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

I am very sorry to have had to cancel my cookie law event in Birmingham. Please accept some links as compensation. The cancellation is a big disappointment. The key speakers could no longer make it so we tried to find someone else at short notice to give a neutral, authoritative overview of the legal situation. Sadly, without [...]

The good folk at civicuk have built a free tool that takes all the sweat out of complying with the cookie regulations. Cookie Control creates an opt-in for your visitors that is clear, uncluttered and unobtrusive. You can tell it whether to pop up when the page is loaded, how long to pop up for, where to [...]

There has been a flurry of people telling us that we need to react to the change in cookie law, and that we must audit our cookies first. That’s all very well, but how? How do we find out what cookies our websites are setting? Here I give some ways of finding that out. I’ve done [...]

Three years ago I made a flowchart to help people manage their response to how others talk about them online. It was well received, which was a nice surprise. It was a re-working of an existing flowchart, and in trying to simplify the language I had, inadvertently, made the first ‘yes’ thread a little confusing. [...]

Last night I set up the Electronic Civic Council. It’s aim is to encourage people to use geo-location tools to share historical or civic information about places. It came from a chat with Jon Bounds, who in turn had been chatting with Jez Collins about spreading music-related trivia. It’s a bit of fun really, but [...]

A good web presence is a bit like a large public park: it has a main entrance, possibly one or two franchises, and clear indications that you’re inside it. I’ve recently been struggling a bit with explaining why I think an organisation’s web presence need not be concentrated onto one ‘front page’, and this analogy [...]

How can ants help us solve complex problems but, using the same technique, end up walking in an endless circle for the rest of their lives? Why can crowds be much smarter, and at the same time more stupid, than any individual? In Smart Swarm Peter Miller explains how lessons from the natural world have already changed [...]

What happens when paid-for news content online becomes sustainable and influential, but a significant chunk of people who are currently engaged and informed get news from other sources? (This is a very under-developed thought; I’m only putting it here because it’s too long for Twitter.) I never buy the Financial Times, but I used to [...]

A couple of times I have voiced on Twitter my frustration with the arm rests on Chiltern trains. It hadn’t occured to me that the company might be listening. Since nothing happened the first time I tweeted, I suspect that Chiltern were not using Twitter then. However, when I tweeted again recently… “I’ve asked before [...]

It frustrates me that organisations still seem to think they can manage their reputations by controlling what information is spread about them. This is simply not possible anymore, and attempting it just makes you seem heavy-handed and out of touch. Far better to listen to what other people are saying about you and engage when [...]