Month: November 2008

Sign up, sign up: as if you have a choice

A little while ago I threatened to start an email newsletter service. Well, I am finally getting to grips with it.

My newsletter will be a monthly affair, providing useful hints, tips and links about digital participation, with the usual social media / web 2.0 slant to things. It won’t be the same stuff as I publish here, so even subscribers to the blog should find some value.

I’m really hoping though that I might be able to reach a few people who don’t really see themselves as RSS junkies or blog readers, but for whom an email every four weeks or so is just enough.

So do visit my newsletter page to fill in the form and sign up, and pass it on to anyone who you think might be interested!

Bookmarks for November 12th through November 25th

Stuff I have bookmarked for November 12th through November 25th:

BarcampUKGovWeb is back, back, baaaaack!

Tom Watson points us all to a new wiki for getting the next barcamp for UK (and elsewhere) government webbies going.

Sign up and start thinking about you could present about! I have already put down that I’m interested in running a social media surgery which worked so well at the UK Youth event in September, and which is being pioneered amongst the blogging community in Birmingham.

For a flavour of what went on last year, check out the aggregated stuff on the pageflake. For discussion of the event, last year’s Google Group is being used again.

I am really happy to promote and support this event as much as I possibly can – last year’s event had a tremendous effect on me, in the friendships I made and the developments I my career. It’s an easy and maybe glib-sounding thing to say, but I wouldn’t be where I am today without the Barcamp, and I encourage everyone to make as much of it as they can this time around!

Jeremy has now blogged it too.

It could be Rotterdam, or anywhere

Actually, no it couldn’t, because Rotterdam is a beautiful city, and I am having tremendous fun here with Nick Booth.


We are at an R4R event for residents groups throughout Europe, with two aims: to demonstrate the power of the social web, and to show just how easy it is to do.

We are armed with some basic kit: Flip Ultras and point and click cameras, as well as our mobile phones (don’t worry, in order to stave off bankruptcy for a little longer I’ve switched roaming off on my iPhone…). The point being that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on tech to be able to publish content online.

We’re running a blog here, in order to demonstrate how easy it is, which has been populated with some of the other work Nick has done with R4R.

Nick and I actually got up at 5.30 am this morning, and we have since used four forms of transport: taxi, plane, train and finally water-taxi. Here’s a pretty rough video of us getting on the water-taxi, with Maurice Specht, who generously guided us around.

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