Great video of Lee Hopkins pouring forth his spot-on views on how social media can be used within corporate communications. Everything he says can be applied to inter-organisation communication and collaboration too.

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It shouldn’t come as a surprise to most people reading this blog that Google provides a number of services other than their traditional business area of web search. Many of the tools can be used as part of an online community environment, indeed it’s possibly to build an entire platform – albeit one spread amongst disparate, if partially integrated, services – using these tools, all for free (or at least very cheap). In this post I will cover some of these and discuss how they can be used to communicate and collaborate online.

Google Reader

Reader is Google’s RSS aggregator. These are really useful services which enable you to monitor your favourite websites without having to visit each one individually. This video shows how uber-blogger Robert Scoble uses Reader to get through an astonishing number of site feeds.

Reader is the best service of its type. Good community use of it includes the ability to share items you find particularly interesting. This produces a web page of content you have picked out which others can use, and there is an RSS feed for this too. Interesting blog posts or other website content can therefore be easily shared with others.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Bloglines, Newsgator

Google Groups

Google Groups is a system of creating communities which communicate through email or a web based interface. It’s effectively a souped up mailing list arrangement, but works pretty well. The web section allows documents to be uploaded and shared, and web pages to be created for further pooling of information.

To be honest, services like Groups are somewhat unsophisticated in today’s world of Facebook, Bebo et al. But they are quick, free and easy to set up and could provide the basis for a community, certainly at the early stages. The ability to contribute just through email is pretty useful too.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Yahoo! Groups

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Docs and Spreadsheets is Google’s answer to ‘Office 2.0’ – the use of office suites of applications within the browser. In this case it’s a word processor and a spreadsheet app. The benefits of this type of approach are as follows:

• Zero cost of software
• No upgrade worries
• Access and edit your documents from any computer with a decent internet connection
• Share and collaborate on documents from anywhere in the world without having multiple emailed versions flying around

In terms of online collaboration, these tools are astonishingly good. There are some risk considerations: you need to be online to use them, your data is stored on a third party server and the functionality isn’t up to the standard of desktop applications. But overall, the good stuff outweighs the bad considerably.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Zoho, ThinkFree

Blogger

Blogger is Google’s blogging service. It’s incredibly popular, largely because it was first out of the blocks. Personally, I hate it, but it’s pretty easy to use for beginners, allows total control of how your blog appears, lets you have adverts to make some money and there is a certain level of integration with other Google services.

However, it’s almost impossible to get the address you want for your blog as so many people are already using it, as a network it’s full of spam blogs, and is nowehere near as feature rich as the likes of my personal favourite in the field, WordPress.com.

Blogs should be an integral part of any online community platform though – they make publishing content so easy.

Cost: Free
Rivals: WordPress.com, TypePad, LiveJournal

Customised Search

Google’s customised search service (CSE) is extremely powerful, easy to set up and stuffed full of benefits for service providers and users alike. This technology effectively provides an alternative to products which cost a serious amount of money.

CSE answers the problem of searching the web and getting loads of irrelevant or spam-filled results. Here’s how it works: you provide Google with a whitelist of sites which you know to be relevant to want people want to search and when people use your customised search, they only get results from those pages, thus increasingly significantly the likelihood that they will be relevant. You can also label sites, which provides clickable filters for the user to further drill down into the results.

Google provides you with a homepage to direct users to, or you can embed the engine within another website, or even set up a bespoke homepage. Examples of uses of this technology include my efforts LGSearch, KMSearch and BookZilla, as well as Simon Dickson’s Findless.

Cost: Free (you will probably make some money on adverts!)
Rivals: Rollyo, Swicki

Google Maps

Lots of people use Google Maps to find their way from A to B, and it works very well in this regard. It’s also very simple to insert a map into another web page, to show the location of your offices, for example. But the Maps API (application programming interface) means it can be much more powerful than that.

For example, you can create a map and display it on your site with a wide variety of information on it. Take a look at Findless’ MP Map for example. This presents a map of the UK with markers for each MP’s constituency on it. Click these markers and information about that MP appears. Pretty clever, but even more so when you consider that the information that pops up isn’t produced by the site, but rather an RSS feed from another service, called TheyWorkForYou. So the MP Map site is merely using two different data sources and ‘mashing’ them up to produce a radically more useful service.

