Following on from Dan’s post about Brockley Central I came across a collection of great sites focussing on East Dulwich. It seems the leafy south London suburb has quite a vibrant online population. My scientific research led me to the buzzy East Dulwich Forum (it ranks top in Google for ‘East Dulwich’), where members share and discuss everything from how to locate lost relatives to the ‘price of fish’. The forum also has a great list of other local sites, that includes Life in Dulwich, East Dulwich Life, and Beatnic: the blog of fellow techie Nic Price.

With any luck the people of East Dulwich will inspire others to go out and build up their own little space of the web.

Photo by Spencer E Hottaway of the East Dulwich Flickr group.

Announcing our partnership with Wedge Card was not the only thing we had up our sleeve. As some of you may have already noticed, welovelocal now has a rather jazzy groups feature. Groups are a simple way for people to come together around a common interest or issue, and share related reviews and experiences. We spent a lot of time making them really easy to use, and we’re sure you’ll all have fun using them.

The decisions to build groups cam from suggestions that welovelocal lacked the functions for people to discuss more openly. We could have simply bolted on a messaging system, but we have always strived to build features that return to our core goal, to help people find the best local businesses. Groups do both. You can find people who share similar interests, share reviews with each other, and exchange your experiences. You should try them out for yourself.

Wedge Card is the discount card for independent shops and local businesses set up by John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue. Wedge Card aims are simple, to re-vitalise local communities by bringing customers and local businesses a bit closer together. Sound familiar? It should do. Wedge Card and welovelocal.com are a match made in heaven, which is why, from now, on all businesses that accept Wedge Card will appear in welovelocal search results.

Finding great local deals just got that little bit easier.

Everyday I come across new local blogs that house active communities and a wealth of local information. Rather than keep them to myself any longer I’ve decided to start highlighting some of the better ones here on the welovelocal blog.

To kick things off I’d like to bring everyone’s attention to the excellent Brockley Central that posts on range of issues from, the closing of a local pub, to the opening of a new nature reserve. Brockley Central is a testament to how passionate people are about their local area and how the internet can bring it’s residents closer together. Keep up the great work too all involved.

For those who don’t know, Brockley is a rather leafy area of Lewisham. Read the Wikipedia entry on Brockley here, and see photos from the Brockley Flickr group here.

This time round we subtlety hinted that our Fun Free Friday would look kindly upon reviews which gave us ideas of how to spend a Sunday afternoon. Now, strictly speaking, Borough Market wouldn’t qualify for this as it is only open on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays; but Rob’s prolific reviewing (he holds the converted third spot in our Top 100) just couldn’t go unnoticed, so we’ve treated him to a £30 tab at the place of his choice.

Fun Free Friday’s are our way of surprising our most passionate locals. All you need do is review, we do the rest.

Photo by Yuki from the always wonderful Flickr

Many of you have recently got in touch to draw our attention to some linking issues we’ve been having, and we thought it best I explain whats been going on for those still in the dark.

Without going into to much detail, a few weeks ago we were required to slightly alter the way in which some of our URL structures work, more specifically, for the individual business listing pages such as this one of Cafe Kick. The problem this has created is that in some circumstances where the URL used is of the /business/ variety the destination is an error page rather than the intended business. This type of link is used most commonly within your Blackbook and in the Facebook App, so, unfortunately, until new reviews populate your Activity monitor / Facebook profile, you’re going to have a couple of instances of broken links.

Needless to say we’re really sorry for any annoyance this may have caused you. Know that the changes are for the best in the long run, and will make for a much sleeker, shinier, welovelocal.