Tag: Government

Stuff I've seen from May 2nd to May 6th

These are my links for May 2nd through May 6th:

  • twittl | Twittl – Chat Catcher is a simple script that you can install on your website or WordPress blog and it will pull in all conversations related to your blog post from Twitter, Friendfeed, and Identi.ca. These conversations get posted as comments/trackbacks on your blog post. http://tr.im/kCji
  • Working Together – Public Services on your side. – Working Together – Public Services On Your Side details the steps the Government is taking to give people, communities and frontline staff the information and real power they need to personalise public services. Reflecting their local and individual needs will create a richer, fairer and safer society.
  • Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky – “It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”
  • Pixelpipe – Free your content, post, upload and share anywhere – Pixelpipe is a content distribution gateway that allows users to publish text and upload photos, video and audio files once through Pixelpipe and have the content distributed across over 75 social networks, photo/video sites and blogs, and other online destinations. We provide a number of mobile & desktop applications for users, liberating their media and sharing their life.

Don't tell the COI but every government news stream now has it's own twitter account.

Some of you will have mixed feelings about this but every major news feed out of the UK government now has it’s own twitter account. What’s interesting about this is the whole process is unofficial.  I’ve no doubt Tom Watson will be delighted, but what will the COI make of this unofficial use of information?  -They’re already working on improving websites, hopefully they will understand this as an improvement in their web presence.

I’m going to quote Geof Cole, who has done this deed:

The Central Office of Information run a rather good website called the News Distribution Service, formerly the Government News Network. Below the fold are the RSS and Twitter feeds in three groups – aggregate, departmental and regional.

Unfortunately, no-one knows about it as the COI doesn’t do much to promote it despite being “the Government’s centre of excellence for marketing and communications”. It consists of news updates for all the big bits of government – departments, agencies and regions – that you could want. It’s a good way of keeping an eye on what they’re all up to an finding the occasional hidden gem of a press release. They’ve had RSS feeds for ages and now they’re on Twitter (thanks to yours truly).

I do hope someone in government picks up the admin for this. If you want to see a full list of the feeds, including your regional one, then here’s a link to Geoff’s blog.

—

Update, others on this:

Neil Williams: “It’s likely there will be lots of crossover between Dave’s NDS-fuelled feeds and these civil servant powered accounts, so choose wisely which to follow. The human-edited tweets will offer more than just press releases but they might also be selective about the news they deem tweet-worthy.”

Stuff I've seen April 18th through April 21st

These are my links for April 18th through April 21st:

  • Better ways to share information digitally « Observations – The Observatory’s Population & Society Group is planning a seminar in the summer to investigate and discuss how research organisations in the West Midlands can get better at sharing information digitally. Do you have any thoughts on this?
  • Google News Timeline – Google News Timeline supports lots of different types of queries that you can add by clicking on a checkbox below.
  • Birmingham City Council Press Releases – An independent site that purely exists to allow a space for commenting on Birmingham City Council Press Releases.
  • World Bank API – Welcome to the World Bank Developer Network! – The World Bank's first API offers 114 indicators from key data sources and 12,000 development photos (see all sources). We are releasing this API because we believe this information can be mapped, visualized and mashed up in an unlimited number of ways that will help develop a better understanding of trends and patterns around key development issues.
  • The Conservative Party | News | The Blue Blog | Making Government data work for you – "MySociety are campaigning for Parliamentary bills to be published in an internet-friendly format, so the public could be kept up-to-date with their progress through Parliament. Thankfully, David Cameron agrees – it’s a great idea, and one that could lead to a UK version of OpenCongress (or, better still, our version of YourOwnDemocracy – an ambitious US project still in its early stages) becoming reality."

Stuff I've seen April 5th through April 6th

These are my links for April 5th through April 6th:

  • Walkit.com gets a redesign. – Need I say more!
  • Government Needs Smart-sourcing, Not Crowdsourcing | techPresident – Clay Shirky, while in London last month promoting the release of Here Comes Everybody in paperback, said the following: “All the rhetoric, including – I’m embarrassed to say – some of mine, has assumed in the past that democratic legitimation is itself enough to regard aggregate public opinion [online] as being clearly binding on the government. I’ve changed my mind.”
  • G20: Tom Watson MP – Watch the short youtube film from Lloyd davis where Tom Watson explains why the G20 matters and why it’s important that bloggers were given access to the conference.