Postscript two: Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

Following the almost universally badly received launch of the new Birmingham City Council website local developer Mark Steadman posted a challenge on his blog:

Why don’t those who are busy complaining and building independent fixes to problems that only concern people who know or care what hashtags are*, get together and build an alternative Council website? Something that’s a real resource for its users, and doesn’t suffer from the dearth of features the official site does.

In particular he singled out another local developer who had joined the negativity, Stef Lewandowski who describes himself as 'Creative entrepreneur and maker of social network toolbox for dads Odadeo.com - Webby winner, Clore Fellow, ideas guy, jack of all trades but master of none!', for criticism and his challenge.

Well Lewandowski has risen to it and in a matter of days has built what's been labeled #bccdiy (screengrab above).

He describes it as:

An unofficial website, aimed at providing a useful service to people in Birmingham based on the contents of the Birmingham City Council website, combined with other tools and services.

It comes from the input of people to the bccdiy wiki I mentioned in my last postcript (the wiki was set up by @jonbounds)

Thus far, I'm not aware of any reaction to this rather incredible and groundbreaking development (which you can follow on Twitter) by anyone from the council but if they don't do anything but welcome it - and it has already been suggested that they may not - then it really is time for local people to start haranguing councillors.

They could start with the Deputy Leader, Tory Paul Tilsley, who virtually came out swinging at a local event full of Birmingham's 'digerati' (or 'twitterati').



Open mouth, insert foot

#recasting was chaired by Charlie Beckett, who introduced Tilsley by praising the council's "magnificent online presence". This drew a response from Tilsley asking Beckett, "could you repeat that for the benefit of Marc Reeves" (the editor of the Birmingham Post, who have printed several articles critical of the website). Tilsley then laughed - but no-one joined in.

(Alison Smith commented on her blog post about the event "we were all too polite to heckle and I wish I had.")

Tilsey said that the council - and bear in mind the venue for his comments - was engaged in 'innovative activity' and said that the website was part of their business transformation (actually, all council's are doing this as Whitehall has instructed them to) "embracing the whole of the digital agenda over a ten year program. If you take a snaphot you have will negative comments but you need to see the whole picture."

“We’ve come in for a degree of criticism because we did spend a bit of money on it,” he said, my emphasis. “It was completely revamped and you can’t create 87,000 pages without cost.

“That was the size of the agenda that we were tackling to get a product that was responsive.

87,000?

The number that's been quoted by Glyn Evans, Birmingham City Council's Corporate Director of Business Change, thus far has been 17,000, which a lot of people have questioned (it's suggested this includes every council minute or other documents).

But it gets worse. Lewandowski says:

@stef of the 87,000 pages that were quoted I've got a functional site out of the 685 uniques I can actually find to index. #bccwebsite

Tilsley also seems to be either unaware, or actively misled, as council staff transferred the content rather than the contractor - thus adding to the £2.8m they've been forced (via FOI) to state as the website's cost.

The Deputy Leader has invited anyone with questions about the website to email him at paul.tilsley@birmingham.gov.uk. Perhaps a first question could be where he got the 87,000 figure from?

Another local councilor Robert Wright, a LibDem so part of the coalition which runs the council, has addressed - in a manner of speaking - the controversy on his blog. So there's another avenue for giving feedback to local politicians.



What may help speed things up is the arrival (albeit very late) of the Taxpayer's Alliance, who are infamous at getting themselves quoted in the media and provoking politicians into reactions.

Hang on, a £2.8m website that has taken literally years to construct isn’t world class? How much does a world class one cost then? Billions?! And if we’re to believe all the boastful publicity we’ve paid to have papered around this city, and the protestations of Cllr Mike Whitby, isn’t Birmingham a world class city? "A Global City with a Local Heart"?

Well if it is, according to this feedback, it’s a global city with a pretty crummy website…

In other feedback ...

Paul Robert Lloyd, Visual Designer at Clearleft, has pointed out that the council next door, Walsall, is doing a far, far better job (others have cited nearby Lichfield).

Ross Riley, technical director of Birmingham digital agency One Black Bear, comments on "another catastrophic disaster in a long line of public sector web projects".

The running theme throughout the site is the complete lack of even a hint of quality. There's the amateur feel of the graphics in the header, the massively bloated size of the pages, the search facility being left open to Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks, the painfully slow load times and the lack of any design input or consistency throughout the entire site.

