How big is the web…continued
Who gets a 100 million unique visitors a day? This site from coverpop.com graphically shows the heavy hitters in web site traffic.
Visit the site and click the coloured bands to see which sites rank the highest. Are some of your favourite sites in the crowded 1 million unique site visits per day?
The raw data for the graph was created by Jim Bumgardner from Google Web Trends.
You can visit the coverpop.com big picture site here.
Our Thirdsectorweb home page is here.
City Stories - a literacy and reading project
We have recently launched a new web site for City Stories, which will continue to be a work inprogress for a while.
This partnership supported project is designed to introduce authors, illustrators and storytellers to children, particularly in inner city areas.
Having created an event the project works to make sure that every child who attends goes home with a free City Stories book bag.
Meeting the author, the creator of the book, is a great experience for children - the magic of which we hope is increased by being able to continue reading on the way home.
The project also hopes to work with communities to create children’s book groups in areas where there have previously been none.
This work with parents and carers is intended to create web sites for the groups, an activity which all of us hope will involve the children, parents and carers in the delivery of their ideas.
Using their new web presence to help sustain the group and an interest in literacy by using our technology as a lever for learning. Just as important, we think is the impact on confidence and levels of expectation that creativity stimulated by suppported access to technology can bring.
We’ll keep our readers posted as the programme of events rolls out and let everyone see what e-presence the groups are able to deliver for themselves.
We would be happy to work with any organisation that could either deliver an event within our core partnership or bring some innovative and fresh technology to the programme.
We are passionate about using our technology to break out of the bounds of perception…not least for ourselves as well as the children who have worked with City Stories.
The City Stories logo was created by our partnership graphic designer Radha Clelland.
See the City Stories web site here..
You can visit the Thirdsectorweb home page here…
The secret of the web?
Seth Godin has some heart-
felt truth to tell about how the web, or rather having and effective and durable presence on it, is to be achieved.
The drip, drip, drip of steadily growing effectiveness is the key, he argues. Here in our small partnership we know this too.
His comment that new frontier technology and first wave tech launches always want a quick return or immediate high status is telling. We know in our sector, which sits across education, social change, community development and projects for children and young people, that the same rule of ‘drip’ applies even for a small business with a social aim.
We recognise too the need to plan for more support for the upkeep of existing creations, whatever their nature, than was ever considered in our first planning meeting.
In our social and community sector ’sustainability’ is a whole organisation mission critical concept. An effective and durable web presence in any form is a key part of that philosophical approach to regenerating communities.
We started with simple static web sites that were informational in a plain sort of way. We now work hard to produce interactive and useful sites that employ ever growing compexity of ‘back-office’ function.
Our growth as a social business is predicated on this increasing complexity. The process for us, in our small corner of the web world, is just as described by Seth.
A gentle, ethical persistent attack of our goals…often seeming to slip away, but with our technical knowledge, capacity to deliver and turnover all increasing over time as we use that wonderful non-technical function - hindsight.
To paraphrase another marketing (the 4P’s) model …perspiration + persistence = presence ..on the web - for most of us anyway.
You can visit the homepage of Thirdsectorweb here…
Google Olympics Page
Everyone has Olympics fever, so it seems. Even the non-sporty in the office have been caught looking at opening ceremony footage out of the corner of their eye.
To ease the burden of thinking about technology, Google have created a special Olympics page for you. You can see Olympic footage on YouTube, add Olympic headlines to your iGoogle page and keep track of news and medal counts from Google Maps.
Enough sport to shake a relay race baton at for anyone. You can see the Google Olympic page here.
Nick Burcher of Zed Media has a useful, more detailed blog post on how to use Google to get the best from Olympic coverage.
You can go to the Thirdsectorweb homepage here.
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Writing for a new audience
Passionate as we are about web technology at Thirdsectorweb, we still surprise ourselves about how simple additions to our technical armoury can affect quite ordinary processes.
Not totally surprising is the need to write differently when the post you are about to make will potentially be broadcast as an audio file. The web is certainly a visual medium if nothing else, but writing a hyperlink into a passage is one thing. Expecting that hyperlink to be clear when broadcast over iTunes or on an MP3 player is very different.
We are still wrangling with the best textual formats to get most value out of our Odiogo broadcast capability.
Even the little things continue to surprise.
The amazed Thirdsctorweb Team.
You can go to the Thirdsectorweb homepage here…
World Mural Project for Young People
To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the chip-maker Intel, the company has created the World Mural Project.
This on-line clubhouse allows you to see the work of 530 young people from around the globe in 21 countries.
The aim of the project was to give the young people involved an artistic and creative way to express, through technology, their vision of how the world of technology will shape our lives, work and play in the next forty years.
You can see the Intel Mural Project site here at world mural project.com
Technology and the creativity of young people in one place. Great!
Go to the Thirdsector web home page here
Using NetBooks - we give them a try
We have recently purchased a netbook, the Asus Eee 9” screen version - running Windows, to be precise.
Our partners felt that lugging a suitcase of kit to every meeting was non-productive, not to say hard on the back and the feet.
We have coupled a large laptop, as a base unit, to the Asus using a direct transfer cable and sync our files using Microsoft SyncToy. Being able to drag and drop files between units and to sync a Windows Suitcase of working files was the best option for us.
We did discuss other storage options, such as drop box services for remote back-up and access. However, in client meetings we cannot always guarantee mobile internet access, so a physical cable sync, post meeting, was right for us.
Deploying the drivers to the Asus, which does not have an optical drive, involved some imaginative use of memory sticks, but once all loaded the dual file tree display came up straight away on both units, allowing us to drag and drop files between machines. We use Open Office as a our default partnership production software.
The software and cable linkage appear to work well - as for the weight saving…we’ll let you know when we’ve run for the 5.10 at Kings Cross a few times.
The breathess Thirdsector team
Visit the Thirdsectoweb homepage here.
We are connected together by only six people after all…
linked...
The technology correspondent of The Observer, David Smith, has published an interesting article on a piece of Microsoft research that claims to show, as web users, we are all only separated from each other by about six individuals.
This ’six degrees of separation’ theory is not new, but Microsoft have examined 30 billion electronic messages from 180 million people across the globe. The average set of unique connections between message senders was 6.6 hops. Amazing.
Read the full article by David Smith at The Guardian by using the link below…
Thirdsectorweb system updates
For clients using our system control panel to manage their web presence some minor additions have been recently added to your control panel.
You can now unzip files in the file manager. We hope this will be useful if you are downloading images or uploading new php scripts to your domain. To use, right click on the zip file and choose “Unzip” from the menu.
Also updated are…
ZenCart has been upgraded from 1.3.7 to 1.3.8
OpenAds from 2.4.0 to 2.4.7.
Thirdsectorweb - helping you get the best from your web presence.
Apple security update now available
Apple now have a new security update available. You can see the detail about the update here.
You can download the patch from the Apple download page here.
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