See my LinkedIn public profile here.

I’ve had the pleasure of developing and now hosting the news service for Kim Murray, proprietor of Margaret River Online, which is the most comprehensive tourist info/portal site for Margaret River.

We based the news service on an open source content management system with a bunch of extensions to suit the style of site we were trying to create.

Here are a couple of things we did to make the site work better:

• The site provides an RSS feed of news stories, which is used on the home page of Margaret River Online to give a ‘latest news’ box.
• Anybody registered on the site (free registration) can submit news which is moderated by an editor before being posted. Registration is made really easy, making it easy for the editor to get community members to write stories which are then edited into news categories and maybe onto the front page of the site.
• There are a minimum of static pages on the site. A club, society or opinion column writer has a category, and a series of dated entries under that category. It is like a bunch of multi-author blogs mashed together.
• We removed a lot of complexity from the handling of stories and comments to make the site easy to use.
• We’ve got the site hooked up to Google News. The Google news folk are really nice to deal with, by the way.

I really like the result and it will be very interesting to see how it goes as content is added and the community gets involved.

Link

I’ve just registered for the Online Social Networking 2005 conference. This is a wholly online conference running for a couple of weeks discussing all aspects of online social networking.

It should be really interesting, both for the discussions of social networking and the experience of an online conference.

OSN2005 will be a summit for all those interested in working with social networking processes, tools, and media. In addition to attending many workshops, panels, and presentations by leading experts and practitioners, attendees will have the opportunity to be part of a community with a significant role in defining the future direction of online social networking. If you want to help shape this industry, come to OSN2005!

During the OSN2005 summit we will co-create and publish a manifesto describing what we want and need from online social networking tools. What are the key criteria for choosing and assessing OSN products and services? What gaps exist in currently available software and related tools? What needs to happen before it’s common knowledge that OSN products and services can deliver significant value? What are the most promising developments in the OSN industry?