There's only two possible reasons as to why this project has ended up as such an expensive disaster. Either the team running it had no expertise in online projects and failed to see that they were being overcharged for sub-standard work or someone on the project team is plotting an escape to Panama with a couple of million in notes.

On Reddit programmers find a whole stack of issues with the website.

Someone has noticed that Birmingham's Respect councillor is the only one who does not have a webpage.


Past posts:

• Postscript: Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster
• Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster 
  

Postscript: Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

The fallout from the relaunch of Birmingham City council's website (#bccwebsite) has continued, not just online but in the local press as well thanks to the strong interest of Birmingham Post Editor Marc Reeves.

It's not a coincidence that the Post has a 'web 2.0' site and in its reporting about #bccwebsite has even included comments left on its news stories as well as comment sourced from online feedback - including mine.

But by far the most interesting developing is the first step in the concretisation of webbie attempts to influence the council's web development in the shape of a wiki (capture above).

This echoes some of the major developments bringing together webbie citizens and government around the world, such as the just launched Code For America who say "we believe there is a wealth of talent in the web industry eager to contribute to the rebuilding of America."

It seems there's also a wealth of talent wanting to contribute in Birmingham as well. Whether they will be heard depends as much on their own abilities at lobbying as creating useful stuff online, alongside the council's abilities at listening of course. Let's not start off being cynical!

Socitm's Helen Williams noted on the Communities of Practice public sector social network my main point, that - from this disaster (and acknowledging it as a disaster) - Things Must Change:

I think there are some specific reasons for the level of interest (reaction to the high cost, perceptions of the third party contractor, the size of the council / city and the fact that it has many digitally active citizens). However, I also believe we have entered an era where councils can expect their websites and any re-launches to receive a whole new level of public scrutiny and comment (and not just in the Web Improvement and Usage Community!)

Let down by Comms, and politicians?

As I noted before, part of the disaster has been a PR one.

In private conversation I have expressed my sorrow for the staff member forced to step up to be the fallguy. Glyn Evans, Birmingham City Council's Corporate Director of Business Change, responses have been unfortunate but betray a lack of help from the Council's PR department.

Even more unfortunately why is he the fallguy and not a local politician? Doesn't it say something for the political leadership's attitude to their website - and possibly explaining why they got in this mess in the first place - that they can watch it be trashed in the press and online and say nothing?

Birmingham Post Editor Marc Reeves agrees with this analysis in a comment on my blog post:

I don’t know Glyn Evans very well, but I do know he’s an effective and passionate public servant who cares deeply about doing the best for the city of Birmingham and its citizens. Much of the opprobrium has centred on him, which I think is a little unfair, although no-one should shirk from holding him up to the ‘cabinet responsibility’ principle.

However, he has been let down by the absence of a cohesive, proactive strategic comms process which – if it existed – would have spared the council some devastating reputational damage, and Glyn this undeserved personal and professional embarrassment.

A well thought-out public affairs / public relations approach to this simply wouldn’t have let the website ‘launch’ proceed. The simple expedient of quietly announcing that the first ‘below the line’ phase of the web overhaul was complete, with functionality to follow, would have avoided this mess. If, as Glyn says, there are major improvements on the way, then simply wait for them to be up ad running, then unveil all in a hail of publicity.

The website scandal just illustrates a much larger problem at the heart of BCC, I fear.

The non-reaction from local politicians (bar Sion Simon MP's retweet of my post) shows why the effects of the Birmingham digerati (aka 'twitterati') need to be as much political as they are digital.



Amongst other developments

• It has been suggested that the task of transferring content fell to council staff rather than the contractor. Also that the statement '17,000 pages' actually means 17,000 content items.
  
  
• An old post by Charles Arthur in The Guardian has surfaced which contains the claim that the project was "essentially trying to knit 35 sites operating under the council's umbrella into a single one. "
  
  
• Reviewers have noted that the forms system, at the heart of any possible cost-savings and 'service transformation, is extremely outdated with "a bewildering array of options?" and has bits which simply don't work.
  
  
• Reviewers have also noted that there are payment forms with no encryption.
  
  
• Questions have been asked about whether there was any public consultation as well as pre-launch testing/breaking and fixing (including usability testing), partly as comments by Evans have suggested this is happening post-launch - "there is little point in assessing our residents' perspective – the view we value most – at this stage".
  
  
• The exact role of the council's web team in the exercise remains a mystery.
  

• The CMS wasn't built by Capita, it was a commercial java-based CMS called FatWire (source: Stef Lewandowski).
  
