Scholarships available for next course

30 June, 2008

5:00 pm

Our Social Media for the Third Sector course is starting soon. Keep 11 July free for the group learning day, and make a commitment before early July so we can work with you on your learning needs analysis.

That’s if you want a taste of a truly educational, capacity building package, and not just a quicky training day.

We are looking for two motivated people / organisations to award 80% scholarships for Part One (and potentially, Part Two).

If you ‘get’ that social media is essential knowledge to:

• build stronger relationships with your stakeholders
• get attention online and in real life
• raise funds
• collaborate creatively and build innovative approaches to social and environmental challenges

.. then apply here.

Find out all about the way we give and support real learning here.

Any questions, just pick up the phone and talk to Libby on 07968 687 107.

As of today, there are still places available, and we won’t decide on the sponsored places until 30 June. But the earlier you apply, the better.

Welcome to Nodestone – What does it mean?

Dear friends, colleagues and extended community

Here it is. Our new entity, website, direction. Nodestone. What does that mean? It’s a made-up word that just felt right. We did branding workshops and brainstormed and came up with all sorts of kooky ideas.

But Nodestone was what came to pass. My dear Mum (a great wordsmith) Jenny Davy had a good go at explaining it:

“The name Nodestone for me resonates with Lodestone which is something that has a magnetic attraction and a node is of course a part of a computer network – so Nodestone is a part of a computer network which will have a mega attraction to people!! .”

Here are some other reasons we chose it, or accidental associations:

• Lodestones:
  • were used in China in the 12th century as a compass for navigation.
  • long associated with the “lore of attraction” and considered by many as a “magical” stone.
  • magnetite, a mineral related to the coating on magnetic disks and tapes used by computers.
• Nodes:
  • connecting points on networks where information comes together, is refined and retransmitted.
  • the point on a stem from which the new leaf grows.
• Stones:
  • solid, reliable, of the earth. Good for building things with. Good for making strong foundations.
  • found as pebbles all along Brighton beach and make beautiful (if a little heavy) business cards.
  • They rock, and roll, and gather no moss. But actually, we like a little lichen ourselves.

You know when something just fits? We couldn’t believe the .com was still available, and pounced.

You can read about what we do, who we work for and what’s coming up all around the site. Hopefully the venture will live up to the name as we travel along.

Looking forward to sharing the journey with you.

Libby

Bringing in the New

We are in the middle of adding redirects for authenticblogging.com and presencelabs.com over to our new home at nodestone.com.

Surprise!

Hopefully it isn’t a surprise that you’ve landed here, but if it is, let me explain.   Libby Davy (of authentic blogging) and I (Graeme Sutherland of presencelabs.com) are putting our work and blogs together into nodestone.com.  So, we’ve built a new blog with the content of both of them, and I’m just now cutting over to the new site.

Basically, it should be business as usual once the transfer is complete. In the meantime, there might be a few little issues wih locating your favourite pages. Bear with us for the next few hours on that.

We hope you enjoy the new site.  We’ve had fun making it.  (Except for the late nights and the hard bits :-)

Technical Stuff

Don’t read this unless you care about the technical details of the changeover.

We’re basically putting in permanant redirects (301s) from the old domains to nodestone.com, with a bit of special redirect magic applied to make sure that old url parts map to the new ones.  This means (at least in theory) that google will still like us in the morning, and all our old paths will go somewhere relevant.  Permanent redirects also mean that records get updated permanently, so things like feed readers should get the new feed address if they have half a brain.

That’s all.  I’m off to arrange the nameserver changes for authenticblogging.com.   Ciao.

Social Media for the Third Sector

Learning Package: Social Media for the Third Sector

New dates coming soon…

Your chance to get > share > use radical knowledge for positive impact. More information…

Slowly and gently we create the new

We’re in the middle of building a new web presence/website/blog combining the best of presencelabs and authentic blogging into one great blog to inform to world.

We start with concept of what we want to be, then comes a name, and then comes new site, logo, tagline, stakeholders, new architecture for the site/blog and then the endless technical configuration of it all from feeds to email to subscription options, taxonomy of categories, tags, redirects, SEO, plugins and widgets

Typically, it is taking longer than we thought. It might voodoo the whole process, but I’ll say we should have something to show this week in its imperfect still-in-beta form. And I’m writing about the process from the technical side. I want to get a sense of what totally is involved in the new site and just what it has taken to get there.

So, more on that soon. And if presencelabs.com turns into a redirect to something else soon, you’ll know why.

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