These are my links for July 10th through July 12th:

• Intel Social Media Guidelines – Genuinely excellent guidelines for intel staffers on getting involved with social media.
• Not what ships are for at Helpful Technology – "one of the local authority participants contributed a quote which struck a deep chord: “Ships are ’safe’ in the harbour, but that’s not what ships are for” – great spot from Steph
  Amen to that. Here’s to seafaring!
• Google – Local Government – This site is your guide to the tools and best practices your council can adopt to reach, communicate and engage with your community.
• Conversation with communities – A councillor’s guide to social media – Councillors, as local leaders, will have a key role in these changes if they take that opportunity. Enhancing local democracy through greater transparency and providing both a greater voice and a greater responsibility for citizens in setting priorities and delivering public services means that the nature of a representative democracy may change. But the need for elected officials does not go away and there are tremendous opportunities local leaders to use social media to engage with a wider range of people in a powerful, focused way.
• Kebablog » Blog Archive » Surgery anyone? – Steve's experience of the Social Media Surgery in Acocks Green: "2 ladies (bec and mandy? – I may have asked the names, but in the excitement forgot!) came in and asked about setting up a blog, Nick pointed them in my direction and I was happy to help out."
• I couldn’t possibly comment: An open, digital Iraq inquiry – "The inquiry should assume that interesting things will be done with the information they publish off their website by independents." A really thorough explanation from Will Perrin about how the UK Government Iraq Enquiry could use the web and meta data in important ways.