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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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..).

#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.

There are functions that turn @usernames into links automatically, but interestingly it’s also possible to edit the ‘sent via’ bit of text that appears next to your tweet.

For example the shamelessly self publicising:

I stuck with a boring name for this one

The via Kimondo (Pete Taylor) bit links to whatever site you set up when you register your app, which makes for some handy self publicity. I’m fairly sure that setting the app name to ‘buy some teeth whitening stuff here’ would infringe on Twitter’s terms of service, but I’m surprised no-ones tried it yet.

There’s a handy step by step guide on how to create your own @anywhere box here and you can see my attempt here. You can already get wordpress plugins that dovetail the functionality into your site.

You can follow me @kimondo to see the tweet.

Google Animal Translate

Introducing Translate for Animals (beta): Bridging the gap between animals and humans

Google have now updated their real time translation software with an android app (sorry iPhone fans!) that provides animal translations. So now you can answer the question as to what Mr Dog/Caesar is actually talking about.

get the app here from google

DIY Carbon Freezing Kit

Yes I know you love me dear, but why can’t I move my arms and why am I now someone’s favourite wall decoration?

Now you can cryogenically freeze yourself for 5-30 years. Yes, really! Making a complete Han Solo of yourself has never been easier. Or possible.

Make a Han Solo out of yourself

full details available here (via firebox.com)

Textp

Help save youtube bandwidth by selecting textp rather than video. For every person who selects TEXTp and keeps it on while they watch a video, they save YouTube $1 a second, resulting in potentially billions of dollars of savings (not to mention the environmental benefit of saving server load).

TEXTp is the result of months of intense transcoding efforts by our engineers, who toiled for weeks to ensure that a large chunk of videos on the platform could be reduced to their most basic elements. By replacing the images in the video with a series of letters and numbers, the videos are far less taxing on our system — and have the added benefit of promoting literacy!

see the above in all it’s textp glory on the Youtube website

Killer KitKats

This week saw two interesting social media ‘fails’. First we had Nestlé’s reaction to a greenpeace video about their use of palm oil in KitKat.  The increasing use of Palm oil has resulted in devastating destruction of rainforests and peatlands to create vast monoculture plantations. It’s a classic ecowarriors versus evil-corporation style campaign which is gaining a lot of support. Greenpeace’s opening shot is here:

I must admit, it’s a quite horrible shock advert in the usual Greenpeace style – Nestlé’s response was to get the video taken down from YouTube citing infringement of their trademarked logo.  Almost since the beginning of YouTube what usually happens when a video is taken offline,  a copy will be almost immediately uploaded again;  and Greenpeace of course used this response to generate support for their campaign, and even made the original available for supporters to upload using their own accounts.

The effect was immediate with tweets and facebook updates being bound around mentioning Nestlé’s censorship tactics – a suitably rebellious message which is popular for users of social media to repeat and pass on.

This is a classic example of the ‘Streisand effect ‘ in which an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information from the public domain has the unintended consequence of generating more publicity than if it had just been left online.

Nestlé didn’t stop there however: inevitably as their Facebook page became the source of comments and questions about their use of Palm oil, Nestlé instead responded angrily to the use of their logo as an avatar image, again resulting in yet another deluge of tweets and status updates.

The end result was Greenpeace claiming the upper hand, and Nestlé looking out of step with the campaigners and their customers.

#CashGordon – whose fail?

The other social media ‘fail’ of the past week has been the Conservative website launched to promote the message that Gordon Brown is supported by money for the Unite Union – currently supporting a strike by British Airways workers that has divided opinion. Interestingly the CashGordon  site features an unmoderated twitter stream repeating every tweet with the #cashgordon hashtag. It’s a particularly old school concept which dates from when twitter was a relatively new phenomenon, and having anyone tweet about your site was quite exciting.

The more left wing tweeters have jumped on this hashtag with a stream of abuse – many of which are too rude to put here, but which include things like:

@fusi_loving the EPIC FAIL that is #cashgordon – they cant even get a twitter feed right, what are they gonna do with the economy? lol. #toryfail

and

@lordbonkers Write something rude about the Tories, mark it#cashgordon and they post it on their own campaign site for youhttp://cash-gordon.com/

and the rather damming:

@psbook New post –> Tory ‘Cash Gordon’ campaign designed by US anti-healthcare lobbyist http://is.gd/aSFIF #cashgordon

Interestingly however the very presence of the website, and the numerous comments on the #cashgordon hashtag has had the unintended consequence of bringing the whole campaign to the attention of a much wider audience (at time of writing #cashgordon is trending in the top ten of the UK) which itself is being claimed as a success.

Update: I’ll see if I can tally up the tweets to see who can claim victory on this one

Another Update: nope, quite clear epic fail

Epic fail

Bzzzzz

So everyone’s buzzing (sometimes quite angrily) about google’s new attempt to make gmail a bit more social. I noticed that in the list of sites I could connect kimondo.co.uk didn’t appear, yet a few older websites I worked on did show up in the list.

A quick google later and I found this workaround based on editing the page headers:

You can manually associate your site with your account by adding this piece of code to your html code’s header part. Just replace profilename with your Google profile name. Usually takes a few days for Google to pick-up the information.

<link rel=”me” type=”text/html” href=”http://www.google.com/profiles/profilename”/>

However there’s an even quicker way which works almost instantly – just go to the superbly retro-titled google’s webmaster tools and add your site or blog to the list. You can do this with a html file upload or by adding a meta tag to the top of the page to verify the site. Once verified it appears on the list of sites you can add in to buzz.

I’ve also discovered I can create a google profile and sell my soul completely to the company that ‘does no evil’.

57ZQX56N5ZX3

Not sure if it’s working out cities using IP addresses, geotagging or the user’s self declared location (in which instance we’d all be tweeting from Tehran).

Now including Brixton