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:
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
Interesting venture here from the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, promoting their budget cuts and council performance through Youtube in the form of a brief music video. Read the full media release here.
It’s not consultation as such, but the comments on the video have been left open, and in this case they don’t seem to have been used for genuine debate. Initially, the… read more
Great e-Democracy work is coming out of Northamptonshire County Council at the moment, along the lines we’ve been advocating for a while.
First of all, they’re one of the many clients using our Budget Simulator this year. Nothing unusual with that, it always just works wherever it’s used. What is new is that they’re promoting it through Facebook alongside more traditional channels, which is having a measurable impact… read more
Back in the good old days of the internet, just as it was taking off, some people made a bit of cash from buying other companies’ domain names and then selling them back to them at a profit. Eventually a few court cases pretty much put paid to this idea, as people asserted their right to domain names over those that had initially bought them.
But now, with blogging… read more
You may have seen recently the furore over ‘Beacon’, a new application introduced by Facebook. Beacon is a tool which tracks, when you’re signed into Facebook, what you do online and posts it to your Facebook profile. The idea behind it being that people trust what their peers are doing more than advertising messages from big business, and are thus more likely to buy say, a book, if they see… read more