SOSIUS - online networking tool for business

I might, at last, have found the app that will enable me to establish a working, user-friendly, social network for East Midlands' Speakers Club.

I found out about Sosius from scanning my RSS feed for Gulf News. Fancy that. I had to read something published in the Middle East to get the lead.

It does everything that I had hoped Google Sites would do, but incomparably more efficiently. The only hitch is that I have to persuade other people to sign up in order to use it.

East Midlands' Speakers' Club hopes to charter into full Toastmaster International status in July. A gradually increasing number of us meet on the 1st and 3rd Mondays of each month to support each other in our bids to become more confident and interesting public speakers. We shall be able to set up our own website under the auspices of Toastmasters only once we are chartered. Meanwhile, we have a Facebook group which I use to remind people about meetings and to create more awareness of the club.

East Midland Speakers came into being as a result of my erstwhile colleague, John Cox, wanting to join Toastmasters himself but being aghast at finding that the nearest clubs were either in Birmingham or Leeds. That's a lot of travelling for a quasi-social event.

We are social, despite following precise guidelines for meetings, speeches and time-keeping and Toastmaster International programmes of Competent Communicator and Leadership. It's definitely a new group of friends.

But back to Sosius. The sign-up process is pretty painless, and membership is free providing you use no more than 200Mb of online storage. You can collaborate with an unlimited number of other users.

The dashboard is an instant guide to what you can do, with inbuilt calendar, content and template creation tools (eg blogs, web pages, documents) email, site customisation, workflow management and so forth. You can even use SpinVox which converts your spoken words into text entries.

It has also introduced me to XFN and FOAF which I'm going to have to look into more thoroughly, since these are technologies which will enable you to create your own friends' network from any pages which link to people you know.

An East Midlands Speakers Club on Sosius would enable us to share information, log our progress through TI programmes, advertise meetings - generally creating a community.

Sosius really does seem to offer the facilities for innovative groups with online members to collaborate and work together, but oh my, most people I know don't live online like I do - yet. And many still don't find these online services sufficiently intuitive.

And oh the eyebrows that rise high when I mention using Facebook for networking! Get real. Social networking apps are powerful.

Google Sites - Hold it!

I've been disappointed with Google Sites.

I wanted to set a site up for the East Midlands Speakers Club and duly registered an account. I got only as far as writing some text on the Home page.

I set up a second page on which I wanted to insert a calendar gadget, and that's where the trouble started. I'd have thought that would have been easy, but oh no. It seems that I have to register independently for yet another Google account in order to create a calendar.

It's all needlessly complicated. Obviously if I want to create a collaborative site, I want to insert a common calendar.

And there's no help for untutored people like me. Google Sites is classed as a Google app, which suggests that only developers have a chance of working out what is required.

Another issue I have is that the interface is clunky. Several themes are offered which enable you to change colour schemes, but how about improving the layout?

All in all, I am not tempted to persevere, and will abandon the project.

Then I discovered MS Sharepoint, which appears to offer the same sort of service. The amount of supporting information is overwhelming, and I haven't a clue how to start. Neither have I seen any statement which shows me how much the service costs potentially. Since this is Microsoft, it will cost.

How sad that I have been reduced to studying for MCTS 70-528 on Easter Sunday, but believe me, it's been raw, cold and snowy.

Online teamwork with Google Sites. WOW!!

I received an email today reminding me that I had asked to be told when JotSpot was updated and relaunched.

To be honest, that was so long ago that I couldn't even remember what JotSpot did, but the big news is that it has been relaunched as Google Sites.

So?

I think it is big news, although I have to admit that I haven't tested it yet. Nonetheless, the concept is very exciting.

At no cost, small companies, schools, project managers, groups and so on can have access to a welter of online apps that will enable them to work collaboratively online, without having to pay for hardware, networking or software licences. Which would have been the way to do it otherwise.

Create your own intranet using the web page builder. Share team calendars. Send mail. Post and review documents, upload photos, videos, files for common use. Prepare online presentations. Update events for internal notice with a blog.

Using Web 2.0 technologies, Google has aimed to make it as simple as it can be at the moment for the ordinary office to make all its admin tasks electronic and increase efficiency.

And because it's so simple, the learning curve should be relatively small. A godsend for companies that have been having to pay for software training.

I suspect the reservations will be about security. After all, anything that's online can ultimately be hacked, but how many people really suffer that, unless they've been extremely lax about use of passwords or even indiscrete about what is shared within the team.

And there will also be the core of people who resist doing anything on computers. Are you still employing them?

I only wish I had a project on which I could test this out. I'm already making plans ...

Gone mobile

I finally took the plunge and signed a contract with 3 for a Skype enabled mobile phone. I simply wanted to try out the technology and was persuaded that a monthly contract would not only enable me to make free calls Skype-2-Skype but that I would also benefit from free to 3 phone calls and a monthly allowance of free minutes to any network.

