This blog, titled as it is as Local Democracy but spending a fair portion of it’s commentary on social media technology, rests on the premise that local democracy will be profoundly affected by tech-driven changes in the way that the media works, and the way that people can associate with each other.

Google Buzz: A great deal more important than anyone seems to be saying?

It will change the very character of representation and the way we make big decisions.

You either buy that premise or you don’t. If you do, I’d be interested to know what you think that the media is going to look like in a few years time.

Writing elsewhere, I’ve made a contention that I’ve not been contradicted on (yet). Please do contradict me if you want – I think that it’s a fairly important suggestion to absorb if you can’t. It’s actually two contentions – one following the other. Here goes:

1. Newspapers often have really good articles by knowledgeable writers who are writing for their audience and not themselves. They have to write to a readable length, check their facts, make issues understandable and keep up their reputation for fair dealing. As long as you monitor a few relevant titles, you can keep yourself informed and challenged on most of the issues you need to know about in order to be a good citizen who votes and gets involved in public life.

Some of you are more sceptical than others about how good newspaper journalism is, but I suspect most people would agree with that – up to a point?

Now here’s my second assertion:

2. Though newspapers cover big issues reasonably well, on almost every subject that they cover (and plenty that they don’t) there is – somewhere – likely to be a better article written by a blogger than anything you can find in a newspaper. The problem is simply how you find it.

I really don’t think either of those lines of thought are problematic. But if they aren’t, the implications are vast, aren’t they?

Newspapers exist for a number of reasons. They keep us entertained, make us laugh, satisfy our appetite for gossip, and so on. But the broadsheets (and even the tabloids and local press, up to a point) also have a very specific role – that of the fourth estate – the one that satisfies Thomas Jefferson’s slightly overstated emphasis:

“If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.”

The most exciting innovations that the internet has brought has been collaborative filtering. In the mid 1990s, there was (for me anyway) a fabulously exciting project called Firefly. It was clunky and small-scale in a way that Facebook, Twitter and Del.icio.us aren’t, but it was basically a hugely influential idea that has set the template that all social networking sites have worked towards. The holy grail of an application that knows what you want and will go and get the best version of it for you to meet your specific personalised needs.

The thing that we have all learned since is that the combination of usability, seducability and the sheer numbers and velocity that the social web creates has made a lot of things possible. Google Buzz – unlocking a lot of the potential that Google Reader brings us – has the potential to supplant that fourth estate broadsheet role.

The implications of this are huge as far as I can see. One of them is that it may compound the problems created by Google’s monopoly status.

I’m surprised that we’re not all talking about it a good deal more than we are.

I’ve started drafting three articles in the last 24 hours for this blog only to find a better one on the same subject written by someone else.

Crowdsourced data visualisations are more useful for the public sector

Firstly, it’s a regular theme here that data visualisations are a huge opportunity for us all because they allow us to break the monopoly that civil servants, sloppy journalists and political parties have in describing the problems that elected representatives are expected to solve.

The rubbish-in-rubbish-out problem. They are, therefore an opportunity to involve more of us in a constructive way in policy making.

According to Public Technology, this is a bigger opportunity than I realised because public sector managers use data visualisations more than the private sector do.

Secondly, Alison Benjamin has a good roundup of the problems that a reliance upon social entrepreneurs and active citizens can bring in the provision of local services.

“…if you live in a neighbourhood where concerned, educated, articulate residents with time on their hands will rise to the challenge. Leaving the fate of, say, the local library in their hands may not be such a bad idea. But what about areas where decades of joblessness and drugs and benefit dependency may have robbed residents of any glimmer of a can-do culture? Here, doesn’t the state have a moral duty to provide a library service where pensioners can read the paper, where schoolchildren can do their homework in peace and discover a world of books not available at home, and where the digitally excluded are able to participate in the wonders of the internet?

If library provision were left to local volunteers, or social enterprises – those not-for-profit organisations run by entrepreneurs much-feted by the cheerleaders of this new settlement – what of the postcode lottery that would no doubt result?”

She’s very restrained. If I’d have been there and got the glib ‘so what’ response that she received, I would have left the room only to return shortly with a flamethrower.

Thirdly, there’s Dave Briggs post on Google Buzz – the reviews I’ve seen are mixed. One side of the argument from Google Reader addicts who carefully select who sends them recommendations is that all of a sudden a tool that was working beautifully is suddenly chucking loads of unrequested information at me.

The other side of the argument is that it will being an awful lot more people into the day-to-day activity of sharing and collaborative authoring of content. This can only be a good thing for everyone, surely?