29 Jul 2010

The "one email address, many alts" Google trick

Ever wanted to set up an alternative profile on a service but been unable to because you need another email address to register a new account?
If you use Googlemail / Gmail then you can sidestep that pretty easily...

This is really simple, and yet a lot of people don't know about it. When you show people they go "Ooooh" like you've done a cheap parlour trick. Say your email is "joebloggs@gmail.com" and you've already used it to sign up for Twitter. Well, you can use that address again at Twitter with this simple syntax:

joebloggs+AnythingYouWant@gmail.com

By adding the + after your username you add a new email address to your Googlemail. When Twitter, or whatever service, emails a confirmation to the new address, it drops into Gmail's inbox and you can action it. If you need to send from that address hit Gmail's "settings" button (top right), go to "Accounts and Import" and select "Send mail from another address"; you can add your new gmail address in here, and then it becomes available to you to send from, every time you are in the compose email view.

Simple.
  • howto
  • Permalink
  • Loading mentions Retweet
28 Jul 2010

My new favourite web app: Tom's Planner - Gantt Charts

This is one for my students mainly, but also anyone who needs to visualise a project quickly.

I haven't needed to make a Gantt chart for a long time, but I've been on a bloody training course on Microsoft Project, and even bought an epic book on that package. Today for the first time in years, I needed to make a Gantt chart. Quickly.

I no longer have MS Project, and I don't have a PC to put it on. I figured in the years since I last touched it t some sort of web app would have appeared which could do the job just as well. Sure enough a tweet later, @ganttchart sent me a link to Tom's Planner. It's a smooth interface, and for a basic project timeline you've got everything you need. I don't think it can manage some of the advanced resource management stuff that Project can do (in fact, I think it's been deliberately designed to avoid that sort of thing).

The service is in public Beta, giving out free accounts. There's going to be some sort of pay model down the line, but the website suggests that a freemium model will be included allowing one project at a time, gratis. There's also a commitment to give Beta members a year's free service:

Once Tom's Planner is released out of beta, it is our intention to extend all actively used beta accounts for a minimum of one additional year without any obligations. This will enable all Tom's Planner beta users to continue to work with and use Tom's Planner for free for at least one more year.
28 Jul 2010

Geek Squared

My BCU colleague Inger-Lise Bore got me into reading Piled Higher and Deeper - a web comic about being a research student. The humour is pretty geeky and quite niche on a good day, but the last three instalments have ticked all my geek boxes.

The three parter is about a trip to a comic-con, and as such is full of in-jokes about both research and media studies. Enjoy:

  • comics ephemera
  • Permalink
  • Loading mentions Retweet
27 Jul 2010

Help Me Investigate: the social practices of investigative journalism

Last week I attended the 2010 conference of the International Association of Media & Communication Research where amongst other things I gave a paper, Help Me Investigate: the social practices of investigative journalism.

Taking all of your ideas and presenting them in less than 15 minutes is pretty hard going when you're used to having captive audiences in lecture rooms for up to an hour, so I was delighted that several people wanted to read the full paper and get some more detail from me. So here it is, my full paper.

Some folk I know will be a little put off by these 8,000+ words, so if you're not used to reading academic work, the best plan is to read the abstract, then the conclusion and then work your way through the detail. You can also catch a pithy version of one of the themes over at Interactive Cultures.  This is draft work at the moment. Following a pep talk from Paul Long (my BCU colleague - Reader in Cultural Studies at Birmingham School of Media) yesterday, I'll be honing this down for publication over the rest of the summer.

(download)

27 Jul 2010

Social capital: you're doing it wrong*

(img cc kelvin255)

*not really. I'm being provocative, but I do have some ideas about another way of using the concept when talking about the Internet.

I wrote a brief piece over at Interactive Cultures last week, which was a neat distillation of a lit review I've written about social capital and a key point from my paper, which I presented to IAMCR 2010. Here's the blog post and here's the inevitable Flickr photo of my IAMCR badge (I collect my name badges)

15 Jul 2010

Video Cultures - only £1.00 per night

This week I've contributed two posts to Video Cultures, a new joint from two BCU colleagues. In their own words Video Cultures is:

a research project looking at the history and cultural significance of the medium of video with an emphasis on the sale, rental and collecting of video formats. Developed by Dr Simon Barber and Oliver Carter, researchers from the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University, the project will initially gather oral histories from video shop owners, collectors, industry professionals and the general public. This research will then form the basis of a published academic work and subsequent documentary film about video shop culture in the UK.  

My two posts:

26 Jun 2010

Web Standards is the new Comedy is the new Rock'n'Roll

So when exactly did coders become rock stars?
 

In the course of my morning I had cause to be looking at some stuff by Jeffrey Zeldman on A List Apart, and then shortly after to be on Amazon which threw up a suggestion that I buy the new edition of his book  'Designing with Web Standards' (I already have the first one, and I've ordered this new edition for BCU's library).

