Government is increasing its presence on social media. On YouTube you can find (by way of example) the following agencies and offices of the US government: Securities and Exchange Commission, Internal Revenue Service and Government Printing Office. Governments have a presence on Twitter. You can follow on Twitter the European Union, the Compte officiel du Ministre de l’Éducation nationale of France, and the Home Office of the United Kingdom. It’s clear that the use of social media by government – as part of the Open Government movement, will only increase. This presents some interesting questions. Read further >

One way of aggregating news feeds for customers is through RSS feeds. RSS allows customers to pull content into one feed so that they can access a variety of resources in one place. I have an RSS feed through Google Reader, but I realized recently that I don’t look at it as much as I check Twitter. To be honest, I haven’t looked at Google Reader in months, and I’m trying to figure out why. Both require me to take some action in visiting the Web site, but it has become more routine to check Twitter at least once a day. I tend to forget to check Google Reader at all. Read further >

Matt Shatz – Head of Strategic Content Relations at Nokia – recently published an article on the future of publishers in the book business. While he painted an overall pessimistic outlook on publishers’ future, I found one remarkable statement: the need for publishers to “develop tight relationships with tastemakers of the digital world.” Read further >

We’re all bombarded with news stories from many sources. Some news items are pushed via e-mail, others are aggregated in a news reader or RSS feed, while other items are on web sites that we visit regularly. With so many news outlets competing for our attention, it’s no surprise that each one wants to be first with the latest story. However, in the rush to be first, I’ve noticed that many of these “breaking news” stories may be incomplete or lacking in analysis. Read further >

Do you question the value of micro blogging services like Twitter and Yammer? I invite you to think of Metcalfe’s law: the value of a (tele) communications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n²). This law has often been illustrated with the following example: one fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines in the network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases. I argue the same goes for micro blogging-like services such as Twitter or Yammer. The more users the more messages, the more value. Read further >