I'm happy to announce a new service that Collaborynth hopes to provide to Councils across the country.

When I'm talking to clients, one of the things I really try and avoid doing is breaking out into Lingua Marketing. That very special language spoken by sales and marketing which can bamboozle the best of us. I don't like it and I don't think it's necessary. Even worse is when I see very cool ideas succumb to the perils of Lingua Marketing, I tend to get annoyed.

One such cool idea - more a collection of ideas really - is the concept of Web2.0.

Just as a quick follow up to my previous post about Social Networking and Local Government, the Local Government Association Conference is currently taking place in sunny Broken Hill, and they're encouraging participants who have twitter accounts, to micro blog their time.

As some of you may know, I have joined the micro-blogging craze and registered myself a twitter account and it's been an interesting experience, something like a cross between slow motion irc and blogging.

When I'm not building up the business or exploring the world of New Media, I like to work on the vegie garden that we're building at home. We started this a month ago as a way to both teach the kids about the wonders of growing things and to take vegies out of the shopping equation. So far we're doing pretty well, however I've learnt some lessons in building the garden that can definitely be applied to building a collaborative project.

1. Ensure Your Bed Is Built Right

It's always nice to see your work being recognised, and last week Randwick Council, one of our local government clients – was awarded a Merit Award for Corporate Sustainability Excellence in Local Government. They achieved this through the use of an Extranet system that we support and host for them.

I've blogged about it before, but I think it deserves another mention because of the sheer coolness of it. The Local Government Web Network Conference 2008 has been running since yesterday and will be ending today. They're covering topics as diverse as basic Web Development skills right up to intranet design and CMS selection.

One of the latest buzz phrases being thrown about the IT sector at the moment is Cloud Computing. Essentially this is the traditional client-server architecture writ large. Where once you would use a Word Processor and save to a server on your local network, you're know using a web based word processor and saving to the Application Providors infrastructure.

I was going to write a post about some up and coming Collaborynth services, but I need to fine tune a couple of things first of, so I'm going to blog about this instead.

Congratulations to Belinda and the crew down at Dynamic Moves Dance for winning the Lake Times Business Person of the Year award.