Wotcha!
February 12, 2008This blog is just an archive.
DavePress is far more up-to-date.
Success!
August 17, 2007Well, I was successful in my interview. So, from sometime in October, I will be a Change Manager at the Information Authority. My role is going to be a really exciting one:
Establishing, supporting and maintaining communities of providers and data users to support the development and management of information and data standards for the FE sector…
Provide online and face-to-face facilitation to enable and then manage the process of defining, assessing and agreeing changes to the information standards
It’s my first paid role in community facilitation, and probably the closest I have ever come to having a job about which I am truly passionate. Exciting times.
Of course, I’ll be leaving the local government sector, which raises a question about the future of LGNewMedia, which has always had an obvious lg focus – even down to the name and URL.
I’m going to be starting a new blog, with a focus on the further education sector. The content will still be quite similar to that here: the social media and web 2.0 news will still be popping up, for example, and much of the stuff about community building can be applied to any sector.
The new blog will be called FEconnect, which is already mostly built, though there are a few jobs still to do. The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/feconnect so please subscribe to receive updates as soon as the blog starts for real.
So where does that leave LGNewMedia? Well, I will certainly leave it up here until the domain expires, at which point I will probably archive all the posts at my personal and historical blog. That is unless there is someone out there in local government who fancies taking it over. I would be happy to continue to pay for the hosting and the domain in the future if there is someone who’ll take the time to regularly update the blog. You would be getting a well established blog with a number of regular readers by RSS and visitors to the site.
I’ll keep maintaining LGSearch myself, and will continue to coordinate the localgovglossary so it would only really be the blog that you would be responsible for.
If you are interested, please drop me a line at dave@change2.org. Thanks!
Change2
July 10, 2007
For a while I have been wanting to put all the bits of work I do on social media into a little basket, just to organise it and let people know that the same person is behind them all.
In addition to that, I have been playing about with Google Apps and wanting to find an excuse to start using it.
So, I merged these two and set up Change2 on Google Apps. My experience of Google Apps has been good so far, despite some trouble with putting a basic site together with Page Creator. What I have looks ok, and I have set up a blog on WordPress.com to cover the other bits.
Another role of Change2 is to publicise the fact that I am willing and able to help anyone out with social media type web stuff, and am happy to give my time up to charities, community organisations or any other non-profit organisations.
Am also moving all my email across to dave@change2.org. Given the number of accounts I have spread over the web, it’s going to take a while to get sorted. Thankfully, I can pop all the mail from my Gmail account into the Change2 one, which makes life easier.
BookZilla
June 6, 2007
BookZilla is another customised search site, like LGSearch, that I knocked together this afternoon.
I think it is pretty obvious what it does. I’m running it through Palimpsest, the books discussion site I facilitate, with any ad revenue going towards the maintenance of the forum.
From Small Acorns…
June 5, 2007Whilst not quite making me a dotcom millionaire, it was still very gratifying and exciting to get a cheque from Google through the post - thanks to the adverts on LGSearch.
The amount was pretty small, but it pays for all the LGNewMedia hosting, making it a self sufficient enterprise. Very nice.
What’s the point?
May 13, 2007…of this blog? To be honest, it’s turned into a bit of a mess. It’s useful to have if only because it makes a handy archive of all the various bits and pieces I have written since I started blogging in 2004.
But just recently it feels like the things I am writing about here don’t have much context to them. After all, I cover the social media and web 2.0 stuff over on LGNewMedia these days, freeware and other software stuff I post about on Free as in Beer or Living Without Microsoft. Book stuff really belongs on Palimpsest, any writing I do will soon be headed in the direction of The Interruption and I’ll be selling my soul and my wares at MediaZilla.
So why continue with this blog?
Well, apart from the historical interest, it might be nice to have a ‘hub’, around which all my online activities are centred. So, I have changed the layout here to start off with a static page, rather than the blog entries, which lists all my sites and the stuff I’m working on, along with some contact details. The blog is then just a click away.
I doubt too many more posts will be added here, maybe the occasional personal note that really doesn’t belong elsewhere. But it will still serve a good purpose as my homepage, which I can easily direct people to.
Hols
May 4, 2007Off on my hols for a week, to somewhere in the North Yorkshire Moors. Am looking forward to it no end.
Still, readers of Free as in Beer and LGNewMedia hopefully won’t notice, as I’ve bunged a week’s worth of posts to publish during my absence.
Headset problems
April 23, 2007I’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.
The Joys of a Strong Pound
April 23, 2007One 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.
