The White House wasn’t kidding about posting animated GIFs to its new Tumblr. Earlier today, however, a mechanical engineer named Claudio Ibarra commented on a Google+ thread that he thought that the animated GIF was a “waste.” Is that true? The White House has had a communications staff for a long time. What’s wasted time — [...]
Social media was a bigger part of the election season of 2012 than ever before, from the enormous volume of Facebook updates and tweets to memes during the Presidential debates to public awareness of what the campaigns were doing there in popular culture. Facebook may even have booted President Obama’s vote tally.
As is the case in every major event in the U.S., social media was part of the fabric of communications during Hurricane Sandy. Twitter was a window into what was happening in real-time. Facebook gave families and friends a way to stay in touch about safety or power. And government officials and employees, from first [...]
Today, I hosted a Twitter chat with the Voting Information Project. They partner with states to provide official election data that developers can use to create free, open source tools for voters. I’ve embedded a storify of our conversation below, along with a video explaining more about what they do. Of special note: VIP is [...]
Earlier today, the White House announced the first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows. Following is the story you might have missed on the Twitter backchannel, followed by a NodeX graph of the tweets around #InnovateGov. [View the story "When #innovategov gets hot, will policy debates follow?" on Storify] In the network graph below, you’ll see [...]
As TechnicallyPhilly reported this morning, the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has joined the ranks of municipalities putting more public data onto the Internet. “Transparency is a cornerstone of good governance, and it is vital for the City to be open and available to our citizens,” said Mayor Michael Nutter in a statement posted to the [...]
[View the story "What is open journalism?" on Storify]
Data from a new study on the use of Twitter by U.S. Senator and Representatives by public relations giant Edelman strongly suggests that the Grand Old Party has opened up a grand old lead in its use of the popular microblogging platform in just about every metric. On Twitter’s 6th birthday, there’s more political speech [...]
If the town square now includes public discourse online, democratic governments in the 21st century are finding that part of civic life now includes listening there. Given what we’ve seen in this young century, how governments deal with social media is now part of how they deal with civil liberties, press freedom, privacy and freedom [...]
Alexander B. Howard is Radar's Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, where he reports on technology, open government and online civics.
How do you build online community and moderate social media?
Had so much fun at our #smwdc #smwengage panel: instagr.am/p/G9uDPjJyHh/ Thanks to @phoebedoris @AlexHortonVA @mjenkins @NishaChittal @digiphile — merici (@merici) February 14, 2012 Last month, I wrote a popular post on the value of blog comments. My take: Whether you choose to have comments or not speaks to whether you want to create an online [...]