UK Web Focus

New W3C Document Standards for XHTML and RDFa

Published on 2010-08-27 03:00:56

New W3C Draft Documents The W3C have recently announced that new “Drafts of RDFa Core 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1 [have been] Published“. The announcement states that: The RDFa Working Group has just published two Working Drafts: RDFa Core 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1. RDFa Core 1.1 is a specification for attributes to express structured data in any [...]

Best UK University Web Sites – According to Sixth Formers

Published on 2010-08-25 03:29:20

This week’s issue of the Times Higher Education contains a six page article on “Deciphering the code” which asks “do universities’ websites tell prospective students what they need to know” and invites a panel of sixth-formers to identify the top University Web sites – and those which can be improved. What were the best performing institutional [...]

Delivering Blog Posts By Email … But Not By Mailing Lists

Published on 2010-08-24 02:45:12

Blog Posts By Email … Did you know that you can choose to receive blog posts by email?  I’ve written about this previously and described how this may have advantages for end users who either do not have access to RSS readers (e.g. they are not provided on an institutional desktop) or prefer the familiarity [...]

“5 Days Left to Choose a New Ning Plan”

Published on 2010-08-23 02:30:18

I received an email on 16 August announced that I had “5 Days Left to Choose a New Ning Plan“.  The email related to the announcement Ning made a few months ago that the company was withdrawing its provision of free social networks. We had made use of Ning to provide the IWMW 2008 social [...]

Escaping the Constraints of Space and Time

Published on 2010-08-20 03:00:03

The Amplification of Events When Lorcan Dempsey coined the term ‘amplified conference’ the image I initially had was of a megaphone so that people outside the conference space could hear what was being said.   However after I had created the Wikipedia entry I realised this image was inappropriate as, with Twitter, for example, we [...]

Should Event Web Sites Be The First To Be Outsourced?

Published on 2010-08-18 08:23:30

I noticed a recent tweet from Nicole Harris which announced that “programme for #FAM10 now available at:https://sites.google.com/site/jiscfam10/FAM10/programme“. I was intrigued by use of a free third party Web site creation service such as Google Sites for creating a Web site for the JISC FAM10 event. Nicole had previously written a blog post on”Counting the Costs of [...]

“Web Development: Not Core and Ripe for Outsourcing”

Published on 2010-08-17 04:00:58

The headline in this week’s issue of the Times Higher Education is blunt: “The heat is on: official hints that cuts could rise to 35%“. And on the same day I read that article I was alerted to a comment published in response to the “When The Axe Man Cometh” post on the University Web [...]

Sharing Discussions of a JISCPress Meeting

Published on 2010-08-16 02:14:48

Meeting With The JISCPress Team Joss Winn and Alex Bilbie from the  University of Lincoln and Tony Hirst from the  Open University recently visited UKOLN  for a meeting with myself and colleagues at UKOLN about the JISC-funded JISCPress project. If you have not heard of JISCPress here is a brief summary: “The JISCPress project has developed a successful [...]

“Why Skype has Conquered the World”

Published on 2010-08-13 03:13:58

Yesterday the Guardian published an article entitled “Why Skype has Conquered the World“. This reminded of my “Skype, Two Years After Its Nightmare Weekend” post. Back in September 2009 I wrote: The headline in the Technology Guardian supplement read “Skype’s nightmare weekend highlights peer-to-peer fears” two year’s ago back on 23 August 2007. The article [...]

5,000 Tweets On

Published on 2010-08-10 02:49:55

Reflecting on 5,000 Tweets I have recently published my 5,000th tweet.  My first tweet was posted on 14 March 2006, 9 months after Twitter was launched, and simply said that I was “Filling in my expenses forms, after trip to JISC Conference at Birmingham.”  Like most people’s initial experience of Twitter I had no clear [...]

“When The Axe Man Cometh” – the Future of Institutional Web Teams

Published on 2010-08-09 03:11:26

Doom and Gloom “The doom and gloom of the impending cuts rang out loud and clear” described Deborah F. in her report on the IWMW 2010 event. I introduced this concern in the opening talk and then, in the second talk at the event, Susan Farrell asked “Are web managers still needed when everyone is [...]

Stifling Innovation and Getting in the Way of Users

Published on 2010-08-06 05:33:41

“Is Flipboard Legal? http://bit.ly/d20eC1 >> interesting how copyright often seems to be in the way of consumers when it comes to progress” tweeted Jonathan Grimes recently. This comment on how copyright can stifle innovation and hinder benefits to users reminded me of an (unsolicited) email I received recently from the Marketing Manager of the Copyright [...]

EPub Format For Papers in Repositories

Published on 2010-08-04 04:19:16

EPub as a Format for Use in Institutional Repositories? In a post entitled “File Formats For Papers In Your Institutional Repository” I suggested that depositing a HTML version of a paper might have various advantages over the PDF format which is the norm. But in light of the growing importance of mobile devices  wouldn’t it seem appropriate [...]

A Tweet Takes Me To Catalonia

Published on 2010-08-02 03:10:39

At the end of the month I’m going on holiday to Spain which I’ll be combining with some work.  I’ll be giving a talk on “What can We Learn From Amplified Events?” at the University of Girona. The trip is a consequence of a tweet I posted in December: Can someone tell me what language [...]

Automated Accessibility Analysis of PDFs in Repositories

Published on 2010-07-30 03:38:28

Back in December 2006 I wrote a post on Accessibility and Institutional Repositories in which I suggested that it might be “unreasonable to expect hundreds in not thousands of legacy [PDF] resources to have accessibility metadata and document structures applied to them, if this could be demonstrated to be an expensive exercise of only very limited potential [...]

