Tag Archives: Twitter

How to follow a breaking news event on social media

For good or bad we’ve had a glut of gripping stories this summer, those sit-glued-to-the-TV moments where everyone wants to know what’s going on. For me the Oslo / Utøya attacks, the London riots, and the rebel advance on Tripoli have been three such events.

Only now there is a complement to the TV – social media, and especially Twitter. Yet that has of course not stopped a whole host of nay-sayers bemoaning the role of social media.

Here then is a practical guide to following a breaking news story via social media, and what to watch out for.

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Today’s emergency riots debate in the House of Commons told us one thing: MPs don’t understand social media

I’ve been watching today’s debate in the House of Commons about the response to riots across the UK. Others are better placed to analyse the substance of the security or policing response but I will focus on just one point: how MPs and the Prime Minister have been referring to social media, and specifically controlling it, and how this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium. Continue reading →

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The requirements for a personal blog, 2011 style

Back in the autumn of last year I did a partial redesign of this blog. Since then the blog has sprouted all kinds of buttons, and looks a bit of a mess. In the meantime WordPress has evolved to version 3.2 and offers a whole bunch of new features. So what, I wonder, are the criteria for the ultimate personal blog in the summer of 2011, and how am I going to change this blog to achieve those aims? Here are my first thoughts.

Feel free to comment on / improve upon the list below! Continue reading →

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Social networks – who to add as a friend / follower / person in my circle

Others will post more profound observations about Google+, but for me it has provoked one fundamental question: what are my rules for adding friends, followers, people into circles etc. on the different social networks I use? Oddly, thinking about this has actually led to a rationalisation of my Facebook use – more on that below.

Anyway here are – now – my rules for who I’ll add where.

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How MEPs should organise their web comms and social networking

I was a speaker yesterday at the Nordic-Baltic Youth Forum 2011 in Narva, Estonia. The slides from my presentation are here, but this post is about an issue that was on my mind all day – how Members of the European Parliament should organise their web presence. The 3 MEPs at the event in Narva - Emilie Turunen, Kristiina Ojuland and Radvilė Morkūnaitė-Mikulėnienė – all have personal websites and some presence on social media, but judging by their comments on the panels they struggle to make the most of the technology, and find it hard to work out what they should do and what their staff should do. So here’s a plan for them.

Click to enlarge
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Why you should use Twitter lists

OK, you have worked our the basics of Twitter. If you haven’t, then read Jessica Hische’s excellent guide (even if it’s Mum, not Mom), and I’ve written a few words on Twitter for politics. Then read on, for this is a guide about how to use Twitter Lists, the way to make Twitter manageable.

I’m often asked how I follow 2900 people on Twitter. You can’t read that much! Sorry you 2900, but I don’t read all your tweets. Nor does anyone who follows a lot of people.

So what do I read, and how?

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Can EU twitter nerds crowd-source a newspaper? A new paper.li experiment

Twitter is a great place for sharing links. But there’s no way to really systematise what’s particularly interesting… It’s see it this moment or it’s gone.

So I’m trying once again with paper.li to do something about this. My new experiment is called The #DailyEuropean (giving the newspaper a hash-tag on Twitter too). The newspaper is made from a new Twitter list – Daily European. The idea is that anyone who tweets links to English stories about the EU anywhere on the web should be added to that list. This includes accounts that broadcast only.

I’m going to tweak the list to see how it works (today’s paper has too much from Roger Helmer for my liking!) but if this works out then it should be a crowdsourced paper about the best of EU politics.

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How elected representatives could use the web to add context (an example for Claude Moraes MEP)

I saw this tweet earlier from Brian Duggan who works for EPLP in their London office:

Labour MEP for London Claude Moraes in today's @ on lack of Tory support for EU crime fighting agency http://bit.ly/eGHVhk
07.04.2011 10:44 via ÜberSocialReplyRetweetFavorite
@TheBrianDuggan
Brian Duggan

I followed the link to the letters page of The Guardian, and this is what I get:

Your report on the conviction of John Sweeney should be essential reading for some of my colleagues in the European parliament who have consistently argued against the very programme that brought this murderer to justice (Report, 4 April). Last year the Guardian reported that the UK requested Eurojust’s help in more cases than any other EU country. Yet time and again, the Conservatives and Ukip in Brussels have refused to support the organisation, a body set up to help the police work more effectively with their colleagues in other EU countries. Perhaps they don’t see the link between abstract agreements in Brussels and the reality of fighting crime.

Claude Moraes MEP

Labour’s European spokesperson on justice and home affairs

The link on the Guardian site leads here, not exactly informative about the processes behind the case. So how about Moraes’s website? That has just a copy-paste of the letter. His briefings page contains no information about Eurojust or this issue more widely. The link to his Twitter account from his website is broken.

So what do I learn from all of this? Well it shows my MEP is at least active – he’s writing to the newspapers. But I don’t actually learn anything. How are the Tories and UKIP blocking Eurojust? Does Labour, the EPLP, PES or S&D group have a proper policy? How should Europe-wide judicial cooperation work? Not a clue.

Now I can understand why a letter to a newspaper has to be short, but surely the website or Twitter account of a politician should be just the place to add that extra context?

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