I know I should have come across this before, but I haven’t, so I’m guessing some of you may not have… They Work for You is a great site from mysociety.org which allows you to track your MP, finding out what they are speaking about, how they are voting and what written questions they are putting. You can even get an email every time your MP speaks. What a great idea.
Some other sites set up by mysociety for various clients include No 10 Petitions Website (does what it says on the tin), Fix My Street (ditto), PledgeBank (which works by building peer pressure for action of a particualr type), What Do They Know (marshalls Freedom of Information requests to shine a light on who local authorities are awarding contract to, how much funding is going into the police, etc), Write to Them (enables you to easily write to your MP) and Hear From Your MP (which encourages your MP to talk to you about issues they think are important – 60,000 people and 160 MPs have signed up.)

Technorati Tags: Government, internet, tools

Some tips for and by community editors in the Online Journalism Blog series. First up is Shane Richmond of the Telegraph. The second is by Mark Fothergill of the Guardian. I’m sure our own community editors could add their own dos and don’ts… especially as we are winning awards for it.

Steve Rubel cites a Forrester report which suggests that the 11% adoption rate for RSS may well be the most it will achieve. I think there is a real confusion at the heart of this assertion. We are currently migrating our services to EpiServer  and RSS is going to be the transport mechanism at the heart of the platform. Zibb, Reed Business’ b2b search engine uses RSS and a core part of the engine – to great effect on Computer Weekly, our UK IT site. While consumer adoption of RSS in its raw form may well remain low, RSS will be embedded in practically everything we do. Just read my previous post about AppLoop.

AppLoop (in closed beta right now) is a platform which aims to turn any RSS feed into an iPhone app – and then automatically distribute it through the iPhone Appstore. Problogger has the details. Thanks to my colleague Simon Robinson for the pointer.

Flight’s first full-time blogger Jon Ostrower gets a glowing write up in the Chicago Tribune. Thanks to my colleague Stephen Trimble for the pointer.

Charles Moore, former editor of the Telegraph, interviewed Tory leader David Cameron and played the either…or game with him – with interesting results. 

Red or white? Red

Bitter or lager? Bitter

Meat or fish? Meat

Town or country? Country

Or again….

Star Trek or Dr Who? Star Trek.

Later, the Today Programme repeated the exercise at the Tory Party Conference – it’s well worth a listen.

This strikes me as a very useful and fun way of gaining insight into key figures and could be used to great effect in the markets we cover. I wonder who will be the first to do it?

UPDATE: I’m having trouble playing the link with Firefox – though it plays just fine in Internet Explorer.

Wired has a story about a patent filed by Google which envisages handsets which automatically poll wireless providers (including wi-fi and wi-max) for the lowest price before connecting. There’s a long way to go, and a lot of vested interests in the way, but it’s a great vision.