It really is quite simple. If you wouldn’t have said it before there were social media, don’t say it now just because there are. If you work for an organisation, don’t be rude about its leaders, products or policies in public. Don’t imagine that online anonymity is an invisibility cloak. If you work in the [...]
My post from May last year on who is blogging in government is picking up a lot of fresh attention at the moment (with thanks to Dominic Campbell and others for sharing it round). The questions of whether the approach is a useful one and, if it is, who falls into which category are still [...]
Update: Since posting this this morning, I have had two people contact me from the Guardian – one in a comment to this post and one by email. As a result, I am reassured that what I experienced was a bug they are keen to fix rather than indifference to the context in which Guardian material [...]
Here’s a small cautionary tale of unintended consequences. It explains why the particularly eagle eyed will have seen a post on the blog this morning which quickly disappeared – though not quite quickly enough to stop it propagating round the web. Over the weekend, I installed the new Guardian wordpress plugin, more out of curiosity than because [...]
Social media spells the end of communicative discretion. This may be a good thing. Charlie Beckett
I wrote yesterday about whether the idea of civil servants staying silent would remain viable in future election campaigns. Patrick Butler has now reflected back that thought more elegantly than I managed: Purdah looks less workable now, when social media – Twitter, blogs, Facebook – is so universal. It is easy enough to silence the [...]
This has been my fifth election as a civil servant. In two of those elections I was in the thick of things. But this is the first in which I have felt personally constrained, with the near silence on this blog over the election period being one indicator of that. I don’t think that has [...]
Why do free social networks tilt inevitably toward user exploitation? Because you’re not their customer, you’re their product. So, solve social-networking’s malign tilt by paying for it – demand they monetize your happiness, not your exploitation. Tim Spalding (h/t @piawaugh)
Yesterday was filled with the sound of silence. That is, of course, complete hyperbole. Web traffic continued, blogs were updated, tweets were twittered, and it’s even possible that out in the real world people chatted in pubs. But in this small corner of the world, the loudest noise was a host of voices declaring silence. [...]
Steph Gray has raised the interesting question of what should happen to public sector social media activity during the election campaign which will be upon us in the next couple of months: When the General Election is called, and government enters the pre-election phase known as purdah, I’m going to suspend my personal blogging and tweeting at [...]