At the beginning of September the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs launched a wiki for members of the public to help shape a new ”environmental contract” outlining our rights and responsibilities in relation to the environment. With no registration or moderation process, the wiki was left wide open to exploitation – read the reports on Guido Fawkes, The Telegraph and The Register and you”ll see why Defra had to shut down the wiki very soon after launch.

Despite this false start, the wiki is now open again, with moderation and registration controls built in. e-consultancy.com has an interview with David Miliband, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural affairs, where he talks about the wiki experiment, including the need to find a technical solution that balances an open approach which allows anyone to contribute, with some controls to prevent abuse. He also discusses his experiences of blogging and how social networking tools could help build closer relationships between politicans and the public.

A company called Moo has teamed up with Flickr to offer a new service where you can order personalised business cards featuring images from your Flickr photostream. It’s a fantastic idea which is already going down a storm thanks to a great launch giveaway of a free pack of 10 cards to Flickr Pro users – I’ve already seen great reviews of the service on Boing Boing, PlasticBag, TechCrunch and cybersoc.com.

I’ve just ordered my free cards and found the process very simple and easy to use – you just select the images you want to use from your photostream, crop them and then add personalised text to the back of the card. Well worth trying out if you have a Flickr Pro account.

Last night I attended a Beers and Innovation evening organised by New Media Knowledge. The topic for the evening was ”RSS frontiers” - who’s doing what with RSS and what impact is RSS having on media and business in the UK?

Richard Edwards of Zebtab believes that if RSS is to take off from a consumer perspective, we need to focus on the benefits that it brings, rather than the technology and its features. There seemed to be a general consensus that we should stop using ”RSS” and ”RSS feeds” in favour of more accessible and user-friendly descriptions like ”news feeds” or ”feeds” (as I”ve discussed in a previous post).

Ivan Pope of Snipperoo made an interesting point about seeing the content of the feeds you subscribe to as your very own ”magazine” that’s updated throughout the day. This reminded me of SimplyHeadlines which puts the content of your feeds into a newspaper format and emails it to you once a day (found via Micro Persuasion).

The next Beers and Innovation evening, which will focus on content aggregation, takes place in London on 17 October.

Update 18 September 2006: Ian Forrester of BBC Backstage has posted a video of the panel discussion on Blip.tv.

You can also read posts about the event by Ian Delaney at twopointouch and Stephen Tual @ Terapad