My good friend and ex-colleague at Object1 Phillipe Parker has set up an online social network community for us all to discuss and disseminate information on anything of interest to web world professionals.
I’ll let the man himself introduce you to the wonders of Web Innovation UK:
“We’re providing an open discussion forum for professionals who want to push the boundaries of what’s possible on the web, whether for their own online presence or those of their clients. Forums allow you to ask general questions, you can send messages to individuals, or you can just listen in.
Clients get to ask questions, suppliers get to show how clever they are. I don’t want to constrain what gets discussed: it can be commercial-driven, design-led, technological, whatever you like as long as it’s relevant and no one else complains.”
Come and join us at Web Innovation UK and help us grow the network as a spot on resource and place to go for assistance. It is very early days yet so you will get to be a pioneer!
By the way, Philippe set this up using Ning and you can read more about this on one of my previous posts,’Create your own social network with Ning.com‘.
Popularity: 96% [?]
The project management process utilised for online projects does vary of course from agency to agency with wildly varying degrees of implementation success. Often the process or methodology is borne out of some understanding of traditional project management methodologies, such as Prince 2. With hopefully a lot of thought put into adapting such things for real modern day industry use!
I am planning on writing a lot more about process implementation as this is after all something I have been heavily involved with at each agency that I have worked for. At the moment I am working for a very good small agency in Brighton that are testing out the use of Agile methods for running online projects and so I thought I’d share a great blog from Kelly Waters that will help you to gain some understanding of what this Agile stuff is all about. It can be a tricky concept to grasp and there doesn’t seem to be a great consensus about what it actually all means, but Kelly is very good at explaining things and her blog is a very valuable source if you are looking at using Agile instead of the traditional Waterfall approach.
all about agile: 10 Key Principles of Agile Software Development
Popularity: 90% [?]
I have been doing some research into the various social networks and their uses, audiences and so forth lately and came across the rather great http://www.ning.com. Ning allows you to set up your own social network with most of the usual tools you would find on things like Facebook and MySpace.
The templates aren’t exactly pretty but you can customise the designs and utilise your own domain name. So users coming to your social network will think you’ve done a fine job of setting something up for them and won’t know it’s running from the ning platform.
It could be used for all sorts of things of course. For instance, we were thinking of using it as a social ‘intranet’ for the agency I’ve just been working with. Might get people off of Facebook for five minutes!
Or maybe I should set up ‘BruceSpace’ for all the Bruce’s out there. Might not make my millions on that one….
Popularity: 98% [?]
Google is busy working on providing a common set of APIs aimed at the whole world of social networking. You know, that world that every client now wants stuffed into their website whether appropriate or not!
Apologies, that was actually a bit cynical. I’m actually working on a new site design and build for a charity that will actually add value to their offering so it’s not all ‘let’s create a Facebook app’ all the time!
Anyway, the common set of APIs will make it easier for developers to create apps for social sites and of course work across sites. There is an impressive list of sites involved, including MySpace, Ning, Linkedin, ILike, Hi5 and so forth.
So if you are a developer then have a look; might not be of great use just yet but it could be soon.
OpenSocial – Google Code
Popularity: 81% [?]
