With full awareness of the irony of my blog having drifted a bit lately, I am well up for helping to get more of a community going between gov bloggers, and making it feel like a safer place to be (strength in numbers and all that). A discussion would be a good starting place.

As one of the 125 RSS subscribers, would plead that you keep pubsec bloggers alive, and yes some kind of categorisation would help to filter. Some which suggest themselves: digital; innovation; local gov; LOTB.

Part of me thinks that resolving the issue would actually require a “resource” on at least a part time basis. I’m not sure that there is a tech alternative which would be sustainable without some kind of manual or human validation.

I agree with Stefan about large numbers put you off, I’ve recently reorganised some of my rss feeds as they were too big. But I expect this in some way – my filters get better and deeper the more I understand what I’m really looking for.

I accept that a more defined set of themes would provide a better and more accessible route into the content and associated twitter streams – like the BBC and guardian do.

Mentoring and an event sound like a great idea – maybe worth a session at local gov camp as well as a more focused blogcamp but I kind of struggle to see what a whole day would do at the moment – who would the intended audience be for it to offer value?

Anyway great post as usual

Carl

Suggestions three and four are ones that I would subscribe too. An event I think would be a good idea. From my side I would be happy to run a session or help out in some way. Either way i would attend as it would be a great learning exercise.

Not because I am a particularly good blogger but having over two years experience working on FCO blogs I have seen stars fight on the shoulders of Orion. Well not quite but instead I have seen some star diplomatic bloggers in action. So happy to pass on some observed knowledge.

Mentoring is another good idea this could happen one to one or in small groups.

Have started work on a brief guide. It’s a Google Doc, so if anyone wants in, let me know your Google account email.

On the last point, we can improve aggregation, but I agree with Ingrid that it needs some thematic arrangements, and the ability to be selective about which themes are followed. I had a go at that a couple of years ago – almost certainly not right for this purpose, but (I hope) makes the point that anything too obvious is almost certainly wrong. I am also reminded yet again of this approach to classification (which also includes what may be my favourite ever comment on my blog), but that’s by the by.

There is also a risk of this just getting to big to be useful. I find that with Govloop, which is currently sitting accusingly in my feed reader with 449 unread items. That’s too intimidating, so I will just mark them read and move on, and the rate at which it grows means that I pretty much always do that.

So we need something smarter. One way – which is de facto what happens now – is that somebody or bodies select what is covered in the first place. The second is to split the problem into smaller pieces with themes or categories. A third would be to apply some kind of social smarts to it using some Digg-like tool to filter the good stuff to the top of the pile.

Not sure what the answer to any of that might be – which could suggest that a get together to discuss some of it might be a good step (though I would definitely start at the less formal, smaller scale end before deciding to attempt anything bigger).

Final thought: finding a blogging platform isn’t the problem. It is pretty much impossible to imagine anything with fewer barriers to entry than a wordpress.com blog, unless it’s posterous or tumblr – I can’t see any advantage in attempting to improve on that.

The added value for me would be helping the conversation by letting people know what the live debates were – the multitude of blogs makes it difficult to get round even a fraction of them. I’d missed the PSB site and there are loads of blogs there I realise I haven’t got round to.

So I agree with Ingrid – but not one of those automated things – a real person writing a human narrative of what’s happening in the public sector blogosphere. In fact it’s probably a blog… yes a metablog in fact!

Like the round ups of football transfer gossip they have on the bbc and guardian sites..

Guidance definitely needs developing, and event could be quite fun (but we won’t be so foolish as to organise it, will we? Will we, Briggs?). I really like the idea of mentors for new bloggers, and an aggregation platform (not a new publishing platform though) which helps people take their first steps, learn about tools that can help, and gain an audience.

People like the FCO have already been there and done that, for some of their bloggers, of course.

For info, there is analytics code on Public Sector Blogs: about 200 visitors a month is the answer.