Would like to speak to you.

There needs to be a clear distinction between work use and social use – it seems to me that most internet use is for entertainment only, followed by research/information look up. Key active interaction on the web is the opportunity to complain…

My prediction is that ‘whinge platforms’ where complaints are taken seriously and followed up are key drivers for interactivity on the web. That is the ‘killer need’ that drives engagement.. If you look at a lot of the existing comments and interaction, they are essentially whinges. The problem is that they are empty, no-one hears the complaints or reacts to them (except for the fantastic Faxyourmp.com which I think transformed politics)

Many thanks

Chief K.Masimba

Cased- good point about users needing complete freedom to set their own topics. It sounds as if Robin’s experience points in exactly the same direction and our experience with yoosk has also confirmed this.

Here’s another elephant: blogging is hard, time consuming, often brings no personal reward and in the experience of many turns out to be a futile venture that they give up within a few months. The same applies to writing comments on other people’s blogs or composing articles for submission to citizen journalism platforms.

As a genre, I suspect it’s likely that blogging will soon be seen as something that is done by people who work in media and on the fringes of media, along with academics, entrepreneurs and others who want to showcase their expertise and intellects.

And as long as people working in participative media and e-democracy expect high levels of participation from the public that involves blogging or carefully composed ‘posts’, either by text or video, then I think we’ll be disappointed.

To write this comment, I sat down in front of a word document and spent about half an hour drafting, redrafting and putting the finishing touches to what I hope is a reasonably intelligent contribution that will add something to the debate. I do this because I know I’ll be judged by what I write and I care what people, even strangers, think of me. I assume most people are the same.

How many people have the time and motivation to do that? I have the time because I am self-employed and I have the motivation because I want to network with a group of people who I think will add value to my intellectual and business life.

But most people are just too busy with their lives. There is too much opportunity cost in even spending a few hours a week recording their opinions. Participative media doesn’t even make it onto their radar.

So I am left wondering if a lot of participative media is in fact exclusive rather than inclusive. Elitist rather than democratic? Is it in fact the preserve of the very sections of society that have the most control over the decision making process?

It matters to me because I have spent the last year developing a participative media tool. I believe in it and want to see it used. But the question is, how to get it into the hands of the busy mum or dad, who although they care about local road safety and want to be part of some form of local action group, barely find time to go to their kids’ football practice?

The answer, I think, lies in our good old local papers, the ones everyone mocks: providers of participative media and grass roots democratic campaigning platforms for the last few centuries. But here’s the rub: people still read the print versions, but in most cases hardly anyone visits them online.

And here’s what I suggest needs to be done. The creativity and enthusiasm of people working in participative media and e-democracy: journalists, academics, developers and entrepreneurs, should be coordinated by a central body, and put to work along with the regional news groups, to create a revolution in local online news.

There are already islands of best practice among newspapers- Teesside, Liverpool and Birmingham. But the vast majority of local news sites are a long way behind. At the same time, highly innovative participative media start-ups are struggling for traffic and investment. I may be wrong, maybe it is a simplistic solution, but it seems to me if we can add these two elements together- the grass roots readership of printed news and the innovative digital news cottage industry, then we might get wider involvement.

Have I missed something, is there such a body?

The legacy of this ‘head in the sand’ attitude being a vast number of under-used online forums set up in a top-down manner. If citizens can’t fully set the agenda then the conversations will be mismatched with their expectations. Those who actaully have the time and energy to engage in the first place will be put off at the first hurdle by logging on to a place which features issues framed in a way that makes them feel irrelevant, or which have a poor user interface. Click on, click off…!