RSS - really simple syndication or local government gone mad?

Last week I was asked to take over the running of a Wordpress site set up to campaign against the housing targets set by the Regional Spatial Strategy for the area where I live. The reason for the photo is that one of our main defenses is that building on the floodplain near us will heighten the risk of a re-run of July 2007 floods round Tewkesbury.

Sorry - this blog is not supposed to be a rant against the whole system of RSS planning and the predict and provide model (daft thought they both are). The interesting thing about this new challenge is that I am now going to have a practical vehicle through which to attempt to engage my supporters.

The site generates a fair amount of comment from those who are prompted to read it by email or word of mouth, but I want to start generating buzz through other means such as cross posting to other blogs, persuading folks to sign up to the RSS feed, and generating a few bookmark entries in Delicious, Digg etc. One of the issues I have come across quite early on is the tag issue, or to use the jargon of social networkers, folksonomy. How do you know what tags really cut the mustard in a given area? I latched on to the NFP tags through acquaintances on Twitter, but if I don't have any friends on Twitter in the housing debate arena, that's not much good. Time I acquired some maybe!

Well the housing debate is all hotting up with the Regional Spatial Strategy (those initials again) coming up for debate in the Commons at the end of October. Hope I can make some noise before then.