Archive for the 'Weblogs' Category
- TweetScan- search engine for Twitter
- Twhirl - free a desktop client. It allows you to post short 140-character updates about what you are doing, as well as following your twitter friends and read all their updates, replies anyone sends to you, and direct messages to your account.
- Quotably- View and reply to Twitter conversations as threaded discussions.
- FriendFeed- index that lets you keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing.
from Bev Godwin, USA.gov and Web Best Practices, GSA Office of Citizen Services, March 3, 2008
|
Technology |
Simple Definition |
Examples |
Opportunity/Potential in Government |
|||||||||||
| Blogs | Journal or diary with social collaboration (comments) | GovGab.gov, 20 federal agencies,
USA.gov government blog library, Webcontent.gov |
Meaningful info delivered from a govt authority to new audiences. Puts human face on govt using informal tone. Opens public conversations | |||||||||||
| Wikis | Collaborative authoring & editing | GSA Collaborative Work Enviornment, NASA, US Courts, Intellipedia, US Foreign Svc, Utah Politicopia, Wikipedia | Workgroup or public collaboration for project management, knowledge sharing, public input. Contributions to 3rd party sites e.g. Wikipedia | |||||||||||
| Video Sharing (and Multimedia) | Videos, images, & audio libraries | USA.gov Multimedia library, NASA YouTube , Coast Guard, Virginia YouTube Channel, Americorps contest, Tobacco Free Florida contest | Public outreach, education, training, other communication for “connected” and on-line audiences. How To videos & audios to improve service and achieve mission. | |||||||||||
| Photo-Sharing | Photo libraries | USA.gov fed/state photo libraries, USGS internal photo gallery with Flickr API, EPA photo contest | Cost savings potential. New audiences. Awareness. | |||||||||||
| Podcasting | Multimedia content with an enclosure for syndicating via RSS for use on iPod TM, Mp3 players & computers | White House, NASA, USA.gov federal podcast library, Webcontent.gov, Peacecorps | More ways to get message out to “connected” and on-line audiences. How To messages. Use in emergencies. Live govt deliberations | |||||||||||
| Virtual Worlds | Simulations of environments & people
(Second Life, Active Worlds, Kaneva, ProtoSphere, Entropia Universe, uWorld) |
NASA, NOAA, CDC, Natl Guard, Dept of Energy, Real Life Govt in 2nd Life Google group, National Defense Univ Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds | Public outreach & other communication for niche Internet audiences. Virtual Town Halls, Education, Training. Ability to bring people together worldwide for meetings, lectures, etc. | |||||||||||
| Social Networking Sites | Connecting people globally | EPA Facebook group, NASA Colab, MySpace, Linkedin | Intranet use to cross internal agency stovepipes. Cross government coordination. Public communities. Viral impact. Knowledge mgmt. Recruitment. Event announcements. | |||||||||||
| Syndicated Web Feeds | Automated notifications
(think RSS) |
USA.gov Federal RSS Library,. NOAAWatch | Do more with RSS, XML/Web feeds. Expand reach. Pull content together across government. Authoritative source. Reduce duplication. | |||||||||||
| Mashups | Combine content from multiple sources for an integrated experience | USA Search, USGS, NASA, EPA, Virtual Earth, Google Earth, Google maps | Lots of potential. Improved govt reach, service, usefulness, and functionality. Integrate external data. Get licenses, stay vendor neutral. Make content available to others who create mashups | |||||||||||
| Widgets, Gadgets, Pipes | Small applications & code in Web pages or for desktop use | FBI widgets, Veterans Affairs, Census Population Clock & NASA Planet Discoveries Desktop widgets | Increase awareness, use, and usefulness of .gov sites, information, and service. Bring content to the user’s home page (iGoogle, netvibes, etc) | |||||||||||
| Social News (Sharing, Tagging) Sites | Ways of sharing content with others | USA.gov, NASA, Govt blogs, Digg, Delicious Technorati .AddThis | Increase the popularity and use of .gov pages, information, and services. Viral marketing. | |||||||||||
| Micro-blogging | Form of blogging which allows brief (instant message size) text updates | Twitter, Jaiku, Cromple, Pownce, NASA Edge, USA.gov, GovGab, Univ of Mich | Seek input. Broadcast msgs: emergencies, news, | |||||||||||
Web2.0 grown and developed into a huge subject area. There are all sorts of terms and jargon associated with it. What about all the categories that fall into Web2.0. How can you keep it straight? Let’s break it down.
