Going local update

Thought I might post an update on my efforts at establishing a social media group in Kettering, Northants. Having been subscribed to various feeds searching for Kettering based content, which mainly produced details of various car boot sales in the…

Angel

Taken as I sped by on my way to Newcastle. I wasn’t driving, honest, officer. I remember being mesmerised by this on my first (and up ’til now, only) trip to the North East. It’s lost none of its magic…

Flat Earth News

I am currently reading Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, which focuses on journalism and news and how the profession is failing in its duty to protect and disseminate the truth. This isn’t, Davies claims, because of a some moral…

Skills 2.0

There are some interesting points in this PDF about the skills required in the age of web 2.0 from Harold Jarche, including: Attitude: Accepting that we will never know everything, but that others may be able to help, is the…

BBC blogging

Interesting re-post of an article that appeared in the BBC’s in-house magazine Ariel by Rory Cellan-Jones on the issues around the launch of the various blogs written by BBC journalists: It strikes me the initial concerns were twofold – that…

Civicsurf in action

Shane McCracken has blogged at Cllr 2.0 about the experience of Norfolk County Councillor Tony Tomkinson who started blogging at the beginning of this year: The post is a superb example of how using a blog a civic leader can…

The need for organisation

Interesting post from MJ Ray on the need for organisation – which perhaps busts the myth that open source software development is a perfect model to follow for other types of groups: Are free software users particularly bad at the…

Going local

Jon Bounds has put together a nice little site for guiding people around Birmingham. It’s wiki based, so anyone can get involved, and there is some nice Google Maps action going on there too. There’s quite a big group of…

Digital inclusion

From a piece by Helen Milner of UfI in egov monitor: The flipside of our increasing reliance on ICT – in public, economic and social life – is that the digitally excluded, by default, also become excluded from public services,…

Upgrading…

…this blog to WordPress 2.5. Possible weirdness ahead! Update: upgrade went fine, with the exception that my theme got overwritten, and my backup wasn’t complete. Hence why you might be looking at the boring old default theme. Am on the…

A pandemonium of fragments

Gordon Burn, in Born Yesterday, writing about the erstwhile Eastenders actress Susan Tully: A colleague had logged her onto YouTube for the first time that very afternoon, and the fact that just tapping the words ‘Michelle Fowler’ into the thing…

Paul Canning’s 10 point plan

Paul Canning – challenged by Tom Watson to do so – has come up with ten things that need to be looked at as part of the government’s web strategy. His number one issue is ‘findability’: Search is the prime…

It’s Eeeasy

John Naughton’s Observer column is required reading. Today he casts his eye on the Asus Eee PC: Besides, the limitations of Mark I ought not to blind us to its significance – which is the cruel way it highlights the…

Empowerment packs from the gov’t

The Department for Communities and Local Government have released something called a ‘Community Power Pack‘: The Community Power Pack has been created to help local groups to organise and facilitate discussions on the topic of empowerment. The pack contains suggestions…

The News as a Novel

Am reading Gordon Burns’ Born Yesterday at the moment. Burn is one of my favourite writers, whether he’s producing non-fiction such as his remarkable books about serial killers (Peter Sutcliffe in Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son; Fred and Rose West in…

Dimdim

Dimdim looks very interesting. It’s a way of hosting your own online conferences or (ugh) webinars. You can do this yourself by downloading the open source package, or by using the hosted option which is, I think, free. No need…