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

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 set of very handy lists of online web development tools, neatly and clearly laid out. Covers inspiration and design as well as markup, coding and marketing.
Visit Web Design Dashboard

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 more [...]

I haven’t tried it yet, but this could make the creation of web accessible video much easier: it purports to enable you to add transcripts to your YouTube videos. Thanks to Andy Mabbett for alerting me to it.
Visit Easy YouTube caption creator

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 [...]

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 [...]

I just stumbled across this mind map that was instigated by Robin Good. It shows people's favourite online collaboration tools for tasks such as file-sharing, drawing, writing, conferencing, reviewing and whiteboarding. Although it was developed collaboratively it doesn't actually seem to be editable by users: shame, but a great resource nonetheless.
Visit Best Online Collaboration Tools [...]

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 so.
If [...]

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 [...]

Excellent post by Tim Davies. He argues that when it comes to governments and large organisations engaging with technology for social change, there is not one big challenge but lots of little ones; and that as those multiply, the ability to engage effectively shrinks. He then lists 50 key challenges that he's encountered so far this year: so now we know they exist we can do something about them; and – hopefully – improve the chances of technology to support social change effectively.

Visit OpenGov: One big challenge? Or a thousand small hurdles