Social Software: Normally applied to a range of web-enabled software programs. The programs usually allow users to interact and share data with other users.
Social Networking: Primarily web based. It is a collection of ways for users to interact by way of text chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, and discussion groups. Social networking sites enable people to create public profiles within Web sites and form relationships with other users of the same site. Social networking sites can be used to describe community-based Web sites, online discussions forums, chat rooms and other social spaces online. Examples are MySpace and LinkedIn.
Instant Messaging: This type of application or client allows people to communicate over a network in real time. Popular examples include Gtalk, Skype, Meebo, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger and Pidgin. Users can add friends to a contact list, by entering their email address. If they are online, their name will be listed as available for chat. Clicking on their name
will activate a chat window with space to write to the other person.Blogs: Blogs, short for web logs, are like online journals for a particular person and are powerful tools. The owner posts a message periodically, allowing others to comment. Some blogs allow comments on the
entries, thereby creating a discussion forum. Blogs may even have blogrolls which are links to other blogs. Pingback and trackback allow one blog to notify another blog, creating an inter-blog conversation. Blogs engage readers and can build a virtual
community around a particular person or interest. Examples include Slashdot, LiveJournal, BlogSpot, and Wordpress. An offshoot of blogs are Vlogs which are video blogs. The most popular example of this is YouTube.Text Chat: Internet Relay Chat (IRC) allow users to join chat rooms and communicate with many people at once. Designed for many to many communication. Examples are EFnet, IRCnet, QuakeNet, Undernet.
Internet forums: Allow users to post a topics
for others to review. Other users can view topics and post comments. Most forums are public, allowing
anybody to sign whenever. Popular examples are Yahoo! Groups, GroupSwim and Google Groups.Wikis: a webpage that can be edited by its
visitors. Examples include Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Portland Pattern
Repository, MeatballWiki, CommunityWiki, and Wikisource and the niche Congresspedia, dedicated to information regarding Congress.Collaborative real-time editor: Simultaneous editing of a text or media file by different people on a network can be traced back to the 1970s but is now a practical application. Examples are SubEthaEdit, SynchroEdit, Moonedit are examples of this type of
social software. Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Zoho allow for joint editing, but other users will only see changes after saving.Social Bookmarking: Very useful for researchers. This technology empowers people to share and organize through use of keyword descriptions to identify images or text as a category or topic. Web pages and blogs with identical tags can then be linked together allowing users to search for similar or related content. If the tags are made public, online pages that act as a Web-based bookmark service are able to index them. Tags can be created
using words, acronyms or numbers. Examples include digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, reddit, Netvouz, and furl.Social Guides: This type of social software recommende places to visit or contains information about places in the real world such as coffee shops, restaurants, and wifi hotspots. A popular example of this is WikiTravel.
Social Citations: Similar to social bookmarking, this software is useful for academics, because it allows the users to post a citations for articles from online database like Academic Search Premier or LexisNexis Academic or even library catalogs. Citations can be organized into predefined categories allowing researchers interested in similar areas to connect and share resources. Popular examples include CiteULike, Connotea, BibSonomy, Zotero and Wikindx.
Social Libraries: This software allows visitors to keep track of their collectibles, books, records, and DVDs and allows people to share their collections through tagging. Recommendations can be
generated based on user ratings. Examples include discogs.com and LibraryThing .Social Web Browser: an internet browser with the ability to interact with popular social networking web services. Examples include FlockVirtual worlds: These are services where it is possible to meet and interact with other people in a virtual environment. Users move through the world by manipulating their custom-made avatar. A very popular example is Second Life.