Browsed by Month August 2011

What AskSGPresident can teach us about Twitter

August 23 2011

june

Heres more proof of my theory that Twitter is a fishmarket

The background Its election time again Presidential elections to be more precise As part of their election coverage the Straits Times put out a public call for questions that people wanted to ask the four Presidential candidates at a roundtable discussion they were hosting The call went out for three days and members of the public were invited to send in their questions via various online channels Facebook Twitter email their website

On Twitter the call went thus Ask your question and tag it with AskSGPresident

And so it ran Fast forward three days later The collected questions were cherrypicked and put up for public voting to select the five questions that eventually made it to the roundtable

From among the 500 questions collected ST editors came up with a shortlist of 15 questions Vote for your favourite between now and midnight on Monday We will pose the top five questions to the presidential hopefuls tomorrow

Of the fifteen final questions selected only three came from Twitter If the above link breaks I believe ST only archives their stories online for a week you can look at the screengrab here

Little wonder when the AskSGPresident tagstream pretty much looked like this

There are a lot of cowboy towns out there

August 14 2011

june

Earlier today or by the time I put this up yesterday I wrote a post about David Camerons clumsy approach in dealing with digital media In it I said that governments were struggling with social media in part because its so new I said something along the lines of five years ago none of this was around

This sentiment was repeated close to verbatim by my own Prime Minister in the National Day Rally that he gave tonight He said this while addressing a point about engaging citizens both online and in real life

You can find his whole speech online on YouTube but the videos are upwards of half an hour each If you want to watch the relevant bit

This is what he said namedropping mrbrown along the way

I think facetoFace on TV we know how to do it Engagement online I think we need to learn to do it better Its not easy to do but it is important because the digital media is continuing to grow in importance Five years ago YouTube was insignificant Facebook didnt exist All you had was mrbrown Today mrbrown has a lot of competition We in Government have a lot of competition and we have to be able to operate in that space

This fire is out of control

August 12 2011

june

So it turns out that David Cameron seems to think that the appropriate response to the UK riots is to call for the clampdown on social media RIM Facebook and Twitter are being hauled in like misbehaving children to see the principal because their services were used by rioters I quote from this Guardian article that sums it up

The prime minister told parliament on Thursday that Facebook Twitter and Research in Motion Rim the maker of BlackBerry devices should take more responsibility for content posted on their networks warning the government would look to ban people from major social networks if they were suspected of inciting violence online

Its all fairly ridiculous

First of all blaming the social media platforms for the riots is like blaming Boeing for their planes being hijacked by terrorists its ridiculous and reductive The medium is not the message Technology doesnt cause riots rioters cause riots

Secondly the precedent of cutting off communications in the face of popular unrest is one with a checkered and worrying history Even in the relentless twentyfour hour news cycle the events which took place in Egypt are surely not so long ago that people have forgotten what happened Suggesting draconian measures in the same vein seems like obtuse tonedeafness on Camerons part

Keep Calm and Curry On

August 10 2011

june

Journalists want their stories to be read Thats why they write them Even in the pursuit of objectivity even when sticking to the facts and the figures and the numbers theres always this idea of but yeah what can I do to make this sexier

So there was this story It involved in a tangential way a tale of two families And there was curry involved It unexpectedly became a sensation online for a brief period of time because we as a whole have not yet been trained to expect these things But that I think will eventually change