Wooohooo – we have wifi. Ian and I brought our router in this morning from the office and it just plugged it in. We are downtown for the first half of the week attending the Web for Development Conference at the World Bank “Telling the Development Story to the World.”Some highlights from yesterday...There was a very interesting mix of conservatives who are nervous about interactive components of sites saying “blogs are not the answer,” and some provocative forward thinkers in the first session “Making Key Connections – A Content Odyssey”.Interactive sites-

The need for an interactive site or interactive component of a site is being championed by Earl Mardle, from KeyNet Consultancy... His best point was that if you don't do it [blog] someone else is going to be having this dialogue on their terms -good point to get more conservative organizations on board. He also talked about folksonomy – a really important end user point allowing categories for content to be freely selected by the user that is posting - giving more control to your community. That said - having an open website for political organizations like the Bank or AID is not coming any time soon but I think there is a lot the WHO could borrow from Columbia University's interactive community driven public health portal Go Ask Alice.

Podcasting-Podcasting was mentioned within the first hour of the conference by Nicole Frost, Senior Communications Officer at the World Bank. This is awesome to see such a high up manager being plugged in... When will we see the World Bank podcasting? I wouldn’t count on that anytime soon.Rapid response -In the second section “Web4Dev as a Catalyst for Action” Rapid response was the main issue... ReliefWeb is working on some very exciting content- including auto generate email alerts and maps on the fly reporting on a natural disaster... Their site is amazing and Craig Duncan, the Project Manager that has been part of the project since the mid 1990s, is really working hard to keep plugging in some of the latest technology into a very practical application.More to write after lunch.