Pezholio

I love Fixmystreet – it’s the nearest thing we’ve got to a national problem reporting hub, while other council website bury their reporting facilities under pages and pages of navigation, Fixmystreet is simple, quick and direct.
What I also love is its openness, as well as being able to pull out reports for problems in your [...]

It’s been a while since I first published my Beginners’ Guide to Twitter in Local Government, and since then (although, obviously not as a direct result of my blog post!) there’s been a plethora of local authorities using Twitter.
However, with a few notable exceptions, most councils seem to prefer the ‘fire and forget’ method of [...]

Certainly not me! We as councils are constantly being asked to save money, and one big element of this is front facing customer services. It’s estimated that it costs councils £6.56 to deal with enquiries face to face, £3.22 by telephone contact, and 27p for online *.
So, imagine my joy when I get this tweet [...]

Now, I’m sure you’re fed up of me banging on about the Royal Mail, but bare with me, this isn’t about postcodes.
Whilst idily surfing around Twitter using Tweetie 2 (which is awesome by the way), I thought I’d have a look at Royal Mail’s Twitter account to see if they’d had anything to say about [...]

A thought occurred to me when driving to work this morning (’cos I’m sad like that) about the kinds of services councils need to manage their social media (in particular Twitter) presence well.
This is particularly pertinent with the demise of Twitapps, which, amongst other things, allows you to keep tracks of @ replies via email. [...]

Just a quick one here while I think about it. I’ve recently noticed there’s a new kid on the corporate Twitter block, and they’re not learning from the mistakes Habitat made earlier this year.
Lloyds Pharmacy (who have two locations on my High Street alone) have recently set up on Twitter and, judging by the [...]

I’ve been thinking recently about trending topics on Twitter and how it would be brilliant if there could be some kind of local trending system that picked up trends in a local area. Twitter already has location based searching, so it should be pretty trivial for a developer (albeit one with more skill than me)
Step [...]

As some of you may know, I was up in Edinburgh for Scotweb2 on Friday (with Localgovcamp the day after!). I delivered a short session on Twitter and gave some examples and advice. I really was aiming at beginners and newbies, but it turned out more people than I expected were already tweeting. Hopefully I [...]

Yesterday, I had a quick interview with Liz Azyan of LGEO Research about Twitterplan, the whys, wherefores and hows. More information is on the LGEO Research blog, but you can check out the interview below:
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Today marks a coming together (if you’re an idiot, you might call it a synergy), of all the obsessions I’ve blogged about so far – Planning Applications, APIs and Twitter. It’s called TwitterPlan, and it allows you to receive alerts of planning applications in your area via Twitter.
It uses the Planning Alerts API and sends [...]