Twitter as Government 2.0 tool - #bbcqt

Tonight, the popular BBC TV program Question Time put UK politicians on the hook about their lyin', cheatin' ways with taxpayer's money and dodgy expense claims

It is a fairly robust program, so a good antidote to the grovelling crocodile apologies of the last day or so...

However, more interesting is that during the show, a few Twitter hashtags were set up to talk about it, one won out (#bbcqt, its trending top on Twitter now an hour later) and a mass group discussion broke out online - ad-hoc, spontaneous and interesting to read (check the above link out). As one person noted:

When there is something REALLY good [on TV], I watch it on Twitter #bbcqt

Loathe as I am to write a paean to Twitter, yet again this tool showed its flexibility in being able to be adapted and rapidly deployed for yet another use.

(Update - interesting analysis about how #bbcqt worked over here)

Its an interesting indication of what Government 2.0 will look like - my favourite was the northern lass saying she was more than happy to scrutinise their expenses for free. Be very scared of very cross northern lasses.......

So, despite the mass poo-bah upon Twitter today*, it carries on doing interesting things...

* We told ya it was a scaling issue

Update - the #bbcqt streamsuffered a mass spam invasion after trending top as "nude cam", "free cd" spam etc posts were continually reposted onto the stream. In chat groups this is solved by viewers being able to block the offending user, but this is not yet possible in Twitter Search - probably needs beefing up against spamsters..