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

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 [...]

I keep finding myself wanting to blog, but not having anything to write about. It’s not that I don’t do anything – recently I’ve been doing quite a lot – it’s more that I want something easy, different and uncontroversial to cover. I have plenty of opinions but they’re not that interesting, they require a [...]

The internet can be great for supporting and developing friendships, but it doesn’t create them by itself. It’s simply a tool: we use it to support the things we want to do in our lives, which include offline as well as online activity. Friendships may be part of that. Pete Ashton recently wrote about how [...]

This one’s really for Nicky over at Digbeth is Good, but as it could be useful for others it may as well go here. It explains how to use the Postalicious addon to add delicious bookmarks to your WordPress blog as single posts. It presumes a certain degree of experience with these tools. (Example of [...]

I’ve wittered about this before, but I’m still concerned about the dangers of encouraging new people to use social media tools without supplying some sort of pastoral care, or covering some of the social and legal implications that they may encounter. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that most of the time we evangelists [...]

You may have discovered that I’ve suddenly stopped following you on Twitter, or you’ve followed me and wonder why I haven’t followed you back. Here I try to explain myself. I’m currently following 199 people, and for me that’s quite a large commitment because I try to pay attention to all of you. If someone [...]

If the powers-that-be are so keen on digital inclusion, and for citizens to embrace social media, then they need to ensure that connectivity is completely pervasive. For example, the UK government wants to set up a scheme of ‘digital mentors‘. These people would help other people learn how to use ’social media’ to get their [...]