501derful.org
Actually, the reason for the FICenter meeting wasn’t just to pose for the corny picture posted below but to discuss the outcomes of the NVHA Innovations conference. The conference was a roaring success. It was well thought out, well run, had excellent faculty, excellent multi-agency participants, and left everyone fired-up to venture into the world of Internet social commentary. Kudos, again, to Randy Moss and Mike Mitchell for all their work and, I think, courage.
One of the outcomes: raising the visibility of FISpace. We–like many of our organizational colleagues at the conference–felt cautious about exposing our first blog, FISpace, to the scrutiny of the blog-o-sphere. Seemed pretty risky given the great caution usually maintained on the public face. The site was passworded when we began. To keep FISpace low profile there are a number blogging tools and strategies that we have not used.
But now we’re ready to take the next step. The speakers sort of convinced us that you’re really not testing the power of community dialog if you don’t talk loud enough to be heard in the conversation.
There are a number of revamps of FISpace that will be made this weekend if I can get around to all of it. Here’s what I’m gonna do:
- Remove the "don’t follow" instruction in the file tree at TypePad so that the site can be crawled by search engines. FISpace has been blocked from searching by Google for instance. No more.
- The RSS feed for posts will be published by TypePad to a couple of blog update lists.
- We’ll enable "TrackBacks" so that if FISpace is commented on by other bloggers we’ll know they’ve picke up our URL.
- We’re going to start posting a "blog roll," a list of notable sites related to the subject matter of FISpace. Note, "notable" doesn’t mean "endorsed."
It won’t be an extreme makeover, trendy as that my be. It’ll be more of a "coming out" saying "We’re here."
