Month: July 2008

Has Birmingham's Artsfest gone anti-social on Twitter?

Artsfest twitter

Earlier today I accepted and cheerfully reciprocrated an approach from Artsfest on Twitter.  A few hours later Stef Lewandowski messaged me to ask If I thought it was right for this icon of the Birmingham arts scene to be using an invite bot to find friends on twitter

The short answer is no.  If that’s what Artsfest is doing then they’ve received some appaling advice.  The social web is about human connections – real networks of real relationships.  Using a software robot to make social connections is anti-social. It’s spam.

So like Chris Unitt I am gonna regretfully block Artsfest.  If a human being reads this blog post and can assure me that you’re not spamming please do so in the usual way – using the comments section below.

Government websites need pavements

A simple summary from Steven L Clift about key ingredients for government websites if they are to help strengthen democracy:

The typical e-government experience is like walking into a barren room
with a small glass window, a singular experience to the exclusion of
other community members. There is no human face, just a one-way process
of paying your taxes, registering for services, browsing the
information that the government chooses to share, or leaving a private
complaint that is never publicly aired. You have no ability to speak
with a person next to you much less address your fellow citizen
browsers as a group. As I’ve said for years, it is ironic that the best
government web-sites are those that collect your taxes, while those
that give you a say on how your taxes are spent are the worst or simply
do not exist.

In summary he says websites should be like streets with places to meet and talk. I suppose Steven means government sites should be social objects in their own right.