Blogging – Page 13 – Dave Briggs

What I’ve been reading

July 14, 2011

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

The Case Against Online Participation and Government As A Platform – "the question is: should we just give up and consider open government and government 2.0 an interesting, nice-to-have, but hard-to-sustain development, and perhaps let it die?"
Social media for social care: how Monmouthshire foster carers support each other with Yammer – helen reynolds – Nice little case study.
Huffington Post UK: What does it add? – Good stuff on the rather underwhelming launch of HuffPo UK – which has been rather overshadowed by other media news this week.
Epic | Mobile learning – Epic's mobile learning stuff looks really interesting.
Home :: PetitionYourCouncil.com – MySociety makes local e-petitions more findable.

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

The digital press office

July 11, 2011

One innovation in the way that local councils communicate is the developments of digital press offices, or newsrooms.

There are two elements to these, I think. The first is having a digital savvy communications team, who get the growing importance of online new sources and the need for mixed media; as well as the increasingly realtime nature of news reporting. This tends to be the result of already existing inspiration in the team or through training.

The second is having the means to deliver on this, often through an online platform. Some examples of these include Birmingham, Shropshire, and Leeds who all have separate microsites for their digital newsrooms. I hear that Warwickshire have one in development that is close to release.

Often these site are using a lightweight, flexible publishing system like WordPress, rather than being a part of the corporate content management system (CMS). Why is this? I suspect there are several reasons:

Speed – using a tool like WordPress you can circumnavigate some of the process and workflow associated with a big enterprise CMS and get messages live as soon as you need them
Flexibility – WordPress and tools like it can handle pretty much any content you throw at it, whether text, images, audio, video
Conversation – the inbuilt commenting engine in WordPress means you can have a discussion with journalists and other media outlets – again, not the sort of thing that happens often on a corporate CMS

One way that such a platform can be used is to develop online news releases, rather than the more static traditional variety. Rather than sending out a PDF or Word document to journalists, the release can b published online, and the link sent out to people – so if there are any amendments made, the latest version is always the one that’s out there.

Photos, videos, related links and documents to download can all be embedded in there as well, so everyone has all the available media resources to work with as well.

What’s more, this way of doing things ensures a bit of visibility, and findability too. Rather than sending your release to the list of people you know, which is obviously pretty finite, by making it searchable online, many different people are likely to find it, and make use of it, whether they are newspapers or hyperlocal bloggers or whoever.

If you’re interested in developing a digital press office, or newsroom, at your organisation, do get in touch!

What I’ve been reading

June 16, 2011

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

What we talk about when we talk about RSS – A useful bit of background to the future of RSS debate.
Media Trust explains how local news hubs will work – David Wilcox follows up the story.
Civil Servant 2.0 (PDF warning) – Interesting ebook on 'practical tips for working in government 2.0'
Arrested for filming a public council meeting – What a mess.
Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication – An academic version of the debate on whether or not trolls ought to be fed.
NESTA Neighbourhood Challenge – Nice blog covering this hyperlocal project.

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

Bookmarks for April 28th through May 18th

May 18, 2011

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Local Government Graduate Gripes – "How would a networked, open, innovative, tech-enabled, social recruitment scheme for government work?"
10 things Alpha.gov.uk gets wrong (Part 1) | Helpful Technology – Nicely contrarian points from Steph on the new government website prototype.
Would you like sauce with your policy? – Steph's writeup on recent stuff coming out of the government on consultation and open policy making.
Is this really the death of political blogging? – Interesting overview of the political blogging scene.
Supporting an Epic Swindle « Digital Social Innovation – Nice post from Manny about Liverpool football supporters using the web to organise their campaigns.
The ongoing need for openness in government – A quick bit more explaining from me about what the hell Kind of Digital does.
Three great posts about micro-participation – Links to some great writing on micro-participation.
How can Kind of Digital help you? – A blatant bit of advertising.
LINKED SOCIAL: Eight steps of social media evolution in local government « The Dan Slee Blog – Nice overview from Dan.
There is no such thing as IT | Public Strategist – Great notes on government IT and agile.
Agile for communications « Sharon O’Dea – Brilliant, comprehensive overview from Sharon.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Workblogging

May 12, 2011

Euan Semple wrote a short post the other day that really caught my eye. Here it is in full (hopefully he doesn’t mind!):

A business where everyone blogs. Everyone thinks about what they are doing and writes about what they are doing. From the top to the bottom, the edges to the middle. Everyone awake and bouncing off each other intellectually as they get more and more effective at whatever they do.

Now, Euan is a great thinker, writer, speaker and doer in the world of deploying social technology in organisations to make them work better. He was one of my first inspirations when I first started getting into this stuff seven years ago or so. He’s still writing great challenging stuff and sparking new ideas.

Because, of course, while blogging – one of the oldest forms of social media – may have been overtaken by social networking, status updating and location services in the fashion stakes, it remains one of the most powerful and useful methods of online interaction that exists.

After all, there’s no way I would be sat here, running my own business, doing what I love, were it not for the fact that I started blogging however many years ago it was.

Indeed, given that we seem to have a knowledge economy these days, how does an individual promote what it is that they know to the outside world? I’m not sure there’s a better vehicle than a blog, to be honest.

But it’s not just about personal gain and career enhancement. Having employees blog, as Euan states, has a great impact on organisations. Whether the blogs are out there on the web or just run internally, having people thinking and writing about their work means they get better at their jobs, and with everyone knowing what everyone else does, collaboration, knowledge sharing and silo-busting becomes a reality.

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