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Small Business News
Twits in Parliament
The official Parliament website has used a third party content provider to keep members of the public up to date with the day-to-day lives and political activities of MPs through the use of social media. The official home of UK politics, www.parliament.uk, has enlisted the help of a third party content provider to allow visitors to the site to read the thoughts and conversations of MPs and other senior politicians as they communicate in real time with their constituents and other politicians, using Twitter.
The Twitter feed, which filters all Tweets to include only those from Members of Parliament and the official Parliament feed is powered by www.Tweetminster.co.uk and is intended to help make politics within the UK more transparent.
The Parliament website will use the third party widget to help visitors
engage with the thought processes of the 49 current cross-party MPs using Twitter, including Kerry McCarthy, John Prescott, George Galloway, Lembit Öpik, Grant Schapps and many more.
Alberto Nardelli, co-founder of Tweetminster.co.uk, had the following to say.
“This demonstrates that politics in the UK has finally accepted that online social media has an important role to play in harbouring trust and a sense of familiarity between MPs and the public. To be the first service used by Parliament.uk to open up politics to the general public, is both flattering and testament to the hard work that everybody involved with Tweetminster has put in. We’re really proud to be taken seriously to the point where our service is featured on the official Parliament site.
“Our hope is for visitors to the parliament website to gain a greater insight into the lives of the people that make up UK politics, in a breakthrough bid to improve trust and communications between electorates and their voters, in a sector that is typically seen as guarded.”
Tweetminster has also recently released a new application called the TweetMinster Wire that allows members of the public and the media to track, follow and engage around UK politics and the issues that matter in real time by using the power of Twitter directly from their desktop.
The TweetMinster Wire pulls together politically relevant conversations from Twitter and allows people to follow and access the Twitter streams of:
• Members of Parliament
• Prospective Parliamentary Candidates
• All major parties
• Parliament and Government Departments
• Downing Street
• Relevant conversations – TweetMinster’s secret sauce to capture
content of relevance.
The TweetMinster Wire acts as a Twitter client letting people participate within these conversations and also to post, reply and direct message friends and followers, and thereby aims to foster a community around UK politics. The desktop application also allows users to search for keywords used on Twitter and compare the term or name with the news stories of that day, to see why a topic peaked on a specific day by seeing its references within those days’ articles.
Editors Comment
You should take a look at this and if you, like us, think this sort of tosh is a complete waste of hardworking taxpayers' money, then you may be interested in this site: http://www.taxpayersalliance.com.
You might also want to write to your local MP and ask why, when the country is penniless, Members of Parliament are wasting time and valuable cash on this rubbish.
Alternatively, you may decide this is time and money well spent as twiddling on twitter stops then doing any more damage elsewhere.
by: Editor
17th Apr 2009
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