Curate’s Egg 2.0
Politics and new-media goodie-bag blog Dadblog is sadly shutting up shop, but luckily only to move a few doors down the road to “I’ve Said Too Much“, where lloydshep opens up again with an interesting take on how the internet both helps and hinders campaigning.
Sure it’s cheap, scalable and potentially powerful, but online campaigning can become a victim of its own success. So many fragmented campaigns are popping up that it’s become very hard to make sense of them. As Lloyd says, using the example of Freedom of Information requests:
The point is that each additional effort of this type weakens the existing efforts unless there is some kind of glue to bring it all together, another locus to focus efforts. It’s a kind of reverse network effect. How do I choose which of these efforts to follow? And where do I go if I want to follow all of them? I could set up a bunch of RSS feeds, or fiddle with Yahoo! Pipes, but what self-respecting non-geek with a life is going to do that?
Lloyd’s idea – Educate, Entertain, Inform. Give the Beeb a role in catalogueing and making sense of the myriad campaigns out there, and help them to access the Beeb’s own vast audience. Nice solution – you could then link in a “What do you want to do about it?” angle to the news, rather than the current “What directionless piffle would you like to spout about it?” tack.
