Neighbourhoods

Mass blog of everyday life: 17 October

I've sometimes thought that future historians will look back at our age as compulsively informative. The publicity for the 'One Day in History' mass blogging day (October 17) fits the bill and manages to leave a few words out as it does so.

Don't let that put you off. It's an adventurous stunt and I think we should all go for it - no reason why there shouldn't be some neighbourhood or community group contributions, from the minutes of a tenants' group meeting to a record of a conversation at the school gates.

A mass blog for the national record. The History Matters campaign has designated a day for the public to make historic. We want as many people as possible ... to record a 'blog' diary of this one day to be by the British Library (sic) and others as a record of our national life.

October 17 has been chosen deliberately as 'an ordinary' weekday of no particular significance. We want to record the mundane and ordinary lives of citizens and by doing something contributing valuable to the historic record (sic). Material that could be used by historians and researchers for time to come.

More.

An alternative source

Aha, looks like Paul Hilder's survived the early stages of fatherhood and thinks life's such a doddle, he can afford the time to start blogging about the Young Foundation's Transforming neighbourhoods programme... More than one post every five months please Paul, the way I can potter off and do something else ;-)

Local Level news: RSS feeds

You can now get feeds from the news page of my Local Level website.

Thanks to Woody Kitson.

i-Neighbors goes live

Keith Hampton is in the vanguard, as usual. He's just launched i-neighbors, a new website to increase social contact and participation at the neighborhood level. Here's how he describes it:

"I-Neighbors is a FREE social networking tool that connects people to neighbors in the same local community. Using I-Neighbors you can:
-Meet and communicate with your neighbors.
-Find neighbors with similar interests.
-Share information on local companies and services.
-Organize and advertise local events.
-Vocalize local concerns and ideas.
Members have access to services that include a neighborhood email list, a local directory, a shared photo album, a neighborhood messaging system, a tool to poll their neighbors' opinions, and a service that connects neighbors who work near each other for carpools. Unlike other web sites that allow global, national, or city-wide communication, I-Neighbors links members of a single neighborhood, defined by the people that create them."

So far it's only available in the US and Canada. No doubt Keith will be monitoring and evaluating take-up quite closely, and we'll learn in due course just how far such a system can go in stimulating local social capital.