Gavin Wray // Carefully crafting content since 2001

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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Yesterday I spent a wonderful hour meeting Attiye Faraji at the sixth social media surgery in Birmingham.

Attiye is a health and wellbeing lead for young people at Health Exchange, which aims to “make health services available and accessible to all members of our community”. It’s a partnership development between the Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care Trust and Birmingham City Libraries.

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I’m a big fan of revisiting posts within a blog and linking to related posts. Whether adding cross-references in the body of the text or at the end of a post by using one of the many related posts plugins, I think they can give real benefits to readers.

Linking between posts is also essential if you’re writing a series of related posts.

But one result of linking between posts has always bothered me. Trackbacks or pingbacks displayed in the comments on your own post don’t make sense in the context of your own site; trackbacks and pingbacks only make sense where other people link to your post.

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Selection of links I’ve bookmarked recently:

• West Midlands Regional Observatory dashboard on Pageflakes
• Commentariat WordPress theme: Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills
  WordPress theme designed to allow collaborative reading and commenting on a document. Code released under GNU Affero licence.
• Beyond cut and paste: the professional skills every government web publisher should have
  Neil Williams has summarised the core skills required in web publisher or web editing role. The majority of the skills are applicable to any web publisher role, not just within government or public sector.
• Is Google News ignoring meta “description” tags?
  Article by Murray Dick on how “meta ‘description’ text used to summarise some news articles, is not being displayed in their Google News results summaries.”
• Tracking documents and external links in google analytics – iQ Blog
  Add this single javascript file to enable tracking of document downloads and clicks of external links.
• OpenGov: One big challenge? Or a thousand small hurdles : Tim’s Blog
  Tim Davies lists 50 small hurdles to successful online engagement that, while small individually, can stack up to prevent success. The list is also applicable to large organisations outside government. The good news is that these small hurdles can be overcome individually. Add a comment on how you did it or write your own blog post and tag ’smallchallenges’.
• ConsultationXML: getting reusable data out of horrid PDFs – Archive – The Dextrous Web
  “Making consultation documents easier to use”
• SEOmoz | Canonical URL Tag – The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps
  Useful introduction to the new canonical URL tag, which site publishers can use to suppress duplicate content being indexed by search engines.

See more bookmarks like these on Delicious.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been photographing some vintage cameras and scanning the instruction guides. This is partly to preserve them (graphically) and also to act as a small kind of tribute to a special person who owned these cameras and was passionate about his photography.

Here’s the set on flickr and here’s the slideshow:

One of my photos of Kenilworth Castle has been included in the Schmap Birmingham Guide. Schmap’s online guides integrate maps, photos and place reviews.

Kenilworth Castle sample screen on Schmap for iPhone and iPod Touch

I’m chuffed to bits (and very much surprised) to have one of my photos included!