What is this?

This is the work blog of Pete Ashton in his capacity as an online communications consultant, though it's often about more than that. If it's to do with people talking online and it interests me it'll be covered here.

If you're interested in working with me get in touch.

Subscribe by email

Get an email containing the posts from this blog each day that I publish something.
Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Sharing the booty

The discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo Saxon gold has understandably gotten a lot of coverage today with the news outlets doing a pretty good job (from my positional as a layman) of explaining the significance and importance of the find. But I just discovered something interesting from a social media perspective – their [...]

Digital Britain needs real Digital Literacy

Lord Carter is unveiling his Digital Britain report thingy today. There’s been a lot of talk about this though it’s sometimes hard to get your head around exactly what it’s about since the scope is huge. But one key thing struck me today while I was trying to read something online.
UK needs industrial policy for [...]

Stop seeing BBC online as a threat to your business model

Another week, another article from a local newspaper person moaning about how the BBC is all unfair and that what with their license fee and everything. This time it’s Marc Reeves, editor of the Birmingham Post, declaring the BBC’s spread threatens survival of local newspapers.
I understand the basic point he’s making here, that a [...]

The power of fun

Today there was a “suspect package” in Digbeth, Birmingham, which meant the roads were shut and buses diverted for the afternoon. Since I tend to get a bus into Digbeth most afternoons I went to Twitter to find out what was going on. News was sketchy with nothing on the mainstream channels and our local [...]

Two points about the alleged “death of blogging”

Today saw the most spectacular example of link bating in a long while when Paul Boutin wrote in Wired that blogging is so 2004 and that Flickr, Twitter and Facebook had all but killed it. Normally one would ignore such silliness but stupid utterances do have a purpose in that they encourage us to articulate [...]