I set out some of the logic behind, and tools you can use for lifestreaming at a recent Ignite event here in our Cardiff. Here's a video of the presentation, the slideshow and some links you can check out.

Ignite is an event where a load of geeks get together to drink, network and watch a series of 'rapid fire' presentations - you get 5 minutes and 20 slides that automatically transition every 15 seconds. The Cardiff (and soon, London) event is organised by Neil Cocker and Claire Scantlebury, from Nocci and Cardiff Web Scene respectively.

The presentation format is a serious challenge - the challenge is to get the timing right and create a presentation that's sufficiently interesting for a very savvy audience but also entertaining enough for a tipsy-but-savvy audience. I hope I managed to get the balance right.

Anyway - here's the video from my presentation, followed by the slides I used:

You can also view these in my lifestream - this site pulls in my uploads and favourites from Slideshare.net, and also any Youtube favourites or uploads too.

Here are a few good lifestreaming links:

• Lifestream blog
• Friendfeed | Friendfeed Beta
• Sweetcron | Sweetcron wiki | Sweetcron users group
• Tumblr
• Storytlr
• I am Shimone (Sweetcron based site)

Lifestreaming makes sense of the mass of social media activity that we're creating. As our actions on the web - be that favouriting or liking a video, uploading media content or commenting on a blog - become more and more dispersed across a wide range of services, it helps to have tecnologies that aggregate them back together.

As I mentioned in the talk, we can all make a start by plugging our media account details into Facebook, but I think Friendfeed is the service we'll all be paying attention to in the future. Not ony can we aggregate all our web activity, but we can subscribe to each other. All Friendfeed needs is an active community commenting and liking the best content and it'll become the most powerful platform on the web.

Right now, Friendfeed certainly looks like the most interesting lifestreaming platform for the future - see Robert Scoble setting out how much more useful it can be than Twitter:

All in all, the IgniteCardiff event was great - there were a bunch of fantastic presentations and a hectic night of networking, drinking and partying was enjoyed by all.

You can check out all the presentations from IgniteCardiff #2 at the IgniteCardiff YouTube Channel. My favourite presentation from the night was from DK at Mediasnackers, who gave a fantastic presentation on change.

Massive respect to Neil and Claire - and if you're based in Cardiff, make sure you don't miss the next one! Stay in touch by connecting with them online.

I've just made an iPhone interface for my Sweetcron site. The iPhone likes a simple interface, so it's easy to create a good looking view for your mobile lifestream.

If you don't have an iPhone, here are some screenshots of the theme mashed together, showing the social media items it supports.

Azri from Brainstorm sets out how to create an iPhone theme in Sweetcron.

Here are the steps that I took to set it up:

1. Replace _header.php with this code - sets up the redirect when it finds the iPhone


2. Rename these theme files:
   
   • _header.php -> _header-normal.php
   • _activity_feed.php ->_activity_feed-normal.php
   • _footer.php -> _footer-normal.php
   • _single.php -> _single-normal.php
3. Create these iPhone theme files:
   
   • _header-iphone.php
   • _activity_feed-iphone.php
   • _footer-iphone.php
   • _single-iphone.php
   • main-iphone.css

Then get to work!

Azri has a few other tips, and I'd add it's a good idea to express all widths in percentages, then the theme then adjusts to the iPhone's orientation based display.

I started with my normal theme files, but changed the feed source navigation tabs to a drop down (which works nicely on the iPhone), put search front and centre then a simple activity feed.

Item display was based on my main theme but with just service, date, title and type.

All the items link directly to the original except blog posts, which display comments as well.

So there you have it - Thoughts?

Like?

Here's a new website I made: The Safe Foundation. It's for a Cardiff based charity that runs events to raise funds for small community projects around the world.

I've blogged about it on the Native website. Native is the company I run with Carl Morris.

They call him "The explainer". Professor Mike Wesch is a cultural anthropologist from Kansas University who is studying the impacts of new media. You should tune into this guy. He's just been made US Professor of the Year, to boot.

Mike has created some awesome little videos that look at the changing nature of information and how it's organised, the relationship between web 2.0 and the relationships it mediates and student cultures. You might have seen a few of his videos, the shorter ones of which have become big hits on YouTube, like The Machine is us/ing us, Information R/evolution and A vision of students today.

