In reports about the recent row over the NHS and the comments made by ex-US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, some news agencies were quick to spot an angle – the fact that Twitter apparently couldn’t handle it.
Why crashing Twitter is becoming the Holy Grail of PR
Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
Crashing twitter – the new PR weapon of choice?
Friday, August 14th, 2009Accessify Forum gets the Twitterbug
Monday, July 6th, 2009
Accessify Forum now on Twitter
Just hours after the original suggestion by fellow Accessify Forum moderator Jack Pickard, the popular accessibility discussion forum has now joined Twitter. You can follow the tweets over at @accessifyforum.
We’re currently developing policies to guide our usage of the account – the first of which is that we’ll be appending each tweet with initials to make it easy to identify the individual author. This is nicely aligned to some work I’m doing within my organisation, trying to define best practices and create policies for our use of Social Media. I’m currently working on a post summarising this work, with some links to useful policies already in existence, so stay tuned for that over the coming weeks.
For now, though, head over to www.accessifyforum.com to join the discussion, and don’t forget to follow @accessifyforum next time you’re on Twitter.
Accessibility and Social Media – an overview
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
My presentation at ScotWeb2 - photo courtesy of Jadu
This post explores some of the issues that I plan to discuss with attendees at tomorrow’s ScotWeb2 event in Edinburgh, regarding the current state of accessibility on Social Media sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. I hope to have some interesting feedback to post here after tomorrow, so for now here’s an overview of the subject. I’ve also thrown in a few open questions to kick-start the discussion.
[Edit: see a summary of the event on the ScotWeb2 blog]
Read the rest of my introduction to Social Media accessibility
Twitter adds account verification
Friday, June 12th, 2009Just days after my post on the risks of cybersquatting in Social Media, Twitter have annouced that they are beta-testing account verification.
According to the official statement, to “prevent identity confusion, Twitter is experimenting with a ‘Verified Account’ feature [...] working to establish authenticity with people who deal with impersonation or identity confusion on a regular basis.”
An example of a verified Twitter account
Accessible Twitter
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009Twitter has its fair share of accessibility issues. One of the biggest is that certain functions can only be accessed with a mouse (I have personally suffered from this when trying to access Twitter via my mobile device’s browser). With Twitter’s exploding popularity, and with various organisations rushing to utilise the service, issues around accessibility become ever more urgent.
Great to see, then, that an accessible web application for Twitter is being built (by Dennis Lembree, sadly not in affiliation with Twitter themselves). Addressing issues including keyboard access, Javascript dependency, colour contrast and navigation, this looks set to be an invaluable resource for many users. Twitterers can also follow the progress of this project at twitter.com/AccessibleTwitr.
Related articles:
- Focus Twitter Greasemonkey Script – Gez Lemon’s efforts to make Twitter funtions available to keyboard users
- Making Twitter Tweet – summary of a talk by Steve Faulkner, as blogged by Jeremy Keith
My 2009 Web Resolutions
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009OK, not so much resolutions as a list of to-dos. These are areas which I’ll be looking more into during 2009. If you’ve got similar goals, or think I should be looking at other things too, do leave a comment!
Upgrade my host
My main website is currently hosted for free at Awardspace. They have been fantastic – only a bit of downtime and lots of features. However, it’s time to upgrade to something a bit more professional, so I’m now looking around for the best paid options. I’ll need to be able to host a couple of blogs too (including this one after I found an interesting article on Why Your Business Blog Shouldn’t Be On BlogSpot.com). Edit – I’m now on WordPress
Complete a list of resources for implementing WCAG 2.0
There are lots of resources appearing, but there still isn’t a comprehensive source of everything you’ll need to design and test according to the new guidelines. I hope to bring together an ever-increasing collection of resources for this purpose, building on it with my own experiences as I work on new projects.
Figure out how to make the most of Twitter
I’ve only recently started using Twitter, and I’m still not entirely sure what purpose it is fulfilling. I’m sure that I should be on there; I’m just not sure why. So I’m going to follow more people, post more updates, promote my presence on there, and see what happens.
One situation where I think Twitter could help is within my organisation, as a tool for communicating to staff exactly what I’m up to on a day to day basis. For many, our website and online presence remains a bit of a mystery, and I want increase understanding amongst colleagues so that they understand what the web has to offer. By posting regular tweets about the projects that I’m working on and the latest things we’ve put online, people will hopefully get a better idea of the breadth of content we publish, the projects we’re supporting, and the process involved in getting things online. The brevity of Twitter lends itself to this far more than, for example, a traditional blog.
Publish more videos online
I really want to get to grips with Youtube and its peers this year, to get a solid idea of the functionality of these services and to kick-start some research on the possibilities and limitations of such platforms. The first obvious step is to get stuff on there – some will be basic footage of local events, others will be experimental projects (I’m very interested in time-lapse photography, for example).
One major project that I’m hoping our organisation will support later in the year is to get much of the content of our corporate website available online as British Sign Language video, with audio and captions. This will primarily benefit severely or profoundly deaf individuals for whom BSL is the first language (1500 of which are estimated to be living within our authority alone), but could also help other deaf users, individuals with low literacy, blind users, and many others.
Get up close and personal with WordPress
I’m also hoping to get to grips with self-installing and customising hosting WordPress, not just for my own blogs, but also as a platform for building CMS-driven websites. Worpress offers tremendous potential for very effective customisation, and I’ll write more about my experiences as I progress.
Be more secure
I think online security is going to continue to increase in importance in 2009, with more peolpe expecting higher standards of security and the penalties for poor security becoming ever harsher. I’ve already overhauled all my passwords, and will next be looking at beefing up my security practices across the board.
So that’s it – a few things which will be keeping me busy over the next 12 months. Stay tuned to see how I get on.