Surfing Spots… all-in-one-page debate, pupil voices and ROI

Do people still talk about surfing the web? Well, anyway…

While surfing around recently, I spotted the following:

1. BBC’s experimental online debates

www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/debates/identity/

This online discussion format is a departure from the normal message boards and comments used by the BBC. I liked the way they had incorporated the issue, the two sides (using rich media), an indication of sentiment, example comments, and the ability to add your own all on one page. The look of the UI is a little bit dated , but hey-ho.

I haven’t been able to find out who’s been behind them or what’s going to happen next. Any leads appreciated.

2. Involver

www.involver.org.uk

A former colleague, Greg Sanderson, emailed me a link to the website of Involver, the social enterprise he is working for, which promotes smarter school councils.

I hold this up as an impressive example of what agile small organisations like Involver can do with WordPress and a few well chosen social web accounts to communicate, consult and encourage communities of practice online.

3. SWIX

www.swixapp.com

SWIX is a company that ‘helps companies measure the ROI of their social media marketing campaigns’. I signed up to test their SWIX app, which is in beta. I’ve done a lot of reviews of these sorts of tools and even in beta this is impressive.

You create a dashboard capturing activity across your corporate/personal/campaign presences online, SWIX tallies them all up and calculates an ROI for each. It even gives you the choice of sharing this information in an automated report, a webpage or not at all. Would like to see a tie in with some more embedded market players, such as Netvibes.

The SWIX blog is at
http://blog.swixhq.com
.

Tis the season for viruses

Clipped from one of the virus visualisations by Alex Dragulescu

Spotted a nice graphic article on the BBC of a series of visualisations of worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code by Romanian visual artist, Alex Dragulescu.

He produced them for MessageLabs but the BBC article has some good descriptions expalining each of the images. Higher res versions of the Malwarez series are available on his site alongside some of his other work, which is well worth a surf.

How not to report a ‘new media’ story

Interesting story about the using mobile phones to combat Taleban propaganda in Afghanistan… but poorly reported. Listen to the audio it’s hilarious!

Are we all art collectors and dealers now because of the web?

I occasionally enjoy ‘Imagine‘ – the BBC 1 arts programme presented by culture-jockey, Alan Yentob. This week was a sort of lite-touch expose of the world of art collecting. We found out that art collecting is a boom-to-bust affair, and that some people are worried about the bottom falling out of it, while others fear the saturation of the art world. Of course, the internet was fingered (particularly on the latter point).

And the end of the show, Alan invited viewers to get onto the website to download an exclusive limited-edition set of banknotes defaced by twisted art-bruvs, Jake and Dinos Chapman. They offer up two different designs, each available with 600kb and a 16mb versions. The downloads stop on November 22nd; I’ve attached one if you need it afterwards.

By offering a copy as an attachment does it mean that I am an art dealer now?