“Want more local food in your shops and on your plates? The WI has the tools to help you get it.”

Welovelocal.com is excited to announce its brand new partnership the Women’s Institute. Have you ever wondered how you could do your bit to eat more locally produced food, but never really been sure of the best way to go about it? Well, the WI has been actively promoting living local for some time now. They have developed a really great toolkit that is used by WI’s, community groups, shops, and suppliers. The toolkit includes tips and information on how to get started living, and eating locally. There are helpful Q&A’s on what really defines local food, and what makes it so much better.

This is a really exciting initiative that ties in perfectly with what we are about here at welovelocal.com. The toolkit encourages people and communities to reap the social and health rewards from eating local food - that has not traveled thousands of miles before it reaches you, the consumer.

Interestingly the living Local toolkit taught us that: ‘every £10 spent with a local food initiative is worth £25 to the local economy, compared with just £14 when spent in a supermarket chain’ (New Economics Foundation, 2001)

This introduction is a little late coming as I have met quite a few of you already - others may have seen me around on the site. Anyway I will formally introduce myself; I am Helen, the latest addition to the welovelocal team. I have been here for three weeks now and I must admit it is pretty damn exciting. I am really enjoying getting familiarised with the site and its great community. Speaking of community, I suppose it would be a good time to mention that I am now the first port of call for all welovelocal community related issues, and most importantly this lovely blog! I must admit I am a bit of a fan of blogging, I think it is due to the fact that I have so much to say all the time (I like to call it passion).

Ok, so here is the bit about me, I am going to attempt make this as least cringe-worthy as possible. I am a huge fan of London and a real advocate for everything local. As someone who has just moved to the city from the sleepy south coast I spend most of my free time exploring. I actually can’t believe how helpful some of the reviews that are written on here are. I plan my weekends based on the descriptions that I read in the week (thank you reviewers!). I spend all my other time crafting, baking and seeking out vintage bargains oh and I dabble in indoor skydiving. I suppose my reviews provide a good insight into what I like and don’t like.

So that’s me covered, it would be good to know a bit more about all of you out there using the site, and not just individuals. It would be awesome to get to know more about all the active local communities out there in London and across the UK. So if you’re out there it would be cool if you drop me a line and say ‘hi’.

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.

For those of you have been paying attention you’ll know that we make a habit of rewarding our community of locals with what we call Fun-Free-Friday. We also hinted that reviews of local trades people would go down particularly well this time round, and some of you actually took notice. This week it was Pandora G’s review of Leakbusters, which grabbed our attention and helped her grab a £25 voucher for the always wonderful Heals Department Store.

Fun-Free-Fridays is a way of surprising some of our most original reviewers. However, you can gain extra brownie points (alas, there aren’t actually any points) by taking heed of our less than subtle suggestions. For example, at the moment weloveGREATPLACESTOSPENDASUNDAYAFTERNOON.

You may have noticed a subtle change to our homepage last week. You can now skip through past Featured Reviews to check out some of our favourite local recommendations over the last few weeks.

Well, just when you thought “pick of the day” Featured Reviews couldn’t get any better, we’ve decided to run a weekly competition to reward the insightful local experts who are selected by our team of editors.

From today, a new featured review will be selected daily based upon a set theme. Each Friday we’ll announce one lucky winner who’ll win a prize related to the theme.

To kick start the first Fun Free-Stuff Friday we’ll keep it simple. So we want you tell us about the best places in London to eat or drink al fresco - places with a great pub garden, terrace, roof top or just great views. Every review on this theme will then be considered for this week’s Fun Free-Stuff Friday where you can win £30 towards your tab at the winning venue. The perfect start to the weekend.

Winners will be announced every Friday and will be contacted using your account email address. The decision of welovelocal.com will be final.

As well as loving local, the developers here at welovelocal love short release cycles too. This means that when we build new features, you get them sooner rather than later. We don’t like waiting around here and we’re always ready to push out our sexy new features to our sexy users straight away.

Obviously the major thing we released was our £10 Amazon voucher for 10 reviews. We’ve already given out quite a lot of vouchers in the last few days, and there’s still loads of time to get your reviews in and claim your tenner. If you’ve not signed up yet, what are you waiting for? Writing 10 reviews is easy!

We’ve changed our action panel on the business page too. If you go on any business page, you’ll see the same yellow panel as usual, but now it comes with super slide-down animation. Very nice. Also, you can now check out how to get to your new favourite business using Transport for London’s public transport directions.

If you’re one of those media types, you can check out our new press section, which features a video review from Center Networks, various links, downloads and a press login for the site so you can check out a full user account without having to sign up yourself.

There’s plenty of other stuff too, such as the new chart in the review section of your profile, and lots of bug fixes that we’ve ironed out. We’ve got loads and loads of features planned for version 1.4, our whiteboard is crammed full, so keep your eyes peeled for them in the very near future!

That’s right, for the month of July we’re offering a £10 Amazon Gift e-Voucher for sharing your local knowledge. Review ten businesses in London, and as a small thank you in return we’ll email you an Amazon Gift e-Voucher to spend on whatever you like at Amazon.co.uk. Easy.

How does it work?

1. Sign up/login to welovelocal.com.
2. Spruce up your profile with a bit about yourself and a photo.
3. Write 10 reviews of any business in London. We’ll be checking all reviews individually, so we won’t accept any old junk!
4. Once your reviews have been accepted, we’ll email you a £10 Amazon e-Voucher. This should be within 48 hours of submitting your tenth review.
5. Enjoy and go shop!

You can read the full terms and conditions here

Feel free to tell people you know about the offer, welovelocal.com is a much better place with friends.
As you already know, we want to take word of mouth online, so help us build the welovelocal.com community and spread the word, because local’s better with friends.

We had the opportunity to attend Library House’s Essential Web event yesterday which aimed to showcase the very best of European innovation from the web. Presentations varied from some Europe’s fastest growing sites such as Jaiku and WAYN through to new exciting new start ups like parkatmyhouse.com and Huddle.

Chaired by a remarkably quick witted Doug Richards, CEO of Library House (also of BBC’s Dragon’s Den Fame),the Essential Web proved to be a invigorating look at the range of web activity currently taking place across Europe.

We were fortunate enough to be also presenting. Within the competition section of the day we were chosen for the ‘Elevator Pitch’ segment where we were given an initial 60 seconds to tell everyone how great welovelocal.com is. Amazingly, despite my rushed presentation, we were voted into the final to close the event, where we went on to voted by the audience as the winning website!

In a room which was more or less a who’s who of the European web community, we were quite shocked, but pleased, by our victory. Thank you everyone who voted welovelocal!

After several application attempts, I was pleased to discover earlier today that our Facebook application has finally been accepted into the Facebook Directory.

I actually finished developing the Facebook application for welovelocal.com a day before the official release but we have had some difficulties getting it into the public directory - two of our applications were rejected for not using Facebook Platform features, even though we really were!

There was speculation that because you have to have an account on welovelocal.com before you can use the application, the Facebook guys were just declining it and I think that is probably accurate. I eventually ended up e-mailing them directly to explain the problem and it seems to have resulted in us getting approved.

In other Facebook related news, watch out for an in-depth tutorial I have written on how you can utilise the Facebook Platform to make the most of their gazillion users and provide useful content for profiles whilst also promoting your own site/service…