Such mashups are an incredibly powerful element of the technology base of Web 2.0 and Google Maps is a great example of a company being open with its information for the benefit of the community. The potential application of this technology has limitless benefits for online communities and collaborative partnerships.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Yahoo! Maps

Gmail

Gmail (or Googlemail as it’s known in some parts of the world) is a web based email service that is probably the best one available at the moment. Here’s a list of some of the cool features:

• Threaded conversations – replies are all kept together in context
• Nearly 3 gigabytes of storage space – no need to delete anything
• Excellent spam filtering – publicise your email address with confidence
• Handle other email accounts through GMail – you can even send mail from a different address
• Add labels to emails rather than putting them in folders – so you can have an email with more than one label
• Use Google Talk instant messaging without having to leave the Gmail screen
• Find your emails with the powerful search tool
• The adverts are text only and unobtrusive

Gmail is great to use as an email system for online communities, whether as a contact address for the community as a whole or for use by individual members. There are a number of innovative ways it can be used as a productivity tool as well – soon making it an indispensable service.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail

Calendar

Google’s calendar offering is another one which, like Gmail, blew the opposition apart. It’s a great little service, with sharing information with others at the heart of much of what is cool about it.

You can share your appointments with other people, create group calendars which aggregate lots of people’s appointments into one, and make calendars public and readable by anybody.

This flexibility makes Calendar a great time management tool for any collaborative enterprise.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Kiko, 30 Boxes

iGoogle

iGoogle is the name given to what was the personalised home page. It’s basically a Google search page with lots of different content on it, which you can choose. It could be made up of RSS feeds, mini versions of Gmail or Calendar, an interactive file list of your Docs and Spreadsheets and a whole gamut of other widgets and services.

iGoogle actually falls behind some of the competition in this area, in that it’s difficult to share a personalised page with others, so its use as a community tool is limited. However, with a little organisation, it should be possible to work out a common set up between members of a community to help foster information sharing and reuse.

The real value of iGoogle, though, is its role within the Google Apps for your Domain platform.

Cost: Free
Rivals: Netvibes, Protopage, Pageflakes

Google Apps for your Domain

Google Apps, as the service is known for short, is a customisable version of the following Google services:

• Gmail
• Calendar
• Docs and Spreadsheets
• iGoogle
• Google Talk
• Web Page Creator

Essentially, you register a new domain, or configure an existing one, with Google and they provide these services for free up to 200 users. You can change colour schemes and add logos to give it all a corporate feel. Effectively, this is a enterprise standard groupware solution. For free.

iGoogle becomes more useful because you can control what the left hand column contains, so that a certain element of the page is similar for everyone, ensuring that specific information is distributed to everyone on the network.

The only lame part of the package is Web Page Creator, which is a service I haven’t mentioned before because it isn’t great and isn’t terribly important. Unless you are a DNS wizard, it’s tricky to get your URL displaying anything other than the pages you create in this very simplistic application. See the Change2 homepage for the sort of thing that’s possible (ie not a lot).

There are a couple of services that really ought to be integrated too, like Blogger and Reader for example. But Google Apps is still an amazing deal.

Cost: Price of a domain
Rivals: None that I can think of

What’s missing?

In terms of the Google spread of services, not a lot. Using the free stuff Google offers, you could clearly create a useful network, with a little work and using the Google Apps service as a hub to control the rest obviously has its benefits.

But there are a couple of things missing. One is a decent wiki service. Google has Notebook, a simple note taking and sharing tool, but it is nowhere near the power of, say, Wikispaces. This should be sorted out soon, however, as Google bought JotSpot not so long ago, which is an established and fully featured wiki platform. I would hope to see this made part of the Google Apps suite pretty quickly, too.

The other is a decent photo sharing service to rival Yahoo!’s Flickr. Google has Picasa Web Albums, which ties in with their free desktop photo manager (which is actually quite good) but there isn’t anywhere near the same power, flexibility or community elements that Flickr has.

Conclusion

Google provide a huge array of free tools to help you communicate and collaborate with others online. For many community groups and collaborative endeavours, this will be sufficient. The real gem is the Google Apps package, which for the price of a domain name will enable you to tie together a number of the services and provide a more tightly integrated experience for users.

