Loosing Site

This is a demonstration of some of the key features of Sidewiki, Google’s system for leaving public comments on any web page. I’m paying particular attention to how your Sidewiki comments can be brought into other systems. Your comments automatically appear in your Google profile. You can also automatically post to Blogger if you choose. I also demonstrate entering a Webmaster’s comment, which is given a highlighted prime position at the top of the comments list.

Background

Background information on the development and philosophy of Sidewiki is available on Google’s announcement post:

Help and learn from others as you browse the web: Google Sidewiki

Transcript

With Google Sidewiki you can add public notes to web pages. Sidewiki is part of the Google Toolbar and can be enabled and disabled as needed.

You can vote up helpful notes.

You can find out more about a note’s author by clicking through to their profile.

In my profile you can see the notes I’ve made so far and get an RSS feed of the notes.

Here I’ve got the feed appearing in my blog.

If you follow a link in the feed you get back to the original page where the comment was made.

Here’s where I commented on a BuzzMachine article.

And you can choose to see everyone’s comments – not just mine.

I really like the way the page scrolls to show which text comments refer to.

Comments can be made about snippets of text as well as the article as a whole.

Here I’m leaving a comment about Rapla. An open source booking system that worked well for me.

As soon as I highlight some text an edit button appears in the sidebar.

Bear with me here while I find some text to paste.

And lets give it a nice title.

How about “Implementation at Oxford Medical Sciences Teaching Centre”.

At the bottom of the post you can set up links to your blogger account, and choose whether or not to post automatically. I’ve set up a demo blog so you can see this in action.

Once a comment is saved it can be sent to your social networks. I’m tweeting this one.

You get a pop-up twitter window, and the system generates a draft message for you.

Here it is on my Twitter profile.

If you’re the webmaster of a site you can leave a special comment that will always appear at the top of a page.

I’m setting this up for the home page of my Loosing Site blog. I’m already registered as the webmaster so I’m given an extra checkbox to write as the site’s owner.

My comment is then highlighted green and pushed to the top of the list.

Clearspace is a well designed robust enterprise collaboration application from Jive Software. Out of the box Clearspace lives up to it’s name with a refreshingly uncluttered interface focused on the core tasks of communication and knowledge building.

The design has brought the aesthetics of social networking into the business community, with a relaxing use of space, profile pages, commenting, tag clouds and blogs. But beneath the surface is a pragmatic core.  Organization structures and hierarchies are represented, but they are also opened up easing communication across and between teams.

Architecturally Clearspace runs as a java servlet with clustering built into the design.  It is robust and scalable, capable of deployment to the largest organizations.

It is extensible through server side java plugins that can be embedded in the interface through a number of integration points. It works well with web services and also provides a range of outgoing feeds. This gives several strategies for smoothly combining Clearspace with other applications in your business by:

• using a Clearspace plugin as an interface
• implementing single signon
• embedding Clearspace feeds in third party portal

In addition to targeting Enterprise users with a per seat licensing model, Jive encourages adoption of Clearspace in small business by distributing free copies of the software for installations with up to five users.

On its own, a technical solution will not fix communication problems in an organization. However Clearspace will help improve communications where there is commitment to do so.

Every now and then I need to find a new tool to work with. It might be a blog or a content management system, a image gallery or an e-learning platform. It could be for a personal project, for a client’s needs, or just a whim. More often than not my starting point is opensourceCMS.com.

Home – OpenSourceCMS via kwout

This site hosts 150 live demos of open source content management systems with both the public interfaces and the administrative interface exposed for you to experiment with. This means you can get a quick feel for a packages interface, structure and capabilities without having to download, unpack, install, configure etc.

Three things to bear in mind:

• There is only one instance of each package running, so if someone else is evaluating the same application at the same time you will see some unexpected changes.
• Each application is refreshed every 30 minutes. This means that all your changes will be lost and you’ll be starting from scratch. This is a way of shortlisting, not of conducting an in-depth evaluation.
• Only PHP/MYSQL packages are included. If you’re looking for .NET, Rails or Servlet solutions you’ll need to look somewhere else.
• The installations are plain, vanilla, out of the box; no extra plugins, modules or themes. So in Drupal, for example, you won’t see a WYSIWYG editor even though there are several available.

Although the site’s focus is on content management systems it’s fairly broad in its definitions, including blogs, forums, shopping carts, project management systems and e-learning applications in the mix.

I use this site intensively three or four times a year. Each time I use it I save time and effort, quickly drawing up a shortlist of applications that meet my needs or my clients’ needs.