How many hours of your life have you spent rifling through emails and looking for all the bits associated with projects? And how often have you been cc’d into an email that was only marginally relevant to your work?
If you’re into managing projects and keeping things together, then Basecamp is your friend. Basecamp is an online project-management system that keeps all of your project’s communications in one place. It comes with both paid and free packages, and while there are some excellent alternative tools out there, we find it one of the easiest to use.
Recently, Ben Sauer used it to manage our work with BBC World Service on the Talking America project. Here, he explains why he is a self-professed ‘Basecamp fanatic’…
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URL: bbc.co.uk/worldservice/talkingamerica
Excitingly, not long after we built the award-winning Bangladesh River Journey mini-site for the BBC World Service, we were asked for another helping of social media expertise.
What is it?
Talking America is a trail-blazing social media campaign that we’re proud to have worked on. This time, it’s a live site that tracks the World Service crew as they journey across America in a social media bus.
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URL: dharmafly.com/crunchies
Planet what?
‘Planet‘ sites are a new and wonderful way to draw people with common interests together online… and today is the day we get to demonstrate how.
What’s all this green stuff?
This weekend, at Barcamp Brighton3, we’re giving Brighton’s best New Media pros some special treats, in the form of Dharmafly Crunchies; little boxes of spirulina (it’s like a tiny green seaweed), known for being a potent power-food.
Why?
We’re hoping that spirulina’s special powers will entice these social media buffs to go online and post tweets, blogs, photos and videos of themselves ‘doing stuff’ with their Dharmafly Crunchies.
What’s happening on Planet Crunchy right now? Take a look.
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We’re proud to be a mini-sponsor of Brighton’s upcoming BarCamp, a revolutionary indoor-conference-camping-type event that’s enjoying growing cult status around the world.
What’s Barcamp?
Essentially it’s a philanthropic grassroots event, run by the community for the community (in this case, Brighton’s New Media and technology community). It’s an opportunity to share expertise, make contacts and learn lots of things that you never knew you wanted to know.
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There’s an area of web development that often gets overlooked. The design may be fantastic, the technology cutting edge and the subject very worthy - but it is also essential that the message is loud and clear, and simple to follow.
Before our designers and programmers get busy on a web project, we often work on the “copywriting” of the content, to help our client’s message shine through.
In this blog post, Leif Kendall talks about what he does as a professional copywriter and how copywriting can help your organisation or business to communicate, persuade and sell.
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Blogs are powerful tools when it comes to getting your message out there and stirring up a conversation about your cause. Recently, The National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) asked us to work with them to develop a social media initiative, and this included setting up a series of blogs.
What did they need a blog for?
One of their initiatives was aimed at empowering professionals who work with deaf children to blog about hot topics and contentious issues that NDCS are not able to comment on themselves, because they’re an impartial charity.
We worked with NDCS to develop a number of blogs on the community blogging site, wordpress.com. Then we created a marketing campaign to attract professionals to come and use it.
How do you promote the power of blogs?
For the campaign, we needed to come up with a short and sweet definition of what a blog is. It went like this:
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After a thorough search, we are now working with a new web hosting provider for the websites that we manage. Web hosting is where a website lives on the Web. It needs to be fast, reliable and supported by a dedicated technical team. And… it needs to be powered by 100% renewable energy.
Web hosting computers are active 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Keeping the World Wide Web online takes a lot of energy, and we at Dharmafly want to be as responsible and ethical as possible with our piece of it.
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The Bangladesh River Journey, a BBC World Service project to track climate change, for which we built the interactive mini-site, has recently received two prestigious awards. These awards recognise the innovative way that the project brought social media reporting on important global issues into an engaging user-experience.
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I have recently had a technical article about Location-Based Publishing and Services published at Dev.Opera. It’s all about the rising use of geographical coordinates in association with media on the Web, and how to get involved.
For the benefit of the Dharmafly archives, I’ve copied the article below.
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Social Innovation Camp was a rollercoaster! From the very first evening, when the delegates gathered at the Young Foundation in London, there was a perceptible buzz in the air…
The crowd was a heady mixture of web developers, designers, entrepreneurs and people with all sorts of skills. Although coming from different angles, everyone seemed to have a driven passion for using the web to help solve the problems of society.
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URL: goomusic.net
Goo Music are a vibrant, young band management company in London. They manage The Subways, a high-energy band who are currently putting together the final touches to their second album and are about to launch a world tour.