Twitter Captioned Videos Gets Even Better

Published on 2010-07-28 02:46:38

A recent post described the Captioned Videos of IWMW 2010 Talks which made use of Martin Hawksey’s iTitle service to synchonise a video with an accompanying Twitter stream. I was not along in being impressed by this service – but since it made use of HTML 5 and the videos were encoded in MP4 format the video [...]

“You are a natural with a face for radio”

Published on 2010-07-27 02:45:05

An Interview on Radio 4 After a recent tweet in which I revealed the nervousness I had whilst waiting to take part in a Radio 4 programme Paul Hollins (@PaulHollins) put me at ease with his comment “you are a natural with a face for radio“. I have to admit that Paul’s comment succeeded in [...]

“I Want To Attend All The Parallel Sessions!”

Published on 2010-07-26 02:58:16

The Problems With Choice! I can recall reading evaluation forms for IWMW events several years ago and seeing people saying how much they valued the event but wishing that they could attend more of the parallel sessions as there was useful content in these sessions but participants could only attend two (or, in some years, [...]

Captioned Videos of IWMW 2010 Talks

Published on 2010-07-23 02:30:33

Twitter Captioning As part of our support for the remote audience at UKOLN’s recent IWMW 2010 event we provided a live video stream of the plenary talks.  The videos have now been uploaded to the Vimeo video streaming service.  In addition we have made use of the Twitter captioning tool developed by Martin Hawksey based [...]

The Big Society and Web Professionals

Published on 2010-07-22 02:40:52

On Monday 19 July David Cameron announced the launch of Tories Big Society plan.  As described on the BBC Web site the aim is to give “individuals and communities more control over their destinies“. The following day on the website-info-mgt JISCMail list Mike Nolan, head of Web Services at Edge Hill University, announced that he [...]

750 Posts and Counting

Published on 2010-07-21 04:46:45

Statistics for this Blog The post on Further Reflections on IWMW 2010: Innovation and Sustainability was the 750th blog post published on this blog since it was launched on 1 November 2006. This provides a useful opportunity to reflect and to provide an update on the statistics I summarised following the 500th post. According to timeanddate.com [...]

Further Reflections on IWMW 2010: Innovation and Sustainability

Published on 2010-07-19 03:03:52

I’d like to followup on my “Initial Reflections on IWMW 2010” with some further thoughts, focussing this time on the innovative aspects of the event and the sustainability challenges. Supporting Innovation One of the aims of the IWMW series of events is to “ensure that institutions are well-positioned to exploit innovative developments which can enhance their [...]

Initial Reflections on IWMW 2010

Published on 2010-07-16 09:41:25

“You guys did a great job with #iwmw10 – my first & really enjoyed it!“ This year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop, IWMW 2010, is now over – and, judging by the Twitter comments from, for example, @andyowen (given above), @Davie_T and @lborouniweb it seems that I am not alone in feeling that it was a great [...]

Revisiting Web Team Blogs

Published on 2010-07-13 02:30:28

Where are the University Web Team Blogs? Last August I asked If Not Too Large, Are University Web Teams Poor Communicators?. The background to the question was a post on “Blogging web teams” published by Mike Nolan almost two years ago on the Edge Hill University Web team blog in a post on  in which he pointed out [...]

Guide to Web Preservation Launched

Published on 2010-07-12 04:38:36

Here’s a press release about the launch of a JISC-funded Guide to Web Preservation which will be announced during the opening talk at the IWMW 2010 event later today. The press release isn’t written in my normal conversation style but in discussions with my colleagues who worked on the JISC PoWR project in did occur [...]

How Well-Read Are Technical Wikipedia Articles?

Published on 2010-07-08 03:08:49

In a recent post on Having An Impact Through Wikipedia I suggested that it would be useful if JISC-funded synthesis reports, for example reports on emerging new standards, used Wikipedia as a means of enhancing access to such work.  In the post I  pointed out that “I can’t find usage statistics for the page [but] I [...]

File Formats For Papers In Your Institutional Repository

Published on 2010-07-07 03:43:22

File Formats I Have Used to Deposit Items in the Bath Institutional Repository What file formats should you use to deposit papers in your institutional repository?  Although I recently suggested that RSS could have a role to play in allowing the contents of a repository to be syndicated in other environments  that post didn’t address [...]

Geo-locating Your Event Tweets

Published on 2010-07-06 03:32:32

A recent article in the Metro (published on 30 June 2010) described “London’s Twitterscape” and included a visualisation of the location of tweets posted in London.  The article was based on research being carried out at UCL and – as can be seen – this works shows the density of tweets around London. The idea [...]

Amplified Events: Plans for #IWMW10

Published on 2010-07-05 03:45:49

Amplified Events UKOLN’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2010) starts a week today, with the welcome talk being given at 13:30 on Monday 12 July.  Way back in July 2005 we exploited a WiFi network at this event for the first time (with the discussion on the IRC back channel being used by about 18 [...]

Having An Impact Through Wikipedia

Published on 2010-07-02 05:41:50

Re-Discovering Amplified Events A recent tweet from Miquel Duran (a University professor, researcher in quantum chemistry, fostering communication of science 2.0 and university 2.0) alerted me to a blog post on The ‘Amplified Conference’. As this is a particular area of interest to me I read the post and thought “yes, I agree” with its [...]

Paper on “From Web Accessibility to Web Adaptability” now available

Published on 2010-07-01 04:00:00

A paper  on “From Web Accessibility to Web Adaptability” is now available from the University of Bath Opus repository (in HTML and PDF formats).  This paper, which was co-authored by Liddy Nevile, David Sloan, Sotiris Fanou, Ruth Ellison and Lisa Herrod, was published in Disability and Rehability: Assistive Technology (Vol. 4, Issue 4). As I [...]