Dave

Manchester to be rebuilt…

…in Second Life. The Manchester Evening News reports:

MANCHESTER is set to open a virtual version of itself in the internet simulation game Second Life…

The aim is to promote the Manchester `brand’ and raise awareness of the city in the real world.

The move to create a cyber-Manchester is a collaboration between the Urbis museum, Manchester’s Digital Development Agency (DDA) and consultants Clicks and Links.

Subscribers to the Second Life community will be able to meet and chat with real-life Mancunians online and visit exhibitions and events.

Dave Carter, head of DDA, said: “Second Life has succeeded in creating a virtual community of more than two million people.

“By creating a Manchester presence, we will be opening doors to this vast community – and having conversations with a huge range of people that will help shape and advance the city’s digital development.”

Apparently four islands have been bought in Second Life. That’s quite a significant investment, if the guidance is anything to go by:

Islands are priced at US$1,675 for 65,536 square meters (about 16 acres). Monthly land fees for maintenance are US$295.

Interesting…

I’m still a Second Life sceptic, I have to say. Once you are past the initial ‘wow’ factor, that any of this stuff is possible at all, I’m not sure what you’re left with.

[tags]manchester, second life[/tags]

LGNM Podcast #1 – WordPress

Here’s the first LGNewMedia podcast. It’s the first in a short series about some of the great social media and Web2.0 tools that are available. This first one is about WordPress. I hope you enjoy it – please leave a comment with any feedback or queries.

[audio:http://web.omnidrive.com/APIServer/public/4tXioJzOFMDKlmdLeEuQBC6c/LGNMP1.mp3]

Download the podcast here.

Show notes, including transcript of the podcast and all relevant links, have been posted to the wiki.

Education LGSearch?

You might wonder why I haven’t put education sites into LGSearch. Well, the reason is that someone else already has done, and I’m not in the business of thunder stealing.

The new links page at LGSearch reveals all. At the moment, the links are limited to three, but they are good ones. The first two are both from Simon Dickson‘s Findless project: Health and Safety and Education.

The third is DirectionlessGov, which lets you compare the results you get from Direct.gov.uk and Google. No prizes for guessing which produces the better links.

[tags]findless, simon dickson, directionlessgov, lgsearch[/tags]

LGSearch+ Update

The ‘slicing’ of the RSS feeds is now working, so now only 10 items per feed are displayed. I had only tested the layout in FireFox at the weekend, and having now tested it in IE 5.5 the feeds carry on to the right of the screen, needing a scroll. I don’t know if this is the same for more up to date versions of IE – if anyone can check, this would be great!

LGSearch+

The latest development to LGSearch is LGSearch+ – which is simply a different search page, but with the latest news from the IDeA, The Guardian‘s ‘Society’ section, the latest links from Info4Local and the Local Government Association‘s news.

These are automatically updated through RSS. I used the open source RSS parser MagpieRSS to produce the content.

One issue still outstanding is the simply vast feed from IDeA. I need to slice this off so we only get the latest 10 items – but this is proving a little tricky at the moment!

I’m also unsure at the moment whether four columns of information is just too much and whether the page looks overly cluttered. Maybe I could get rid of the IDeA stuff anf kill two birds (magpies?) with one stone…

[tags]magpierss, rss, lgsearch[/tags]

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