links for 2010-04-19

For example, it was interesting to hear how one London based commercial website sells advertising, in a much more competitive environment than Leith – and makes a lot more from it than Greener Leith does! And similarly, the opportunity to do a little informal benchmarking with peer sites, and learn about 'market research' techniques was also really interesting.

This section, therefore, is for people to find out how to learn more advanced skills, or ask someone technically-minded for help. The TAL team and anyone else working with offline communities can also use these resources to ‘translate’ community issues into the sorts of problems with parameters that developers love to get their teeth into. We don’t want to reinvent any wheels, so please use this very simple and friendly questionnaire to ensure we’re not missing anything that already exists, or if you prefer dive straight into the editable Google document of this page to add content.

And as if this wasn’t enough, we have also been selected by the widely read American site blogs.com as one of their top ten “cool hyperlocal blogs”. In fact, we’re the only British site to make the list! Once again, we’re very pleased to be recognised in this way.

Ploughing through Council minutes and agendas can be time consuming but unearth really useful local information. Actually attending Council committees and meetings of the Local Strategic Partnership can give you a first-hand insight into local issues and decision-making. Keeping track of Council planning Committees and sub-committees, by online and/or physical means, is another useful activity routinely carried out by journalists. Making full use of information released under FOI (the Freedom of Information Act) and actually making FOI requests is another useful activity that can often result in stories from a differnt 'expose' angle.