sorry Ross!) 27 November. As well as being on a non-Wednesday, we will be starting a little earlier than usual at 16:00 going until 20:00. The focus of the meeting will be on the networking, but we’ll still have good content too. For the moment, please sign up on the wiki as usual, and look out for full details and the agenda soon.

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I’m just completing my first week of living with my new BlackBerry and my conclusion, particular if your phone is for business or heavy email use, is a resounding “go for Bold”! Let me explain why.

In the world of web 2.0, social media experts and Stowe Boyd’s edglings that I inhabit, I’m surrounded by Apple Mac fanboys who love their iPhones. I’ve got 2 kids trying to convince me to switch the family from Vodafone to O² so they can get them. Consequently, over the last few months, I’ve been dropping in to every Apple Store, O² shop or Carphone Warehouse that I pass to have a play with the iPhone. I’ve been a BlackBerry user for some while, first with an 8700, and for the last 18 months with a BlackBerry Curve 8310. I love the simplicity and intelligence of the BlackBerry OS, where the thing you generally want to do next is only a click or a few clicks away. I use my phone for email, sms and twitter every day, as well as regularly using it for note taking on the road or in meetings where I don’t want to open my (Sony Vaio/Windows XP) laptop. One of my worries over the iPhone was whether I would get on with the QWERTY touch virtual keyboard. Although friends told me it would take a few days to get used to it, and then it would be fine, others told me it was worth it for the other iPhone benefits. I practiced a lot in the stores, and wasn’t convinced. I watched the early videos on YouTube comparing iPhone vs Bold, and decided to take the plunge. Here are my thoughts so far.

In terms of size, the BlackBerry Bold is 1mm shorter than the iPhone, but 4mm wider and 2-3mm thicker. In the hand, you notice the extra width, but for me there isn’t a lot in it. It’s bigger than a BB 8300, but almost the same size as an 8800 (same length and width, but 1mm thicker). It’s slightly lighter than the iPhone and the black and silver echoes its look. The black leather effect back adds style, and it certainly looks very cool, in my opinion. In terms of feel and build quality it’s top notch.

For me the slightly extra width turns in to an advantage, because it is one of the factors that makes the keyboard superb. The keys feel great, and tapping out text is smooth and easy. This device allows fast thumb typing and is perfectly practical for long notes or emails, a big advantage over the iPhone touch keyboard. It doesn’t have a touch screen, but the trackball and navigation work well.

The display is absolutely awesome. It has the same 480×320 resolution as the iPhone, but is smaller. However, photos, and particularly videos look exceptional. Showing video side by side with the iPhone, I actually preferred the Bold although it is a close thing - the iPhone’s screen is superb too. Compared to the Curve, reading emails or SMS is a big step up, and the overall interface has been improved with lots of minor tweaks and enhancements. It’s easy to configure the home screen with the 5 applications you use the most, and the rest can be organized on the application menu or in folders. Take a look at this CrackBerry hands on tour on YouTube to get a feel for how the OS works.

The one area where the iPhone is ahead is web browsing. I wish all PDAs and smartphones could be as good, with that multi-touch screen approach to zooming and moving around. On most other phones, like my Curve, I’ve never actually bothered to surf from the phone, as the experience is too painful. The Bold browser is actually a big leap up on the Curve or anything else I’ve used before. The home screen lets you easily type a URL, go to a bookmark, or search Google, Wikipedia or Dictionary.com. In a page it’s easy to zoom in and out using keyboard shortcuts or menus, and move around with the trackball. If there is a phone number on the page, with the BlackBerry OS you can call it with 2 clicks. The browser is a long way from perfect but it works, aided by the high quality screen. I’ve used it regularly all week, for example yesterday searching for the correct courier address for a college in Cairo whilst at my local DHL office, where they were telling me the postcode didn’t exist - I wouldn’t have bothered trying on the curve. I can live with it, and hope that RIM improve things over time.

