March 23rd, 2009
I spent an enjoyable hour with Kate Foley late last week, Kate is Neighbourhood Manager in Lozells Birmingham and runs the Life in Lozells blog. The site has been running since March 2007, and is an invaluable resource for local info — but Kate is interested in building more of a community around it, generating and hosting conversation as well as collecting information.
I suggested that an injection of opinion in to the blog might help that, which is something that it’s difficult for Kate to do in her official capacity — two possible solutions came to mind:
- invite some other people to contribute, either on subjects that they are “expert” on (they may only be tangentially related to the area), or
- make use of links, so that Kate is flagging up and pointing to opinion rather than directly offering it herself.
The first relies on use of Kate’s real-world network, pulling voices in to contribute, the second can be done in a more online way but will rely on Kate becoming confident in using search and RSS and building her online connectivity.
Those of you with local blogs, how do you work to build up the conversation?
October 7th, 2008
Great coverage of whether "passion" for the subject is important in blogging. My take – yes of course it is. [link]
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September 25th, 2008
Gavin Wray designed this elegant website for management consultancy Ladder Consulting, which I then turned into a Wordpress theme. The site contains a blog, as well as a number of hierarchical pages which are all controlled by Wordpress’ easy-to use CMS.
The site looks great in all browsers and is very accessible to all.
September 5th, 2008
Ex collegue of mine Matt Cashmore is about to blog motorbiking to Russia for charity, some of which he'll be doing as audio by phone – here's his handy guide to doing just that (the phone thing, not the motorbiking): "Sound simple doesn’t it. Just find a way of leaving a message on something like skype, then get it to encode your audio, upload it to the server and generate the XML." [link]
April 24th, 2008
Tired of newspapers doing intros to blogging: “it’s sort of like an online diary…”?
Here’s a nice turnaround – Meet the newspaperers -
For those of you who don’t already know, newspapers make up a significant portion of topical written content in the UK and are fast becoming a vital part of the newsgathering process.
A few facts about newspapers
1. Newspapers are actually made from trees.
…
4. Newspapers are run like big companies and can employ hundreds of people.
via
September 29th, 2007
I’ve just spent an hour or two (Saturday morning would be the quietest time for traffic to my blogs) updating this blog, BiNS and The Kitten Channel to the new Wordpress release 2.3. No major problems, but it is still squeaky bum time.
The Google sitemap generator plugin requires an upgrade to verion 3.0, and and plugins or themes that use the old catergories database tables directly (and not the recommended API) will fail. Unfortunately that, at least for the moment, includes the map function of the GeoMashup plugin I’ve been using on BiNS. I think I could fix it, but as it is well supported by the author I’ll wait for the official fix.
Haven’t noticed anything else wrong tho’, and the plugin update checker in the new version will be great.
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Blog for The Birmingham Post
Guido Fawkes and his blog comment policy
Although his political blog is often a place for sniping and argumentative comments (following perhaps in the style of the posts), this is a very clear piece of work. It sets out in a friendly (as friendly as the blog gets), conversational, tone just what is and isn't allowed in the comments on order-order.com.
While every point isn't transferable to all blogs, I for example love a long an detailed response to any post on sites I run, it's useful to read it and to think about how comments add value to a site — or even possibly detract. If it's a personal blog, it's very much "your gaff, your rules" and if you set them out no-one can argue. [link]