Creating Community Conversations - Gallomanor

Google Love

Last Thursday I went back to school.  The teacher for the evening was Steve Johnston, Google Consultant.  He was giving a one-off presentation on how to make Google Love Your Website in order to raise money for St Laurence School (which his 3 kids attend, and mine probably will in a few years time).

Steve's a compelling and knowledgeable speaker who made the 3 hours fly by in a whirlwind of facts and tips about how Google provides search results.

Top Fact:   20 - 25% of search expressions on Google each day have never searched for before

Top Tip:   Title tags and Meta Description data is the most visible part of your site - it is what appears on Google.

I've started on this blog.  The page title is now Creating Community Conversations as opposed to gallomanor.

The only downside of sitting through the presentation was the length of the list of small little things that you could do to improve the Google performance of your site.  However the upside was remembering that the sites we produce are far more interesting than what your average retailer gets to deal with.

and now a number 36!

Shane Richmond from the Telegraph is hosting another Open House event and this time focussing on Political Blogging.  In the interest of the Cllr2.0 project, Andrew and I are going along to take the pulse and add a ha'penny.

(hat-tip to Simon Dickson for highlighting it)

eDemocracy buses

A bit like the proverbial buses - you wait all year for an eDemocracy event and then suddenly three (and then some) appear at once.

Yesterday Sophia and I nipped across to the bright lights of Bristol and the Watershed for the Modern Methods of governance - democracy in action or mob rule?.  (A Webcast has been promised).

We heard from Tom Steinberg of MySociety about how ePetitions and "golden pages" can help draw people into engaging with democracy and government.  A view that was put forward in our evaluation of ePetitioner for ICELE (page 8).  Mary Reid continued on ePetitions and Mike Brewin added some Bristol detail.  Ian Wiebkin from Kirklees Council presented the DigiTV project and the imminent digital switchover was hailed as a potential tipping point when interactive TV services could become mainstream.  I am currently sceptical about interactive services on TV and the figures that Ian was able quote from Sky were not comforting.  90% of Sky users have used the interactive service at some point, but nothing about how often they used them and what for.  Personally I don't know anyone who has ever used digital TV to access a non-TV service, yet last night in the pub (not a Hoxton digirati crew) we found that Mr T, the farmer, was on Facebook and for the next hour a masterclass on social networking and virtual knickers ensued.  I have never heard that buzz about interactive TV services.