Social media continues to grow apace and takes many forms.
The webteam at Haddenham dotNet is aware that a new option is currently being touted as 'the new means of staying in touch with your neighbours in the local community'. Some readers may have received emails or even letters looking to recruit them to this new platform.
Clearly, we all value choice.
However, the latest offering claims to be "local" but is actually a national level commercial enterprise looking to create a localised advertising platform.
We see little evidence that its content is being actively moderated. Nor do we see any effort from journalists to provide local content of their own – rather, they are relying on residents to create the platform from their own posts.
We at Haddenham dotNet are clear about our aims and objectives:
1. To provide a community website that offers very local news, information and contact details for every kind of organisation, school, club, society and charity in the village
2. To support and celebrate our sense of 'one community', especially as the village grows rapidly
3. To provide a vehicle through which we can acknowledge and thank those who contribute freely their own time and talents to the community, and to offer tributes to those who are no longer with us
4. To provide a free platform for the advertising of jobs and the services of local tradespeople and service providers
5. To capture a photo-archive of Haddenham's social events and activities down the years
6. To maintain a community Facebook page that works in partnership with the HdN website, but with the added facility that allows residents to post their own content and comment on local issues
7. To maintain a local Facebook page that is actively moderated to ensure that its content is very locally focused and fair, decent and inclusive
8. To achieve all the above as a free service to the community, offered by volunteers who have no desire to generate revenues through commercial advertising or the selling of browsing histories, contact information or any other covert data mining activities.