Internet
BBC website: what the changes will mean for PR
Posted by Mark Pack at Wed, 03/03/2010 - 11:42am in Internet
The BBC's website regularly feature in the lists of the ten most popular websites in the UK - and are usually the only ones in the top ten from a British organisation. So the BBC's plans to refocus and shrink its web presence are likely to be widely felt.
The 79 page strategy document ranges over all of the BBC's operations but specially on the web it proposes cutting BBC Online's budget by 25% by 2013. It says:
How the internet is changing British politics - and what 2010 will bring
Posted by Mark Pack at Mon, 01/03/2010 - 6:16pm in Internet, Political commentary
In February 2010 I gave this talk as part of the "Distinguished Practitioners Series" at Nottingham University:
Twitter etc and the election: Is it worth the risk?
Posted by Mark Pack at Wed, 10/02/2010 - 6:09pm in Internet, Political commentary
That's the headline on a BBC report today, which also features myself:
Mark Pack believes the internet will spell the end of indentikit candidates, all repeating the same election message crafted for them by party HQ.
"It will encourage individuality and creativity," he says.
He even argues that round-the-clock scrutiny by camera-phone wielding voters is a good thing for aspiring politicians: "In a less politically divided age, the personal attributes of a candidate are increasingly important."
Public still likes its privacy according to new poll
Posted by Mark Pack at Thu, 04/02/2010 - 2:34pm in Internet, Social media
The question of people's attitudes to privacy has been in the news following Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's comments that, "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people" and that sharing, rather than privacy, is the new "social norm".
However, the British public still greatly value their privacy according to a poll commissioned by the Sunday Times from YouGov:
iPad: initial reactions running 2:1 positive
Posted by Mark Pack at Thu, 28/01/2010 - 11:27am in Internet
This week's launch of Apple's iPad has generated a huge amount of media and online coverage (a cynic would say rather too much for a firm that has such a small share of the global mobile phone and computer markets).
Google and Twitter trends come to the UK
Posted by Mark Pack at Wed, 27/01/2010 - 10:19am in Internet, Social media
For a long time both Google and Twitter have provided information on the currently hot terms - those words people are using to search (Google) or in tweets (Twitter). The data has been global totals, which in practice means the data tells you what is currently hot with Americans, with the rest of the world only getting the occasional look in.
Both have however recently added geographic options.
What are the implications of Nick Robinson's reporting?
Posted by Jonathan Lomax at Fri, 08/01/2010 - 10:30am in Internet, Political commentary
Now that the dust has settled on the Labour leadership plot that never was there is time to reflect on the way this 'micro plot' affected the news media. There has been much written recently about how blogs and Twitter will affect the General Election campaign. What is already clear, however, is that TV news reporters are already changing their style in order not to be outdone by the less-constrained blogosphere.
It's better by blog: why councils should embrace blogging
Posted by Mark Pack at Mon, 04/01/2010 - 2:33pm in Internet, Social media
The following article about the advantages blogging offers local authorities was written for the January edition of Total Politics:
The Google Surge: Coming to the U.K.?
Posted by Mark Pack at Mon, 21/12/2009 - 9:31am in Internet, Political commentary
The phrase "Google Surge" (aka a "network blast" for those less keen on using a militaristic vocabulary for all things political) has been coined to describe the practice of blanketing websites viewed by inhabitants of a particular area with geo-targeted online adverts in the last few days of an election campaign.
What do Twitter's top trends of 2009 tell us?
Posted by Mark Pack at Sat, 19/12/2009 - 2:17pm in Internet, Social media
There are some useful lessons to learn from Twitter's round-up of the top trending terms in people's tweets during 2009 (click on image for large version):
What are the lessons to learn from these trends?
