Tim's Blog

A few additions to the one page guide series, this time developed for the 2gether festival. Blogger here mainly for people in the Talking Tech session. You can find a range of other guides here.

We've got a new overview of Twitter (PDF)

An experiment with a more image based style for an overview look at tagging (PDF).

And a How To for the CrowdVine conference social network in use at the festival.

You can find the original files for each of these guides (created in iWork Pages on the mac) below - and they are all licenced under Creative Commons so you're free, indeed you are encouraged, to take and adapt these for your needs. (Erm - it's a bit of a slow upload here from the venue WiFi - so I'll post the original files later on...)

Tomorrow the Buzz Off campaign will be launched. The youth led Buzz Off campaign is calling for a ban on mosquito devices, and you can hear the campaign team talking about the mosquito devices in this video.

What has this got to do with Google Alerts? Well - if you're launching a new campaign you probably want to keep track of the sort of coverage it's getting. And it's not just converage in the mainstream press that matters, but converage right across the web. And that's where Google Alerts come in.

Google Alerts lets you set up certain keywords that Google will track for you. As soon as it finds new webpages, blog posts, news stories or documents containing those key words, you get an e-mail to let you know.

These two one page guides were written very specifically for the Young Researcher Network launch conference and look at online video editing and using the voicethread tool for collaboratively narrating slide shows and presentations.

I was introduced to VoiceThread by Al Upton and the miniLegends during the 31-days to a better blog challenge this summer. It's a really interesting tool, and so, with this one page guide my aim has been to offer an introduction to VoiceThread, but to leave open to discussion it's possible applications. I'd love to hear stories from those who have used VoiceThread in any consultation, participation or youth work contexts.

These two one page guides were written for the Young Researcher Network launch conference where they were used as part of a session introducing social media tools for young researchers.

I've always found geographic and mapping visualisations to be really helpful in participation projects (as in this series of workshops on the local offer), and so these two guides explore how Google Earth and the My Maps feature of Google Maps can be used to add an online dimension to community mapping projects.

I wrote this one page guide on running an online survey in response to a suggestion from Damien at ChangeMakers Virtual Volunteering programme, and to go towards a section on online consultation and participation I've been putting together for Participation Works.

You can download the guide for printing here (PDF), or for editing here (Word doc).

Another post in the one page getting started series. This time taking a look at the humble wiki.

From the document:

A wiki page is a bit like a whiteboard. All you need is a marker pen and you can change the content of the whiteboard. On a wiki page, just search for the edit link and you can change the page contents directly from your web browser.

Unlike a whiteboard, however, a wiki will store a history of page changes so you can see how a page has changed over time, and can bring back an old version if you want to.

A wiki website is build up of interlinked wiki pages. It is easy to create new pages. Wiki pages are usually created in plain text with special ‘markup’ to indicate links and formatting.

This is the next in my series of one-page getting started guides - and the first of quite a few to be posted this evening.

The concept for these guides is fairly simple, although one I'm still experimenting with.

The goal is that each sheet should take someone from not knowing what a particular social media tool is, nor how they would use it - to at least having taken the first steps to using it in a sensible and sustainable way. And it should do that in no more than one side of A4.

So - attached to this sheet is a getting started guide on 'Finding and Reading Blogs'.

You can download this as a PDF for printing, or a word document to edit and adapt for your own use.

Engaging effectively and honestly with the social web involves listening a lot more than you speak; reading a lot more than you write.

One of the first tools I introduce to clients interested in exploring social media is some form of RSS reader. An RSS reader is a tool to agregate conversations and information from across the social web into one place - making it easier to listen as a foundation for engaging.

Recently, my reader of choice (for those starting out) has been NetVibes. So, here is the next in my series of one page guides - this time looking at NetVibes.

You can download the guide as a PDF here.

I've had more free time than I expected this evening, so here is the second of my one-page guides to social media tools, prepared for a training course I'm currently running.

This time, social bookmarking with del.icio.us in one page of A4.

Each of these sheets aims to:

I've recently started creating a series of 'Social media in one side of A4' mini guides as part of an online course I'm leading to introduce social media into one of the organisations I work with.

I'm planning to tidy up the first few for a general audience soon, but, as I noticed mention of Flickr on the Fairtrade Towns Yahoo Group this afternoon (thanks to Stafford Area FT Group who have set-up a Flickr group here) I though I would get a copy of the guide to Flickr online now.

So, here is Flickr in one side of A4.

Flickr is an online photo sharing too - and a very powerful one at that. So, if you're interested in how you can make the most of your photos, do take a look.