NB This post has two x hour long videos by Mike Wesch - to get the best out of it, carve out some serious time from your day to watch.

Mike knows a thing or two about YouTube - with his students, he conducts an ethnographic study of the site's community - participating, creating, watching, analysing thousands of videos - and exracting an understanding of how social media sites are transforming human relationships, cultures and networks around the globe.

Anthropology

Anthropologists like Mike have huge advantages when it comes to getting their heads around the shifts in human culture that the current surge of technology changes on the web are bringing about. Being trained to understand the assumptions of your own cultural framework, grasp the underlying structures of our own and other cultures enables the anthropologist to see the underlying narratives and discourses among human societies.

Anthropolgy often brings a unique and surprising perspective to social and cultural change, and its insights are particularly valuable at the moment. He gives us a wonderful example of this in his lecture - An anthropological introduction to YouTube - watch and enjoy:

Education

The most impressive thing I've seen from him is an hour long lecture (below) he gave to other academics, talking about how the assumptions behind our current models of education are being shattered by current technological changes. He covers the shifts in the culture of knowledge, technology, students and learning environments. It's a must watch for anyone involved in teaching.

Fortunately, Mike is geek enough to start exploring some of the solutions to the problems these huge shifts create. During the lecture, he goes through the learning portal he has created for his students using RSS feeds and free online social media services such as Netvibes and Diigo.

Before I introduce the video (and please, set aside an hour to watch this - it's worth it), here are some of the structural shifts Mike is grappling with.

• knowledges is scarce --> knowedge is uniquitous
• information is organised by specialists --> knowledge is organised by everyone
• learning is absorbing information --> learning is filtering information
• we find information --> information finds us
• learning is individual --> learning is collaborative
• web = multimedia publishing platform --> web = multimedia conversational platform

Anyway - enough of my blathering - get yourself a cup of tea and switch on your brain - this is like plugging the Matrix into the back of your head:

Professor Wesch is one of the most interesting guys on the web - the other day on Twitter, he was researching the history of "meh" (which has to include references to 'whatever', of course!) and I'm really looking forward to seeing the work he produces in the future.

To connect with Mike, you can follow him on Twitter, subscribe to his blog, "Mediated Cultures" and follow his YouTube channel.

Awesome work Professor.

My mum didn't really meet her father until she was a young child - he spent most of the war years as a dentist in the RAF, stationed in India. Now she and her sister are travelling around India, following in their fathers' footsteps and blogging the journey.

Chris Beardshaw is an awesome lady - I know I'm biassed, but ask the people who know her - she can knock up one of the best dinner parties in Hampshire, has looked after the old ladies in the village once a week for years, and when she recently suffered from Cancer, her response was to do an Art degree at Winchester College - ask anyone and they'll tell you that you couldn't meet a more lovely lady.

Part of her art degree was a work involving all the letters that her father had sent to her mother during the war (over 500 of them). Detailed in these letters were the humdrum and extraordinary stories of his stay in India.

Sadly, her mother Doris and father Edgar have both now passed on, leaving their children - Chris (my mum), her sister (Judith) and brother (David) behind.

So mum and Judith have now decided to visit India and trace the steps of their father's Indian RAF years. Today, they landed in Mumbai, and with the help of my brother in law's family (originally from Nagpur), are off round southern india to see the places he stayed.

Mum's fairly technoliterate - when she did her art degree, she learnt photoshop, and she regularly prints off dad's emails (he on the other hand...). So I talked her through blogging, and while she didn't get on with Wordpress, she has set up a travel blog at Get Jealous.

Follow their blog and send them a message of encouragement via their discussion board.

Maybe they'll even see one of the rooms where he held his surgeries (the picture above is my grandad's dentist surgery in Vishakhapattanam).

Tangled Up in Blue... a cool blue Sweetcron theme putting your blog up top, your lifestream below.

"Wow this is a hot looking SweetCron implementation"

Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb)

Download | Demo (coming! - this site runs on it atm)

Please follow the 10 steps in the Readme.txt carefully!

