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Just tagging this for www.thericeshow.com – must re-jig postalicious.
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Interesting initiative from Involve and the Scout Association. Scout troops in Birmingham are being invited to take their messages and opinions to the conservative party conference.
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"We are undertaking some of the largest Web 1.0 implementations in the world. I do wish the detractors and the news media would take this into account. "
Author: Nick Booth
links for 2008-09-11
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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."
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" ‘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."
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"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:"
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"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."
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"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.
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"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."
Quality newspaper video from the Birmingham Mail:
[youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiFZtI_KLXQ]
Why do I like this?
Static shots well framed with thought for the lighting. Simple story, well told by one voice, someone we can relate to. No poor voice over from someone who didn’t get into the BBC because they couldn’t broadcast and equally no tacky script riddled with newspaper cliches, the sort of things no one would ever say. Timeless. Finally it gives the pictures a little room to breathe.
So, Birmingham Mail, very well done.
Update: from a comment below (source verified) this wasn’t made by the Birmingham Mail, but provided for them by MG. The Mail has put it up on their youtube channel without telling us that this is provided by a pr company. They haven’t even used the text beside the video to clarify things. Why would a newspaper be so careless about the boundary between what pr people do and what journalists do?
So, Birmingham Mail, very poor.
Tooled Up For School.
[youtube]rOV6h1NNv9E[/youtube]
This video appeared on the West Midlands Police Youtube site last week. It is part of the Tooled up for School campaign.
As I write this has been seen a couple of hundred times. It is a song produced for a dvd which is used in schools to discourage children from carrying weapons. In it the singer Witness uses the phrase “…goodness gracious me” rhymed with ..”weaponry”.
The video is beautifuly made, the music good quality and getting this onto youtube makes sense simply because, with all public organisations, my view is if you’ve got it then share it, somehow.
But this is material designed to be used in a controlled, adult led, educational environment yet is now spilling onto the social web.
Some questions: Had it been intended to make its way on the social web in the first place would it be the same product? Is this optimised to go viral amongst children who will be tempted to carry weapons in school? Is it right that the campaign url www.oneknifeonelife.co.uk essentially re-directs users to part of the West Midlands police website?
The whole programme has been funded by the Birmingham Children’s Fund, Birmingham Community Safety Partnership and West Midlands Police – a force that took to podcasting very early on with the fab Plodcast.