Discuss, share, and connect with peers

We have a few different groups for sharing information and links, and starting discussions with us and your peers. Check out the options, choose your preference, or if you’re new to all these then perhaps try a new network out and see if you like it. We welcome feedback on how useful or not these networks are, and let us know if you have any other suggestions.

Share your favourite bookmarks in our Ma.gnolia group:

Here you can share useful web links and start discussions (this group is open to the public, anyone can join). Ma.gnolia is built for bookmarking your most useful links and seeing what other people and groups have added. When you add each new link you can tag them which helps you and others explore and find relevant links in the future.

I’m quite excited about this one as I think it could prove to be a really useful tool. I’ve just started using it and it’s really easy to use and is helping me keep of all the useful things I find on the web, I’m planning to pull in the tag clouds onto this site from our ma.gnolia group when things get going too.

Connect with professionals and join our LinkedIn group:

LinkedIn is a professional networking site that offers you a way to connect with colleagues and make industry contacts. We’ve created the group to provide another way to stay connected with other LG Web Network members, and it also has a facility to start discussions within the group. (Anyone on LinkedIn can join this group.)

Join in with the discussions in our Google Group:

We have set up a private Google Group which is an email discussion group and is open to government, public sector, and not for profit people. (Sorry to all you other industry professionals, whilst we value your involvement in the network we need privacy in this case so we can share sensitive data.)

News and updates from the LG Web Network

Keep in touch with news and updates about what we’re doing and interesting things we think are worth a mention:

• Subscribe to news and interesting things we find posted on our TumbleLog (via RSS or Email), or if you’re on Tumbler you can follow us. We’re using Tumblr to post short messages with links, videos, and other mixed media quickly. Here we post news, events, new tools, useful articles, and anything interesting we stumble across on the web.
• Subscribe to blog posts via RSS or EMail, and if something sparks your interest please comment on the post.

And don’t forget Twitter if you want a bit of all the above!

No post on how to stay connected would be complete without mentioning Twitter. I personally find it a great, low resource intensive way of keeping generally abreast of webby things, and in touch with peers and people I am interested in. Many bloggers post their latest blog posts to Twitter - as do we! Whilst I’m a great fan of RSS feeds, the list of feed updates tends to pile up when I’ve got a big project on and I often find that Twitter is how I find out about the latest happenings.

We post all our blog posts and TumbleLog posts to Twitter, as well as posting small messages, and answering quick questions. So essentially Twitter gives you a way to keep up to date with our network, participate in discussions online, and connect with your peers and other network followers.

Follow us on Twitter!

Thanks to our sponsors Viocorp we’re able to provide you with audio recordings of nearly all the presentations from the conference. This is great for any of you who weren’t able to make it to the conference. We understand that distance can be an obstacle especially if you’re based in the outer reaches of New South Wales. It’s also great for those of you were able to be there to refer back to and listen to any of the presentations you didn’t see if you were in the other room!

We’re also happy to bring you a feature video podcast of our closing keynote speaker Lachlan Hardy, who presented on Local Government on the Open Web.

John Allsopp

Want to listen to them now? Okay, this is where you’ll find them:

They’re all linked from the speakers & preso’s page, so if you can’t remember who spoke on what, and who you want to listen do, you’ll find under the session descriptions the audio files are linked there in WMA and MP3 format.

http://lgwebnetwork.org/podcasts08/podcasts08.html - This page also just lists all the audio file recordings if you don’t want to sift through all the speaker sessions and bios.

What about slides?

We’ve encouraged all the speakers to put their slides up on slideshare, we haven’t got all of them, but we’ve linked all the ones we next to the audio file.

From Slideshare you can download or comment on the slides.

Russ Weakley

About Viocorp

Viocorp is one of Australia’s leading internet broadcasting companies. Specialising in the production and distribution of video and audio content directly to end users, Viocorp have the resources to deliver high quality multiple format output globally across the internet using Viostream.

Viostream has built a server-based architecture which allows the rapid and tailored encoding of your content into just about any format. This includes Windows Media, QuickTime, Flash, and 3GP videos. They can also provide low and high bandwidth options to make watching your media content accessible to a wider range of your website visitors.

VioTV is an Enterprise WebTV platform, ideal for creating niche communities of audio and video content.

For more information please go to www.viocorp.com

We really appreciate Viocorp giving us this opportunity to provide you the audio recordings, so thank you very much!

And don’t forget the Photos!

Cameron Adams

Check out ours and other peoples photos from the conference on Flickr.

If you took photos at the conference, upload them to Flickr and remember to tag them with lgwn08.

If you’ve been to one before then you’ll understand my excitement. If not then here’s why you should go:

• You’ll meet a whole new load of awesome, talented, creative, web peeps
• You will here some great presentations on the mad stuff people are doing
• You won’t get bored by long droll presentations cos each presenter only has 3 minutes to wow you with their cool shiz
• If you’ve been secretly working on something the world (or at least a room full) should know about then this is your chance to get up and “Jam” about what you’ve been working on
• It’s at a bar so you can have a beer (which might be nice if you feel like relaxing after a day at Web Directions)

Thanks to misswired for the photo.

Be part of the local web community and come to Webjam 8 on 25 September and watch and learn or present, and have fun (and tell your webby friends about it).

I’ll be there, hope to see you there too.

If that sounds like a challenge facing you and your organisation, then perhaps the upcoming Web 2.0 Bootcamp, to be held in conjunction with this year’s Web Directions South conference may help you address that.

http://south08.webdirections.org/?cat=3#post-89

Rather than looking at the technologies and their implementation, this workshop, delivered by renowned corporate trainer Jeff Kelly (already thousands around the world have taken the workshop) leads you through a deep exploration of the latest ideas, business models, trends, and techniques behind Web 2.0 with a special emphasis on proven, actionable methods for creating new online products and services – or transforming existing ones – using a Web 2.0 model.

Topics include the 7 major patterns of Web 2.0 applications, the structure and business models of Web 2.0, and how Web 2.0 concepts are applied directly to the design and development of online products and services.

Discount for you!

Web Directions is happy to offer members of the Local Government Web Network $100 off the price of the Web 2.0 Workshop. To take advantage of the offer, just register using the promotional code W2U08LG.

Lachlan Hardy, our closing keynote speaker at the We Believe in Community conference did an excellent presentation on Local Government on the Open Web. And to keep in the spirit of openness you can now view his presentation in full technicolour thanks to the wonders of online vide, and our Streaming and Podcast Sponsor: Viocorp.

If you’re interested in learning more about what the Open Web is, and how it can be applied in government and organisations, then watch the full video of Lachlan Hardy’s presentation: http://lgwebnetwork.org/podcasts08/Lachlan-Hardy.html

You can also view or download Lachlan’s slides on Slideshare.

Thanks to Viocorp who recorded the session and who are also providing audio podcasts of the other presentations - these will be up very soon and we’ll let you know when they’re available.

Thanks to Lachlan for this great presentation whilst standing under the heat of the camera lights, and thanks to all our speakers, looking forward to sharing your podcasts and slides soon!