Evolved from Boxdaddy, based on YongFook's classic Boxy theme, has been tested on Sweetcron 1.08e and has:

• Tabbed navigation for single source activity
• 'Link/blog/video/photo/audio' labels for items
• Full, blog & page RSS feeds (i.e. feeds for search, tags, services etc)
• A nice user interface using service colors and rounded corners in CSS3
• A blog display area at the top of the homepage (thanks to teh blog ar (not) dead)
• All items news shares and links go straight to original source
• Audio players for both Blip.fm and Last.fm
• Twitter lives in the sidebar now - way too noisy for this Sweetcron
• A friendfeed page for the hell of it
• Disqus integration (just add your username to files)

I've added a plugin folder with the relevant plugins bundled inside the zip. 

(Update: Version 1.1 includes IE fixes - 23/1)

User requirements: some PHP and CSS knowledge

If you have any problems, post them to the Sweetcron Code Group thread Comments, ideas and feedback welcome!

My website runs on a system called Sweetcron - an open source lifestreaming app. These are my early thoughts on setting it up, using it and what it can do.

If you're into social media mashups, I think you'll like it, but you're going to need to know some code.

Sweetcron is new PHP software created by the Sweetcron-Meister Yong Fook which pulls in items from social media data feeds around the web onto your own hosted site.

At the moment, I've got feeds from a number of services running into the site, including:

• Photos I add to Flickr
• News items I share from RSS feeds I read within Google Reader
• Links that I bookmark in Delicious
• Web pages I Digg via Digg.com
• Videos I upload or favourite on YouTube
• Tracks I love on Last.fm
• Songs I play on Blip.fm
• And last, but not least, blog posts I write myself via Sweetcron itself

Why use Sweetcron?

Sweetcron certainly isn't for everyone, but the system appealed to me for a few reasons:

• It's different... and I'm just like that, I guess


• I'm as interested in sharing other people's content as I am in my own, and Sweetcron treats a link to someone elses content as important as my own writings


• I'm not a prolific writer and hate the feeling many bloggers have that they have to write something, but I don't want my site to sit there without updates for days on end while I procrastinate about blogging (nor force myself to write when I've nothing important to say, or someone else is saying it better)


• I want to build a collection of useful, interesting stuff that I can go back to, and others can access if they find my tastes interesting


• I like the concept of Lifestreaming - Friendfeed is an awesome social app for doing this, but it's just way too complicated for someone like my mum to get her head around. I wanted a nice simple way of displaying my stuff that anyone could appreciate


• It was a challenge to hack around in the code and customise the system for my own purposes

Tweakage

So I installed the system, added some feeds and had a tinker. I changed the design a bit, added a tab for each of the main feeds I use to the top (so you could look at, for example, just my bookmarks, or photos, or videos etc). I added a label to every item, so the user knows what it is - a blog, a link, a video or a photo. And I removed Twitter from my main activity stream - more on that later.

I also set up an RSS feed for just my blog posts as well as the default feed for all items, as the default feed was initially just way too noisy to be useful (especially when Tweets were included).

I got loads of help from the others in the Sweetcron Google code group and even got some requests from some people to give them the code for the theme I'd been developing, so I released the Boxdaddy theme, which to my surprise, lots of others have used and customised for their own purposes.

I've continued to tweak the functionality of the site, and I've enjoyed getting stuck into the code and creating something unique. I'd love to get comments/feedback on the site, and the next thing I want to look at is the design - I'm no graphic designer and I'm well aware that the site looks a bit bland, so if anyone wants to give me some suggestions, I'm all ears!

So what's it like using Sweetcron?

There's an interesting shift in thinking that takes place when your actions on Social Media sites result in a new post on your website. It's different from aggregating your content on Friendfeed.

When bookmarking a page, for example, on Friendfeed it just drops into the endless datastreams - some people notice it, most don't, but it really doesn't matter in the end - Friendfeed is a kind of black hole for web content.

When the same action creates a new item on your site, however, it takes on a greater personal significance and this has certainly made me think about the usefulness and importance of what I'm sharing a lot more.

Another thing that's happened is that I tend to think about the balance of services that I'm using more. When you look at your own site and see 10 google reader shares in a row it just doesn't look so good, so it kinda prompts you to mix up the services you're using a bit. For example, if there haven't been any photos for a while it'll prompt me to go back to my camera and get something new onto Flickr.