  

Going over the top (in another sense)

In a great post about the website, local web business owner Jake Grimley has bravely nailed his colours to the mast (more people with potential business to lose will have to follow Jake if efforts like that started by the Wiki are to succeed) and made concrete suggestions from his own experience of developing large and mission-critical websites. He also goes with my guess on what £2.8m actually bought.

He says:

For me, it’s not really the lack of RSS Feeds (inexplicable as that is) or the failure of the CSS to validate, or the difficulties keeping the site up on its launch day that really bother me. It’s the complete lack of attention to detail or quality in the content, design and information architecture that I find astounding. For those that need examples, there is a log of snarky highlights, but you just need to spend five minutes clicking around the site to see what I mean. It’s the equivalent of re-launching the Town Hall with bits of plaster falling off, missing roof-tiles, and sign-posts to facilities that never got built.

Another great follow-up post by Pesky People details the accessibility issues and comes out fighting:

At the moment they are saying Disabled residents in Birmingham are not important enough as Gly Evans was quoted in the Birmingham Post

All the signs are that this one will not go away, for the reasons Helen Williams outlines. But it remains to be seen if the 'Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster' will actually be learned any time soon. That's down to all of us, including you, the reader of this blog post.

~~~~~~

One other consequence

As I endeavored to make clear in my previous post, none of this should be taken as a criticism of the City Council's Web Team. It is unfortunate that it appears that this may not be the case. It would be more than good to hear from them as developments continue - it would be invaluable.

• Past post: Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

Google Reader clips catch up

Roy Greenslade has been doing lots of reports from WAN 2008, a newspaper gathering in Sweden.

He says that many small newspapers are doing very well with hyper-localised sites.

"News travels fast in small villages but the news in our village never made it into the local newspaper, it was considered to small to make it in," Olofsson said. That changed one year ago when she established Heartproject, a series of eight hyperlocal sites, one for each community in the region. Online reporters file local news for the sites, which had at their heart have 101 reader blogs. The 101 bloggers were given set of rules about blogging and asked to write about their local village. None are paid.

My point, exactly. Hyper-local is a logical web growth point.

Rue89.com is a very successful online only French news site with a unique use of 'citizen journalists'.

The motto is "information with three voices, journalists, experts and readers, working together in the news-gathering process," Haski said. One third of the content comes from non-professional sources, in the form of alerts, testimony and commentaries, but professional journalists have the final say on what goes online.

Young people are consuming news differently, and badly.

One fascinating insight: news stories, by their nature, lack resolution, unlike sports and entertainment which generally have a rapid middle and end. This lack of a conclusion is a major reason for boredom among the young.

The study has certainly been taken up enthusiastically by AP. Kennedy says the agency has since designed a new model for news delivery to meet the needs of young adults.

It has resulted in what he calls "1-2-3 filing," starting with a news alert for breaking news, followed by a short present-tense story for the web. The third step is to add details and to format stories in ways most appropriate for various platforms. (This echoes the way in which the Daily Telegraph - and, to an extent, the Financial Times - have approached integrated daily news strategies).

But Greenslade notes that the over-riding theme at the conference was 'Publishers and editors clash over illusion and reality'.

They genuinely believe that digital missionaries, like me, have helped to influence investors and advertisers to turn their backs on newsprint. (I just wish we had that kind of power). They are right to say that newsprint is still the most profitable media sector, as it will be for at least the next five years. But the trend, the future, is online. Editors know that, which is why so much of the forum was taken up with presentations about multi-media journalism.

Simon Dickson picked up on the BBC’s Jem Stone's perspective on BBC blogs:

[Dickson] There are very valuable lessons here for many similar ‘transparency through blogging’ initiatives, not least in government and politics:

[Stone] We’ve found that [engagement with readers' feedback] is possible (and I’m talking about the BBC mgt internet blog here but I’d say it applies to other similar propositions) but only when we’ve had two factors in place:

a) Strong ownership (buy in from senior management even when criticism from users is a “s**tstorm” as Ashley Highfield dubbed the initial BBC iPlayer/Mac period the other day) and

b) Investment in community facilitation, monitoring and hosting. Monitoring feedback and having the antennae to alert issues to teams (and thus the knowledge of the tools that makes this now a lot easier) is often overlooked. Doing this well can’t be done by magic.

Simon also noted the lack of quality amidst the New Statesman's New Media Awards this year.

