Make sharing books, social and fun! with Open Planet Ideas

Dan — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:25:07 +0000

The Open Planet Ideas is an interesting initiative from Sony and the WWF. So what is it? Well I am getting to that bit now.

The challenge is to use your imagination to come up with a great idea for how to use tech to make the most of our world’s resources. To help get you going they have a wealth of technologies which just waiting to re-purposed in interesting and creative ways to help shape a cleaner, more sustainable and brighter future for us and our planet.

I was having a look and came across a great idea re-using books instead of them being resided to the shelf, you set them free. Book Crossing is the idea where you label your books with a unique ID number and simply give them to a friend, stranger or perhaps leave them in your local coffee shop for others to find. With the hope they logon to bookcrossing.com and enter the ID and register the book as “caught”, this is done with the hope that books can be passed on and re-used many times and you can track your books across the world as new people discover and enjoy it.

Now I LOVE this idea and think it’s a very interesting concept, and would love to see this applied to more than just books and it would also be interesting to see technology used in more interesting ways with the tracking and “catching” process of it, for example having the printable labels using the QR barcode scanning and apps for mobile devices so you can have an easy “check-in” style process utilising the app, camera and GPS functionality of many modern mobiles. So you find a book, scan it, read it and pass it on, potentially without even needing to visit a website!

Check out my concept “BookCrossing made Social” based on BookCrossing and comment!

You can Find Out More About Open Planet Ideas in the concepts and inspiration pages, so check them out and Join the challenge – You might be lucky and realise you idea and help make the world a better place…

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Offical Twitter Accounts – Worth a Look!

Dan — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:53:06 +0000

Twitter has become a massive force on the Internet, I am wrapped up in it and tweet obsessively (@Dansgalaxy) as well as managing many twitter accounts and twitter bots.

As well as this other (bigger) businesses are taking advantage of twitter and using it as a way to communicate with their users, often it can be hard to tell which accounts are official here’s a list of companies / celebrities twitter accounts which are worth a look.

Microsoft:

@Microsoft – Main MS account being run and managed by the corporate communications team
@MSWindows – Announcing Windows 7
@WindowsLive – Official Twitter account of Microsoft Windows Live
@liveframework – liveframework
@livemesh – Sync, share, and access the information you care about—wherever you happen to be.
@SharePoint – The official tweetstream of the SharePoint product group – managed by @LLiu
@bizspark – Microsoft BizSpark – Software, Support, Visibility
@zunemarketplace – Zune Marketplace is a store for the way you love music, with brand-new releases every week and a huge selection of music in every style imaginable
@wmdev – Windows Mobile
@microsofttag – Microsoft Tag
@ch9 – listen to the cockpit, help us fly the plane
@ch10 – Channel 10 is Microsoft’s online community for the technology enthusiast
@ch8 – Microsoft’s community for students
@mixonline – Come check us out at www.visitmix.com
@MIX09 – The Next Web Now, pre-empted by @MIX07, @MIX08 and @PDC08
@SiteNamedDesire – Want a copy of A Website Named Desire? This li’l birdie will tell you how. Wait for the tweets.
@MicrsftTech4All – News from Microsoft Accessibility team, which strives for technology to be usable by everyone & complements our physical & cognitive abilities.
@MSDN – Updates from the MSDN site team.
@adCenterBlog – News, Tips, Tricks & Best Practices From The Guys At Microsoft adCenter

[ Most Microsoft twitter accounts sourced from on10.net ]

Tech News:

Twitter can be a great place to stay on top of the latest tech news, and I often use it as a basic RSS system, and am often reminded to check out TechCrunch.com or the Guardians tech articles when i see their tweets.

@TechCrunch – TechCrunch.com is a great tech news blog with some interesting stories.
@GuardianTech – Tech stories from the Guardian
@Twit – This Week In Tech
@NYT_tech – New York Times Tech
@TimesTech – Times (of London) Technology News
@Digg_Technews - Popular technology stories from Digg.com
@msntech – Tech and Gadget news from MSN
@BBCClick – The BBC’s flagship technology TV show.

News:

@BBCbreaking – Breaking News stories from the BBC.
@Reuters – Reuters breaking news stories.
@SkyNews – SkyNews news stories.
@GoogleNews – Breaking news stories and updates from Google News
@CNNbrk – CNN.com is among the world’s leaders in online news and information delivery.
@NBCnews – NBC News — a leading source of global news and information for more than 75 years

Twitter Bots:

Twitter bots are becoming a fun part of the Twitterosphere (Twitter community). Twitter Bots can be like marmite, you either love them or hate them as with most things.

Personally I love some twitter bots (particularly the ones i run) and tend to take the view of don’t like it don’t follow.

Here’s a few of mine and others which I follow which are worth checking out.

@JacksonBot – Picks up tweets about Micheal Jackson
@LMAObot – Picks up anything with “LOL”, “Lmao”, “ROFL” etc in it picks up some random and funny tweets.
@IsDeadBot – Picks up tweets about all things er dead. Which can be more interesting than you might think.
@NoteRobot – Retweets “Note to self” tweets, very funny and some random laughs!
@LuvOrHate - Picks up on what people love and hate, again some random interesting tweets – Created by @aaronbassett.

Celebrity Twitterers:

There is no doubt that celebrities have jumped on the twitter bandwagon, be it for self promotion or simply to tweet their life.

I wont go into an extensive list of Celeb twitterers, as there are lots so instead I will share my favourite picks and share with you some great celeb twitter stalker sites!

@StephenFry is one of my favourite twitterers with some interesting posts and insights into an interesting mans life as he goes about his day to day tasks, from visits to the apple store to ponderings a must follow for twitter users.

@lilyroseallen is one of my favourite artists (I know maybe a little sad) but i do love her, and from what i can tell she tweets for “real” and isn’t using twitter purely as a publicity vehicle, which i like you get to see Lily Allen the person.

One of the difficult parts about the web is you don’t really know if the person you are following is the person you think it is, this is where Valebrity.com comes in. Valebrity enables you to “validate” celebrities online so you know who your following is who it says it is!

Worth checking out if you want to follow your favourite celebs.

Also came across a blog post on Mashable.com which is worth checking it out which has 25 celebrities accounts from actors, musicians, politicians and writers which is worth checking out too.

So take a look, follow people and get involved in the wonderful world of twitter!

Don’t forget to follow @Dansgalaxy for updates and randomness from the world of Dan.