Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

The Saturday before last Digital Birmingham were involved in putting on Local Gov Camp on its return to Birmingham. Actually, my Gov Camp started on the Friday night when 20 or so ne’er do wells turned up early to have a drink in The Anchor followed by a curry at Manzils in Digbeth. Already, it was invigorating to be part of conversations between such committed people.

Local Gov Camp is is run using the unconference format. Here we don’t have any key note speakers, the attendees run their own sessions if they want to and the agenda is decided on the morning, based on people pitching the sessions they want to run.

More – Local Gov Camp

Safer Internet Day is organised by INSAFE

in February to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world. Each year hundreds of events are organised to raise awareness about online safety issues.

For more information about SID, how to get involved and set up your own event, please click here.

A lot of people seem to be using various free URL shortening methods to ensure their web pages fit into the character limits of various social media sites such as twitter.  Eg if you have a web page URL address that is huge – this limits the space left for you to create a powerful piece of copy to help readers continue on to your link.  Also if you’re printing leaflets or transferring your URL address onto paper format it’s quite difficult for the reader to transpose a long URL address without making errors.  Why not make it easy for them and shorten your URL For example  http://bit.ly/ is an easy way – paste your long URL into this site and it gives you a free short code.

However there is also another great function on the http://bit.ly/ site and this is when you sign up for a free account.  It allows you to track the clicks on to your URLs.  If you had a number of different publicity materials going out (email newsletter, email footer, printed leaflet, on the back of staff Tshirts) why not give them all a different bit.ly address and then at the end of your campaign you can see which of the different marketing comms. channels have been most successful.  In the old days this used to be done by a team of marketing assistants, newspapers, clipboards and guesswork – now it can be done almost instantainiously – and all free of charge.  Thank you Mr Bit.ly and others.

For the past week a sizeable contingent of people from the West Midlands have been in Austin, Texas for South by South West (SXSW), a large festival/trade show for all things interactive.  Reports back indicate that the region was punching well above its weight in terms of its presence at the event.

And there’s a fantastic little site popped up to pull together all the content that has been produced while people are over there.  Head over to Heart of Austin to see what has been going on

Recently read an article which reported that Alzheimer’s could be staved off by becoming web-savvy.  Dr Gary Small, an expert on ageing at the University of California, Los Angeles, said “Our findings point to an association between routine internet searching and neural circuitry activation in older adults.

Google, more than ordinary reading, stimulated the brain regions controlling language, reading, memory and vision.”

The study of UCLA’s Memory & Ageing Research Centre, used 24 adults aged 55 – 76, half of whom were used to performing web searches.  Dr Small added:  “it seems people who are more adept with internet technology are likely to remain mentally agile.”

If the above is true, I think the DB team must be the exception to the rule as we all seem to be suffering from one mental dysfunction  or another, but just not Alzheimer’s!

France & Germany line up to bash Internet Explorer

Here’s a link to the article that might be of interest to you!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/18/browser_hole/

Well, it may be 5 years too late but at last Central Government has decided to catch up with the times and revise the primary school curriculum to include Internet Safety and prepare our children for the digital age.

It has long been the belief of IT educationalists that there is no point in restricting young people’s access to the wealth of information held on “t’internet”.  But, wouldn’t it be better preparing our future generations by providing them with the knowledge and understanding of not only the benefits, but the dangers of “t’internet” and enabling them to make informed decisions and judgements for themselves.  Because we all know, if you tell a young person not to do something … the likelihood is that they WILL go and do exactly what you’ve told them not to!

Last Tuesday I helped to launch Birmingham’s e-Safety Strategy on behalf of Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board.  My presentation, which is below, talked about the different work that Digital Birmingham has done around the Home Access agenda and then covered Social Networking Sites as a new technology being used by young people that professionals don’t always have a full understanding of.



So I spoke about the Aston Pride project to provide computers in the homes of primary and secondary school children and also the Computers for Pupils grant which has been used by the city to launch 40-50 Birmingham e-Learning Foundation schemes in Secondary Schools across the city. The latter means that more money is coming back in to the system to help provide kit to more kids. More – e-Safety Strategy Launch event

Last Thursday, myself and Matt Butler from Birmingham BEST went down to London for a Local Government Information Unit (LGiU) event about Social Media and councils.  It was a mixture of talks and panels about how politicians can use social media, which tended towards the campaigning value rather than talking with constituents, and possible usages of social media within local government.

Because there was a lot of content, I’m going to split these posts up between the political and council based bits with this one concentrating on the politics side.

The first keynote speaker was Iain Dale, the Conservative political blogger.  He was a very engaging speaker, often because he spoke of the effects that his blogging had made upon his personal life.  It had already become obvious that at least one person had strong opinions about him before he stood up as they had called him a liar on the Twitterfall in the room.  Iain used this opportunity to say how he had been targeted by some people he considered to be political obsessives as a result of his writing. More – Local Government and Social Media event – Political