links for 2009-07-07

"Out of 121 accounts, just 19 do something other than running as a glorified RSS feed. The other 112 do no retweeting, no replying to other tweets etc."

"And younger users? Use by 18-25 year olds went down 3% in the last month. Whether that's simply due to the summer break, or whether that's a tentative sign of younger users starting to tire of the service, this research is yet another stat to file away for when someone tells you that 'it's not for us, it's all about kids'".

An amusing bit of mischief making from the Press Gazette's 'Media Money' column over Cameron's pledge to clip Ofcom's wings, and how one of the main companies to benefit might be BSykB.

"Tom Steinberg, who's in charge of MySociety, has done some real journalism (programmers doing journalism? It'll never catch on) and actually spoken to Lisa Greenwood, the civil servant who was sacked from the DCSF after using her office systems to send an angry message to Hazel Blears over her use of the second homes allowance. He's written it up briefly on the MySociety mailing list, and it gives you one of those 'ahhh' moments which shows that the Telegraph indeed got it wrong, but understandably so".

"Research by The Daily Telegraph has found 134 unelected quangos, across a broad area of sectors, directly associated with British business. The study was conducted as Conservative leader David Cameron yesterday pledged to cut the number of quangos and make them more accountable". Firstly, that's a stroke of lucky co-incidence in the timing then, and secondly, the article might have been improved, dare I suggest, by even listing ten of the 134. Or indeed any more than Ofcom and the UK Commission for Employment and Skills which are the only two to get a name-check.

This has got to be one of the best online photo captions I've seen for a long time - respect to the Metro subs: "The ghost of Elvis: we'll be honest, we've no idea what we're supposed to be looking at here"

Great set of resources to learn from, but, hey, way to make me feel nervous about showing people my pencil scratches guys...

"You may have seen coverage on various websites saying that a civil servant was sacked after posting a comment on TheyWorkForYou. We’ve no idea what this story is about, but we’re pretty certain it has nothing whatsoever to do with TheyWorkForYou. No journalist bothered to contact us before running the story. There is no comment on TheyWorkForYou containing the text quoted in that article, nor anything like it, nor has there ever been. Nor in fact (as we’ve checked), on HearFromYourMP, WriteToThem, or WhatDoTheyKnow. Only one comment has been left on any contribution by Hazel Blears in 2009, and it’s definitely not related to this. 27 comments were left on 13th May, the date the comment was apparently posted; we’ve read them all and they’re all nothing to do with this. So frankly, we’ve no idea what’s going on."