It didn’t take long! Ann Macintosh and colleagues beaver away at software to analyse social media for insights that might influence government policy, and now Big Blue (aka IBM) have developed a tool to suggest blog topics to writers from their potential readership…
No, I’m not making it up! The MIT Technology Review doesn’t normally run to the wacky stories sometimes found in The Register. In the 9 March 2010 edition was a story by Erica Naone entitled “Software tells Bloggers What Readers Want“. The results are even due to be presented at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
So, if the muse has left you and you are feeling bereft of words, always remember It’s Better Manually and buy Blog Muse!
It may sometimes appear that I have a slightly negative approach to the government use of social media, to disabuse such rumours I am presenting a paper next week at Ethicomp 2010 on its use in academic research into information systems. To further put off such rumours I would like to point out the excellent set of resources on Gov 2.0 Steve Radick has posted in Australia. In the way of the Internet, I was made aware of this by Jacques Raybaut who runs the useful en.europa-eu-audience news broadcast.
Posted by greatemancipator 
The Great E-mancipator 