On the Internet nobody knows who you are - or do they?

I have just returned from a holiday in Venice. Amongst other sites, I visited the original Jewish ghetto - the Venetians created the concept centuries before the Nazis (in 1516). For Venetian Jews the ghetto was both a good thing and a bad thing. It was bad because of course it created segregation between Jews and the rest of the (mainly Catholic) population.

To boldly search…

I’m sure you’ll be familiar with this scenario.

You want to find out, say, something about the GDPs of countries in the developed and developing world. So you do a search (mostly in Google, but it might be Yahoo or one of the others) – e.g. “gdp uk nigeria usa india” – you get around 40,000 hits (in Google) with sites like The World - Globalisation and Trade and Economy Watch. With luck you might get a site that give you the answer, or you might have to visit two or three to get what you want.

Social networking and positive engagement

TYPECAST - a positive example of public sector social networking

In my blog entry of 25th May 2009 I wrote about a couple of the problems with social networking, but concluded that Councils still needed to engage within this medium, partly to counter some of the misuse. I gave the example of Cyber Mentors as one illustration of how to do this, and today I want to highlight another in order to illustrate the following points:

• that public sector bodies can do this successfully;
• how the principles of Groundswell, which I've previously written about, can be applied;
• and to publicise and celebrate that good work.

Are newspapers dead?

In today’s online world, information is available both for free and seemingly limitlessly. So how do newspapers survive? Are they just another dinosaur?

Doing Good

At a recent (6/5/09) NWeGG programme and project managers' (PPM) group meeting, we had a really interesting session, led by Peter Kawalek, on social networking. Peter's remit was to try and relate this to the world of PPM, but inevitably we ended up discussing it in a wider context. This led me to think about the following two attributes of social networking.

Inventing the Future

The presentation "Did You Know 2.0" (available on YouTube) poses a question about education. It asks if we are preparing our young people adequately for a future that could be radically different from now. It majors on the fact that change is happening more rapidly now than at any time in the past, and that the pace of change is now so fast that the tools and working environment that school children will encounter when they grow up and start work will be very different from what they are now.

Mapping "New ways of working"

In my last blog post I promised to write about a good example of a public sector use of social networking. In fact I will have to delay this as the web site is not due for launch until June – so it will come, but not right now. So instead I'm concentrating on a process that public sector bodies can undertake as part of developing how they use channels like the Internet, digital TV and mobile phones.

The devil in Social Networking

My blog entries about the use of social media / social networking in local government have been positive and have strongly endorsed the use of these tools. It would be remiss of me not to touch upon some of the dangers because, like all very powerful tools, put in the wrong hands or used in the wrong way, they can be very damaging.

Striped pyjamas, book thieves and the meaning of life

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a little movie doing the rounds at present that many people say is very moving and a great story: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, based on John Boyne’s children’s “fable” of the same name, published in 2006 (DVD due out in March).

Soap Life - a playful history part 3

In my previous two posts I have been looking at computer gaming history and how it relates to the upcoming phenomenon of virtual reality worlds. My conclusion so far has been that virtual worlds like Second Life potentially supply a cornucopia of opportunities for the public sector. Examples include service delivery, citizen engagement and consultation (and many more).