Paul and David have been working hard to pull the focus group together - the detailed programme is here.
The focus group already has enough members but we could make space for one or two more people. If you are interested please call 0845 1300 411 and ask for Angela or comment on this post.
ruralnet|online feed
Would anyone mind if I came
Would anyone mind if I came along?
Dave - you'd be most
Dave - you'd be most welcome. All the info on the day is here. Details of where we are and how to get to us are here. I look forward to meeting you.
We are the web... I
We are the web...
I can't be there in person but I'm happy to add my two-penn'orth...
We are on the cusp of a new generation of service delivered through the internet. Often referred to as Web 2.0, this is about evolving "killer applications" and services that are good not necessarily on account of their content, but maybe on account of how they facilitate people to interact.
Ask yourself why services like FaceBook and MySpace have taken off in a way that Friends-Reunited seems to have fallen behind from? It's to do with the degree that their value is tied up in how their audience can contribute to them. You can develop add-ins for Facebook. You can develop social-networks from Facebook. You personally engage with it and through it with your community of contacts. It gives you a personal window on part of your (social?) world.
What's more, the direction it goes in feels as much driven by what its users choose to contribute as by what the Facebook Gods decree. One isn't channelled by a singular purpose decreed by its hosts.
Take tools like Flickr, Slideshare, Del.Icio.us. At one level you can simply use them to stash your own personal content, resources, bookmarks, etc. But whole point of tagging, tag-clouds, and their emerging folksonomies is that you can use them to feed and gather and share and organise and annotate and make-more-discoverable the information that you or others contribute.
Web users discovering 'Google search' is a big first step... one soon discovers that "if it isn't on Google, it might as well not exist". Google helps you find stuff that someone else created.
But we're now talking about another dimension beyond this. We're talking about tools that help other people to discover stuff that either you have created yourself, or have identified as being useful in some particular context. You the user don't have to just be a passive consumer - you can be a contributor! And to a potentially vast audience.
So, Web 2.0 is about transcending boundaries, and about being less parochial. Spare 5 minutes to watch this excellent YouTube video that makes this point eloquently and precisely in a very simple graphic way...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
Roger G... (Aged 53, Too old to die young)
A Tool or a Contributor?
A Tool or a Contributor?
So are you suggesting that ruralnet|online could be (or include) tools or mechanisms to help it's users discover stuff, or should it just be a contributor to the general cloud of information?
One other thing that arises from this thinking is how to you know if you are actually helping people discover stuff, or whether your contributions are useful in any context.
Brian