Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

In yesterday’s interview with BBC Breakfast, Digital Inclusion Champion Martha Lane Fox rather worried me. She seemed to be advocating something because someone else had told her it’s a good idea, and not because she understands the issues herself. Martha Lane Fox: “… Government is going to move most of its services onto the web [...]

Nibbler is a free online tool for testing websites. Give it a URL and it will test five associated pages against a range of criteria. It's still in Alpha, and I haven't looked closely to see how it actually works, but it could be very useful as part of a web developer's toolkit. Visit Nibbler [...]

We’re seeing a lot of it lately, in the run-up to a General Election: one party does something bad, the other party jumps on it; then it happens again, but the other way round. But does this bickering do them any good? I for one am put off voting at all, let alone for the [...]

In response to Gordon Brown’s speech on ‘Building Britain’s Digital Future’, Ben Whitnall of Delib asked if interested parties would like to group together to take a lead: ‘let’s get some interested people together and help design the future of digital deliberative democracy for the government. It’ll be faster, better and, with any luck, more [...]

A lot has been going on recently with regard to digital inclusion and civic engagement. People keep publishing reports that I really ought to read for work, but just don’t have the time to; and even if I did, many of them are pretty impenetrable. So I’m going to spread the load. In April I’ll [...]

This appears to be Google's belated answer to StumbleUpon, which has been around for ages. It claims to find cool stuff on the internet based on your interests. I quite like it, but it's bloody hard to find. There was a temporary message in Google Reader shouting 'Try it now!', but that's now gone and [...]

I’m concerned about the Digital Economy Bill so I’ve just sent one of those standard lobbying emails to my MP. I used the online form at 38 Degrees because it was easy, but I made substantial changes to the message (I would have added more but I was in a hurry, hence the convenience of [...]

This is really interesting, because I always assumed that online registration forms were easier to use if their components were separated clearly. This post suggests that in fact a narrative paragraph containing the form fields in-line is more likely to encourage use. Thanks to Martin Black for drawing my attention to this on Twitter. Visit [...]

Today I had a post published on the British Computer Society’s Savvy Citizens website, in which I ponder the challenges and opportunities that the internet brings for effective citizenship. I won’t re-post it here, as I’m sure the BCS would much rather you read it on their blog than mine. Suffice to say I flag [...]

A very good piece by David Schneiderman on the effect of the internet on journalism. I particularly like his 'Final Perspective', which I think applies to organisations acroos sectors: "Many of the fundamental, underlying principles of effective public relations remain unchanged by this emerging world without newspapers. "But make no mistake, the revolution is indeed [...]