Archive for February, 2008

Latest tools from Google

Head over to Beth Dunn’s Small Dots blog, where she updates us on the new version of the Google Apps (a suite of applications such as Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar and Google Docs), which has now been made easier for people to collaborate and use without the technical knowledge needed to get up and running with it all.
Also Beth highlights Rebecca’s recent posting on the Wild Apricot Blog about how Google Forms

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NTEN’s Love Your Techie Day!

NTEN have used Sproutbuilder in an innovative way for you to to send a special message to your favourite techie for their celebratory ‘Love Your Techie Day’ on February 14th. Find out more, and send your special message at the NTEN website today!

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Remember accessibilty when using widgets on your website

There’s been much excitement in the media during the past week about a new widget application called Sprout. It aims to be an easy to use Flash based interface with simple drag-and-drop features, to build live, interactive multimedia content that can easily be added to any web page. Once a user publishes a Sprout widget, it can be copied to any website in much the same way as an embedded YouTube video clip. If you make updates to your ‘Sprout’ when logged into your account, it will update on all of the websites you have embedded your homegrown sprout on. Quick and easy.

It’s still in closed beta stage currently, but you can sign up now ready for when it gets to public release.
I’m hoping that when it is fully available for a wider audience to use on their social networks and websites, that it makes amends with its lack of accessibility.

I ran a workshop for non-profits earlier this week on the topic of getting a website for organisations, focussing on many of the free or quick ways available to get an online presence easily. Web standards, usability and accessibility formed a large part of the workshop where I was able to demonstrate that many sites are either unusable or inaccessible to many of the people they aim to reach and work with.

So how could widgets like Sprout be improved to enable a wider audience to be able to access your message and communications? What’s the problem, it looks great on my screen?

The following is a really simple example of the how a websites accessibility and usability can be compromised when flash media widgets are used on a website.

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Google releases it’s Social Graph API

Google has released it’s new API (Application Programming Interface) graphing publicly available social connections on the web.
You can see more about the Social Graph API for developers or have a go at looking up your own public profiles and see who is connected to you at the Social Graph - My connections demo page.

(Want to understand more about what how API’s work? Last autumn, I discovered this simple explanatory video by Matt Dickman which is a great introduction for non-geeks into API’s.)

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