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

I supported the idea of strategies and policies for Twitter or social media when it was evident that people in managerial positions needed a solid, reassuring case for allowing their communications staff to use those tools. But I hope things have moved on now. I keep hearing people talking about how they’ve written a ‘set [...]

Yesterday I told you I was to be liveblogging with a couple of cabinet ministers. Well, I did it. The result below is not a comprehensive account of the session, but I got as much down as I could. 5:37 Andrew Mitchell telling us how great Birmingham is, and how the Tories enjoy coming here, and [...]

Lots of people in the voluntary sector will tell you that your organisation should be using Twitter*, and that it’s easy to engage with your audience by doing so. What many seem to overlook is that while Twitter may well be a useful tool for your work, there is no ‘one size fits all’ model [...]

According to new research, most young people aged 14-25 would be likely to vote in an election and would be more likely to if they could do so online. However, they don’t see social networking as particularly useful for furthering a cause, favouring instead an email to their Member of Parliament. A recent YouGov poll [...]

A while ago I chewed over the problem of making it easy for members of the public to leave useful contextualised information for others in spite of opposing commercial incentives. Whether their developers intended it or not, foursquare could be the solution. I had been incensed by a cashpoint in Birmingham’s International Convention Centre. It [...]

I’ve been lookikng for a good audio sharing service for a while, and stumbled across Audiofarm. You can choose to grant your files ‘preview only’ playback or Creative Commons licencing. It would be great if the site also offered some annotation features and codes for embedding into web pages as well as the sharing options [...]

I find it exceptionally difficult to believe that I have any skills of note, and keep meaning to force myself to try and audit them just to check. So here I’ve spelled out what I do in my day job, and some of the challenges I’ve faced. Although I’m still not sure I know any [...]

In his Digital Britain Final Report, Lord Carter sets out his plan to keep Britain “at the forefront of the digital revolution”. But a revolution needs revolutionaries, who are driven by passion and not just economic incentive. Has this report overlooked the importance of people as volunteers, and the impact on their social contributions of [...]

Last week I went to hear Lord Carter discuss his Digital Britain Final Report in Birmingham. I took a laptop and tweeted a little. As a crude record of what I wrote, what follows is my Twitter stream for that event. All I’ve done is take the html from Twitter Search and pasted it here [...]

Jo Swinson, Liberal Democrat MP for East Dunbartonshire, is trying to convince Parliament to allow the posting of parliamentary footage to social media services such as YouTube. She is asking other Members of Parliament to sign her Early Day Motion in support of putting parliamentary procedures online. At the time of writing 28 have done [...]