 
I'd never really thought twice about the front cover of 'Designing with Web Standards', but having just been reading some of his other content I spotted that he's got a neat little corporate identity going based around the book cover, which looks like this:
 
 
His Twitter avatar, his avatar on a List Apart all call back to this iconic book cover. So far so obvious: I have the same avatar in lots of places on the Internet, and the man is selling a book, so you'd expect him to use every trick in the book to remind you of that fact. But just look at that cover for a second. That's not the way we sell technical manuals about the Internet. They look like this:
 
 
They should be dark, have some sort of symbolic reference to the "world" part of "world wide web". They should look like an extension pack for Warhammer 40,000. So what's with the beardy guy on the cover? He's a geek's geek: men want him, women want to code like him. The guy's a bloody rockstar. In the words of Ron Burgundy: people know him.
 
Now look at this companion volume:
 
 
OK, it's classic brand extension - you can't miss that this a companion for Zeldman's book - but at the same time it anoints another rock star coder; Zeldman's rhythm guitarist, speaking up for standards. 
23 Jun 2010

Enabling digital participation in Higher Education

OK so being as Ana and Jen (part 1 & part 2) blogged about posters, I guess that means it's what we do now. So here's my regulation blog post about a poster.

A few summer's ago Dave Kane, Anita Reardon and I were given a small grant for a pilot project in the uses of technology in teacher training. This paper presents our findings, grounded in education and cultural studies theory, to help understand some of the determinants that affect the uptake of technology in classrooms.

This was my first academic poster, and I enjoyed the process. The premium on space means really cutting the research down to the core, while trying to retain enough to give some sense of the project's narrative. That's pretty tough - even the forced brevity of using Twitter doesn't prepare you for it fully.

We presented the poster at RESCON '10 (BCU's internal research conference) as a dry run ahead of our attendance at next month's Research Informed Teaching Conference in Staffordshire. The poster went down pretty well (we came second in the judging for the poster tour - I'll take that) so we won't need to make many changes before we head to Staff's in July. Looking around the posters, I have to say (discarding all sense of modesty for a second) that ours looked the best. Many of the posters were wordy, and hard to read, and as many members of staff had made them on PowerPoint they suffered from some of the afflictions that can only come with an off the shelf Microsoft template (ill conceived drop shadows, poor contrast, garish colours) as well as from pixelation caused through blowing A4 slides up to A1 and even A0.

Lessons learned?

Brevity works, for sure, and it's worth speaking to someone who knows a little bit about print production when you undertake this sort of task. In that regard I wonder if there's a place for academics to team up with design students when they produce their posters? Valuable experience for the student, and some practical training in effective communication for the academic. That's got to be worth some thought if you're based in a University that has a design school.

Do something different

One thing before I sign off - it seems to pay to do something different. RESCON gave a special award to a poster that had its own frame made of astro-turf, and I added a little something extra to my poster that got a few nice comments. I won't tell you what it is, you have to find it. Seven people did at RESCON yesterday, and they hadn't been given a clue so you have a head start.

(download)

4 Jun 2010

Professional ethics and informal social media

Last year I spoke to a big room full of occupational therapists at their annual conference and I promised to do a follow up with a smaller group over at Therapy Learning. So today I took a day's annual leave from BCU, and went to Melton Mowbray (where the pies come from) to talk to a few occupational therapists and some physiotherapists about social media things.

The format of the day was for them to find out a bit about some tools they might like to use to help their professional practice. The most interesting stuff we did were chats about how thi sall fits into what they do. These are regulated professionals, so ethics is a big part of their job. While we were trying to unpick what a therapist should and shouldn't do in social media, we were looking at the activity of a few therapists who actively use social media in a professional context. What we discovered was that even when people have good intentions, they can slip. Here's an example tweet:

When hearing what I did for a living, my bank manager confessed to breaking down earlier this year. Reminded him he is one of 1 in 4...
That's over the line. Big time. In the flow of a conversation, and the heat of the moment, it may have seemed reasonable to the author. The bank manager isn't named at all, but really this isn't good enough. If you know the person, and who they bank with (maybe they've written you a cheque, or you all live in a small town with only one bank), you'd easily know who they're talking about. It's a breach of trust, and an ethical fail.

We tend to think about digital footprints as being all about us: don't put drunken photos on Facebook, don't give out your date of birth or your mother's maiden name. But what about the subjects of our blog posts and our tweets? Have you ever stepped over the line? Have I? I'm not so sure. I may well have done. If you have a duty of care to people, professionally, ethically, morally, take a breath and think before you post.
20 May 2010

Digital Communications & Social Media

This may be of interest to some of my contacts and students. It's a report on social media in PR and comms agencies, based on interviews with industry bods. I've only skim read it, so this is not an endorsement of the content or the methodology, but there seems to be some interesting points raised and if nothing else then, for me, it gives me an insight into how established industries are thinking about social media in terms of their existing business models

The report was written produced by Watson Helsby 

(download)

  • pr socialmedia
  • Permalink
  • Loading mentions Retweet
Next

Jon Hickman's Posterous



Hi, I'm Jon. I teach and research digital culture, social media and new media practice at Birmingham City University.

Find out more about me with this lovely CV:
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/jonhickman

Find out about my work at the Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research:
http://interactivecultures.org

My Work

Me elsewhere

Clever folk I know

Search

Obox Design