Tag: Journalist

David Cameron, Tom Steinberg and Information Scraping

Has David Cameron been talking to Tom Steinberg at MySociety?  His announcement yesterday suggests he has because he wants to make ‘scraping’ easier.  Scraping is the process of harvesting information from government websites and reusing it – hopefully for public good.

The Conservative leader quoted a really good example with the mysociety website theyworkforyou which provides collated information about politicians and what they do and allows you to contact your MP. Last month I met Tom Steinberg at the UK Gov barcamp.  What stuck out in my mind is how extending theyworkforyou to include councillors can’t be done at the moment because councils don’t make details of councillors available in a consistent format.   That in turn makes automated collection of this  information a nightmare.  Freeing up data is a key part of Tom’s Power of Information review  and he  also talks about it here:
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So I think it is quite remarkable to see something as apparently prosaic as consistency of data making it into a policy statement from the leader of the Conservative Party.   In his speech he explains how freedom of data will make it easier for social enterprises, charities, community groups to identify and understand local need and solve problems. He’s right.

Local MP Tom Watson is looking for what to do with his new ministerial interest in web strategy.  I’m sure you’ve already had this conversation Tom, but in the spirit of the social web please say that you agree with Mr Cameron and do what you can to get those standards  in place and used.
By the way – yesterday MySociety launched  GroupsNearYou.  I did a tiny bit of testing (adding data and telling them what I thought) in the development stage.  Please go on there and add details of groups near you, the sooner we do that the sooner we can stop more public money being wasted on more online databases of well – groups near you.

I hope you are not a journalist…

An Italian blog recently referenced a twitterquake experience I shared with Jon Bounds and Joanna Geary (and before you reach for the irritating cliche yes the earth did move for all 3 of us – which is why we were blogging at 2am – partly to reassure each other that we were not mad and the earth had just moved).

I left a thank you on the Italian blog (only polite) to which the response included a comment which  translated along the lines of “I hope you are not a journalist..”

Well I am.

I was trained as a journalist and paid as one for the best part of 20 years. I have worked with some of the most intelligent, passionate and honest people I could hope to share office, head and heart space with. In almost every piece of work I do I use story telling skills and in doing that I try to tell people things that are new(s) to them. I remain a member of the NUJ.

Just because the publishing business model is becoming confused it does not mean that journalism is dead. I admire journalists and journalism. I dislike liars, dissemblers and self publicising ego maniacs – whether they are working journalists or not. If your instinct and skill is to tell people the truth quickly and honestly then you are my sort of journalist – whether you are paid or not.

The user is the content.

You may have heard me before railing at the term user generated content. It infuriates me because it embodies two ideas: “you mean we can get them to make films for us for free?” and “Well yes they can use our space but only when and how it suits us”.
It begins with the assumption that you can’t trust the public – or rather the public is just too risky to trust. This has shaped too many public and private sector approaches to sharing with the audience.
Websites don’t exist without links, they don’t exist without readers and hence they don’t exist without community. It is the users, the comments they make, the virtual, intellectual and actual links they establish through using your content that turns it from a string of one and noughts into something with influence in the world.
Without the user there is no content, so learn to trust us.