We invite you to be part of the process of building the 'next generation' of the ruralnet|online service. You can do any of the following:

* BROWSE AROUND and see the collective ideas and thinking. Take away what you like if you think it will be useful in your work. Everything on here is accessible to everyone on an attribution/share-alike basis
* COMMENT ANONYMOUSLY
* REGISTER AND WRITE your own thoughts and have your comments attributed to you

Here's some background information:
- what's ruralnet|online?
- what are the objectives of this process?
- >>more

Thanks for joining in.

The co-design phase of ruralnet|online has now closed but will remain here for reference.

Here is my presentation of the new version of ruralnet|online delivered at collaborate|2008. Sorry that the audio is a but stuttery . . . I need more practice. but anyway I think it is still helpful.

[Addendum: at one point I say we had 40,000 users. I should have said 4,000 users and this is the number on the slide.]

if the slide transitions don't work automatically for you, you will have to advance them yourself. Or, you could go to slideshare and watch it there.

| View | Upload your own

All the insights gathered in this co-design exercise have been pulled together to produce a prototype for ruralnet|online 2.0. This prototype is a fully working system for the Rural Community Carbon Network and is live here: www.communitycarbon.net. It was launched at collaborate|2008 on 10/4/08. Click on the image above to view an annotated screenshot which describes each area of the 'root' page.

The Community Carbon Network is truly innovative and draws on the ideas expressed here over the last 3 months. The key factors that guided this implementation are: >>Read more

I think I have just caught a glimpse of the user interface for ruralnet|online 3.0

Thanks for everyone's input so far. It's now pay back time. Drawing everything together and injecting Paul's and Duncan's excellent work this week with Wordpress MU the image to the left is an attempt to show the status of our current thinking. A focus on relationships between people and organisations rather than 'information'. A focus on 'services' rather than 'content'.

In summary, it's a graphical RSS aggregator, maybe Google Apps For Your Domain, with WordPress (organisational websites and individual blogs), Drupal (Experts Online), Gmail (for those who want it) and other things sitting behind it. Although we're focussing on ruralnet|online here we'd be able to replicate this for other networks using the Networks Online philosophy.

Please let us know what you think. This is an Aunt Sally for everyone to have a go at.

Key questions are: What's the business model? Do we need a forum facility? What about shared file storage?

:-)

This is one of Google's best kept secrets. It's a free service but you'll need to sign up for a Google account if you don't already have one. Within Google Custom Search you can set up as many customised searches as you like and then GCS provides you with a bit of code to paste into your website (or blog) and this displays a search box and search button. Like this:

About this search

So what is a custom search? A custom search works just like the main Google search but just searches the list of websites (or bits of websites) that you specify when you set it up.

This one searches all the websites that I am contributing to. This includes my personal blog, my cycle websites and the things I post here. Note that GCS can be setup to search parts of a website. So this custom search only searches my contributions on this site, not the whole site.

So what's the relevance of GCS for the new ruralnet|online? Well, if we go down the road that Paul is suggesting, ie we provide a Pageflakes page with all the key rural feeds on it, then we could also, in theory, provide a custom search to cover the websites that these feeds come from. So the pageflakes site would provide a snapshot of the latest rural information from many sources, while the Custom Search would provide a search over all of those sources. I'm pretty sure that the GCS could be incorporated into the Pageflakes page which would be neat.

I have to admit to being a bit sniffy about Twitter. I took a look at the public area of their website (see image) a while ago and was a bit put off. Then I realised I was falling into the trap that so many people fell into when they dismissed blogs on the basis of who they perceived were using them and what they were using them for.

I remind myself. It's not about content its about the underlying functionality and the network of people using it, or potentially using it. Anyone can use twitter (or any other technology) for whatever content they like. Contrast twitter's public feed with the view I get of twitter: Interesting mini observations and calls for help from trusted friends, a feed from the BBC on technology and the rural news from xPRESS Digest.

So twitter, like everything else, is what you make it. The real question is: "Is the network of Twitter users relevant to ruralnet? Are there people using Twitter that would appreciate ruralnet|online services delivered to them in this way?"

To try and find out and as part of an experiment, I have set up a Twitter account called 'ruralnet_xpress' and each day I am pasting the day's rural headlines to it. So far ruralnet_xpress has two followers me and Paul Webster - cheers Paul! If you're a Twitter user and would like a daily dose of rural headlines, you know what to do.

Yesterday and today I'm out and about with at the UK Circuit Riders conference in sunny Birmingham. We had a great day yesterday and I helped out with a session run by David Wilcox, Nick Booth and Laura Whitehead who I've finally met!). highlight of the session was the chance to Skype with Beth Kanter (who has already blogged about it here).

I picked up on a new 'forum' while doing xpress this morning. It's from the CPRE and nothing more sophisticated than a Wordpress.com blog.