Gavin Wray // Carefully crafting content since 2001

My last post was on how to update your Google Docs settings so you can track published documents in Google Analytics.

Currently, only documents can be tracked in your Analytics reports; views of published spreadsheets and presentations are not tracked. I’d really like Google to add support for tracking published spreadsheets, in particular. Here’s why.

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Browsing this morning, I discovered that you can track views of your published Google Docs using your Google Analytics account.

A published Google Doc is one that you have chosen to openly share with anyone on the web.

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The Birmingham social media surgery for voluntary and community groups is now one year old. Huzzah! The first surgery took place in October 2008 at the BVSC and since then has developed into something quite special.

Here’s a video capturing the essence of what the surgery is and how those taking part feel about it (video by John Popham and questions from organiser Nick Booth).

Photo by benjibrum

It’s almost a year now since I first went along to a social media surgery for voluntary and community groups in Birmingham. The surgeries are thriving and it’s great to see new surgeries sprouting in Lozells, Acocks Green and now Solihull.

One of the things I love about going along to these surgeries is that I never know who I’m going to meet or what topics will come up. The randomness is refreshing, it keeps me on my toes while meeting motivated folk who really want to improve their communities is good for the soul.

This social media lark is wide. Those coming along to the surgeries for advice may want to talk about anything from how to start a blog, attracting more readers to their website or making new contacts using the social web – and that’s just the start.

So, what really happens? What do we talk about?

Here’s a summary of a chat from a surgery in Fazeley Studios on 19th August between Esther Boyd, Paul Hadley and I.

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When embedding Flash objects such as flickr slideshows in posts on the free WordPress.com blogging platform, you may well run into difficulty. You grab the embed HTML code from the source site, paste the code into your post in WordPress, save your draft then—hang on a minute—where’s the embed code gone? The code gets stripped out.

I was stuck trying to embed this flickr slideshow a few weeks ago so I asked for help on Twitter. Josh R and Warren Pearce pointed me in the right direction, mentioning a workaround using Vodpod to convert the slideshow to video and then posting the video to WordPress.

After some further digging, I found a solution I quite liked within this post by Geeky Coder.

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The super bunch at Rhubarb Radio have posted the audio of my impromptu talk on geotagging life experiences and the ensuing discussion at the WxWM2 unconference.

Download the audio (MP3, 9.2mb)

Here are the other talks from the event

Yesterday I went along to the West by West Midlands 2 event at the Spotted Dog pub in Digbeth, Birmingham.

Expertly hosted by Shona McQuillan, there were some planned talks plus, following the unconference format, off-the-cuff talks by attendees. If the number chosen by Shona’s random number generator thingy (there’s probably an app for that) matched the number on your sticky lapel label, you stood up and gave an impromptu talk.

My number 31 popped up and here is my attempt to describe what (I think) I talked about…

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I stumbled across an interesting application called Twittersheep that produces a word cloud based on the biographies of your followers on Twitter. This is what Twittersheep came up with based on my followers:

There aren’t many surprises in the words that pop out. In a way, I’m quite pleased that my followers’ interests or specialisms match closely to my own.

It’s still interesting though to see what topics your followers use to describe their own interests and how these topics correspond to what you ‘think’ your tweets are about. It’s the content of your tweets that retains followers after all.
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