The new website

October 29th, 2009
wp-w

It’s all go over at Democracy Towers – and today has been a flurry of media calls along with a meeting about our new website.

New TV widgets, live twitter feeds and examples of the great work the Democracy team has been upto are all included, and of course the blogsite will remain a key feature. The site is and is developed by the WordPress guru Simon Wheatley, another Chorlton creative who has an absolute gift for beautifully designed sites, with simple usability (so much so that he’s recently been working on Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie & the Royal Navy’s new site!).

It’s all looking very exciting, and fingers crossed we’ll be launching the site as we move into our brand new offices in just a few short weeks time.

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Speak to a geek

March 3rd, 2009

Last Friday I found myself in the headquarters of the MDDA (Manchester Digital Development Agency, although I will agree that it sounds like a Bond baddy benevolent trust).

I was there to meet a couple of the chaps involved with ‘Speak to a geek’ – an event created to help charity organisations look at ways to use social media and the internet to develop communities beyond their existing website.

Social media and digital communications are becoming increasingly important to the charity sector – they offer a low cost option to reach out to a much wider audience and it was great to see more than 15 charities turn up for the event, ready to pick the brains of the “Geeks” on everything from WordPress and Twitter to RSS feeds and google apps.

Our own work for the Niall Mellon Township Trust project, will be using many of the social media channels open to us alongside more traditional PR tactics and with a pre-launch event due to take place on the 17 March 2009 (yes – that’s St Patrick’s Day) we’re quickly getting our plans up and running.

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BarCamp Manchester 2

March 3rd, 2008

For those unaware of the whole BarCamp phenomenon, it’s a different way of people getting together to share information in an open environment.

The content comes from the delegates who are tasked with giving talks/demos, running workshops etc. Time slots are released in the morning of the event, with anyone who wants to present making a mad dash to register. Then all the delegates choose which sessions they want to go to.

This was my second BarCamp; I went to Leeds in November and met with some genius type people who all ‘got’ what was going on in the online world and who are now firm friends. So I had high hopes for Manchester.

My favourite talks were by Tom Scott (Facebook apps in 30 mins!), Daniel Morris of the BBC who chattted through how they were using new technology to market to teens and Simon Wheatley who gave an intro to WordPress.

What I love about BarCamp, is that there’s something for everyone and the guys there break information down into plain English (meaning anyone can follow) and they want to share what they know.

In the spirit of giving something back, I presented on something I know about: “How to become famous” to demonstrate that although the online world is where we’re going, the traditional media is still a big part of where we are.

A great day – only marred by a small ankle twisting incident during the after-party – heels, red wine and curbs proving a bad combination (big thank you to Dan and Guy from Adaptavist for taking care of me).

Roll on the next one, I can’t wait!

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