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

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 young [...]

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 for [...]

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 on Vimeo.
Visit [...]

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 & I’ll [...]

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 – as [...]

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 I [...]

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 cries [...]

Ok, I’ve finally decided I may as well publish my Twitter mosaic; only because the look pretty, mind.
(Mosaics were correct at the time of writing.)
Friends
These are the profiles which I find interesting enough to follow:

Followers
And these are all the folk who – for reasons known only to themselves – are happy to listen to me [...]

The Times Labs have joined the ranks of those pushing Twitter to its limits. It's tweeting the entirety of Romeo and Juliet over the next month: with cats. There are 15 accounts – one for each of the main characters – and a line from the play is tweeted every 15 minutes.

Good to see that the same paper which throws scorn upon Twitter is testing it with such intellectual rigour. Not.

Visit Wherefore art Romeo and Juliet on Twitter?