Have I used the minutes in the first month? No. On an economically rational basis, I have made a bum decision, and should have stayed with my Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go but pay-monthly-plan, which averages around £5 a month. The person who I speak to most on my mobile Skype is my daughter, who I can also call for free using 3.

Still, I have demonstrated the use of mobile Skype-2-Skype to her. She has chosen a phone upgrade which also uses the facility, enabling her to speak with her admirers across the globe via Skype. I wish there was rather less admiration and a more focused effort on earning money rather than asking for handouts to keep afloat. But there you are, we can't force people to be economically rational, even though it is a fundamental premise of Economics that people are economically rational.

I also, oh goodness me, subscribed to another 3 contract, for mobile broadband. It works on my Mac Book Pro as well as my PC laptop. It's a liberating sensation to feel that I can take a laptop anywhere to connect to the net, and I only wish that I had had the facility at John O' Groats last year, when I wanted to send a photo of George and his friends at the start line, to the local press. But is the 3 3G network available in the very north of Scotland?

So far, this, too, been an economically irrational decision. I haven't made the use of it that I could. If I were more mobile doing business on the move, I could justify the expense, but being at home most of the time, I'm a heavy user of wireless broadband.

Sadly, the FON/BT partnership for mobile broadband doesn't seem to have caught on, such that I could login for free to FON wireless mobile hotspots wherever I went. And Skype seems to be in the doldrums too. If more people subscribed, then we could be considerably more inventive in our use of cheaper telecomms technology.

The latest issue of Web Designer reckons that Wimax will be with us, in certain locations, within two years.

Yeah, right!

Three wheels on my wagon

The only justification for including this video on this blog is that it is a Google Video. It appears on Mr Motorvator's website, to demonstrate the efficacy of attaching a Cyclone motor to a Pashley powered tricycle.

Mr Motorvator (aka Tony), wearing the Valkyrie wings on his cycle helmet, personally delivered my trike to me last year. He specialises in customisation of bikes with motors.

I am the supporting actress.

YouTube - in defence of human rights?

Today's issue of Global Voices Online featured YouTube's removal of the account of Wael Abbas, a well-known and respected blogger in Egypt.

In one stroke, this arm of the mighty Google has removed the ability of Egyptian human rights' activists and journalists to broadcast to the world the inhumanity and brutality of the Egyptian police, who are presumably working with the cognisance of the Egyptian authorities.

Why? Because, strictly speaking, Wael Abbas has broken the rules.

Graphic or gratuitous violence is not allowed. If your video shows someone getting hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don't post it.

Wael Abbas had posted video clips of Egyptian police torturing and abusing people in custody.

Whether YouTube will provide a fuller explanation of its censorship remains to be seen, but the ironic explanation of its action is that it was reacting not to pressure from the Egyptian authorities, but to the squeamishness of American users, who really don't want to see the very nasty side of life endured by ordinary, poor people in this token democracy, heavily subsidised by American aid.

I did watch one of these videos a few months ago. It's not for the fainthearted I agree. But where else can people post full, factual information about abuse and corruption?

One of the strengths of YouTube is that it is universal.

The video service is caught between a rock and a hard place. Scenes, for example, "of an Egyptian bus driver, his hands bound, being sodomised with a stick by a police officer" are not what I would want my kids to watch, even if I could understand the genuine anger and motivation of the blogger who posted it.

On the other hand, my kids would complain if I didn't give them the space to view what they wanted.

Even if the blogger was able to post and stream his own videocasts on a server elsewhere, it's quite likely that someone would object to his ISP about the content, and the offending items would still have to be removed.

Overall, however objectionable the material, its removal does seem to me to strike at whichever Amendment it is that defends free speech.

I do have just one query. How did Abbas get hold of these videos in the first place? Presumably he is not a police officer. I can't help but suspect that his motivations may be mixed. He probably wouldn't be able to say since that would compromise his sources.

Also see The Hub.

Free wi-fi hotspots throughout the UK!

Yes, it really might happen - providing you subscribe to BT Broadband, or are a Fonero.

Fon has been around a little while now, starting in Spain where the network is pretty good, even with hubs in Corralejo, Fuerteventura.

You buy a small Fon router, plug it into your existing router, and hey presto, you get your own secure Fon network PLUS an unsecured network which anyone in the neighbourhood can use, as well as your existing network.

If you've registered with Fon and operate your own Fon router, you can access anybody else's unsecured Fon network for free. If you haven't signed up, you can still pay for Fon network access, at a cost rather lower than that of The Cloud.

BT have combined with Fon to extend the range of wi-fi hotspots in UK. It's got to be a great idea, at least until Wimax gets here.

I'm not sure if Wimax has met technical problems or if there is a major hitch with the economic model. Keep hoping it will work. VoIP could knock the socks off mobile networks.