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“rather they tend to be drive-by abuse and little in the way of discussion.” says who?? *puzzled* lots of massively large sites have great discussions and community. Have a chat with CNET, ZDnet etc – they have blogs and forums with huge readership and good times.
Once we start buying into this “oh turn comments off, it’s just a debacle” philosophy, we’ll never get collaboration on line, just a bunch of websites with no discussions. And frankly, it’s not for you to judge whether our comments are useful or just noise.
Future of Melbourne wiki and New Zealand Police Act wiki both point to the way forward for meta government. The head of the European Union and the President of Iran both blog with comments on. If one of the Axis of Evil (no, not Europe
) can blog with comments, why can’t the self proclaimed leader of the Free World?
I know it’s tempting to say there is no way to manage behaviours online, but that’s simply not true. Incidentally my point was that Obama doesn’t HAVE to have comments on, but there is no difference between a website vs a blog with no comments. Sure, turn comments off, but don’t call it an engagement strategy with the voters. Call it a press release website, which is what it is.
Comments on Government Sites {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/DhcVdRdCqm_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”Comments on Government Sites ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/4Y75L8xwZE”}}}
that’s my point Laurel: CNET, Zdnet etc are focused communities with shared values where conversation is actually useful. That shared understanding simply isn’t there in the American polity.
Europe is a different polity to the USA, there’s more of a focus on shared decision making and process oriented politics, that simply doesn’t exist in the USA. The USA has one of the most divided political systems in existence, and the textual/network analysis that’s been done on American political blogs confirms this (sorry, don’t have link to hand, will find it this afternoon) – there’s no interaction, simply shouting across the barricades.
(The textual/network analysis of political blogs is the centre of my phd research – what i’ve found so far tends to support this.)
The New Zealand Police Wiki act experiment actually supports my point, in that they made sure all the necessary information for informed discussion was available prior to opening it up for public debate.
And frankly, it’s not for you to judge whether our comments are useful or just noise.
If you want to have an effective polity and want social media to be useful, then we need people actually studying what’s going on and trying to improve it. Social media is as much in need of criticism, review and development as broadcast media is.
NO better illustration of how Governments are struggling with blogs…
http://snurl.com/cyyb7