Tag: Leadership

Gapingvoid quote on being a blogger:

From here:

“The best thing about being a blogger is the people you get to meet.” I have found this to be true and self-evident. When I was younger, the people who inspired me the most professionally were famous, dead, or both. Since I become a blogger the people who inspired me the most became good friends of mine. We hung out. We drunk beer. We ate pizza. It wasn’t a big deal, it was just… lovely. Back in 2004, my blogging buddies and I knew we were onto a good thing. Something powerful and creative and earth-changing. But that’s not the main reason we liked it. We liked it because we enjoyed it, because it was interesting, because of the smart, passionate, fun people we were starting to hang out with.

A decade from now, maybe blogs as we know them won’t even exist. Maybe they’ll call them something else. Do I care? Not really. What matters, like Loic (my link)and I talked about, is the people you get to meet. That’s where the magic lies. Ten years from now, these people will still be around, geeking out on the internet at the latest WHATEVER that’s coming down the pike. They’re not going anywhere, and Thank God for that.

Oddly enough my twittercloud got me thinking about the people I enjoy talking to and how far that is at the root of friendship.

Urban Obsessives or Civic Revolutionaries, they still look much like this…

Uban Obsessive

Take a good look at this picture. It is full of what I would call ordinary folk. None of them appear to be super heroes, to fit the heroic mould we have created for our social entrepreneurs and active citizens.

They are David Barrie’s fellow “bloody minded obsessives” who have collaborated on this urban project. He tells us

there are about ten people missing from the shot but this picture includes community leaders, an architect, a property developer, a former school cook and a janitor who won an Order of the British Empire – in part for her commitment to the cause. Every town or city in the world has such a group.

Dejan calls them urban obsessives.

Doug Henton of Collaborative Economics has a positive, more romantic catch-all description of the cadre.

He calls them civic revolutionaries.

I mention it simply because it is people such as these that populate the stories of the Grassroots Channel Podcast. You can see some of the pictures of these folk on our flickr account. More than 50 stories almost all from Birmingham. That’s a lot of bloody-minded urban obsessive civic revolutionaries for one city – but I know we’ve only just scratched the surface.

Downing Tweet : and so the conversation begins.

Downing Street Twitter - want to talk?

More on Downing Street on Twitter this lunchtime, Very friendly, would like to have a name behind the address please and I suppose my feedback would be that until we know who you are we don’t really know how to relate to you.

There has been loads of blog other suggestions since the Downing Tweet Twitter feed appeared last Thursday.

Here on Podnosh we were asking if this was anything special and what the social web might mean for politics and patronage, as we all potentially dance the merry dance of getting digitally close to those in power.

Simon Collister puts us social media enthusiasts in our place by reminding us that:

I spoke to a client’s government relations manager recently about how he communicates with MPs and Peers. His reply was: “Mostly by phone or letter…. Although some are starting to now use email.”

Emma Mulqueeny is a twitter fan and summarises why it does and doesn’t work:

Twitter rocks – but only if you use the Internet to communicate: email, Facebook, blogs etc. If you don’t it is as pointless as setting up an email account and not telling anyone about it… nothing will happen. My personal use of Twitter has been to share experiences and validate thoughts.

Is “Downing Street” interested in using Twitter to “validate thoughts”. The business of using it to ask questions assumes you need to know answers. So what sort of questions could the Prime Ministers Office ask on twitter? Would it be “How quickly should we get out of Iraq?” or “Purple or Red Tie for PMQ’s”. Most of my Twitter friends use it for both.

Techprogressive (Hello, do you have a name?) offers this sound advice:

be less boring. And be more human. Twitter’s a new form of media — use it that way. Post observations, insights people wouldn’t see in press reports, jokes, reactions to news.

Twitter is about forming relationships with your followers, so it doesn’t work if those doing the tweeting just come off sounding like public relations bots

Nils at NDNL echoes all these suggestions and expands on them a touch:

So, @DowningStreet, tell us who you are and keep things worth our while. Know we’re a different audience. Make sure any “news” you push our way has that sense of immediacy we’ve come to know and love over at Twitter.

If you, and others, keep that in mind, get personal with us (can you?) I suppose this will work. If not, the unfollows will hit you harder than you’d held possible and the, essentially great, idea will founder.

Meanwhile our own Brummie web news guru Paul Bradshaw offers a techie slap on the back over at Poynter:

so far their feed mostly offers a kind of Twitter shovelware using Twitterfeed. But that’s not bad in itself. Actually, I think it shows a higher level of tech savviness than simply twittering.

So I’d like to sum this all up into “Hello my name is Nick: what’s yours?”