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

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 [...]

Is it possible to work full-time without an office, simply taking advantage of free wifi offerings? To find out, I intend to spend one week trying it. And I call on others to do the same. The dates are yet to be confirmed, but I hope to try and work for a full five days [...]

With so much of people’s conversations and personalities now available for everyone to see, is there a responsibility on us as users of social media to keep an eye out for others? If the answer is ‘yes’ – as I should hope it is – does that mean that we should also learn to see [...]

Explaining to the uninitiated why web feeds are useful is something a lot of us find hard to do. So here I’ve attempted to draw an analogy: with fish. I’m not actually going to try and explain what RSS is (or equivalents such as Atom), because it’s a bit technical and has a confusing history [...]