But Blogger for me is too weak a blogging tool to be of much use to anyone but a real beginner, and I would recommend using WordPress.com instead as a free option. Also, until JotSpot is re-released, any wiki pages will have to be hosted on a non-Google site like Wikispaces. These are two areas that will need to be addressed before Google can be considered a one-stop community shop.

Further reading:

• Official Google blog
• All Google blogs
• Google Blogoscoped
• Google Operating System
• Google Watch

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There are a number of ways that content providers can make related information available to readers. One such method is to provide tags on posts which link through to services like Technorati or del.icio.us, so that items which other people have tagged with the same term can be found.

Sphere, however, provides a whole new way of accessing related content on the web. Sphere is all about creating connections between content, whether it’s being produced on blogs and other social media platforms, or through more traditional media platforms.

As the Sphere site states:

By creating connections between contextually relevant mainstream media and blog content, we’re exposing a broader set of Internet readers to blog content, fundamentally giving more power to the people.

Sounds fair enough. So how does Sphere work? Well, there are two main elements: the Sphere home page and the widget, called Sphere It, which can be embedded in any website.

The Sphere website is basically a blog search engine. It’s described pretty well by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch:

The main area of the site is broken down into four columns. On the left are major topics, like Top News, U.S. News, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, etc. Click on any topic and the second column populates with recent news items from Sphere partners (sites like ours, Time.com and others that include the Sphere It functionality) that has generated a lot of buzz, which is calculated based on page views for the item (against an average for the site) and other factors the company isn’t disclosing (but which probably include an anlysis of the extent to which other sites are writing about similar things).

Pretty good stuff. Blog search is dominated by Google, but Sphere could well become a challenger to the likes of TechMeme in terms of monitoring popular stories.

Sphere It is the really cool feature though, as far as content providers and readers are concerned. It’s essentially a widget that appears at the bottom of every post, which when clicked produces a dynamic list of related content, so the reader can follow the story elsewhere in a manner similar to the Sphere homepage.

I’ve installed it on Mediazilla and LGNewMedia as it’s an important way of adding value automatically to any post. It removes the need for readers to go away to a search engine to find further content to read on a subject.

Cross-posted from MediaZilla.

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David Wilcox in a post called Developing the New Media Open Innovation Exchange opens upthe site and the community that developed around it to become a network of social media collaborators, dedicated to producing services and platforms for social benefit. He’s even created a Facebook group.

This fits in perfectly with my vision for Change2. All the sites I have developed provide services using Web2.0 and social media technology for free to the people who will make use of them.

Easily my most successful is LGSearch which clearly filled a yawning gap for people wanting to be able to run searches for information within the UK public sector.

The Open Innovation Exchange is currently lacking a logo. I’ve put the following two efforts up for consideration.

In the meantime, my focus is clearly shifting away from local government specific stuff, and more into the wider non-profit sector, and specifically, I think, into the gaps between the two. I’ll need to decide how much longer LGNewMedia is to last – especially as there is a chance I won’t be working in the sector by the end of the year.

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Here’s a few items that have caught my eye today:

• Ning – the do it yourself social networking platform – now makes it possible to add audio to your networks, something that was seriously lacking before. Now music, podcasts and any other form of audio can be uploaded or linked to.
• Richard MacManus of the excellent Read/WriteWeb blog, discusses the launch of version 1 of EyeOS, a web based ‘operating system’. It’s like a desktop that runs inside your web browser, and what’s more, it’s open source. Give it a try.
• Guy Kawasaki blogs how we went about setting up his latest social media project, Truemors. There’s even a slideshow on the subject.

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Two fairly similar services here, brought to my attention by the ever reliable TechCrunch.

Demofuse allows you to create ‘tours’ of your websites, to demonstrate functionality, say. It looks very useful indeed, and will be something I will be using for some of the services I’ve put together.

Screencast-o-Matic is a service that lets you create screencasts – that is, the recording of what happens on your PC screen – within the browser for free. Cool! Screencasts are great for recording demos of how to do stuff on the PC, whether online or not.

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CoRank is a site which lets you create your own social bookmarking sites, which are hosted at yoursite.corank.com – a similar kind of thing to what Ning does with social networks.

This is a great way for small groups to share information through weblinks between each other, without going to the trouble and expense of setting up something like Pligg on a server.

