engagement

After the early frustration with Google Apps I've now found it much easier to set up new accounts. Perhaps too easy, I manage around 200 domain names and they're all just pointing to community websites and projects with no email associated with them.

I just set up a new instance for www.saltburn.org.uk but I only altered the MX records so google apps is only providing email on the domain name. The domain name is still pointing at the original website. This means that email accounts can be provided for project staff and it also creates a kind of "Intranet" of apps e.g. http://partnerpage.google.com/saltburn.org.uk that each user can customise.

This opens a whole range of possibilities - for instance what could we do with www.skinningrove.tv www.margovepark.com www.ts3.org.uk www.hfhc.co.uk (and many others) At fist my intention with this pilot project was to pull all the participants together under the google app running at www.myweb2.org.uk - now I don't know, perhaps it may be better to introduce different groups to stuff running under their own community domain and find some way of linking them up.

Some sessions are due to start in Margrove Park. They're I'm trying a new approach there which is even more informal than before. It seems to me to be the most likely to work. I blogged that proposal here

Those sessiosn are now going ahead so we could introduce participants to a email@margrovepark.com concept.

Hey, google apps finally verified the domain MyWeb2.org.uk - I remain slightly unconvinced. It's a convoluted mess of stuff - slightly kludgy. I do somewhat prefer the iGoogle approach of bring google gizmos together. I'll stick with it a while. Guess I need some early testers to give it a whirl. I think the problem with this "make it easy one size fits all" is you lose the ability to give your users custom vehicles put together with HTML etc. I may be wrong about this and I'm currenly experimenting.

(expensive) typo when registering the domain name. I registered three but two have the typo and (surprise surprise) they have all since been snapped up. However this tells me why the domain has not been verified yet. Sorry google. The Google Apps part of the project will now run on myweb2.org.uk

Margrove Park Website

Margrove Park Website

This could bring out first participants. I went to the Village Hall at Margrove Park yesterday to talk about some new workshops within the SID project.

I proposed some sessions (see below). I mentioned Web2 for older people but the only bit they understood was "older people", a description they said applied to them. About half way through teh sessions I think they'll begin to understand and we'll get our participants then.

Marian,

From the notes you gave me at the Village Hall I propose the following idea:

To run club type sessions from 4pm to 8pm on Thursdays (we'll arrive at 3pm)

We'll spread out laptops so people can do a variety of things

Basic IT
Email
Updating the Margrove Park website
Using the website to contact us and receive support
Images, scanning etc
Anything else

Sessions to start August and run for 6 weeks on Thursdays after which we'll review what is needed

Still trying to verify the google apps account. Google are so hard to deal with with days between emails. I want to change the account to an educational account but somehow I have managed to convince google that www.tvcm.co.uk is an educational institution but not www.myweb2.com - not sure how I did that.

I could discount google as a source of web2 apps to engage people with but it's hard to ignore them. I have an inkling that this will work better if we try wherever possible to stay with one "brand". This means we could draw upon:-

Google Apps
iGoogle
Google Mashups
Picassa (need to run a comparison with Flickr)
Youtube (inc YouTube editor)
Google Docs
Blogger

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