Last week, while looking at the effectiveness of microformatting government media releases, the vexed issue of metrics reared it’s head. Vexed, because it is an ongoing issue for communicators, public sector and otherwise, to collate and report communcations metrics; even more so for the newer social media tools.
The sense of dissatisfaction I felt with my [...]
Just over I year ago I posted the first government social media release, using an in-development microformat, hRelease. Since then, I have issued 7 more releases using this format (you can see them all on the e-government site). During the course of that year the markup has evolved as I worked with the hRelease working [...]
Chris Wilson posted an interesting article on Slate last week, The Wisdom of the Chaperones, that uses some interesting data on Wikipedia and Digg contributors to look critically at the notion of the wisdom of the crowd.
Essentially, Wilson points out that these social sites are not built and maintained by the masses, rather they are [...]
February 24, 2008 – 8:19 pm
Reading through the latest Pew research paper, A Portrait of Early Internet Adopters, at the same time as talking with colleagues from a variety of government agencies over the previous week, I was reminded how the challenges that social media present to government are neither particularly new nor require especially innovative or radical management responses.
It [...]
January 20, 2008 – 5:11 pm
Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC, last week on the BBC blog posted a speech he gave called The Trouble with Trust. At over 6,000 words it is a long post, but if you are a public sector communicator, it is well worth the read – for some very different reasons.
Thompson wants to [...]
December 19, 2007 – 2:50 pm
Having finally arrived at the last couple of working days of what has been, without too much of an understatement, a pretty tough year I am only too happy to fulfill my obligations to those few loyal readers and send you off towards the break with a little light entertainment.
Once a decade or so, you [...]
December 16, 2007 – 7:15 pm
Andy Oram wrote a post on Friday that triggered some thoughts of my own about reputation management, and how public sector communicators can approach this issue. Oram attended a Yale symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace and has since been providing thorough coverage and analysis.
What I found interesting about his first post (he has posted [...]
November 11, 2007 – 2:56 pm
I have been wondering why it is that we are all working ourselves into early graves trying to transform government, the achievement of which will largely be driven by Internet based technologies, and yet we continue to disclaim the content we post to our websites?
It strikes me as being analogous to saying to someone who [...]
November 4, 2007 – 2:28 pm
Demos and the Victorian State Services Authority have embarked on a project to explore the concept of agile government. The first product of this collaboration was what they described as a provocation paper, released in September, and called – as you might expect – agile government PDF [238 KB].
The focus of the project is to [...]
Censoring social media
Some of you may have seen the post a couple of weeks ago on TechCrunch that caused a fair amount of comment and controversy in the blogosphere. The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos was a spectacularly ill-advised and unintentionally revealing account of one marketer’s techniques for placing client videos in prominent spots on the [...]