I’ve set up a CoRank at http://virtualcommunities.corank.com/ – feel free to join it and have a play. I’ll still be using del.icio.us as my main bookmark repository though.

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Operator11 looks like a truly groundbreaking social web service: it’s a social television network.

It’s like a live version of YouTube (though you can upload preproduced video if you want) but what makes it a real killer for me is that other people can request to be involved in your show, you can have them on the air instantly. This is, as far as I can see, all through a web based flash interface.

Jasaon Calacanis hits it on the head:

It’s like giving a CNN newsroom to a MySpace dude

Yet more of the walls separating those who create media and those who view it are being torn down.

Tags: operator11

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Nice article from The Guardian:

This week came the news that “William Wales” had joined the social networking site Facebook. Yesterday there was much argument about whether it was a hoax or not. Would Prince William really post a profile on the net? The answer is: well, why not? After all, this is how most people his age keep tabs on their mates.

With websites such as Facebook and MySpace constantly being talked about in the media, it must be easy to feel like a 20th- century luddite if you aren’t already part of the in-crowd. Here lies a great disconnect at the heart of 21st-century socialising: either you’re in (and use every social networking website you can) or you’re out (and don’t use them at all).

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Right, the virtual community is now live, kinda. You can find it at http://virtualcommunities.eu. Be warned: it isn’t pretty.

But prettiness can come later.

So, the point of this site is to create a community platform using different social media services. The point being that I already have a blog, and a flickr account, so why would I want to bother logging into another one in order to contribute? Through the wonder of widgets and RSS, Virtual Communities tries to create this online utopia.

Let’s go through the various media and talk about how each can be contributed to.

1. Photos

There is a Flickr group called Virtual Communities. All you need to do is join the group, and then add some photos to it. The content is displayed on the VC homepage through a Flickr ‘badge’ which displays the latest 5 images. The ones there now are just some random ones I chucked up to test things out.

Check – is this the right way? Could we just use a particular tag, thus making it even easier?

2. Video

This uses a VodPod pod called (guess what?) Virtual Communities. This works best as you can add video from a number of providers to it, and it produces a nice widget. All you need to do is join the Pod, and start adding video to it.

3. Events

An Upcoming widget for the Virtual Communities group displays upcoming relevent events. Of which there are currently none. This was added after the screenshot above was taken, by the way.

4. Blogs

This is an RSS feed which aggregates a number of blogs (those of Messrs Wilcox, Dickson, Mitchell and, er, me). This is done through the rather mega FeedJumbler. This combined feed is then spat onto the page with MagpieRSS.

Check: Do we want all blog posts? Or could we use a category or tag based RSS feed? Both WordPress (hosted and non-hosted versions) and TypePad are both capable of this…

Also – would it be better to display cotent from blogposts, and give them a bigger and more central lump of the screen?

5. Links

MagpieRSS once again comes to the rescue, this time chucking the latest del.icio.us bookmarks that have been saved with the tag ‘virtualcommunities’.

Check: this probably needs to be changed to a more specific tag that people aren’t likely to use by accident…unless the accidental is actually more fun?

6. Slides

There is a group on SlideShare called Virtual Communities. Oh yes! Anything added to it is republished on the VC homepage with a rather marvellous widget. Anyone can join the group and any presentation can be added to the group.

Next Steps

It obviously needs a redesign, and a decent stylesheet putting together. But it works, I think. It needs a central combined RSS feed, but FeedJumbler can do that. Maybe another combined feed to track comments on all the different services would be cool too (if possible!).

Other services that could be included are something like a shared box.net account, which can be added as a widget for sharing uploaded files. There isn’t a wiki, and I am not sure how one could be incorporated into this model, other than through tagging wiki pages in del.icio.us. What about audio?

If this is a model that people are interested in, I’m quite happy to package up the various scripts it uses and make it available. Another option might be to host other communities of this type at (say) http://virtualcommunities.eu/anothercommunity. The bandwidth on my side wouldn’t be much as the services are the things taking the hits.

Creating some kind of web based framework around the whole thing, allowing people to create communities and add stuff to them using a web interface would be really cool, but waaaay beyond my capabilities.

Please do provide feedback, especially those involved in the earlier discussion – is this the sort of thing you were thinking about?

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