For Blog writing, Sweetcron doesn't have much of a Content Management system - you just get to add the title, content and tags - that's it. There's no image insert, no B, I, U buttons... no "Kitchen Sink" of the kind you find in Wordpress, so everything has to be hand coded. It's something that's definitely a key issue to improve the system if it's to be more useful to the average user, but I'm happy working in HTML, so I'm not too bothered by it, but it does make writing slower, and I'd like to see a decent CMS integrated soon.

My thoughts on Sweetcron

I really like the concept of a self hosted lifestreaming website and I'll be keeping my eyes open for some of the other projects coming online - for example Kakuteru (A Ruby on Rails solution).

I've got a few thoughts I want to push out there to see if they resonate with anyone else...

• It's not for everyone. Don't try Sweetcron if you're not comfortable digging into the PHP and CSS code on your site - it's not a simple "install and go" solution - you'll need to customise it. (Although, of course, if you need someone to customise it for you, I'm open to offers! - Get in touch!)


• Sweetcron could really do with a back end CMS for blog posts - perhaps someone will be able to point me in the direction of an easily integrateable PHP CMS, or hopefully, Yong Fook will incorporate it into his next release


• Sweetcron doesn't discern any hierarchy of information - each item is treated as an equal, so it helps to create other ways of highlighting your more important content. For example, I've added a 'Recent Blog Posts' scrolling textbox to my sidebar to highlight my own writing.


• Related to this, Twitter is a problematic service to incorporate in your main Sweetcron activity feed. If it's in there, your site will tend to be a flood of Tweets, or you may find yourself limiting your use of Twitter so as to avoid flooding your website with tweets (I did this at first). This can seriously limit the value you can get out of Twitter, which is a free flowing conversational medium. I wanted to be able to use Twitter as and when I wanted, so eventually, I just pulled the Twitter feed out of my main site and put the stream into my Sidebar. This works way better for me.


• UPDATE: I've just added a blog container at the top of the home page instead - nod to the teh blog ar (not) dead theme


• I'm quite interested in the possibilities that Sweetcron offers for creating an group or event website - it could be really useful for a project involving a number of different people focussing on a particular topic, or event. I'd quite like to get an opportunity to work with the system to try that out

All in all, I love what Sweetcron enables me to do with my own site, which is to just get on with reading, sharing and creating content on social media sites, knowing that my website will be updated with the content I choose, and it doesn't need any heavy curating by me.

Of course, it could do with some improvements - I think a back end CMS for blog writing and media uploading is probably the most important, and there are a bunch of issues with particular feed types - so configuring Sweetcron is not a straightforward process - but you can get help from an active community on the Google Code Group and I think the end result is very elegant and user friendly.

So what do you think? Like my site? Useful idea or should I just junk it and get on the Wordpress express train like everyone else?

UK Culture minister, Andy Burnham launched an idea into the debate on the protection of children on the web during the Christmas holidays by suggesting that film style age ratings be applied to websites.

As a father of three young children, Mr Burnham was reflecting the genuine concerns that parents have about the exposure of young people to harmful material on the web. Sadly, his idea for classifying websites is unworkable, would be useless at protecting children and could potentially waste a huge amount of our money.

Stef Lewandowski has already set out some of the practical impossibilities of the scheme. The number of web pages is technically infinite (many web pages are generated on the fly and don't even exist until requested from a user). Web pages are not final published items - they change and evolve, so anyone checking a site on a Monday will fail to see what's been uploaded on a Tuesday.

Obviously, manual checking of web content is practically impossible, but automated filtering is also hugely problematic - as the Australian government is currently discovering. Filter out the word 'sex' and bingo, no more content offering good education and advice on sex for young people.

Mr Burnham even suggested that he saw great opportunities with the incoming Obama US administration for co-operation on controlling content on the English speaking web. I'd suggest he take another look at President-elect Obama's views on support for net neutrality and revisit that assumption.

And then there's the thorny question of WHO, exactly, would be in charge of classifying or filtering the web. Like many others, I'm concerned that anyone should set themselves up as an arbiter of culture in this way - the very notion seems ripe for abuse.