Both devices have 3G, Quad-band, EDGE, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, and USB connection. They can both handle multiple email accounts, PIM functions, and integration with desktop office applications. The iPhone has 8 or 16Gb storage, whereas the Bold has 1Gb and a micro SD slot. Both can sync with iTunes, and do a great job of handling multi-media files, although the Bold handles more media file types. Both have a 2 megapixel camera with geotagging.

Here are some things the Bold can do, which the iPhone can’t:
• The camera has a flash
• It has a video camera
• You get Documents to Go, so you can edit doc, xls and ppt files, not just view them
• It records voice notes as standard
• View all email accounts in one inbox
• You can swap in a spare battery if you need to
• Use cut and paste - this, for me, is a very big one, and I wouldn’t be without it.

On battery life, there is a potential issue, where you’ll probably need to charge the Bold at the end of each day. My Curve and 8700 would last for a few days, but all the extra functions drain the battery somewhat. On paper the iPhone has more talk time than the Bold. However, looking around the various forums, it looks like both the Bold and the iPhone suffer from the same problem - searching for wifi or a good 3G signal sucks the life from the battery quite quickly, particularly in bad signal areas. I’m not turning off 3G (which would be silly!), but I’ve improved things by turning off wifi and Bluetooth till I need them, and reduced the configurable backlight by 50% (which doesn’t make much practical difference to viewing). That has all helped.

One minor criticism of Vodafone here in the UK. Viewing the various YouTube first impression videos in the US and Canada, it looks like they give you the proper BlackBerry pouch with belt clip in the box. Over here in the UK, they are a little more cheapskate, and you only get the BlackBerry sleeve. I must add, though, that Vodafone’s technical support is excellent, and they have a good forum, with a fast turnaround on answers from both their team and the community.

So for my usage, with a heavy emphasis on using mail, note taking, and the PDA functions, the Bold wins hands down. I’ve added TwitterBerry, so I can make sure I keep more in touch with my twitter community on the run. Put all that together , and I’m very happy wandering around town showing off my new toy.

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Following the “rebirth” of London Wiki Wednesday last month, from this point onwards we plan to hold a meeting once every two months. The next meeting will be jointly sponsored by BearingPoint and The British Computer Society, and hosted by The British Computer Society on 1st October 2008 at their Covent Garden Office - my thanks to Andrea Rindler of BearinPoint and Dalim Basu of BCS for the venue, food, beer and wine.

The address for event is BCS, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Nearest Tube is either Covent Garden or Charing Cross (and here it is on Google Map). This event will be strictly limited to 45 people because of space constraints, so sign up on the wiki page on a first come first served basis. As usual, everyone who wants to speak will be allowed 5 minutes on a wiki related topic of their choice. At the last meeting it was decided that we start this meeting with a discussion about the rise of Microsoft SharePoint as a social networking solution in the corporate environment. A number of people are seeing corporate IT wishing to adopt the SharePoint “toolkit”, when simpler, cheaper, or off the shelf solutions might provide quicker results. I’ve got strong views on this, and I’m sure we’ll see some lively discussion.

As of today we already have 17 attendees booked on to the event wiki. I look forward to seeing you there.  As usual, if you are interested in sponsoring or hosting a future event, please contact me. 

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After a very long break, since the Wikipedia oriented meeting of last December, around 25 people came to the restart of London Wiki Wednesdays this month, which by all accounts was a very good meeting. We were hosted by Alek Lotoczko at NYK Shipping, on the 17th floor of CityPoint, with great views over the ever changing London City skyline. Beer, wine and pizza were sponsored by WordFrame (so I have to thank myself and George Athannassov for that!). Actually the pain of finding a venue, and getting sponsorship so that the event can stay free, with food and drink provided, is at the heart of the long break. During last year it was relatively straightforward to keep on top of booking a sequence of venues and partner organizations who were prepared to fund us. Coming in to this year, a combination of factors meant the day job(s) and family matters took priority. However, we have restarted, and the meeting decided that we will convene once every two months - the next meeting will be on the first Wednesday of October, and we’ll hopefully keep to a regular timetable every other month from then on. I’ve had a few enquiries from potential sponsors, but at this stage we still need a venue and someone who wants some exposure and link love - please contact me if you are interested or have any suggestions.

