Leeds is currently in the grip of strike action by refuse collectors; bin men in old money (Not for the 1st time either). I am not going to get into discussing the claims and counterclaims of the council and the unions, but what I have found is, for a council that does a fairly well developed internet offer, just how little they are leveraging it to keep customers informed.

Our bin has not been collected in nearly three weeks now, although we do now have the advantage of a skip in a front garden because of the kitchen renovations; an advantage I would not be surprised to see some of our neighbours take advantage of too.

When the collections missed for the second time, I thought I would go on the Leeds City Council (LCC) website and see what information they had to offer. What I was hoping for was some kind of information portal that would be aggregating all updates relating to the strike action. I went to the main LCC webpage, saw a news link about the strike affecting several waste storage sites (tips or dumps in old money) and at the bottom of that a link to a webpage specifically devoted to the strike action. "Excellent" thought I, "this will be what I was looking for". Wrong!

First of all I could not get on the page because it kept throwing up errors until I temporarily disabled my firewall's privacy settings. Not a good start, but then when I did get onto the page, all it had were some bland stock answers about the strike action. Yes, there a couple of lines on what to do if you don't get a collection, which is basically, put you bin out on your next collection day (Duh!), but nothing more specific than that. What do customers want to know in such circumstances? When they are likely to be getting a collection in their area of course, but that page offered nothing to manage my expectations. We have had some people taking their rubbish to the waste storage sites themselves, but how are we expected to judge if that will be necessary without more specific information.

Twitter seems ideally suited for LCC to get out status updates on the strike, including when particular areas are going to get collections, and LCC does have a Twitter account. It seems though that this is only used to push out information rather than engaging with customers and answering queries. A shame considering elsewhere LCC are trying to make some services available via the web.

From Twitter I looked at the Posterous site set up by LCC to post updates specifically relating to the strike. Again a great idea, but what does it actually offer customers? What information is there on there? It seems to be more concerned about taking on union claims than with providing useful updates to citizens affected by the strike.

It does seem now that the council will be using a combination of private contractors and working council crews to start to clear the rubbish for the duration of the strike. The latest post on the Posterous page does finally give some useful advice, which has also been sent out via letter over the weekend to all households, but it still does feel that LCC could be using the web more to get their information out.

I would have liked to have seen some information on where they were getting crews working on particular days, but what about trying to make use of Leeds Twitter users as an information source of which areas are particularly bad? Use of the internet as an information source during such disputes is only going to grow, so bodies like local councils needs to be more on the ball about how they use these new technologies.

These days you cannot seem to get away from articles and blog posts about Twitter. Some endorsing it, some saying it is a complete waste of time, but perhaps now it really has arrived: Oprah is using it now.

In the last 6 months there has been a steady trickle of celebrities to Twitter, and although the UK have an irrepressible advocate for the technology in Stephen Fry, surely Oprah is biggest coup yet; as the article points out, she is one of 'Middle America's most influential tastemakers' and her reach, should she get behind the technology, should not be underestimated. This is no mere sports celebrity or has been pop starlet, this is a woman with influence beyond a small niche of over zealous fans. Ignore the fact that politicians have been trying to hook into the technology for a while [see here and here], but you know a technology really is making headway when it starts to attract celebs.

There has been some evidence of what I would call Twitter creep though recently; the inexorable rise of it, something akin to when Facebook started to see its own popularity explosion. Previously used to cover dreary tech conferences, I think Twitter's watershed moment came with the recent G20 summit in London, where is was used by police and protesters alike to keep track on activities. The ubiquity of mobile phone cameras allows people to upload images and video to the web and link to it from Twitter, so people following the event on Twitter have a greater sense of what is happening on the ground. Here is the BBC article on Twitter use at the G20.

"For many, Twitter was a way to find out about and get to the independent media reports from people caught up in the protests. One of the messages most regularly re-tweeted was a link to video footage of the police breaking up the Climate Camp."

Hashtags, Twitter's recent of 'trending topics' and sites like Twitterfall and Monitter, that allow realtime tracking of tweets with particular topics, have become an invaluable way of not only following opinion on the selected topics, but also seeing what material people are linking to. The weekly parliamentary slot for Prime Ministers Questions for example, has the associated #pmqs, so has you watch, you can see what others are saying about it and, if you wish, contribute yourself.

Utilising Twitter for organisational purposes is really very much in its infancy, but as this article in the Telegraph suggests, it can certainly leveraged, even if one puts aside the hyperbole of the article. Or consider this story of the student that 'tweeted himself out of an Eygptian jail'. Twitter is becoming an invaluable tool for sharing information on civil protest or government clamp downs and civil rights abuses. Bloggers have long been a thorn in the side of authoritarian governments and Twitter adds to their armory, providing a medium with more immediacy.

Another way to know you have arrived? When mainstream media technology journos start declaring your death of course. Here's the Independent's David Randall doing just that.

The websites with real permanence are those, such as eBay, which have locked users into business relationships. Or ones like Amazon.com, which have, with their stock and warehouses, raised the barriers of entry for anyone wanting to start an online bookshop to almost high-street levels. The sites which can't do that are vulnerable. They have no means of stopping a slightly smarter version, one that has the cachet of newness, replacing them.

He ends his article by pointing out not even Google is safe in the long term. In a sense it is immaterial whether Twitter continues to thrive and exist, and I happen to believe it will, but the point is that the concepts of microblogging and real time information exchange have started to become embedded in the public's mind. It may not be Twitter, but the demand for that type of service is not going to go away, and as with Google and Facebook, an early frontrunner that can crossover from the tech geek citadels and into the mainstream stands an excellent chance of maintaining its attraction to users.