Sometimes I feel as if I’m always playing catch-up. This book “A Useful Fiction“, which came out last year, has just brought me reasonably up-to-date with devolution of the United Kingdom, particularly some of the finer details which I’d missed. It has many good insights into the idea of Britain and its democracy, or rather [...]
I have two predictions for 2010. Prediction one is that we will see lots of online campaigns around songs, inspired by Rage Against The Machines’s chart success in 2009. It will be easy to be dismissive and call these “copycat” campaigns but the idea of mobilising large groups of fans via social media is a [...]
Remember the recent All Wales Convention? Yesterday they sent me this message via Facebook: Diolch am ymaelodi a’r Grwp hwn. Gan fod yr Adroddiad wedi ei gyhoeddi bellach, rydym wedi cadw cofnod o gynnwys y Grwp Gweplyfr a’i ddirwyn i ben. Thanks for joining the Group. Since the Report has now been published, we have [...]
I went to a public meeting at the Assembly buildings in Cardiff last night, which was a chance to meet Wales’ new Cross-Party Digital Group and have a discussion to answer the question: “How can we make better use of new media and digital technology to engage with the people of Wales?”. The members of [...]
I’m going to be writing more about politics on this blog. My interest is how politics might relate to technology, business and “ordinary” people in the UK – with a particular emphasis on Wales. As a personal rule I try and stay away from the various personalities and day-to-day machinations, allegiances, squabblings, who wore what [...]
The Welsh Assembly Government generates a lot of its own news. The news is available as separate RSS feeds for 22 different topics, which is good. Actually, double that because there are 22 in English and the same 22 in Cymraeg. This week I wanted to subscribe to a complete feed of everything, but I [...]
Below is some full background to this, but in summary TheyWorkForYou are looking for volunteer coders interested in working on Welsh Assembly data. If that’s you, please join the new discussion list and let’s figure out how to do it. If you don’t know TheyWorkForYou then take some time to familiarise yourself. It’s a well [...]
I’m thinking about our obsession with “open”. People work in “open plan” offices. If not then maybe their manager has an “open door policy” and offers an “open mind”. Maybe they conduct negotiations with “open palm”. Then there’s open source software, now pretty familiar and widely used. Of which OpenOffice is an example (as well [...]
Language is important. Recently I found George Orwell’s seminal essay Politics and the English Language online, originally written in 1946. I’d heard of it before but never thought to track it down. Here’s some of the intro: Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it [...]
Just a couple of days ago, I mentioned some really odd police posters I’d seen in Cardiff. This isn’t about those posters. (At least those police ones were trying to make some kind of valid point, but failed.) It’s about the ones that say “These chemicals won’t be used in a bomb because a neighbour [...]
My name's Carl Morris and this is my blog. It's about language, music, art, business and other stuff I care about.
Hacio’r Iaith, papur rhithfro
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