stefan

Last week I was invited to a reception at The House of Lords where the local e-Democracy National Project was presented.

"The local e-Democracy National Project is exploring how new technologies can change the way in which Councils engage and work with their Citizens." 21Publish has contributed one part to it called ReadMyDay which is a BlogPortal where councillors can start blogs to report about their life and what they are doing.

I found the project to be really outstanding. It also includes a number of very interesting tools like e-petitioning. I am not aware of any project alike in other countries but it seems to me that this is really the way to go forward.

A full list of all tools that have been created by the project can be found here.

One thing I like about being an entrepreneur is that my business life is full of surprises.

Take this as an example:

When we started 21Publish I envisioned that we would have lots of classrooms using the 21Publish multi-user portals as blogging communities. I thought that one student from the class  would set up a blogging community for all his classmates or his school as it is easy to do, inexpensive and lots of fun. That's what I thought.

Reality is that we have hundreds of teachers who have set up a multi-user BlogPortal for their students as a digital classroom or to learn how to communicate and share ideas with others on the read/write web. I believe what teachers like in particular about 21Publish BlogPortals is that students are able to post public and internal entries.

Just check out some of these classroom blogging portals:

North River School Blogs
room204
Middleswart
East Central
Mr. Rimes Room
7dc
Loveland

It seems that this is a great tool for teachers. For those interested in further insights in classroom blogging I strongly recommend Wills blog as a starting point to learn more about it and to find other experts in classroom blogging. 

There has been some noise lately in the german blogosphere as 20six has announced to switch its platform to another system they already operate called myblog.de. The migration has taken place last Thursday. Some of the users stayed but quite a bit also have chosen to go with new blog systems such as twoday or the 21Publish operated bloghof. Some people have wondered how this would affect 21Publish.

20six and 21Publish separated 16months ago to pursue different business models. 21Publish today is a separate and completely independent entity with no influence on any decision taken by 20six and vice versa. Upon splitting the company the key technology remained the same but since then 21Publish has modified and developed the 21Publish software in many ways with respect to features, security and performance.

Shortly before splitting the companies, 20six had acquired myblog.de which is by far the fastest growing service in Germany. Most of the myblog users are teens. 20six has decided quite a while ago to focus on such a target group of predominantly young people from 12 to 17 years old who appreciate a software such as myblog with a lesser or different set of features.  Since the decision was made by 20six to migrate to a new platform, enhancements to their specific version of the software has been minimized while 21Publish’s software has continued to enjoy R&D improvements. Therefore the migration by 20six has no impact at all on 21Publish apart from the fact that we are losing a customer.

Although this is so it is a strategic decision I can understand. As providing blogs is 20six core and only business it is difficult and expensive to maintain and support two different systems.  myblog has proven to be extremely succesful for the  teen target group of 20six and therefore it was a logical step to take.

Anton, has upgraded our editor and added a few functions.

It is much easier to insert a link now. You just mark a word, click on add link and insert a URL.

Also you can position a photo. And now the text floats around the image either on the right hand side or on the left hand side of the photo. Right now it only works per drag and drop, but that will follow short term.

Also, I cannot wait to see our new templates and template structure online. I know that we have announced this already a while ago but now we are close to launch and it should be online within the next 10 days.

 

I have been to London last week to meet a couple of people like Fraser and Joe who run this very exiting e-government project readmyday.

On Tuesday I gave a presentation about blogging in non-profit organizations to some of the international webmasters of amnesty international. I very much enjoyed the discussion that followed the presentation. Organizations like amnesty certainly need to go through a process of setting their goals first.  I believe that knowing the technology inside out already helps in this stage of the process.  Every feature has been created for a certain reason. So knowing the features means knowing all the different goals that these features were built for. 

Niall has published a very interesting article that also inspired parts of the presentation ( Blogging_ai_Nov05.pdf).  If you download the presentation or use it in any way please do not change anything.