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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I’ve drawn up a legal primer for people commissioning or managing websites. This is by no means detailed or comprehensive: it is intended as a starting point and to raise awareness of the issues. I welcome feedback on anything that’s unclear or factually wrong. I’ve posted it here initially, but I may well move it [...]

On the train this morning I had with me my laptop, iPhone, Flip video camera and Zoom audio recorder. But my brain wanted pen and paper: why? It wasn’t that I couldn’t use what I had, but that in order to get my thoughts out of my head relatively intact my brain needed another conduit. The thing [...]

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 [...]

I’ve suffered plenty of headaches trying to create standards-compliant emails, and have given up in favour of bloated, cumbersome, outdated html (ie the stuff of nightmares where the design of each paragraph is dependent on its own font tags).