links for 2010-07-02

Sometimes you have to make useful yourself

A big part of the Cabinet Office data.gov.uk initiative was the idea of “build it and they will come” – but sometimes you have to stimulate the market. And if the market itself isn’t well developed or really it’s of little benefit to an individual, not really a consumer related app, but it is of massive benefit to the sector, the maybe you have to make useful yourself. The Knowledge Hub wants to help stimulate this market. And we’d like your ideas about how we can do that.

So if you’re building a local blog network and you want really great education coverage, you either have to convince someone to do it who doesn’t already love it enough that they were doing it anyway, or you have to convince someone who does love it to stop being afraid of losing their job over it. It’s a recipe for failure either way. Or, you know, you could get your reporters that you hired to do it for you, which seems far more workable to me.