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.

This is really a comment on Paul's latest post.

Following a long train journey and discussion with my colleague Brian Rich last October I produced a 'Green Paper' which described what I thought ruralnet|online 2.0 would look like. See the document Forum ideas.doc attached. The graphic here is part of that document and if you go to www.rsnonline.org.uk they look remarkably similar.

However, when I presented these ideas to my colleagues at ruralnet|uk they challenged me. "How do you know that this is what users want?" they said. And this co-design process was born.

So. Will we go through this exercise and come back to my green paper and implement that anyway? No, we will definitely not. One thing this process has reinforced is that ruralnet|online is not about information. It's about relationships. It's about making links between people and the ideas they have. For example, Experts Online is about putting one person in touch with another (an expert) who can help them. The shared information and resources this generates is a spin-off of the relationship building process.

So, I think, ruralnet|online should start with the ideas expressed here and here.

If we develop (and I think we will) a forum-type feature then it will be based on Web 2.0's ability to make links (relationships again) between people and ideas. It won't be an information system. See Ideas on Forums.

Added on 22/2/08
Another thing I should have said is that a key aspect of our strategy is the ability to deliver services through the websites of others (see thread 3). So we have already contacted the 'Rural Services Network' to offer free access to Experts Online (the RSSupport implementation) and a free 'rural services' newsfeed from our xPRESS Digest News Service.

When we played out the scenarios in David's game we noticed that ruralnet|online didn't figure much. In fact although it was there in the background some of the people didn't use it until year 3!

Now this might seem a bit worrying when we're trying to work out what ruralnet|online should be but I didn't come away thinking that.

We had a fair amount of debate on the day about one-stop-shops vs network and where ruralnet|online would fit in.

As has been said here and elsewhere the old model of a membership and subscribers is breaking down and having to be rethought radically. Whatever happens I think the following two points will be central to our offering:

It was a great day today at the focus group for RuralNet|online. Got to meet Simon and Paul for the first time, which was ace, as well as a bunch of other cool people. Even better, they were people that cared about rural affairs, community building and were interested in using online tools, even when they weren't too experienced in using them.

We had a great meeting a couple of weeks ago with Megan Griffith and Karl Wilding from NCVO (and David Wilcox), where we discussed amongst other things the future of ICT Foresight.

One of the things we wanted to do was map the people, organisations, initiatives, events, places/platforms and ideas that were involved in shaping the future of the third sector. We had a very low tech approach on the day - colour-coded post it notes (pics to come). However we thought by pulling this together online it could be shared, added to, tracked and reused by everyone involved.

For years the BBC have set the standard for the delivery of a huge amounts of content in an accessible way. At ruralnet|uk many 'how should we do this' discussions end up with someone suggesting that we look at the BBC's website to see how they do things, what screen widths they publish for etc etc.

Well, I think they have done it again. The BBC's new beta site is very interesting and gets close in many aspects to the ideas emerging in this co-design process.

The new site owes a lot to those innovators at Netvibes and Pageflakes. Most of the new BBC's home page consists of 'tablets' of information that you can move around! If you're really interested in the weather, move that tablet to the top. If you like sport, then drag that tablet to the top too. Oh, but you're intersted in Rugby? Well, edit the sport tablet so that it displays Rugby information instead of Football. Brilliant. Oh and I really like the retro clock too.

This approach was the one we took when faced with the challenge of 'getting farmers online' in Warwickshire at the end of last year. See 'Google Apps For Farmers'.

Is this how the new ruralnet|online should work?
 
 
 
 
 

One of the good things about all this Web 2.0 stuff is that you can pick up things that are really useful and interesting but would never have crossed your path otherwise.

Over at Nick Booth's Podnosh blog he blogged about a new website called Hear by Right. What's this got to do with ruralnet|online? Well, Hear by Right provides a framework to assess and improve the ways of involving young people in their futures.