Have just put a piece on Huffington Post. It has a bearing on social media, but not exclusively so, so I didn’t also post it here. It is about strategy, competition, customers and the likely failure of political ideologies that believe that the best way to reform public services is to make them ‘competitive’. Check it out if you want to.
I was lucky enough to meet Arianna Huffington at the DigitalAge 2011 conference in Istanbul a couple of weeks ago. We had a very interesting chat at the conference speakers’ dinner – one result of which is that I am now a Huffington Post blogger. Not quite sure what I am going to post and how, or if, it will be different from what I post here. Anyway, you can follow me here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-stacy
It was interesting to see the appetite from people at the conference for The Huffington Post to establish a Turkish edition (and speculation that Arianna’s presence in Istanbul must be linked to this), which really illustrated that the less freedom of expression people enjoy, the greater their appetite to by-pass the official media, which is likely to be allied to political or commercial elites, and establish a people’s media. And the other interesting thing is the role a hybrid platfrom, like The Huffington Post, could perform. Being a politcal blogger is quite hard work in Turkey at the moment, but an organisation like The Huffington Post could offer a form of safe house for political opinion on account of the fact that it straddles the worlds of traditional and social media.