June 2009 Archives - 2/8 - TheWayoftheWeb

Horse business comes to microblogging

June 29, 2009 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

It’s not just Twitter that is spawning television shows in the microblogging world, with the launch of Horsetweet, a microblogging platform for horse lovers, which accompanies U.S. reality TV show ‘Hard Reins to Hold’.

Both the site and the TV show are the work of father and daughter Matt and Loagan Fury, who run Loagan ranches, around which the TV show is based.

Horsetweet itself is on the Shout’Em platform, which allows you to ‘roll your own microblogging community’. Which means you can sign up for the site, or login with your existing Twitter or Windows Live details.

The aim is to accumulate 10,000 members on Horsetweet by the end of 2009 – could this be the start of more disaggregated microblogging for specialist areas of interest?

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Filed Under: Microblogging Tagged With: horsetweet, microblogging, niche, shoutem, specialist, twitter

This week I have been mostly reading about Sweden

June 28, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

In amongst my normal RSS fest and occasional work-related reading, I’ve actually been doing some reading for pure pleasure over the last few weeks.

The main reason is child-proofing the house for a one-year-old who is learning to walk, throw things, and hurl himself at every possible object. Which has meant moving as many things as possible to positions outside of the main toddler thoroughfares.

And as a closet librarian, rediscovering probably 200+ books has meant that I couldn’t possibly put them into the loff/charity shop/ebay without quickly skimming through one last time to check I remember them correctly.

Added to that, I’ve also been given a couple of books on Sweden by friends and family who presume that I still need help despite being in a relationship with a Swede for decade…

At the moment I’m engrossed in Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future That Disappeared selected by the aggregator of Sunday broadsheet book reviews known as my mother. It’s interesting to read about the Sweden that existed before I ever became aware of it, and puts more and more of the current country into perspective – which is where the shorter and skimmable In The Secret Garden of Sweden comes in handy.

Meanwhile I’m also making the most of reading to my son at bedtimes, with the exploits of Alfons Aberg improving my Swedish at the same time as entertaining him.

And the original Swedish Kurt Wallander is making an appearance on BBC 3 or 4 tonight.

No real point to make, or social media/publishing/web 2.0 connection. Although the fact one of my new colleagues owns a house in Sweden, and the new office is right by the Nordic Bakery in London is showing some type of subconscious trend.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alfons aberg, Books, fishing in utopia, in the secret garden of sweden, Miscellaneous, reading, sweden

When concerns over social networks go way too far…

June 25, 2009 By Dan Thornton 3 Comments

Businesses and organisations can either embrace the opportunities and challenges of increasingly easy social interaction, or they can react against it. And two recent examples show how worrying that reaction can be.

Most digitally-aware people realise that anything you put on a public (or even supposedly private) social networking site can be seen by people including your employers.

But how about Bozeman City, in Montana, which requires job applicants to hand over their log-in information and passwords to any internet chat rooms, social networks or forums?

Why should potential employees have any right to privacy at all?

And then a media company, which by rights should know better, gets shown up. The Associated Press has issued social media guidelines, which not only match the restrictions put out by other media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, but actually asks employees to monitor and edit what appears on their social network profiles, even when it’s written by their friends.

From the guidelines (via Mashable)

“Q. Anything specific to Facebook?

It’s a good idea to monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn’t violate AP standards; any such material should be deleted. Also, managers should not issue friend requests to subordinates, since that could be awkward for employees. It’s fine if employees want to initiate the friend process with their bosses.

The News Media Guild, which represents 1500+ AP employees is rightly speaking out about the matter, which could, in theory, see AP employees punished for something written by someone else on their profile wall etc. Or, as is equally likely, a spambot.

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Filed Under: Digital Culture, Digital Publishing Tagged With: associated press, bozeman city, Digital Culture, Digital Publishing, employees, facebook, montana, privacy, rights, social media guidelines, social media policy, social networking

Will Microsoft listen to the FixOutlook Twitter backlash against Outlook 2010?

June 25, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

One of the strengths of Twitter is the ability to get quick feedback, but Microsoft might not be seeing it as a positive right now.

I first picked up on the complaints about Outlook 2010 and the resulting FixOutlook site via Hacker News on Wednesday morning.

The reason the movement have started is that Microsoft intend to use the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010, and this means:

for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. Want proof? Here’s the same email in Outlook 2000 & 2010.

That means angry developers, which is never good on the internet. The use of Fix Outlook, which is a nicely presented stream of people ReTweeting the message (HT to Neville Hobson for a nice summary and digging a little into who is behind the site), and the move from core users to mainstream means the site went from 7,500 tweeters at around 1pm UK time on Wednesday to 16,676 just five hours later. And it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down yet!

Especially as it’s now being picked up by the likes of Mashable.

The main questions are how significant Microsoft will see this protest, in comparison to the likely number of potential Office customers who don’t use Twitter and won’t understand or care about tables or CSS – and whether that significance will result in any action on their part.

But even if it’s a small group numerically, considering the relatively high proportion of digital workers and developers using Twitter, it’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few days.

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