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

LocalGovCamp Roundup

LocalGovCamp was “an unconference for local government”, specifically those who are working with websites and social media tools in relation to local government. As such it should have been really dull and a tedious waste of a Saturday (yes, Saturday. From 10am – 6pm.) But it wasn’t. It was really good.
I went along partly [...]

A Local Blogs Blog for Birmingham

Over the weekend it became apparent to me that I couldn’t keep all the local blogs that have sprung up in Birmingham straight in my head. I was also aware that what defines a “local blog” is somewhat, well, ill defined. so I started Local Blogging Birmingham, a quick and dirty Tumblr blog to record [...]

Hacking the Government

I and others will talk a lot about “setting data free” so it can be used in ways the original owners hadn’t thought of or simply weren’t able to do, usually to the benefit of said owners. Often this can be as simple as putting your press releases in a blog-style website which produces an [...]

Easy in, Interesting out

During a catch-up chat with Dave Briggs he mentioned the Real Help Now site the government recently launched. I heard about this when at the time but hadn’t clicked as to how interesting it was. As Simon Dickson explains the back-end is an incredibly simple system for publishing links to useful information:
The news content is [...]

Talking about Local

Will Perrin has a plan. He wants to train thousands of people to set up community websites in their neighbourhoods across the UK. And it’s very likely a lot of this work will take place in Birmingham. Here’s Will talking about the community blog he runs in Kings Cross which inspired him to develop the [...]