Tom Watson , William Perrin and the Power of Information taskforce shows off some mock ups for crime mapping by neighbourhood and the whole social media story makes it onto the Telegraph’s front page with a couple of subsidiary articles – including one mentioning West Midlands Police mapping site. Practical and political! Crime mapping has been useful tool in the US for a few years now, some of it inspired by tracking gun crime and is seeing growing use in the UK.
Tag: Journalist
Journalism from the UK Parliament Twitter Stream
If you modestly define journalism as telling people what they need to know when they need to know it I think the various British Government twitter streams are getting into the swing of that.
This on David Davis and his resignation as an MP from UKParliament (which uses its biog to describes itself as “Keeping an eye on government, debating laws, raising taxes”) is a good example of what might have once happened in a newspaper – journo rings press office and asks: “so what exactly is the procedure for resigning from parliament?”, press officers checks details and piece is written and appears in paper. This is a modest example of journalism but it does show how much collective efforts press officers and journalists have wasted by duplicating bits of each others jobs. We don’t need the journo to do that anymore. They can do something more useful.
By the way here’s the link to the info on the Chiltern Hundreds.
Update:
Dave Briggs and Ewan McIntosh alerted me to Stratford on Avon District Council starting to use twitter. As Dave says “sometime you just have to give things a go. And it’s great that someone in local government is doing just that.” What I like is that the council uses the description of the feed as “Short, simple news” which is a more honest description of how man bodies use twitter – subverting the orignial use of “what are you doing now”.
Is the British Government planning a new department of Digital Cleaners?
According to the FT the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, thinks he may be able to not just control product placement in TV programmes but also on the web!. To quote from Neville Hobson’s blog post (nice spot Neville)
Andy Burnham, culture secretary, said the government had an economic interest in protecting standards in UK broadcasting because they were “part of Britain’s brand when it comes to world markets”.
No worries, you might think, there’s always the internet. But they’ve got that covered, too:
[…] And in comments that may alarm the digital media industry, he suggested that the government should have a role in ensuring the same standards were met on the internet as on television and radio.
“If a clip on YouTube gets a million hits, it is akin to broadcasting and it doesn’t seem to me to be too difficult to have an alert on that clip, an alert for violence or for sex,” Mr Burnham said.
Oh dear. Someone somewhere is confused.
So what are they gonna do? Count every time every online video is watched? Which ones – the ones made in the UK, uploaded to the UK, available in the UK? Just the ones on Youtube?
Then what? When a video reaches a certain popularity a crack team of digital nano cleaners (perhaps we could call them Civil Surf) will swoop into the interwebs and pixelate out any potentially placed product – or maybe re-arrange the ones and noughts so they look like Andy Burnham?
Or they could ban British production companies from putting products in video which may appear on the web – and in the process kill one of this countries fastest growing wealth creating industries.
Overall a sad, sad, idea.
Perhaps it does reveal how government is already thinking about ways in which it should/could control the internet when it no longer is able to regulate the media through the current mechanism of owning the bandwidth.
Update: Sunday 15th. Here’s a link to the speech itself: Some quotes:
With so much of the online world untrusted, I feel we should preserve standards of accuracy, impartiality and trustworthiness, rather than dismantle them. People still use the internet and TV for different reasons and with different expectations and we mustn’t forget that.
and:
But the penetration of the internet to all of our lives, means that I think that people don’t want it to feel like the wild west. Things some people accept as inevitable in terms of governance, I believe we should question.
Why? Because as, for example, Tanya Byron finds in her report there is a climate of anxiety, as well as opportunity that surrounds new technology.
You do have to stop and think when you read a quote from a nine-year old boy in Tanya’s report about whether we are sufficiently controlling this online world in which our children are roaming. It’s funny but it does make a very important point. He said: “I’m worried I’ll get lost on the internet and find I’ve suddenly got a job in the army or something.”
It made me laugh and I’m glad it made you laugh too but I think it makes an important point.
I think it’s well worth a read. He’s thinking through some important problems – yet the instinct to control rather than educate is the wrong one. It goes back to the simple reality that we should teach our children to cross the road – not prevent them going anywhere near a road.
Environmental News Online blog: The Musical.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8_TSXassg8]
A cracking video made to promote a Birmingham blogging venture – Environmental News Online. The site has been run by a group of journalism students working with Paul Bradshaw and the Online Journalism Blog at Birmingham City University. A month or so ago I helped in a session with the students to encourage them to think of ways of using the network effect to reach a wider audience with the blog. Nobody at the time thought of writing a song and putting it on youtube, but it’s a classic example of media as a social object. The video has given me the desire and the excuse to write about what they are doing – to join their conversation.
Nice one. Now would you like to mention this film Podnosh made about cutting co2 in Birmingham on ENO?