Digg isn’t the website it once was, and I must admit I generally turn to twitter now for the latest news from the rumour mills before it hits the official news sites. Despite it’s drop in traffic and influence Digg still commands a large (although male-student-dominated) audience. There’s now a ‘new digg’ with a simpler interface which harks back to the original feel of the site.
All change here
One of the interesting features is the ability to import feeds directly – so perhaps digg will become what it intended to be – a democratic way of voting for news that’s interesting. Or it might just remain “top 10 hot pictures of Christina Hendricks / 10 Star Wars characters you’d forgotten about/ top 100 1990′s video games”.
There’s a lovely infographic with a potted history of Digg available from Online Schools.
If you’d like an invite to New Digg I have a few spare – give me a shout on twitter @kimondo
My validation code is below, it activates this blog feed in Digg (although I’m not expecting the Digg effect any time soon)
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Well I’ve finally got round to tidying up the open source Webtivist online action script.
I’ve called this version Webtivist Basic (because I lost count of what version number this would be).
The script is very basic (hence the name) but allows you to setup simple email actions to a suitable target from any site, and to store your activists details in a database. This can be exported as a .csv file which can be dropped into any supporter database / email newsletter program.
It checks for common swear words (in case your activists get over enthusiastic!) HTML and script language I’ve noticed that form bots use, so you probably won’t need a captcha.
Visit my Webtivist page for instructions and the link to download from sourceforge.
This was originally written as a project at the World Development Movement since as a smaller organisation they couldn’t afford the more expensive online action systems on offer. It’s free and released under the Non-Profit Open Software License 3.0 (Non-Profit OSL 3.0).
I’m hoping to include a bit more functionality in the next release, to include things like pre-filled in form values from personalised emails, email to MP using a postcode lookup, tweet actions (all things various versions of the script has done in the past). I’ve also had a few ideas about integrating SMS as well.
Eventually I’d like to build a super-dooper version that has a nice administrator back-end, so that setting up online actions to elected representatives and capturing the data will be as easy as setting up a blog.
Comments / ideas / criticism welcome. If you want to help me work on the database of MPs emails & contact details please get in touch (am working my way very slowly from A..).
The following are a few ideas that came out of a discussion I had with a group of campaigning geeks at the recent Ecampaigning conference in Oxford. Working out what the next big thing on the internet always seems to be a bit hit and miss (and some would argue a waste of time) but it’s always a popular topic. So here follows a round up of new and not-so-new things that might or might-not be the next big thing.
#1 Crowdsourcing
The idea of outsourcing work to the internet is hardly new – Amazon has effectively crowdsourced all of it’s product reviews for years, but there are a few interesting projects that have popped up recently.
Hunch is a project by on of the people who developed flickr and is effectively a technology demonstrator – it’s a social network with questionnaires which learns from the answers given by the community and & builds up idea of who you are and then helps you identify what things you would be interested in. Although the commercial potential is obvious, this approach could work for matching campaigners (or donors) with charities they’re likely to be interested in. SocialActions.com
During the expenses scandal the Guardian newspaper uploaded nearly 500,000 documents and crowdsourced the analysis of them on their MP expenses website.
Crowd sourcing translation for emergency info was used in Haiti by Ushahidi although it posed problems with matching the expectations of users on the ground with what was practically possible by the aid agencies.
Taking the concept even further The extraordinaries is a mobile phone app which describes itself as micro-volunteering – and which seeks to answer the question “I have 20 minutes right now what can I do?” by matchmaking suitable volunteers with tasks.