For example, Facebook (well known for policing content on their site) is currently taking down photos of breastfeeding - it's fair enough for a company to do what they want on their own website, if annoying when they so obviously get things wrong, but if it's a government agency, which cultural values drive the decision making and how can they be accountable?

Old media solutions won't work on the web

There's another reason why this notion of classification of websites is useless. It builds on an old media model from an age where access to media was limited and depended on an identifiable gate-keeper who could be held to account for their control of access to children.

Film classification works because you have to buy a cinema ticket or DVD from a real human being who can be trained to refuse access to anyone underage. In an age with limited access to media through movie theatres or shops, classification works because it can be enforced.

There is no such control of access on the web - click or don't click - ultimately it's the user is the one who decides whether to access a website, and there is no intermediary available for preventing someone aged 15 from clicking on a site with a 16 rating.

Indeed, I'd suggest that putting a 16 rating on a website would pretty much guarantee it would become a big hit for the under 16s! Ban something and you make it way, way more interesting.

The big question I have is this: How does a big sign on a website saying 'adults only' protect a child from accessing it if the only thing the child has to do is click a button saying 'enter'?

The UK government, if it runs with this idea, could waste a huge amount of taxpayers money and years of the opportunity cost of not pursuing more effective policies, and still leave children as unprotected as ever.

It strikes me as a naive hope for an easy solution to an incredibly complex problem, and yet again demonstrates the profound levels of ignorance about the internet that so often pops up within government.

The Byron Report

Mr Burnham attempts to build on the excellent work of Dr Tanya Byron's review for the DCSF in which she carefully examined child safety online. In a thoughtful review, Dr Byron called for a wide ranging set of initiatives to help protect children online, but classifying websites wasn't one of them.

She did talk about strengthening the classification of computer games, but with real world intermediaries to control access (the shops and people who sell games), the use of classification is a viable option.

But sadly, classifying websites would be an enormous and expensive undertaking that would ultimately have no impact on the protection of children from harmful material.

Far more useful would be to look at Dr Byron's actual suggestions, which included:

• reducing the availability of harmful material on the most popular areas of the internet. This means working with (and resourcing) popular sites like YouTube to ensure they have the capacity to remove damaging content quickly and effectively. She acknowledged that it was impossible to 'police the long tail'


• helping parents to understand the web and how to protect their children online. There is an accelerating generational digital divide and as parents are the key gatekeepers to childrens' online access, it is with them that we should focus our efforts


• building childrens' resiliance to the online environment and its content

Dads, mums and carers are the key

It's on this second point that the most potential exists. Parents can and do gate-keep their childrens' access to the web, but there is a huge amount of work to do to help them do this.

Here are some basic tips for protecting your kids online:

• Never allow your children to access the web in a private space. If you have a desktop, put it in a communal room like the living room, where anyone can wander past and see what they're up to. If you're using a laptop, try positioning your wifi router so that there's no signal in their bedroom, and therefore no private access to the internet


• Set up separate accounts for all family members on your computer. Make yourself the only administrator and password protect your account. You can configure parental controls in both Windows and Max OS


• Try installing Netnanny or another parental control software on your computer


• Try using Glubble - an internet browser which pre-approves websites for children under 12 - and make this the only browser available on your children's computer accounts

The FBI has some good pointers on indications that suggest your child may be at risk in it's Parents' Guide to Safety Online .

Ultimate, the internets will not be controlled by the governments - it's core architecture means that attempts to control internet content by apply the same thinking as was applied in the old media age can never really work.

In the old media age, content was created and distributed by a small number manageable and regulate-able actors and access was controlled by gate-keepers who could be made accountable to a law based on classification and control.

In the new media age, content can be created and distributed by anyone, anywhere at any time. Billions of items are uploaded every day and it cannot possibly be policed, nor, arguably, should we want it to be.

The real solutions are to invest in the skills, knowledge and understanding of children and especially parents. It's a messier, more organic solution and certainly no low-hanging-fruit for a government minister looking for an easy win, but in the long term, it's the only way.

UPDATE: Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson MP has opened a debate on the issue on his blog. So far, every one of the 160+ comments is against the idea. Let's see if Andy Burnham listens.

