VolCom Groups in UK and Web20 - Research notes for presentation

I need to get my act together for next week's Circuit Rider Conference in UK and a session I'm doing with David Wilcox called "Demystifying Web 2.0 Tools for VolCom Groups: Blogs, RSS, Tagging, Wikis and Beyond." 

I need to start organizing the various pile of UK examples that tagged and grab from various emails and listserv posts.  I have one blog post here.  And, then revisit and revise the outline we brainstormed via skype and wiki, and finally build a powerpoint. All by next week!

Paul Webster from the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action a partner with the ICT Hub pinged me about his blog.  He finds blogging valuable for the same reasons I do, although I love the way he phrased it:

I'm really hooked on the idea of blogs all being linked together into one big mega-conversation.  Although I do have a couple of uneasy feelings about blog spontaneity...  e.g. is it correct to have an email conversation like this and then go blog about it ? (I probably will anyway!).

Paul, I think it is okay to blog private email conversations as long as you aren't airing dirty laundry or sharing too private information.   I guess we probably should have asked each other first, but I'm finding phrases in my email like, "don't blog this, but ..."

Paul likes how blogs can also be a soapbox:

Blogging should be "about the moment" and not pre-arranged, but then I guess if you've spoken with someone and you want to share it with the wider world then why not.  My post yesterday was immediate as I heard about this... I think reading your blog that you post similarly when the cause gets you!

Paul's idea of blogs by people who work in ICT for volcoms (US translation nonprofit technology) as a way to have an ongoing (but distributed) conversation resonated with me:

I have a blog of my work, with links to the two regionally based ICT blogs I have discovered so far.   Ultimately I'd like to see more blogs around the UK that chart Technology Crusaders use and evangelism about ICT... it will come I'm sure!

It links back to what Judi Sohn was saying about why she blogs. She uses her personal blog, A View From Home, to help her keep informed of technology.  "I use my blog to help work things out for myself. If I have a “eureka” moment about something, I’ll blog it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to remember when something happened or what the circumstances were that led me to a given point, and I’ll search my own blog to get that reference."

So the idea of having aggregated Eureka moments or simply being able to read a colleague's Eureka moment anytime you want.

Some more examples and resources from the LASA list:

Sean Kenny points to an example of publishing content with RSS feeds.

"We've been experimenting with using various feeds on our local CVS site to make it more dynamic.   The front page combines several active feeds from our editors in a side bar and the news page takes a feed fom the local council  and the ict page takes a feed from the local Digital Challenge blog.   Every section of the website can be subscribed to individually. The site is based on Drupal which I think is very Web2.0.

I know of a very active local organisation that uses 2 great opensource web2.0 apps phpwiki & wordpress.

I'm a great fan of simpy bookmarking, like delicious but as an open source app you can run the code internally in an organisation for group bookmarking.(Not that I've done that yet)

Steve Dowding points to  <http://www.lifeisland.org/> suggests following the
link to Wikimapia and locate the 'place' for Manor Garden Allotments then click
for Info (Win) / double-click (Mac) for the Info pop-up and follow the link to
the documentary on youtube for possibly useful example.

A good resource mentioned was the Guardian's recent list of 100 most useful websites

Steve Bridger's posts: 

Blogs
Bertie, Blogs and Breast Cancer Care

Second Life
The Yak Shack

GoogleMaps

Comments

[peter ballantyne]

Hello Beth

Sounds interesting. While not UK-based, you can also see an example of extensive web2 and rss use at www.euforic.org. We also made a small brochure about it available from our 'about' page.

We make extensive use of del.icio.us and structured tagging to generate the content feeds - plus related email alerts etc through feedburner.

For us, one of the challenges is to encourage dev organisations and non-profits to configure there web and information efforts so that content is easily available for others to aggregate, re-use, and re-publish. Once information is routinely accessible through rss, for instance, we can then focus our efforts on pulling it together and 'mashing' it into new products.....

cheers

Peter