Tag: blogging

Stuff I've seen December 4th through to December 6th

These are my links for December 4th through December 6th:

  • Measuring digital engagement – Digigov – "Recently, I’ve been working with colleagues in COI on this problem and we’ve come up with three common measures that appear to work across all digital engagement or social media tools:

    1. Number of relationships
    2. Number of user-generated content items
    3. Number of referrals/recommendations"

  • Listening to you – "Residents in Longton and Meir are invited to meet their local police commander next week, and a new billboard will leave them in no doubt of where and when to find him. A 20ft by 10ft billboard has been sited on Weston Road in Meir (near The Broadway) inviting people to come and speak to the local commander. " via @Mike_rawlins
  • Charlie Beckett, POLIS Director » Blog Archive » Networked Journalism: Challenges To NGOs and Mainstream Media – What a relief: "In a recent Polis private seminar with a major international NGO and a global news organisation, the head of the news media’s international division said that he now accepted that they had to work together to report the world:

    “We may have, if we are lucky, one stringer in a particular country. You may well have a dozen people there who know it well. It makes sense for us to use your resources to cover a story or issue.”

    All media organisations are now opening themselves up to gathering material from the public – including NGOs. And NGOs are now expecting their humanitarian staff to act more like journalists. "

  • Freedom to Lead | John’s Idea – "In Leicestershire 92 council staff spend their time keeping government up to date on 3,000 performance indicators at a cost of £7 million a year. The need to reduce these costs, and shift the emphasis of performance reporting from central government to local people, sit at the heart of the LGA campaign Freedom to Lead."
  • CivicSurf » “That’s not a blog. Blogs are boring with lots of text” – Hear, hear: "

    What struck me last night, and not for the first time, was that people still have this ingrained view of what a blog is. When I showed the cake site to one lady she blurted out, “That’s not a blog! A blog is boring with lots of text.” WordPress.com still promotes itself to bloggers and offers:

    “Express yourself. Start a blog.”

    It’s a website that is easy to update and optimised for search engines. End of. Let’s not label it with something that puts people off.

Stuff I've seen November 7th through to November 9th

These are my links for November 7th through November 9th:

Stuff I've seen September 10th through to September 12th

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

  • Google’s PageRank Predicts Extinction Paths | Technology & Gadget News – "The complex algorithm that Google’s uses to rank web pages has been hailed by scientists as a way to predict extinction cascades within ecosystems."
  • Mapping revisited & social change theory « CDI Europe – "The largest opportunity – and the largest experiment – would therefore be to test its social change theory in a space that so far no organisation has consistently occupied: mobile Internet and apps based on smartphones."
  • The Ethics of Openness | Rebooting the System – "Today the default in our discussion of government is negative: they are doing bad things badly, and we are the watchdog who’ll catch the bastards in the act.”
  • At “Blogger Roundtable” To Launch Homeland Security “Dialogue”, DHS Policy Head Heyman Asks For “Shareholders” Input As Part Of “Shared Responsibility” To Help Protect The Nation – "there were three major reasons for bringing the public into the “dialogue”: 1) to raise awareness and engage citizens about the “shared responsibility” for homeland security and address a “sense of complacency”; 2) to include the “shareholders” (ie. citizens) in discussions on how their government should be allocating its resources in homeland security; and 3) to solicit good ideas about how to keep the nation “safe and secure” from across the nation “capitalizing on the knowledge of the public”."
  • Treatment of Alan Turing was “appalling” – PM | Number10.gov.uk – "Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later."

Stuff I've seen August 28th through to August 31st

These are my links for August 28th through August 31st:

  • 15 Unconventional Uses of WordPress – "In this article we will highlight some of the most unconventional uses of WordPress and show you how you can use WordPress in these unconventional way as well." via @problogger
  • Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text | Wired Science | Wired.com – Neat way forward to what we think we can rely on, colur coding the wikpedia stiff that is form people we trust and survives: “They’ve hit on the fundamentally Darwinian nature of Wikipedia,” said Wikipedia software developer and neuroscientist Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the project. “Everyone’s injecting random crap into Wikipedia, and what people agree with more often sticks around. Crap that people don’t like goes away.”
  • Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – "technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions."
  • BBC – Peston’s Picks: What future for media and journalism? – Robert Peston: "the blog is at the core of everything I do, it is the bedrock of my output. The discipline of doing it shapes my thoughts."
  • Access Space Overview & Site Map – Sheffield – "Access Space is the UK’s first free media lab: an open-access learning community where participants learn, create and communicate online. Participation empowers individuals and develops skills, community, creativity and resourcefulness."
  • New feature: custom locations / The EveryBlock Blog – Draw your own neighbourhood: "As a neighborhood news site, we try to maintain accurate lists of neighborhoods and their boundaries, but we're inevitably incomplete. Neighborhoods change, areas get renamed and redeveloped, and even the most well-established districts can have ambiguous boundaries. (In fact, some argue that neighborhoods have no true boundaries, only centers, but a computer needs to be able to draw the line somewhere.)" Via @dominiccampbell