Via Mick Phythian, I’ve just seen this (shorter version: people don’t use interactive services because it undervalues their time, ‘valuing it at zero’- face-to-face is a more reliable ideal, and the utility calculation has to be positive before people will take online options. If buying something online saves you £20 then you may take the [...]

If you want to get an idea of the value of Twitter, here’s my experience in establishing an ‘unconference‘ and publicising it quickly and cheaply.  Last week, myself and Mick Fealty of Slugger O’Toole launched PICamp. We did it using a free-of-charge Ning website and the whole development took about an hour – soup-to-nuts (as they [...]

The G20 Summit is providing an appropriate showcase for the excellent Debategraph application. I’ve written about it over here on the Local Democracy blog, but as a quick primer, Debategraph takes the idea of a ‘debate wiki’ one step further – providing a Graphical User Interface to arguments. I’d argue that this is the most [...]

At the end of February, I was in Miami for the WeMedia Pitchit final. It was a fantastic event – very interesting to see what the social media community looks like in the US – how they are responding to the different challenges of a different polity. I’ve written this up in more detail over [...]

Though there are lots of ways to make a document available for commenting online, I’ve still not seen anything as effective as the use of a slightly hacked blog in allowing the public to get into the detail of a document. A few years ago, the Power Enquiry made it’s findings available in this way. [...]