I facilitate the Community of Practice for Social Media and Online Collaboration over at the Improvement and Development Agency. We are a pretty new group, though with over 40 members, we aren’t doing too badly.

The aim of the group is to introduce people to social media tools and techniques and how they could be used within local government; and providing news and views on the latest developments in Web 2.0 type stuff.

We are also involved in a couple of projects, one of which is producing a community edited guide to social media, using the CoP’s wiki facility.

The other project has just been launched, and is really quite exciting, is the Local Government Glossary. This is a wiki based dictionary of local government terms and jargon, which we hope will become a Wikipedia for local government. We can but dream.

Anyway, the Glossary is hosted on the excellent Wikispaces, so it’s open to all – all you have to do is register and then you are free to start adding your knowledge and sharing it with the world!

This is a presentation I put together for a gathering of facilitators on IDeA’s Communities of Practice platform on the hot topicof social meda tools. I hosted it at the excellent SlideShare.

This video is a great intro to RSS.

I’ve got a Logitech 250 headset, which I mainly use for Skype calls. All of a sudden though, it’s been producing the most awful crackling sound, making it effectively unusable.

Anyone know what the problem might be?

Update: Whatever it was, it’s sorted itself now. How odd.

Tags: Logitech+Headset+USB+250

One of the cool things about a single pound being worth more than $2 is that geeks like me can buy domain names on the cheap.

For example, the other week I got a .net domain for less than a fiver. Also, at GoDaddy at the moment, you can buy a .info domain for $0.99, which comes out after taxes and stuff at just over 60p! OK, so the .info domain is the spammers’ favourite, but it’s still worth doing at that price.

from Gaping Void.

Note the hilariously positioned bird poo.

Am pretty impressed with Google Groups, having had the need to play with it for a couple of days.

More here.

Following the makeover that Living Without Microsoft has recently been given – and the upturn in activity that the site has seen as a result – I’ve been beavering away on WikiSpaces putting together a wiki for resources on how people can get away from using Microsoft’s products.

You can find it at http://lwm.wikispaces.com. If you’ve got anything to add, then go for it!

Since I started Free as in Beer, I’ve come across a few of apps which have become essential:

• Evernote
• Zulupad
• Launchy

If anyone who reads this blog has some favourite freebies, let me know!