Success!

Well, 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!

What’s the point?

…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

Off 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.

Tags: free+as+in+beer, lgnewmedia

Blogpolitic

Oliver Kamm in The Guardian:

In its paucity of coverage and predictability of conclusions, the blogosphere provides a parody of democratic deliberation. But it gets worse. Politics, wrote the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, is a conversation, not an argument. The conversation bloggers have with their readers is more like an echo chamber, in which conclusions are pre-specified and targets selected. The outcome is horrifying. The intention of drawing readers into the conversation by means of a facility for adding comments results in an immense volume of abusive material directed – and recorded for posterity – at public figures.

The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted – overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

A remarkable view for a political blogger to hold, unless Mr Kamm considers himself a Proper Journalist these days.

It’s early days yet. Political blogging has only really taken off in the last couple of years in the UK. Sure, much of it is unbearably negative and full of inaccuracies, but the same could be said of pamphleteering.

Just because some political blogs aren’t particularly edifying, it doesn’t make the blog format a Bad Thing. In time, some balance will be restored, and as always, the quality will float to the top.

In the meantime, we will just have to trust ourselves to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction.

Tags: oliver+kamm, political+blogging

My favourite feeds

According to FeedDemon:

Tags: feeddemon

I hate Blogger

I wanted to set up a free blogging account for a little project I’ve been wanting to start for a while and I thought I would give the all new Blogger a go.

I wish I hadn’t.

I must have just been spolit with WordPress for the last couple of years, because even the latest iteration of Blogger lags far behind. The editor is ridiculously basic (not allowing me to add title text to links, for example) and adding pictures is nigh on impossible.

So I gave up and created a new account at WordPress.com, called Free as in Beer.

Tags: blogger, wordpress, free+as+in+beer

Twitter: Cat Blogging, Evolved

Via Mashable:

From the Archives

Since cobbling together all the various posts from my previous blogs into this one, I came across a few posts that surprised me by being quite interesting!

• My Top Ten Websites and services
• Living without the Desktop
• Things I Use
• My 10 thoughts on successful blogging
• Clear your desk(top)

BlogJet 2.0

BlogJet was always my favourite blog editor when I used Windows regularly. I was pretty annoyed when version 2 was released not long ago, as by then I had made the transition to Ubuntu. I’ve so far failed to find anything even remotely as good in Linux, and have been blogging using the inbuilt WordPress editor and the Performancing for Firefox plugin since.

I still have Windows available on a dual boot, and on popping in today I downloaded the trial of BlogJet 2, and it’s great. It retains the simplicity of the original, but packs in loads of new features. I like it a lot.

I’ve also always liked FeedDemon as an RSS aggregator. Google Reader is the best online newsreader, but I still prefer FeedDemon overall.

So, for the tools I use most on my PC, I prefer the Windows variants by quite some distance. The advantages of Ubuntu are that is has never crashed on me, and is lightening fast.

So what do I do? I could reinstall Windows and see if it makes any difference speed-wise… but would going back to XP be a retrograde step?

Cost cutting, and welcome home!

Welcome to my wordpress.com blog!

I’ve basically decided to cut right down on my web expenditure. Having the vebrig.gs domain was fun, but the renewal was going to cost £35, and the bill for my hosting is due next month too. So, I’ve cut right down by:

• Moving all the da.vebrig.gs content to this blog and letting that domain die
• Moving all the content I produced at hyprtext into this blog too, and that domain will also soon disappear

I’m also planning on moving some other things around to save time and money. For example, is there any need for the separate LGNewMedia and LGSearch domains?

This sort of rationing is sad, as it means a lot of links and things won’t work any more. But building it all up again will be fun, and after all, the best things in life are supposed to be free…