Webcameron has only been around for a week, but it feels longer thanks to the media attention it has garnered, largely due to an unsuspecting Australian poet-performer and a quick-off-the-mark spoof website from UKIP supporters.

When planning a new website domain, checking that all of the domain extensions are available for you to buy (or at least the core ones, including .com and .info) is a basic measure, and failing to do this left Webcameron wide open to attack. The team behind the website has certainly learnt their lesson, with WHOIS showing lots of webcameron domain-buying activity going on over the last few days.

The domain debacle aside, I”ve been impressed with what I’ve seen on Webcameron so far. In contrast to the very basic David Cameron in India blog that ran during the first half of September (the content of which has been transferred to the new site), Webcameron is experimental and bold. There’’s a strong emphasis on multimedia and user-generated content, and although not everything on the site is working 100 per cent smoothly as yet (justified by the ”beta” label), I think it’s a really promising start.

What I particularly like is the inclusion of a Guest Blog where invited contributors, who so far have included writer Jeanette Winterson and political blogger Iain Dale, contribute to the site – an effective way of extending the range of voices on the site and placing it within a wider context. I’m not so sure about the very open Open Blog, where anyone can register to write their own blog entries. If the open blog does produce some good content, it”d be helpful for it to be highlighted or promoted in some way, so that readers can find it easily.

Cameron’s own blog is evolving into a good mix of text and video content – the videos clearly demonstrate that Cameron is fully engaged in this blog, and that’’s crucial if the blog is to be successful. The content itself is, I’ve found, interesting and engaging – I’ve subscribed to the feed and will continue to read and watch new posts. It’s clearly not to everyone’s taste though.

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

Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion has conducted an interesting study on major brands and Wikipedia. The study found that on average, Wikipedia articles appear as result number 11 in Google searches on the top 100 brands in the United States (by advertising spend) - just outside of the first page of results. Many of the brands had Wikipedia articles on the first page - Chevrolet and McDonald’’s, for example, both returned a Wikipedia article at number 4.

Steve’s conclusion is that companies need to ensure they keep an eye on what Wikipedia says about their company / brand. He also makes the important point that it should strictly be a case of ‘look but don’t touch’ - the neutral stance that Wikipedia aims for makes it inappropriate and inadvisable for companies to manipulate entries. Jeff Jarvis echoes this point on his blog.