Some online software tools
I’ve been having a look at some online software tools, several of which are new to me, and which some may find useful.
The first two came to me via Brigada, which is itself a tool worth noting. It has a mailing list that tells about resources, services and tools that might be useful to people involved in Christian mission.
This comes a couple of weeks too late, but it would be useful for people who are trying to compile lists of people to read the Book of Acts on Easter Eve, for for the Maundy Thursday Vigil (if Anglicans and Roman Catholics still have those).
It offers:
Simple wizards for creating your sign up
Public or private online group sign up
Automated email reminders
“Swapping” ability for schedule changes
Attractive and customizable templates
Easy administration tools and stats
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.
Good for planning a trip involving several people, and similar things.
The only hitch (according to Brigada) — it’s online only. So… there’s no Windows, Mac, or linux version.
I haven’t quite made up my mind about this one.
It’s supposed to tell you who you interact with on social networks, and who influences you and who you influence and things like that.
I’m not sure how well it works, though. I think it’s still a work in progress, and it seems to work mainly with Twitter, and not so well, so much, or at all, with other platforms.
Among the rather strange things Klout tells me is that I am influential in Singapore (first and last time I was there was back in 1985) and that I’m more influential in “Celebrities” than in “Christianity” — if you look at the tag cloud in the right side bar you’ll see that “Christianity” is quite big, and “celebrities”, if it appears at all, is very small.
I mostly use blogs, and use Twitter mainly to let people know when I’ve written a new blog post. And what I post on Twitter gets passed on to Facebook. But Klout doesn’t seem to pick up my blog posts or Facebook or Google+ interactions at all.
I learned about Klout via Blog Catalog, which, however, remains but a shadow of its former self. About 2-3 years ago someone decided to revamp the user interface, but never finished the job, so a lot of things no longer work, and the new interface is far more difficult to navigate than the old. There are many things that are impossible to navigate to from within the site, though you can still get to them through external links – a classic example of what comes if you ignore the adage, “If it aint broken, don’t fix it.”
But a member of Blog Catalog visited this blog, and showed up in the Blog Catalog widget in the right sidebar, so I visited their blog, and saw this post: Links to 22 Social Networking Sites. And that’s how I found Klout.
How do some of these tools interact?
The WordPress statistics show that very few people come to this blog from Twitter, so perhaps I’m wasting my time posting announcements of these posts on Twitter. And almost nobody bothers to retweet them. I quite often go to other people’s blog posts when I see them on Twitter, though I tend to ignore tweets without links, mainly because they lack context, and it is rare that anything meaningful (other than “Will be late for dinner tonight”) can be fitted into 140 characters. And that brings me to the last tool which is
… which shows the links posted in tweets on Twitter in a more readable and informative format. I find it very useful as a kind of digest of the best of the tweets from the people I’m following on Twitter, including my own. My only complaint is that sometimes its idea of what is important doesn’t always concide with mine.
PS As an experiment, if you came to this post from Twitter, please go back to the tweet you came from and retweet it, or even if you didn’t come from Twitter, but if you are a member of Twitter (you can find me on Twitter at @hayesstw). I’d just be interested to see how such a thing affects the Klout statistics, and if it manages to put WordPress on the map, even a tiny bit.