One of my new years' resolutions is to really get going with my blog, so I thought I'd kick off with a brief review of my working year.

The years started off very focused on building Dad Info. The project came out of a long held concern at the Fatherhood Institute and among fatherhood and health workers that the absence of good information for new fathers helped the general sense of distance us men often feel from parenting.

So our aim was to get a card into the hands of every expectant dad in the UK with core information they need and directing them to a website where they could find the information they're after.

Over years, we've developed relationships with midwives to work on tackling this problem. They meet more new dads than any other professional - over 90% of new dads turn up at their maternity units.

And 2008 was the year that the Dad Card was launched - it's a great achievement that midwives have embraced it and are handing them out at 300 of the UK's 330 maternity services.

We've listened to their feedback about the card and yesterday, I received my first copy of the new version we've just printed. You can download a PDF of the card here. It has much more information than the original including a unique set of graphics showing how dads can help their partners during pregnancy.

The company is just becoming independent of the Fatherhood Institute and we're thinking about the future. In 2009 I'd like to set up a multi-author blog on the site with some of the best writers on fatherhood in the UK.

Soon after we launched Dad Info I came across another brand new site for dads - Odadeo. Built by web entrepreneur Stef Lewandowski, it's a social web app to help dads answer the question "How am I going to be a better dad?". I was so impressed by the early work, I contacted Stef and suggested we work together. We're now tackling user experience, marketing and community building.

Odadeo is a very clever social web app and it's great to have the talents of someone like Stef focusing on fathers. It uses a system of collaborative pledges - for example "I am going to read more stories". If you're pledging that, you can ask and answer questions, offer tips and links for the pledge and when you make some progress, you 'pip' the pledge. Odadeo builds a DADSDAQ graph. You can check the DADSDAQ for each pledge, for your progress as a dad as a whole, your friends and the whole Odadeo community.

For the past few months, Stef and I have been building the community at Odadeo, thinking through how the site should develop and creating ways for blogging dads to find a community and platform for their content. We've been building connections with dads on the web and he's also released couple of extra apps like Goingtobeadad.com and Tweetlet, which sends private twitter messages through pregnancy with little messages like "Hey - I've just opened my eyes for the first time!".

This was also the year I went freelance. After eight years working for the Fatherhood Institute and Dad Info full time I'm looking to spread my wings a bit.

Since going freelance in September, I've focused on a few projects. The first thing to do was to set up a site for myself, and I settled on Sweetcron - a lifestreaming app that pulls data feeds in from social media sites around the web and displays them on your own server. Sweetcron's an interesting system, I've done quite a bit of work customising it and I feel a blog post about using it brewing!

Across the week I'm working for two days on Dad Info and a day for Odadeo. I've also been setting up a few sites for friends and charities and developing a new partnership with Carl Morris.

In it's very early stages, Native is a new company - a vehicle for the work that Carl and I are doing together. We're both into Social media, web hackery and staying ahead of the curve, so we're offering our time and brainpower to clients looking to grown online.

A big part of this year has been learning about all the latest trends, tools and developments online.

Web 2.0, Social Media or whatever you want to call it has been the key trend on the web for the past few years, and it has the potential to be as revolutionising a force as the initial development of the web in the early nineties. Tools like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are transforming human relationships, culture and markets. Personally, 2008 was the year of Twitter for me - it's certainly where the most exciting action is.

As for the tools, I've been learning CSS and PHP, and having seen what Stef can do with Odadeo, I'm starting now to look at Ruby on Rails. Setting aside time for learning while getting the projects and income in is going to be an important balance in 2009.

So it's been a busy and interesting year, and it looks set to continue in 2009!

I've been doing some work on this site recently and have done a lot on my about page in particular.

Sweetcron is an interesting platform, as it allows you to download the (open source) code and host your own site on your own domain and server, a bit like Wordpress.org.

The difference is that as well as having a blog engine, Sweetcron pulls feeds in from, well... anywhere - I use it to pull in my content from social media sites I use.

I'll probably write a bit more about Sweetcron, as I think it can be a really useful platform for creating websites for individuals, events and brands.

