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.