MD Government Banned from communicating with constituents

It looks like an unelected buearuacrat who doesn't want to do his job is prohibiting OUR elected officials from engaging US in the manner we most prefer to be engaged.

I'm only going to publish the comments section of this important blog post from a written by Judd Legum, an attorney, progressive activist and Annapolis native.

Previously, Judd was the research director at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, where he created the blog ThinkProgress, which remains one of the most popular progressive blogs on national policy and politics.

Most recently, Judd was research director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He graduated Georgetown Law in 2003 and currently practices law in Annapolis.

http://www.juddlegum.com/blog/2009/02/maryland-general-assembly-bans-facebook/

Phil In Denver on 06 Feb 2009 at 2:39 pm

This guy, Mike Gaudiello is NOT an elected official, he is an IT director. He does not have the right to make a decree of this magnitude if it interferes with the business of legislation, as clearly something like this certainly would do. As an IT director he would report to the head(s) of the Maryland General Assembly. Furthermore, viruses and phishing schemes can easily be blocked with anti-virus software and up to date browsers properly configured.

As an IT director he knows this all to well, so he is either incompetent and not qualified to hold that position, or he is injecting his own personal political agenda into his duties which as someone who serves the entire MGA, are by definition supposed to be non-partisan.

Sonja on 06 Feb 2009 at 5:05 pm #

Interesting that an IT director has the authority to select content that our elected officials find helpful and useful as an application. Wonder who blessed him with that much control? Rooted in ignorance methinks (is the IT person in inept that he cannot remedy a virus, one might ask?

This is a terrific template for whom not to hire when looking for IT people. Control-seeking individuals who overstep boundaries and claim security issues to further their own bias. Note to self, when searching for IT staff, make sure paranoia isn’t apparent in the resume. Maryland just moved back a few decades technologically.

Unfortunately, the 150 million people on Facebook might be worth another glance, Maryland. There is great potential for marketing, promotion, relationship building, resource sharing, collaboration, and problem-solving.

Steve on 06 Feb 2009 at 5:41 pm #

As being a Director of IT and having been in the IT field for over 32 years, the bottom line is clear. It doesn’t matter where the viruses come from, Facebook, MySpace, whatever. All this proves is that Maryland’s antivirus protection is severely lacking and horribly inadequate and proving the incompetence of the IT staff. It would be like a grocery store setting a policy to not accept checks anymore because someone wrote one that bounced. How absurd.

http://digg.com/politics/Maryland_General_Assembly_Bans_Facebook

because, after all, why would they want to make it easy for people to communicate with politicians and their staffs? it's almost like they don't want to hear from millennials or anybody else on social networks ..

=====

Newspapers Not Effectively Using Social Media

Need better integration
Newspapers should be using social media more effectively to engage their readers and boost online revenue, according to a new survey by Gartner."In the wake of the economic challenges facing the U.S. newspaper industry, publishers are losing focus on the crucial imperative of how to capitalize on those consumers who remain loyal, engaged online and print readers," said Allen Weiner, research vice president at Gartner.

If you enjoy this post, please consider leaving a comment and subscribe to my RSS feed or via email to ensure you can enjoy the latest post(s).

The survey indicates that newspaper Web sites are failing to optimize for search and a there is a lack of integration between content and social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Nearly half (49%) of respondents use general search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) once a week or more to find content, but only 20 percent use search tools built into a newspaper or magazine site.

Only 24 percent of those surveyed share good content with friends or others via email and instant messaging. Just 7 percent say they usually or often share content via embedding into social networks.

- Although many newspapers list their staffers who are on Twitter, an influential microblogging social network, few offer Twitter users the ability to "tweet" stories from their Web sites.

- When asked what they do when they find interesting content online, more than half of respondents (52 percent) said that they usually read it immediately. Only 9 percent said that they bookmark it to read later.

"Although it's easy to criticize the newspaper companies for falling behind the digital curve and not thinking innovatively about their future, some of the industry's current failures fall under the category of looking past the basics," Mr. Weiner said. "One of those basics is turning those who are fans of your product or service into your best and lowest-cost marketing channel. Even simple social media tools not only allow sharing and recommendations, but also provide a level of identity and reputation management to give others a snapshot of a content curator's credentials."

Mr. Weiner said that while the newspapers have incorporated social media content, they just haven't taken the step of integrating social media tools into their content management "ecosystem" to provide pervasive deployment of important social features. The task at hand is now to prioritize the integration of social media into a current or future content management system.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report "Newspaper Publishers Must Do More to Empower Brand Stewards." The report is available on Gartner's Website at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=911415&subref=simplesearch.

Issue #57

Life in Frederick Maryland

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment and subscribe to my RSS feed or via email to ensure you can enjoy the latest post(s).