DISQUS

Excellent post and very true in many respects. I sometimes use Twitter to just get stuff off of my chest because I know no-one else is listening (or caring) and have fallen into the trap of talkback radio mentality before. But I have also been looking at how to use Twitter for things like direct online political action (I've written about this on my blog); as well as how to better integrate it into online campaign activities so it's not just an information/news feed.

Before Facebook does any more it should take care of it's terrible refresh rate. Many of the applications take much longer than expected to load and these minor annoyances could begin to drive people away.

I agree that live streaming of Council meetings would be awesome. It is a total shame that Councils, a great majority in my experience, don't allow any kind of recording of the meetings, unless it's the official recording that is.

For the most part it would seem the reasoning behind this is purely politically motivated to stop Councils, and individual Councillors, from being caught out and later embarrassed. But I think that having meetings streamed live or even recorded for broader public consumption would mean they'd have to play nice at least.

Thanks for posting about this topic Kieran.

More evidence as to why the dredging of Port Phillip Bay is such a bad idea. Thanks for bringing this information to light.