You can see this meeting’s attendees from the sign up page, and we have kept to the same format as last year. We started with a discussion on Stewart Mader’s Wikipatterns - a book and a wiki which details the patterns, techniques and constructs that wiki practitioners have come across repeatedly, and which presents them in a particular format or “pattern language”, describing in what context these techniques arise, what problem they solve, and how they solve them. Many of the audience use the resource, or in some cases wish they had found it a lot earlier, as it would have saved them time. There was plenty of discussion about the 1-9-90 rule of participation, and use of things like barn raising. By the way, Stewart Mader, has recently left Atlassian and started his own consultancy, and will actually be in the UK next week. On 3rd September from 7-9PM, he will be in Brighton at the Whuffie Club is for an evening gathering at The Werks. On following day, 4th September at 9:30AM, he’ll be conducting a half-day workshop at the same place on Effective Project Management Using a Wiki. Stewart’s a friend, so I’m sad to be missing him, as I’ll be in San Francisco next week.

One of the topics that came up during the discussion was the regular tendency for large companies and corporates to want to provide wiki, social media and collaboration solutions using Microsoft SharePoint - a key driver being that the company already has licences for the product bundled with their server software. There is a perception that SharePoint is “free”, when actually the approach will require significant development using the Microsoft toolkit. Many practitioners were comparing this to standard, “out of the box” solutions from open source wikis, or products like SocialText, Atlassian, or WordFrame. We decided that this trend, and how to work around it, will be our discussion topic for the next meeting.

Following the discussion, we had our usual 5 minute slots. I talked through one of our WordFrame projects at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales. IT Counts, is the award winning web community which links together their membership and provides practical IT advice for accountants in business and in practice.
Alek Lotoczko talked through his latest deployment of a collection of tools for collaboration in NYK using LDAP and single sign on.
Philip Woodgate added to the discussion on IT Counts, and his use of wiki and blog technology in his own practice, with the kep message being “keep it brain dead simple!”.
Andy Roberts surprised us all by highlighting a new feature in WordPress 2.6 which provides version control of post edits, allowing wiki like roll back. It means that you could, conceivably, set up a WordPress blog post to act like a wiki.
Andreas Ridler, who has previously shown us BearingPoint’s MIKE 2.0 methodology, showed omCollab. This is a collection of open source collaboration tools for blogging, bookmarking and wiki that they have pulled together as a platform for their clients, and which they are providing on an open source solution under a GPL 2 licence.
Lars Ploughman talked through use of wiki and other tools in different contexts.
Ben Gardner talked through his presentation that he uses internally to position the various tools that they use inside Pfizer, from OneNote, to wikis, to desktop Office, to SharePoint and document management systems. The key message being that there should not be a “one size fits all” solution as information needs to be summary or detail, structured or unstructured - different tools were needed depending on the context.

It struck me that there was common theme throughout all of the sessions highlighting the use of different, “best of breed” tools in the context of the way the information is needed. Everyone I spoke to seemed to be delighted with the meeting and the fact that London Wiki Wednesday is back on track.

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There has been too long a hiatus since the last London Wiki Wednesday (which happened to be a very “Wikipedia” oriented affair). The big gap was caused partly by me getting very distracted with a very busy few months with WordFrame and the day job, and some family stuff. However, the biggest factor was the pain of finding an available venue and sponsors to maintain the format - free, with beer, wine and food available.

LWW - 13 August 2008
To kick things back off, Alek Lotoczko will be providing NYK Shipping’s premises (again! but we love the view), and WordFrame will be the sponsor. The next event will be August 13 - the second Wednesday of next month. We hope to get back to monthly meetings, targeting the first Wednesday of each month thereafter. Please go to the LWW wiki page and book your place as normal. As usual, everyone who comes along will get the chance to speak about their wiki related project or business for up to 5 minutes. Sequence of the agenda is first come first served, so book on as soon as you can.

