For good or bad we’ve had a glut of gripping stories this summer, those sit-glued-to-the-TV moments where everyone wants to know what’s going on. For me the Oslo / Utøya attacks, the London riots, and the rebel advance on Tripoli have been three such events. Only now there is a...
I’ve been watching today’s debate in the House of Commons about the response to riots across the UK. Others are better placed to analyse the substance of the security or policing response but I will focus on just one point: how MPs and the Prime Minister have been referring to...
Back in the autumn of last year I did a partial redesign of this blog. Since then the blog has sprouted all kinds of buttons, and looks a bit of a mess. In the meantime WordPress has evolved to version 3.2 and offers a whole bunch of new features. So...
Others will post more profound observations about Google+, but for me it has provoked one fundamental question: what are my rules for adding friends, followers, people into circles etc. on the different social networks I use? Oddly, thinking about this has actually led to a rationalisation of my Facebook use...
I was a speaker yesterday at the Nordic-Baltic Youth Forum 2011 in Narva, Estonia. The slides from my presentation are here, but this post is about an issue that was on my mind all day – how Members of the European Parliament should organise their web presence. The 3 MEPs at...
OK, you have worked our the basics of Twitter. If you haven’t, then read Jessica Hische’s excellent guide (even if it’s Mum, not Mom), and I’ve written a few words on Twitter for politics. Then read on, for this is a guide about how to use Twitter Lists, the way to...
Twitter is a great place for sharing links. But there’s no way to really systematise what’s particularly interesting… It’s see it this moment or it’s gone. So I’m trying once again with paper.li to do something about this. My new experiment is called The #DailyEuropean (giving the newspaper a hash-tag...
I saw this tweet earlier from Brian Duggan who works for EPLP in their London office: http://twitter.com/TheBrianDuggan/status/55944123059941376 I followed the link to the letters page of The Guardian, and this is what I get: Your report on the conviction of John Sweeney should be essential reading for some of my...
There’s a story on The Telegraph website today entitled Twitter ‘elite’ send most tweets. That’s not quite a fair representation of the story itself – the most important parts of the story are these: Fifty per cent of all tweets read and shared on Twitter are generated by only 20,000 ‘elite’...
The screenshot above was taken at 1719 today, showing William Hague’s Twitter account, @WilliamJHague. It’s worth noting the three tweets present at the top, shown in more detail here: The first tweet is explicitly party political, while the second and third are retweets of governmental business. The Hague account states...
So 2 days after #NetrootsUK, and a load of recriminations rumble on, mostly on Twitter. Sigh. Here’s a selection. @Jessica_Asato I would like to have gone just as ordinary attendee but received no info so assumed was an invite only event — Luke Akehurst (@lukeakehurst) January 8, 2011 @LukeBozier V....
A Very Public Sociologist has completed a second annual survey of the number of Twitter followers of people who also write political blogs in the UK. I finished up 34th on this list last year, now I’m down to 61st. Other people who blog alongside their main non-media day job...