London Regional ICT Champion

Thanks to a brutal regime of monitoring and evaluation we’ve seen more punishment than Frank Bruno’s gum-shield (for those of you who remember the great man), but hey! We’re back with another round-up and then some longer stuf that might contain an opinion or two.

Events are in the air:

• 25th of April 2008 – Abilitynet’s “Accessibility 2.0″ conference focusses on web accessibility in a Web 2.0 world. Find out more about the stellar list of speakers, download podcasts, etc, all from here.

• 10 June in London – NCVO and Microsoft UK are hosting an interactive conference combining case studies, workshops and keynote speakers to explore the potential of ICT for small and medium sized charities. It’s free of charge to all charity employees on a first come first served basis. Online registration will be open from 23rd April 2008 here.

• 8 July 2008 it’s the London Connects 2008 conference at QE II Conference Centre, London. It’s primarily for the statutory sector and technology enabled service delivery, but could be useful for VCOs with an interest in this area. See here.

Security:

• Spam is a sad fact of life and Symantec’s April State of Spam Report is out. According to the report, backscatter, social networking sites and a “419″ (a.k.a. Nigerian) scam being spread promising users they’ve won big money in a promotion for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, are the spammers current favourites.

• Google is not liking an EU report that says that “search engines, in their role as collectors of user data, have so far insufficiently explained the nature and purpose of their operations to the users of their services,” It concludes there is “no basis for a retention period [for user data] beyond six months,”

• Norton Internet Security has now fixed 2 bugs here, so go run Live Update now.

Web 2.0 and applications:

• MANSEO is short for Mother of All Nonprofit Search Engines Optimized – and is a search engine that only searches nonprofit technology websites. Why might that interest you? Type in keywords about web design (we just tested it by typing “drupal” and “web 2.0″) and all the results should all be specific to nonprofits’ use of these technologies. Our old friend Jason King has been spotted poking around there.

• Concerned about kids and social networking sites? More here and here.

• The Google Email Uploader desktop utility uploads email and contacts from desktop email programs (like Outlook) into your Google Apps mailbox. Only works with Google Apps pro to date. Read more here.

• Yahoo! is parking its tanks on Google’s lawn by getting into the analytics business and opening flickr to video uploads.

• A United Nations project – with help from Google Earth Outreach – is using Google Earth to raise the public profile of refugees and vulnerable people once far from the public eye. You can also check out Google Earth maps of the ‘Crisis in Darfur’ here, Greenpeace here, and World is Witness here.

• And lastly, Tech Crunch blurbs on the future of mobile social networking here.