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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.

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Influence is weird

This morning I found myself on a list of Birmingham’s most influential Twitter users blogged by one of our PR agencies. Which was nice. Now, please don’t take this as me being blasé or modest but I think it’s important that we realise how the nature of “influence” has changed and is incredibly hard to [...]

Connected doesn’t always mean digitally connected

Last Thursday I attended 4ip’s Recasting Power event in Birmingham. With presentations including Stoke’s grass-roots website Pits ‘n’ Pots and Nick Booth talking about Help Me Investigate and Big City Talk, a panel of politicians discussed with the audience what this all meant.
As is often the case it was partly inspiring and partly irritating and, [...]

Surfing the web with blinkers on

The other week I was talking to Joanna Geary (web development editor at The Times) about how people consume (if that’s the right word) the news her company puts out there and got thinking about the phenomena where a journalist can write a thoughtful piece only for the commenters to pick up on a throwaway [...]

Coworking and Internet Culture

At Moseley Barcamp last week I did a short talk about the Coworking movement, specifically looking at how it differs from similar notions of collective activity by being informed my Internet culture. My aim was to take a snapshot of a larger thing I’ve been thinking about – how the supercharged networked nature of online [...]

Do we need to rethink Good-Cheap-Fast?

This set of rules popped into my head today while grazing my Twitter:

For most things this is a no-brainer. To do sometime better takes time while costs more. Easy. But I’m wondering if social media tools, and the Internet culture that creates them, change this.
Back when Stef and I started Created in Birmingham one [...]