London Wiki UnWednesday
For anyone who can’t wait a month and a half, we’ll be holding a London Wiki UnWednesday straight after this Friday’s London Social Media Café from 12:00 to 14:00 at The Coach & Horses in Greek Street (see map). Sign up at the wiki page.  We’ll be talking wikis, deciding on a theme or topic for the August meeting, plus trying to solve the problem of sponsorship. Ideally we need a steady flow of volunteer organizations who are prepared to provide a space and put their hands in their pockets for a few hundred pounds to buy the booze and food, in return for a little exposure and link love.

So I hope to see you on Friday, and on Wednesday 13 August.

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I’m just finishing off a few very productive days in Plovdiv, at the WordFrame development centre, where we’ve been negotiating and planning with two new prospective partners. Later today I’ll be heading to Milan, and driving to Varese to speak at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0. The conference is being organized by my friend Emanuele Quintarrelli, one of Europe’s best known bloggers on the enterprise 2.0 topic, and his company OpenKnowledge, in conjunction with the Università dell’Insubria.

On their website, they describe the conference like this:

• A 360° overview on Enterprise 2.0 business and organizative impact
• A comprehensive exploration of Enterprise 2.0 tools and techniques: tagging, blogging, wiki, feed rss, open innovation, widgets
• A concrete and pragmatic approach with a strong focus on real case studies and well-proven methodologies
• Thought leaders and widely renowned speakers from all over the world

The speakers include Luis Saurez of IBM - I was with him only two weeks ago at Boston’s Enterprise 2.0 conference, and I’m looking forward to hear what he has to say in his talk “See the Light - Thinking out of the Inbox! ” He recently reminded me of the Doc Searls quote:

“Email is where knowledge goes to die”

The other speakers are Thomas van der Wal, Stewart Mader (we use his Wikipatterns book and resource all of the time) , Laurence Lock Lee and Ran Shribman. I’ll be doing a presentation version of the workshop I ran at last week’s NLab Social Networking Conference at De Montfort University. It uses our recent implementation of WordFrame at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales as a case study of how to build better web communities that add value to an organization. I’ll be going through approaches to building a community, content and community management, highlighting success factors and making practical recommendations to ensure a positive outcome. The ICAEW’s IT Counts community just won Best New Web 2.0 Initiative, so it is a great story, with some good conclusions. While I was putting together the material I was trying to investigate other cases studies that highlighted metrics to track whether we were doing well or badly. I found that there are very few good stories, and very limited statistics. After the event I’ll be publishing the PowerPoints on SlideShare, and doing a write up here which details what we now track to measure the success of this type of enterprise 2.0 community solution. I’m looking forward to a brief visit to one of my favourite parts of Italy, near the lakes, but more importantly to what I know will be a great conference.

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Yesterday, at Web 2.0 Strategies 2008 in London, the ICAEW’s IT Counts community won the award for “The Best New Web 2.0 Initiative”. IT Counts, which is sponsored by Microsoft, provides practical IT advice for accountants in business and in practice. It is part of the ICAEW online network (ion), a new collection of web communities, powered by WordFrame, and available free of charge to ICAEW members. The institute, which is the UK’s largest professional membership organization for accountants, is providing blogs, wikis, people profiles, professional connections, the use of RSS feeds, group messaging and document management to their member network so that they can complement the physical meetings of regional and special interest groups with an online presence.
Web2.0 Strategies is the UK’s leading forum for exploring real-world implementations of web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 tools and techniques. The conference was chaired by social media expert Euan Semple, and had speakers like Dion Hinchcliffe, President & CTO, Hinchcliffe & Company, Julie Meyer, Founder & CEO, Ariadne Capital and Jeff Schick, Vice President of social software, IBM Lotus.

Carolyn Harrington, ICAEW’s Head of Commercial Initiatives Development, Member Services, and Stuart Hall, their Online Communities Manager were there to collect the award on the Institute’s behalf from Kat Allen, Director of the Information Division of Incisive Media (formerly VNU). Kat was responsible for the event and is publisher of Information World Review, which was the co-host.

We are delighted that the community has got this level of recognition, and we expect there to be further press releases and press coverage available soon.

Photo courtesy of Stuart Hall