Here comes a straight press release…  Thoughts, anyone?
As part of the government’s consultation to gain opinions and views on its higher education debate - JISC is hosting a blog on its JISC Involve platform.

The Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), John Denham launched a debate on Higher Education, in February 2008 when he announced the intention to develop a framework for Higher Education for the next ten… read more

One of our contacts at the European Parliament has set up a Facebook group entitled ‘I’m going to vote in the Euro elections in 2009′ and is looking for interesting and exciting things to do with it to take its membership beyond the current (very respectable) 260-odd and counting.

He’s keen to stress that this is a personal endeavour, not an official European Parliament initiative, but… read more

According to this story, Gordon Brown is going to be launching an online version of Prime Minister’s Question Time In June. It’s an attempt to ‘reconnect with younger voters’ according to the BBC (isn’t everything online described as that now?) and will be a regular event.

It’s going to be run through Youtube, so absolute top marks for going where the people actually are and not reinventing the wheel… read more

I’ve finally managed to dig out this v.interesting blog post on a recent piece of research from New York University’s Stern Business School that correlates online “chatter” to higher physical album sales.

What the researchers did was to monitor the levels of online buzz - in particular blogs posts and MySpace friends - created by 108 different album releases in the first two months of 2007, and then cross-referenced this… read more

We’ve launched a nice new shiny product called Opinion Tracker. Opinion Tracker does what it says on the tin i.e. it monitors what people are thinking and saying around the net.

We track conversations around the net (in forums, communities, blogs and videos) and then analyse these to show what people are thinking and saying about specific issues - whether that’s to do with an event like the… read more

A few months ago now, I was invited to take part in a two day workshop on ‘Designing for Social Justice’ run by Futurelab. It was a really enjoyable set of sessions, bringing together a wide mix of people from different sectors, and showed once again the strength of many minds coming from varying perspectives working together.

The results of the workshop has now been excellently written up, and contains lots… read more

This has been our for a while now, but I’ve only just caught it… but better late than never…
Queen Rania (Queen of Jordan and general looker) is running (or was running last year) a campaign to try to get people to change their views of the Arab world through dialogue with each other - using the power of YouTube.
Her stereotypes campaign is interesting to us not just because she’s using… read more

Check out the interview and podcast in the Times from Jay Adelson, chief executive of the news site Digg, in which he says that the internet has brought down barriers and given a voice to all.

A quick read of the article prompted two (related) reactions from me, both of which I’ll hopefully get a chance to blog in more detail soon:

1. the internet is a democratic

Following Chris’s post about English Heritage’s ‘Your Place or Mine’ the other week, we were pointed in the direction of a subsequent English Heritage social media project, the aptly-named ‘Our Place’.

‘Our Place’ describes itself as ‘…for people who work in broadening access to heritage. It is an online space where you can network with peers, share and be inspired by project case studies, and… read more

‘Hey Monkeybrain!’ is an extension of Squidoo, a site that lets users collect content on a particular topic from all around the web in one place.  We’re not particularly enamoured with Squidoo itself (to put it politely) but, having first seen it yesterday, I think ‘Hey Monkeybrain!’ looks far simpler, cleaner and with a stronger proposition.  The idea is that you set up two opposing ideas… read more