There must be 100s of local authority / connexions / youth service / charity websites aimed at young people - often seeking to provide Information, Advice and Guidance alongside local news, information about places to go and things to do, and young people-created content.
Is there a space for / need for a place where sites can share useful units of content (e.g. videos / where-to-find-out-more widgets and the like?)
You know, a lot of these things -- classic examples might be, what, an alcohol unit counter or an animated condom demonstration? Well, they've already been done, on other websites, so I link promiscuously to the ones I think are good. It might be nice to have them embeddable within my pages, mind -- there's a bit of that going on now, like the GI Johnny stuff, but it's a pretty recent development (and mostly in the sexual education zone).
I've always just encouraged services to use the tools that are out there (e.g. the real YouTube) and to tag content / bring it together... but there may be a case for a specific 'YouthTube'.
With the YouTube api, or white label video services it would be relatively easy to establish I would guess (technically that is, marketting might be more of a challenge...)
Colleagues of mine at Greater Manchester Connexions (a couple of years ago at least) tried a youth type video site - which was great, but the issue is that nobody can easily upload more videos. Hence the centralised model didnt quite work.
The site was nice though !
Permalink Reply by mas on June 25, 2008 at 11:13am
Thats very interesting & have added to my 'play around with' todo list! Plings looks like a good possibility for the sharing of relevant info too. I had been thinking of setting something up to pool all the latest youth blog posts (we also talked about doing something similar for the now redundant 'oneyouthworkblogger' campaign) - one of the reasons I hadn't got round to it though was that I read there may be copyright issues although maybe this is easily got round by seeking permission in advance and making it clear copyright is owned by the authors etc. ?
Regarding the copyright issue in terms of aggregation. I am not sure where this would derive from, although I am no legal eagle.
I would guess that the there is an issue (and a term of licence in some RSS feeds) that you cant make a commercial return out of a feed use. Probably around someone plonking a load of feeds onto a page and generating google ads out of them, but lets not go there for now!
One way to pool all the latest youth work posts would be to use something like technorati to find and mark as favourites the relevant blog sites, and then feed the RSS out into Google Reader or through Yahoo Pipes. The result could be a stream of posts that are relevant for people to engage with.
I appreciate that this is a rather techno-centric approach to the question I hear , which is "what are people blogging about?" It was (and still is, and always will be!) on our 2do list to look at this, as getting more people engaged in these discussions and conversations is the most important aspect.
Just noticed that Tim has posted a long (and probably more coherant response that this) response to my blog, so best get over there and reply...
Erm, I'm not sure my reply on your blog falls in the category of coherent Steven.
In other things though - I've pulled together a list of all the youth work related RSS feeds I'm subscribed to - and have dropped them into a Grazr widget here.
What am I missing? What other blogs are out there?
Permalink Reply by mas on June 26, 2008 at 10:31pm
Is there anything anyones come across that allows for pulling in rss feeds but also posting replies/comments? I'm guessing not because of issues of overcoming spam filters etc. Just thinking it would be handy to have a central place to view blogs & send in replies etc. as (hopefully_ youth work blogging grows - maybe I'm just being a bit too lazy though!
Out of interest has anyone tried feedly? - think its for firefox only but I'm finding its quite a nice way for reading through some of the feeds I usually skip over.