Out With A Bang

As I mentioned, I was wandering round www.2gether08.com last week – at which Messrs Watson and Loosemore announced the launch of this…

http://www.showusabetterway.com/

…which I can only commend. Nice if they could have found a way to have added another nought onto the end and given 20 great mashes a little pick-me-up, but there we go.

Eyes down for the full £20,000 it is.

My early favourite was this baby… something that was muttered about in passing last week. But, heh, you go girl, you go…

http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk/call/2008/07/war-graves-comm.html

Unfortunately the party appears to be pooped somewhere in the bowels of the Imperial War Museum with a restrictive copyright, as Richard points out in the posts…

http://www.ukniwm.org.uk/server/show/nav.8

Who knows, maybe that could be one for Messrs Watson and Loosemore to sink their teeth into; get those boys to enter in the spirit of summer ‘08. Get down with the kids and data stream…

But wander round the other ideas and there’s some great stuff in there; real little gems – so many of which deserve a wider airing.

But that was one thing that struck me out of www.2gethero8.com – that this whole mass, this soup of unleashed data still needs an organisational principle.

To the magnificent four people that listened to my 40-minute presentation last Thursday, apologies. You’ll have heard this before.

But with my trusted marker pen in one hand and much-maligned flip-chart steadied by the other, I drew this picture of one of our Tom’s early biology experiments. I guess it’s biology; maybe it was chemistry.

Anyway, it’s the one where you create this saturated sugar solution – this warm, rich, gloupy soup of all manner of goodness, bit like the combined output of www.2gether08.com and www.showusabetterway.com, which you then allow to cool.

But into that gloupy soup you drop a single thread – in our case www.mylocalwriter.com – which then offers an organisational platform for all those beautiful, sugar-sweet particles to re-crystalise around; that given something to hang onto – a platform to which to cling – an order, a symmetry and a possibility is brought to that gloupy soup of ideas and data…

Confronted by this great wall of noise and data, we have to find devices, to find platforms, to find organisational principles to which all this glorious out-pouring of knowledge and information can be framed around.

That’s the basic premise, I think, to www.mylocalwriter.com – that it becomes this communal reading room, a first meeting place with a warm-hearted, smiling local reporter on the door who then merely stands back and lets you the reader wander through the maze of sub-groups and interest hot-spots that lie beyond.

But there has to be a starting place; an entry point; an elegant and sustainable way into those deep, gold-bearing seams of data.

Add a post-code to every soldier’s name – and all those boys will come home from beneath their foreign fields.

So, Siobhan, go for it girl…

Smash your way into the dark, restrictive vaults of the IWM and I’ll see if I can’t give you a bright, new shiny home for all that gathered data – right where the Preston Pals belong; right at the very heart of their local, Preston community.

