The thing about websites in local areas is that they’re often not very well linked to one another. I found in Stoke that I would struggle to find websites I’d seen on a shop sign unless I remembered the exact address, because Google wasn’t aware of their existence (see How to get the top of Google). This annoyed me, because I have replaced by memory with Google.
Social Stoke was started to combat this problem and it has two sections: a straightforward blog and a delicious map. The blog looks nicer than a delicious page and means I can add pictures and longer articles, but mainly it is just an aggregate of delicious feeds.
The tag cloud is more useful. As it builds, it creates handy lists of different subjects. For example, here are our local pottery firms and here are some museums. As noted elsewhere, the lists can automatically become RSS feeds for embedding into other sites or tracking on a feed reader.
The easiest way to open this up to collaboration – and it’s great to do this because if you don’t have a passion for fishing clubs, you can be sure someone in your local area does – is by asking people to create their own delicious account and start tagging, including ‘for:socialstoke’ (or whatever your username is). This means you can keep the tags consistent while still sharing the workload.
It doesn’t take very long to make a really useful tag cloud and it makes those Saturday nights watching the X-Factor with your laptop on feel so much more productive!