I've also done a lot of work on my about page. This is an interesting exercise in working out some issues about direction, identity, branding and digital presence.

There's a danger with the rapidly developing web that pre early web stuff can get lost, so I've compiled a list of my 'greatest hits' - things I've achieved in my life that I proud of.

Wherever possible, I've I've put in a relevant link - have an explore - there's some interesting stuff in there.

There are hundreds of dads tweeting and blogging on the intertubes, and as I tend to keep my ear to the ground on dad issues in my work for Dad Info and Odadeo, I thought I might as well put up a list of my top 25 twitter dads.

Obviously, I don't know everyone, and I'm sure I've missed some great twitter dads - so why not add your twitter URL via a comment?

So here they are: these are the guys I think every new dad should be following on twitter. Some are creating great dad content, others are just great guys who happen to be dads... and there are a few dad services thrown in there as well.

(BTW - you can follow me on twitter @tombeardshaw)

In no particular order...

• Geekdad Ken (Geekdad)
• Stef Lewandowski (Odadeo)
• Chris Brogan (DadCentric)
• Dad Info
• Louis Gray
• Odadeo
• Jeff Tincher (Daddys toolbox)
• Michael Sheehan (Hightechdad)
• The Father Life
• Mitch McDad
• Daddy Clay (Dadlabs)
• Daddy Brad (Dadlabs)
• Tony Chen (Savvydaddy)
• The Dadjam
• Busydad
• Joeprah
• Dadcentric
• Building Camelot
• BackpackingDad
• GeekyCyberDad
• Danny Evans (Dad gone mad)
• MrBabyMan
• Buckdaddy
• Danny + Heidi (Divorced dad weekly)
• Jeremy Biser (Discovering Dad)

Here are some more recommended via comments:

• GadgetVirtuoso
• Orlund
• adadslife
• mrbigdubya
• joedawson
• jamesatbabyspot
• ladaddy
• LookyDaddy
• SoulShiner
• simplyChuck

You can find more twittering dads at Odadeo.

OK - now you can tell me who I've missed! And if you're a twittering dad, feel free to add your details in the comments.

I had lots of people emailing to ask for the theme to my Sweetcron site, so I decided to make it freely available.

Boxdaddy is built on YongFook's boxy theme, and adds:

- Tabbed navigation for single source activity pages

- Brings back the 'link/blog/video/photo' label 

- A blog only RSS link

- Source specific item announcements

- Standard sidebar but with tag cloud

If you want to install it, you'll need the latest version of Sweetcron, and you will need to go through the installation instructions in the readme.txt or it won't work.

Download the theme here

If you need support implementing the theme, I've created a thread on the Sweetcron google group - let's keep the technical discussion there.

I've agreed to become community manager at Odadeo - a great new web app / social network for Dads.

I sat down yesterday with Stef Lewandowski, the founder and lead programmer to discuss the future of the site.

I'll be available to anyone if they need any help with using the site and I'll be helping the community to grow and Stef to get the site working right for its users.

Odadeo is currently in private beta and you need an invite to join - contact me. We need dads to help us test the system to make sure it's really nailed before it goes public.

It's a very clever site with a big aim - to enable us to answer the question - "how am I going to be a better dad?". I've been using the site for a while now and I really think it works!

What we do at Odadeo is to make Pledges. You can make your own, or you can join in with Pledges others have made. The most popular pledges on the site currently are:

• Learn some songs
• Read more stories
• Learn some cool tricks to impress the kids

When you do something towards one of your pledges, you can 'pip' it - and your progress on each is shown on a 'DADSDAQ" graph so you can track your progress. Here's mine:

There's lots of great things about Odadeo but one I like the best is that you can create a profile for your child and add photos - with complete privacy control over who gets to see your child - and the defaults are 'private'. We're very serious about building a site that dads can feel confident about.

There are loads of exciting development coming soon as the site moves closer towards an open public beta, but we want to work with Beta testers to get the site right before it does.

If you're an Odadeo beta tester with something to say about the site, why not meet us at Diigo, where we can share notes and thoughts on the pages?

I'm really looking forward to work with Stef and the Odadeo dads - he's a top notch programmer with a great idea and dads deserve something this good!