Prime Minister Gordon Brown has launched his own book, ‘Britain’s Everyday Heroes: The Making of the Good Society’, which tells the stories of 33 individuals whose commitment to a cause or campaign has inspired him. East London charity Community Links helped with the book and will receive the royalties. And apparently VolResource is recommended in the resources section.

We’ll add a link to the book on Amazon - it’s discounted by a few quid.

Thanks to a post on the Globalab blog, we’ve ended up with a number of links to sites which I’ve grouped under ‘Social Change 2.0′. That’s discussing using the web, social networking and other ‘Web 2.0′ type things to promote social change. See the Links page, right at the bottom.

And before I get round to writing this blog item, Gordon Brown makes ’social change’ a theme in his support for community and voluntary organisation campaigning, including to “encourage the use of multimedia for community and social action by creating the Awards for Social Technology”. More in this week’s VolResource newsletter, or perhaps view the (edited) Downing Street YouTube video of the PM’s speech.

Here’s one item I probably won’t try to include in the weekly email newsletter, as it would trigger too many spam alarms.

From this week’s Computing magazine: Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) has had to change its email arrangements so that genuine communications covering such topics as HIV and AIDS, Vietnamese currency (dong) and originating from its office at spam hotspot the island of Vanuatu can get through.

Charity fights against overzealous spam filters - 19 Jul 2007 - Computing.co.uk

I really ought to get out and do various stuff in the garden, now that the sun is back in Malvern, but while I’m digesting my lunch …..

The RSS (news feed) aggregator we’ve been using over on VoluntaryNews has improved a lot now that that site has been upgraded to latest software. So adding it here to ’stream’ latest items from charity news blogs and campaign sites seemed a good idea. Take a look at the Blog Pool section.

I’ve scraped around various link pages and bookmarks created over the last year to find appropriate feeds. Some are now dead (although the sites still exist), some, particularly on Blogspot, don’t want to work with the aggregator. We’d be pleased to have suggestions for others - we only poll feeds roughly daily to keep server load down at both ends.

You can of course use CharityBlog to create your own blog news, and this will generate an RSS feed which can be used elsewhere.

Radio 4’s new series of ‘Analysis’ kicked off yesterday evening with a programme called Changing Charities where Professor Alison Wolf of King’s College London asked: “Have we found a third way which offers the best of both public and private? Or just created a threat to charities’ treasured ability to speak truth to power?” Or as it concludes, in the search for the holy grail, will the knight slay charities on the way?

It’s on ‘Listen again’ presumably for the usual week, and the half hour is packed with interviews with prominent sector names, from a variety of perspectives.

Thanks to Karl Wilding for his post to VSSN list.

It’s good to see that the Institute of Fundraising has finally moved away from its old web site which completely ignored accessibility issues. Unfortunately its chosen back room engine, OneStop CMS, makes life a pain if your web browser is set to restrict cookies, continuously asking for a spurious username and password. If you cancel this often enough it WILL go away, but I’ve given in and allowed IoF to set cookies.

And a colleague comments: “It’s still a crap website requiring too many clicks, many of them not very intuitive.” While checking out the cookies issue, I managed to get some very funny layouts, but for me it doesn’t quite get the case study award for how to address accessibility without doing usability.

Development Trusts Association has the same CMS and issue, as surprisingly does the CMS supplier, www.cubik.co.uk.

I’m currently investigating using the open source Drupal for moving the main VolResource into the Web 2.0 world (yuk) so any horror stories on that front welcome sooner rather than later! Plus - a raft a of new third sector groups have adopted Drupal recently, but so far all seem to be hosting the sites in the States. Why?

Response received from IoF Web editor Frazer Orr:

thank you for taking the time to look at the Institute’s new website and posting your comments on Charity blog.

I’m very excited about the potential of the new site.

I know that the cookies thing can be a pain for users who don’t like them being dropped on their computer but the more we understand about how the website is used the better we can make it. This is an issue for more sites than just our own.

I am happy with using onestopcms. It’s a very powerful system and allows us to do a number of things which aren’t possible on other systems. It will be some time before we are getting the most out of it but there are plenty of exciting possibilities.

It does address the issue of accessibility very well which is certainly in its favour.

Your colleague’s comments about finding things difficult to find are very interesting. The site holds a lot of information for a lot of different types of user and we’ve tried to make it as intuitive as possible.

I’m very keen to make the site as user-friendly as possible. There are many ways on the site to send feedback and though we’ve only been live for a week I’m hungry for it. Using the CMS I can move/copy/connect pages easily and use friendly URLs and meta values to try and anticipate what the user needs.

I know that it has been a long wait for the new site but I think it’s been worth it. In many ways, having just gone live, we’re back at the beginning – having to think again about how best to use the site.

Thanks for your comments – keep ‘em coming.