Freedom Line Blog

Say you’re a career civil servant who’s looking for a way to package old wine in a new wine skin. You don’t have the budget for hiring hot marketing talent or revamping your website. What to do? Invite a flock of twitterers to tweet about your work. Of course, this strategy is probably a bit easier to implement if you’re a NASA scientist offering prime seating at a shuttle launch in exchange for good publicity in the form of electronic sentence fragments. If nothing else, it will probably be a better show than watching a delivery of supplies to the International Space Station.  To be sure, transparency in government is usually a good thing, but do we really need to spend taxpayer money sharing footage of the space equivalent of a trucker delivering goods to a grocery store?