On Friday afternoon, I got my first Tweets from UK trade magazines Construction News and New Civil Engineer, as two of the Emap Construct titles took their first steps into the Web 2.0 world of Twitter. Initially, @CNPlus went into overdrive repeating itself several times over but it’s now sorted out an RSS problem with its Twitterfeed; @NCEmagazine has so far taken a more, er, leisurely approach.
(Update, 2 September 2008: The NCE feed has gone mad! Lots of repeated Tweets, I think, due to a similar Twitterfeed problem to CNPlus. Sort it out, NCE!)
(Update, 4 September 2008: The NCE feed is now repeating the same five stories hourly, quickly alienating its followers. If you’re going to Tweet, NCE, do it right!)
This morning, following the launch of Constructing Excellence‘s new-look website, I discovered its Twitter feed and have also now started following its tweets @constructingexc.
Be2camp
These two developments are perhaps the latest indications of a growing awareness and adoption of such tools within the UK mainstream architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, but we are still only scratching the surface. This is one of the reasons that I am involved in Be2camp, an online grouping which is promoting an innovative event next month at the Building Centre in London (and online).
For Web 2.0 newbies or sceptics from the AEC sector, be2camp will give a valuable introduction to Web 2.0 technologies and their potential to support, augment or improve existing forms of collaboration and communication.
For Web 2.0 enthusiasts, it’s worth pointing out that the AEC sector comprises around 10% of UK GDP and so there is a potentially huge market for relevant Web 2.0 applications, from simple micro-blogging tools (like Twitter) through to mapping tools, applications for mobile devices, support for building information modelling (BIM), planning, facilities management, building online communities, etc, etc.
And whether you love or loathe ICT, we should all be concerned about creating a more sustainable environment for ourselves and future generations, and this will be an underpinning theme throughout Be2camp. Please join the Be2camp community, register to attend the event and – above all – participate.
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Hi – thanks for subscribing and fair cop on the CN and NCE twitterfeed overdrive. We are working on a fix and this should be deployed early next week.
It’s now a week since Suzie said the Twitterfeed fix would be deployed, and still the stream of repeated stories continues to flow…
[…] (even if they don’t look much like blogs). CN also jumped on the Twitter bandwagon last August, just ahead of NCE (though the initial @NCEmagazine experience was painful!); now, the CN feed […]
[…] this is despite Web 2.0 now being embraced by some mainstream construction publications – see post). Even attempts to get some very collaboration-oriented individuals to start using online […]