I’ve been working with Mick Fealty over at the Northern Ireland political weblog Slugger O’Toole on a bit of an experiment. We decided to try and convene some free consultancy for all of the political parties in Northern Ireland – starting with the ruling (!) bloc, the DUP. As with all political weblogs that host [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’
Poblish: crowdsourcing new policies, and why blogging has to change
This is the second in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’. Last week I made the case for using existing content – blog posts; Wikis, like Debatepedia; and visual debate-mapping tools, like Debategraph – as a knowledge base to drive new policy [...]
Blogs, twitter and leadership
Just a quick signpost to this post on the ReadWriteWeb blog about. I think that this observation has implications for the nature of representation – and even for leadership. “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh once wrote that Twitter made him “a better and happier person.” He asks, “What would you do differently if there were a [...]
How bloggers can help people understand public service
One of the advances that the long tail of the blogosphere has brought us is that some social work gets reported properly. Not the way that newspapers often report them, in their need for sensationalism. And, of course, they do it all for nothing. Take Random Acts of Reality, for instance. The latest post is [...]
Choosing who to talk to
Sandwell Councillor, Bob Piper, has a good post here about his recent trip to Bruges, raising questions about graffiti. It seems there may be a case for a high level of short-term investment to make the problem go away? “One aspect of the City that distinguished it from so many places I have visited in [...]
The Slugger O’Toole Awards – blogs and politics
Tonight in Belfast, we’re running the second in what I hope will become the annual ‘Slugger Awards‘. These awards – previewed here on the Amnesty blog – are something of a departure for political weblogs. It would be fair to say that politicians are – for the most part – less than thrilled by the [...]
Niall Connolly – democracy expert
Niall Connolly appears to regard himself as an expert on democracy. Wonder if he’ll stand for election?
Breaking the monopoly that civil servants have in describing government
Charlie Beckett has yet another good post up – this time, over at OpenDemocracy. The point of Networked Journalism is that the citizen as an individual and as part of these organisations is now part of the production of news communications. The relationships offered by networked journalism offer the potential for increasing trust in that [...]
Should politicians blog?
Shorter version: If you’re a politician, it may be a good idea to get into blogging. But do it under a pen-name! It’s safer that way, and it will make you better at your job. This is an old-ish question nowadays. And as the big question around social media at the moment is ‘should everyone [...]
Engaging with articulate commenters
I started my blog, Slugger O’Toole in early June 2002 purely as a research tool for a paper I was planning to write on the future of Unionism in Northern Ireland. At the time, I was still trying to assemble the writing team and hadn’t even approached a funding body. Of course I didn’t need funding [...]
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