I’ve just set the new site for the Birmingham Conservation Trust live. I’ve advised on how it could work, and done the final coding and design.

The Trust is a charity that tasks itself “‘to preserve and enhance Birmingham’s threatened architectural heritage. … to promote an enjoyment and understanding of the city’s historic buildings’”. Most famously they restored Birmingham’s Back to Backs (now a National Trust attraction).

The site itself has been in the planning for a long time, but was held up when the Trust decided to go through a change of image. I’m pleased that the new look works much better on the web than the previous style.

The move to a WordPress based CMS and blog should help with keeping the content fresh — often a problem for charity sites (where everyone always had many calls on their time). That should in turn help the engagement of users with the site, and hopefully contribute to the efforts (physical and fund-raising) of the Trust.

If you’re interested in the super, open source, thingy WordPress — I hate to call it a blogging platform as you can do so much else too — you could do a lot worse than come to WordCamp UK next weekend. There are a host of talks, but it’ll be a great opportunity just to hang out with WP affictionardos and bloggers.

I’m planning on spending a lot of the weekend “broke out” around and about the venue, and I’ve organised a meet-up on the Friday and also a proper do (with a geeky quiz, prizes to be won) on the Saturday (I may even do some stand-up ).

You can book tickets here

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I’ve been quietly impressed with Get Satisfaction, which is sort of best described as a “social customer service” site. Twitter and some other big-name players on the internet use it for their official support channels - the idea of the site being that employees of the companies join in with discussion of “problems” that people are having. Some employees just join to help, others are granted “official” status and can speak on behalf of the organisation.

Of course lots of problems that we have with products or services aren’t really problems (or are well know and documented) - in these instances other users are happy to help (very much like unofficial forums for software). ‘Users’ are also welcome to point out possible solutions to anything - and of course they do.

So, I thought, could this work for a local council? Imagine time saved by council officials if knowledgeable citizens helped answer questions, imagine the resources available (once someone had explained how to apply for a licence, the information would be there for everyone), imagine a monolithic body “joining the conversation”.

Rather than deciding to attempt to persuade my local council (Birmingham City Council - one of the largest in the UK) that this would be a good idea, I discovered that - as the site is “a space for an open conversation between you and other people with interests and passions in this organization.” - anyone can set a company page up. So I have.

I don’t have anything to ask at the moment, but I’m hoping that it might get used.

“Sometimes representatives from the company or organization may take part in the conversation too.” says the blurb — wouldn’t that be great?

Birmingham City Council progressively decided that they would livestream their local election results, which was more of an invitation than us politically-interested twitters needed to provide a ‘backchannel’. Having decided to base round the hashtag #brumcc (a few test tweets fired off as people voted in the day), it all kicked off around 10.25 with a very geeky moan about the format for the streaming (Windows Movie Player) and the standard of the the sound (there was a problem with the gain on the wireless mic I think).

The actual conversation bounced between pub-style debate, willful surrealism, and the kind of listening and reacting to the actual words that microblogging really helps — collating the “did he really just say that?” factor between other viewers rather than waiting for the host to pick the politician up.

Four hours of it made us all flag, but it really was a worthwhile experience and in two years (when the local elections come around again) I really hope the council harness the conversation in some way too. It doesn’t have to be twitter (which, considering the UK local elections borked it, may not be around) but it was really powerful - and if publicised widely could be really useful.

• Online Shops for Niche Products / ShopWindoz - Etsy for europe? One stop shop for leather leiderhosen min-dresses and amigarumia at the mo'
• South By South West Midlands - A group from the West Midlands go to South By South West Interactive. Lucky, lucky, sods, we're not jealous or anything… But seriously, they're offering to spread the weird by letting youse lot tell them what to go and see (within reason I guess).