We’ve created a distinctive website for the business, in the style of a one-page fanzine that keeps itself up-to-date with feeds from the Twitter and MySpace profiles of both Goo Music and The Subways.
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This weekend is BarcampBrighton2, a grassroots technology conference organised and run by the participants. Over the last couple of days, we’ve been piecing together a special Greasemonkey userscript for the conference, which enables Yahoo Live users to broadcast live video as a group. We call it YLiveGroups.
» Install the script
We first used Yahoo Live at last month’s SemanticCampLondon and there was a great buzz of conversation from people who were watching from other countries, discussing the topics of the talks, asking questions and learning about the subjects.
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I’ve submitted “Social Compost” as a project proposal to Social Innovation Camp.
SI Camp is a grassroots conference, where social entrepreneurs and web developers get together to help each other out. A number of great ideas have been submitted, a few of which will be selected for the event. My idea is to connect local people who produce kitchen scraps with those who produce compost.
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We were happy to have attended Tuesday’s launch of UnLtdWorld, a social networking site for social entrepreneurs.
UnLtdWorld brings together people and businesses who make a difference in the world and connects them with potential co-workers and supporters. It aims to be a hot-bed for collaboration, the sharing of services and the pooling of resources.
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This weekend was SemanticCampLondon (alt) - a grassroots conference of semantic web developers.
Semantics is all about meaning - and the idea of the “semantic web” is to use techniques that add greater and greater meaning to web content. The intention is for computers - as well as humans - to “understand” something of the content, allowing them to make associations with related content and to present options to the web user based on those associations.
When web developers agree about standard ways to add semantic meaning to content, then some pretty amazing things become possible.
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Goodwill and loveliness to all our friends, colleagues, clients and peers.
It’s been a truly transformational year. Can’t wait to see what 2008 has in store…
Well, this one didn’t get blogged yet… Back in June, we stayed up all night at the BBC / Yahoo Hack Day in London. The task was to combine data sources and build something experimental - and a little bit edgy.
We forged a script to enhance mainstream news sites (such as BBC News) with a layer of grassroots community content - from bloggers, photographers, and the like. The idea was to propagate the news and views from the streets, alongside mainstream media. The result: ‘HackHUD‘.
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I am afraid it is no exaggeration to say that what we saw was a hellish scene. [source]
It has been a sobering experience to see reports of the Bangladesh cyclone - and to watch them flow through the Bangladesh River Journey site we built for BBC World Service. The project’s original aim was to expose the very real presence of climate change in Bangladesh - a low-lying land of myriad rivers - and the cyclone’s arrival seemed shockingly symbolic.
While news of the cyclone competed for airtime in the general media, the World Service maintained a stream of often very personal and touching accounts from the Bangladeshi people. Their Flickr photos and Twitter texts acted as informal media channels, adding an extra dimension to the more formal reporting on the World Service website and radio.
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We gave a 30 minute session at BarCamp London called "Yoga and the Social Graph: from smoke-signals to self-realisation"…
We discussed the ever-increasing trend for expansion and connection within society. This is now stronger than ever with the progress from the Internet (a network of interconnected computers), to the Web (a network of interconnected documents), to the Social Graph (or more simply, ‘Social Network‘, a network of interconnected social relationships).
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We’ve been doing some exciting work with Just Different, a UK charity who promote disability awareness and social inclusion.
Introducing Just Different
Founded by Toby Hewson, a young man with cerebal palsy, Just Different focus on educating the future leaders of our society. They provide in-school workshops on disability and difference, along with recruitment opportunities for young disabled people. They also act as disability advisers to teachers, parents and organisations.
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URL: www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/bangladeshboat
Phew! We’ve been busy these last three weeks! From commission to launch in just 12 working days (and nights), Dharmafly has built a site for the BBC that explores social media and cutting edge Web technologies…
The Bangladesh River Journey is a mashup of posts from a BBC World Service trip to track the effects of climate change in Bangladesh. The trip lasts a month, with photos being posted to Flickr, messages sent to Twitter and journal entries made on the World Service site. The mashup puts all these posts on to a map, letting you navigate around and follow the trip.
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We ran an interactive workshop at BarCamp Brighton: "How to Save the World and Succeed in Business". This is the perennial question for Dharmafly, and instead of telling anything, we wanted to get the answers from the crowd…
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Welcome to our shiny new blog. We’ll be posting news, tips and bits here… about social media, web strategy, web development and ethical business.
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