Go Go LocalGovCamp!

After last night’s debacle (see my Twitter stream) doubt was cast on my attendance today, but I’m happy to announce that I WILL be atending LocalGovCamp in Birmingham. I’m writing this before I pack up my laptop and drive over there; my intention is to blog as much as possible and take as many notes as I can. It should be a really cool, freeform experience and I’m loking forward to picking the brains of some of my fellow local gov types. I may be hosting a discussion on the use of contractors VS open source software for web and intranet solutions, the pros and cons of both, so keep an eye on here and my Twitter stream for as many updates as I can muster.

If you’re reading this and attending; see you there!

Local Authority Mapping Collective

This is a follow up to the last post I made. I have set up a gro.up called the Local Authority Mapping Collective. I’d like to encourage anyone from Local Government or who has an interest in making this information publically available to sign up and get involved in our collaborations. At the moment the gro.up is being moderated by myself and Stuart Harrison and we are only accepting registrations on this basis – if you’re not local gov, let us know why you have an interest in joining.

TwitterPlan

TwitterPlan - Get local planning alerts via a Twitter DM

As Staind sang, It’s Been a While (ouch!) but I’m back with a heads up on a project I played a small part in. Stuart Harrison of Lichfield DC has just rolled out his Twitter / PlanningAlerts.com mashup, TwitterPlan.

You can find out all the deets in Stuart’s TwitterPlan blog post, but for my part I developed the look and feel of the site, taking obvious influence from the Twitter look while trying to keep things bold and user friendly. Kudos also needs to go to Mike Pollard who designed the birdie illustration which adorns the service.

It’s still in alpha as Stuart is banging out the bugs; please go give it a try and leave me and Stuart any comments on our relative blogs!

Get your Twitter Home updates via email – Part 2

A quick follow on from the last Twitter Home Updates post, I’ve actually done a little tinkering with the pipe and created this one: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=efc6a71d7ae898bb990ec53fdd8ee898. This new pipe adds a further branch which customises the whole process specifically for Twitter, namely creating a feed which only contains tweets that have specifically been addressed to the user with the @ prefix.

So now comms teams can monitor their organisations Twitter stream to read only those tweets that are specifically addressed to them, making sure that any external correspondence is not missed!

If you make this use of this on your organisation, drop me a line in the comments and let me know!

#localgovweb Get your Twitter Home updates via email

Apologies for the hash tag in the title; wanted to make sure this got into the Localgovweb Twitter group…

One of the key issues I’ve seen with Twitter as a two way communication tool for organisations such as councils is the fact that you either need a bespoke desktop tool or browser plugin to get “live” updates from the people you are following; something that I am sure would not be possible in most organisations with stringent IT protocols. The only alternative is to keep refreshing your Twitter homepage at regular intervals however in the busy day to day life of a Comms team, I’m sure that this would not be feasible. The Twitter homepage does provide an RSS feed of your followers updates, however you need to provide your login credentials to see this. The ideal thing would be to have an email pop into your inbox every time there is an update. You can then set up email rules to file these to address at a later date. So how can we get these email updates?

I found the answer in this post: http://nik.me/access-authenticated-feeds-google-reader-using-yahoo-pipes. The Pipe that the author has created does the job very nicely and, using Yahoo’s built in email notification service, you can choose to have the results emailed as they come in or as a daily digest. This way the pipe feed will never be published, keeping your login credentials as confidential as possible. Still, as a precaution I took a clone of the pipe and used it from my own Yahoo login.

So this way Comms teams can keep abreast of anything INCOMING traffic on their companies Twitter stream at their leisure, without having to constantly check the homepage. This should also mean that they should not miss anything which may be regarded as direct correspondence and can reply accordingly.