Month: February 2007

Wiki move

I’ve moved the LGNM Wiki to Wikispaces, having had a look round the Social Media wiki that David Wilcox runs. All the existing information has been copied across.

The system I had been using, MediaWiki, is excellent,a nd I haven’t had any problems with it. The only issue is one of resources: I’m trying to cut down on my web expenditure and the wiki used a whole database and a big wodge of filespace. By hosting the wiki elsewhere I don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Also, wikispaces is a really good system, with a nice wysiwyg editor, so I think it’ll be better too for anyone who fancies helping out too. I know a few people registered on the old wiki, so apologies for any inconvenience.

David Wilcox

I’m a regular reader of David Wilcox‘s blog, and if you aren’t at the moment, you should be. His posts are full of great stuff.

He’s also the editor of a wiki which is chock-full of useful social media information. A recommended bookmark for future reference for sure.

The wiki system David is using looks good: wikispaces. I hadn’t come across it before but it looks like a good competitor to the likes of Wetpaint, pbWiki, Stikipad and others…

Announcing LGSearch.Gov.uk

I’ve been playing around a little more with Google Coop, and discovered that you can use wildcards when defining the sites you want to search.

The way the standard LGSearch works is that I provide Google with a list of the sites I want it to search. Every single one of them. It’s not fun. But it does mean I can tag them with the category of site it falls into, making the filtering possible.

But with LGSearch.Gov.uk I just submitted one ‘site’ – *.gov.uk. In other words, every site that ends with .gov.uk! This means that as new sites are added, or taken away, the search engine will update automatically.

I don’t think this will be as useful as the standard LGSearch, but it might be a useful second option if you can’t find what you want first time round.

Defining Social Media

This is nice, via Neville Hobson:

‘Social media’ is the term commonly given to websites and online tools which allow users to interact with each other in some way – by sharing information, opinions, knowledge and interests. As the name implies, social media involves the building of communities or networks, encouraging participation and engagement.

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