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.

Need a Web 2.0 Name?

The Web 2.0 Company Name Generator is a cool and amusing little site. As the site says:

Need a name for your Web 2.0 company? Try this handy name generator.

Here’s some that I got:

Zoomworks
Buzzfish
Flashdog
Thoughttune
Quambee
Flashcat
Npath
Skamba
Chatterpulse
Quimia

That last one is just filthy.
Anyhow, once you have your name, don’t forget to head over to ImageTool.NET to sort out your Web 2.0 logo…

[tags]web 2.0, names, logo[/tags]

Link posts

Since the death of the previous blog, I cancelled the regular posting of my daily del.icio.us links.

When I set it up I thought it would be an interesting reminder for me of the stuff I thought was worth reading, and some bits might be useful for those that read this site. I was conscious, though, that a lot of the time those posts came up one after the other as original content is a little hard to come by sometimes.

So, what do we think? Should I bring them back? Or would a discreet link to my del.icio.us page on the sidebar be sufficient?

[tags]del.icio.us[/tags]

Blog Woes and a New Start

Problems with the old blog mean that I have had to abandon it for now. At some point I’ll drag the old posts back through to this one. As it is, though, this represents a new start.

I’ve installed the latest version of WordPress, 2.1 – released this evening – though I was tempted by giving Drupal a go. Everything looks pretty good in the new WP, one of the best features is the new code editor, much better than the old one. Means you can correct the odd mistake that the wysiwyg editor produces.

It’ll take me a little while to get everything up and running again – sorting out a theme and getting plug-ins installed. Hopefully all my old favourites will be compatible with 2.1.

Still, I must’ve been doing something right before. Somehow my mug has ended up on 901am’s shortlist of bloggers. Right next to Guy Kawasaki! Not sure I belong there at all…

That was easy!

In the end, I just used the same theme as hyprtext, but changed a few things around. I like the look, but all the widgets I’m using might make the place look a little cluttered.

Any feedback gratefully received…

Ch ch ch Changes

Things will be going a bit wobbly ’round these parts over the next day or two. Will be upgrading to 2.06 of WordPress, and sorting myself out with a new theme.

Wish me luck!

Get in!!

Finally have Ubuntu talking to the internet!

Woo-hoo!

[tags]ubuntu, linux[/tags]

hyprtext

I’ve been beavering away on a new collaborative blogging project, which is called hyprtext. It’s going to be covering web and tech news, mainly. The feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/hyprtext.

I’ve already signed someone up to cover copyleft and drm issues and am looking for a couple more contributors. One I need specifically is someone who can cover the open source angle a lot better than I can. We’re looking at a few posts per week, I reckon, not a huge commitment. If anyone is interested, drop me a line.

There are still a few issues to iron out with the site layout. I’m trying to get an RSS feed to publish in a sidebar using the WordPress RSS widget (just the standard one that comes supplied with the sidebar widget plug-in); and I can’t seem to get my MyBlogLog thingy looking anything other than lame. I’ll get there though, I guess.

hyprtext

So, the first post to hyprtext. Guess I better explain…

This is going to be a blog about the web. Talking about the new web services, Web 2.0 and all that stuff. Yeah, I know, another one. But I’m hoping this is going to be a little different.

One of the differences with this blog is that I don’t want to write it all. I really want other people to contribute. So, anyone email us to register then with the blog and allow them to submit an article. Please do so.

In addition to this, while we’ll be bringing you news of all the latest happenings in the world of the web, we’ll also be offering the occasional comment piece, full of reflection and wild predictions.

Also, we’re happy to host stuff for people. So, if you would like to start a blog, then get in touch. I’m sure I could sort something out here. I guess that’s true of other types of site like wikis, too.

Thanks to WordPress for being great as usual, and Mike Lococo for the original theme which I’ve hacked up a bit.