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 [...]

I’ve just read on the cover of Metro that the details of Prince William’s wedding ceremony were released ‘exclusively on social networking site Twitter’. Even Clarence House is bypassing traditional news outlets; so are we finally seeing the demise of ‘traditional’ media? No, probably not. The thing is I didn’t discover this news on Twitter. [...]

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 [...]

Recent research reveals that young people in the UK have little faith in journalists, but see them as having the greatest influence on government decisions. And tabloid journalists, it seems, are the worst of a bad bunch. The research was undertaken last week by online pollsters YouGov, on behalf of the Citizenship Foundation. Almost 4,000 [...]

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 [...]

Jon Bounds just tweeted this, which is just stunning: “GoodMorning! is a Twitter visualization tool which shows about 11,000 tweets collected over a 24 hour period between August 20th and 21st. The tweets were harvested to find people saying ‘good morning’ in English as well as several other languages.” GoodMorning! Full Render #2 from blprnt [...]

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 [...]

The furniture shop Habitat recently made a very wobbly entrance into Twitter, by not appreciating the norms that have evolved there. Not good for a trusted brand; although even with the disgust voiced by some in the community I doubt it’s damaged their business particularly. However, the episode did spawn this blog post, which – [...]

Does what it says on the tin. Well actually it does more: it lists the RSS feeds and Twitter accounts of UK government departments, and bigs up the Central Office of Information's News Distribution Service (http://nds.coi.gov.uk/). Visit Government Department News Feeds on Twitter

I keep telling people how my life has altered since using Twitter, even though I’m well aware of how sad that sounds. The thing is it’s not really about Twitter at all, but about people: all Twitter did was help me find them. This post will appear particularly self-indulgent: it’s trying to articulate something that [...]