The people who want a government subsidy to run help their business have calculated that "The cost of stringing fibre cables to every home and business could cost £28.8bn, according to a report from the Broadband Stakeholder's Group."

" ‘Web 2.0 challenges the very roots of the public sector ethos’, he says. ‘As if the retreat from paternalism and recognition of the citizen as a customer were not enough, Web 2.0 provides the facilities to put citizens in control. This turns public sector thinking upside-down."

"Twenty years ago, few civil servants would have regularly worked with a computer. Ten years ago, email would have been a novelty for most. Now, we’re wondering why it’s seeming so tough to embed a blogging culture amongst a workforce of whom over 30% (PDF) started work in the 1970s and 64% of whom were filing their first dockets before Tim Berners-Lee’s vague but exciting idea was even conceived.

Douglas Adams was right:"

"Several industrialized countries, such as Great Britain, Spain, Australia and Italy, offer broadband speeds that on average are just below what is necessary to make good use of broadband applications such as watching videos on YouTube, video chatting and small file sharing, the researchers found."

"The likes of Jon Bounds on BiNS and the team at Created in Birmingham are doing an impressive job of drumming up enthusiasm for this weekend’s Artsfest in Birmingham.

Both sites have invested time in providing some simple and informative guides to the various events taking place around the city.

The question is why have they done this when Artsfest is a Birmingham City Council backed programme?"

Good question Paul, although because you can is always a good answer for doing something.

"It may in fact be the case that using social software ineffectively could be worse than not using it at all. Find out using a wide variety of search tools (Google Alerts, Twitter Search) whether people are talking about your entity online. Where are they talking about it? What are they saying? Who are the thought leaders? Regarding adopting social tools that you might not be familiar with, one reasonable approach is to watch what other government entities are trying, and ask them if it is working or not. Another is to try to use social tools internally before using them in a public relations effort."