extended reach

Over the weekend I wrote about the value of a common disclaimer for civil servants that blog - it seems I didn’t need to worry as there are now principles for online participation in place, launched today by the UK e-government minister.

I’m not sure this will lead to an explosion of government bloggers but it does provide some sense of security for those already bloggingt. It will be interesting to see where this leads - the public sector digital community seems to be responding positively: some can already see potential in the announcement, whilst for others there is a general sense of relief.

My original post on a common disclaimer had some very helpful steers from colleagues in the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, I’d be really interested to hear what they think of the guidance, as would the team behind them.

I’ve replicated my original twitter project and have aggregated a number of government feeds into a HMGov News friendfeed. Looking at the aggregated product I’m not sure which I prefer - all of the gov feeds in one spot, or something that’s a little less cluttered, like the downing street friendfeed.

The more I use friendfeed the more I like it. I don’t know if it will end up being a twitter replacement but it seems to have it’s merits and dedicated followers who are increasingly championing its potential.

Thanks again to Dennis for telling me to have a look.

With the recent downtime in twitter and the arguments around why this has been happening, I thought I would look at friendfeed as an alternative. I have to admit I like what I see, particularly the ability to create a ‘room’ to host conversations - this could be great for ad-hoc consultation activities. I’m still getting the hang of it, but it seems that friendfeed can offer a better ‘lifestream’ of UK Gov activities than shoveling press notices into twitter.

I’ll probably stick to twitter for the moment because the HMGOV feed works for me (when twitter does). Having said that, while I’m exploring friendfeed I’d like to see news I want come to me, so I’ve started aggregating UK Government feeds - I’ll add more as I find the time.

This isn’t an ‘official’ activity - but the content is. If any civil servants want to take ownership of their stream, or can suggest improvements, let me know and I’ll hand it over/do what I can.

Anyway, for now I thought I’d start with one of the more active government players in the social media space: 10 Downing Street is now on friendfeed.

HMGOV

A while back I mentioned that I’d developed an aggregated news feedof UK Government press notices for Twitter. It works for me because twitter is (when it’s working) where I spend a lot of my time online.

The tool was/is far from perfect, and with some very helpful suggestions from Dave Briggs, Simon Dickson, Paul Webster, John Sheridan and a host of other peopleI have managed to improve (I think)  the content by incorporating more feeds, hash-tags and doing a bit of QA on the links. It’s not perfect - but it works for me.

One thing I haven’t been able to do is sit on the end of the account and respond. This is one of the fantastic things about the Downing Street service - civil servants, responding and providing advice in an ‘official’ capacity. This probably explains why I was only recently able to clock just over one hundred subscribers (124 today) - a feat the Downing Street feed was able to achieve in roughly an hour.

As I said in my original post, if there are any civil servants out there that would like to take ownership of the account to make it more two-way, I’m happy to hand it over.

I had hoped that at some stage I might blog about something other than twitter, but yesterday brought news of the Prime Minister’s arrival to twitter.

There are lots of reasons why the Downing Street tool is better than the HMGOV news feed , but for me the top three would be:

1. It’s official

2. It’s [kinda] two way

3. Its one source of information - not many.

I’m really pleased that the take up of Downing Street twitter feed has been so significant, as Nick Booth points out, there wasn’t exactly a rush to follow the HMGov tool when I published it.  It’s how the take up occurred that I find really interesting. As Simon Dickson said

‘Just as interesting: I think I broke the story when I mentioned it to my own (relatively) select band of Twitter contacts. I was subscriber no3. Two hours later, we’re up to 23. Word travels fast.’

Stuart Bruce goes into a bit more detail:

‘I (245 followers) was NOT the first to Tweet or blog this story. That honour goes to Simon Dickson (39 followers) at 12:04 yesterday, mine was second at 13:18. It was just that mine got picked up by Marshall Manson (followers 150), which in turn was picked up by Steve Rubel (4627 followers). I think it’s down to the number of followers.’

With 234 followers (at last look) Downing Street has a pretty powerful conversational tool on it’s hands - It’ll be interesting to see what happens when they start talking.

Of all the social media tools I use, twitter is my favourite (well, it is this week).

One of the reasons I started blogging today, a bit in advance of when I wanted to, was some activity on twitter and in some blogs by some colleagues.

A lot of my time is spent on twitter and I thought it would be useful if I could quickly scan bits and pieces of info released by government. So, with a bit of playing around, I pulled together an aggregated twitter feed for Her Majesty’s Government News. I’ve done my best to capture RSS feeds from as many .gov.uk websites as possible. The volume of news produced by the government can vary and it might not be right for everyone - but it works for me.

This isn’t exactly a new idea. There are a range of twitter streams that aggregate RSS feeds and there have been some practical demonstrations and a lot of thinking on how twitter and other social media can extend the reach of communications used in emergency situations.

I expect to have similar feeds up for UK government consultations; I was going to do one for local government, but Mr Briggs beat me to the line on that one.

I have also developed an aggregated twitter feed for travel advice that pulls in alerts from the US and Australia - it’s still a little clunky, so don’t rely on it if you are about to go to Tibet.

If I have missed your feed let me know: hmgovnews[at]google[dot]mail[dot]com