Most nominees have only received a single nomination, in many cases by themselves, judging by the frequent use of the words ‘I’ and ‘we’. Most are pretty straightforward uses of off-the-shelf technology, by ‘one man band’ operations. And from a technical and/or creative perspective, most frankly aren’t great.

James Ball picked up on some investigative reporting in The Times that found that the Culture of spin costs UK police £39m.

Police forces have stepped up spending on marketing since the Home Office began measuring their performance against public perceptions of crime. Senior officers insist that most marketing is aimed at crime prevention and providing accurate information to inform the public. But there are concerns that forces are withholding information about serious crime in an effort to manipulate the news agenda.

ClickZ on TechPresident reports that the online ad spend by Obama is rapidly evolving, though others have noted how small it is proportionally in marketing spend and others have noted how Clinton ignored it completely and this may have been because of Media Directors vested interests.

Like countless commercial advertisers, the Obama camp has gravitated towards performance-based ad buys, and not only on Google. The other top recipients of his campaign's online ad dollars specialize in cost-per-action ads as well.

While it appears the bulk of Obama's online ad budget was spent on Google and other performance-based media, a small portion did flow towards direct buys on Web sites including Politico ($36,000), CNN.com ($24,000), and Gothamist ($2,800). Those most likely involved CPM-based display ads.

Jack Pickard picks up on a report which says: "a 10-minute ebreak a day can have significant benefits but, despite this, many bosses are banning them in the fear they distract employees."

If you ban your employees from using the net for personal use, you’ll actual harm productivity… and that the British economy is potentially being damaged to the tune of £ 4 billion per year because of this.

Scrapbook clips catch up

Scrapbook is the Firefox extension I use to quickly capture either a whole page or a text selection. It's not, yet, online - meaning that I can't access clips anywhere - but much more useful for my needs than del.icio.us.

Accessibility, two new useful resources.

• Shape Shed on How to make websites more accessible for users with Intellectual Disabilities.
  
• Jack Pickard on WCAG 2.0 and Accessibility for older users.

Why we posted epilepsy film to YouTube

Epilepsy charities condemned Russell Barth andChristine Lowe's YouTube seizure video as a "freak show". Not so, say the couple: the movie has saved lives.

Since posting this footage, we have had over 254,000 views (23 times more hits than the next-most-viewed clip), and have received dozens of emails from people asking for advice in reducing seizures, and hundreds of positive comments about our bravery and compassion.

This footage has been used in medical schools and presentations around the world, and a prison in New Mexico has even used it to help new guards recognize real seizures. Another man in Fort Worth, Texas emailed us to say that our video helped him save another person who had a seizure while at his place of work. Our video has saved lives.

What is it with charities and the web?

Wired's Wiki on how to set up an online pirate radio station.

From the US, UK egov read this and weep:

More than 400 government Web managers from across the country are meeting this week at the fifth annual Government Web Managers Conference, co-sponsored by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and the Federal Web Managers Council. This year's conference focuses on new collaborative technologies that allow agencies to work together to create and deliver better Web content for citizens. The Web Managers Best Practice Awards were presented as part of the conference on May 5, recognizing six exemplary federal Web sites.

From Public Sector Forums (.gov.uk only):

The Cabinet Office is currently embroiled in a huge behind-the-scenes row with the Treasury who they are accusing of failing to sort out tax rules on VAT on shared services for the last two years. Although some public bodies are VAT-exempt, buying shared services incurs 17.5% VAT which they cannot recover. The Cabinet Office, along with many other departments, believes this is one of the two single biggest barriers to shared services, is wrecking business cases for shared services and costing the public sector more than £200 million per year in lost potential efficiency savings.

Others have reported how Gordon Brown talked up the Internet at a Scottish faith gathering. Here's how the Express reported it:

To many it is a talking shop or a playground for perverts. But for Gordon Brown the internet is a new force for global good.

Gordon Brown's speech to Google Zeitgeist:

Churchill once said that those who try to build the present in the image of the past will miss out entirely on the future. And he also warned about people who were facing change, resolved to be irresolute, he said, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, and all powerful for impotence - and that is a warning to all of us.

Chairman: So am I right in paraphrasing that that you expect the web to drive more responsibility and accountability to our elected leaders?

Prime Minister: Yes.

Chairman: And will we see a lot more 'coups de blogs' and 'coups de social networks'?
Prime Minister: 'Coups de blogs' and 'coups de texts', yes!

What was clear from his speech and answers to questions, though, was that although Downing Street will be webbie he doesn't understand how this isn't flowing down through Whitehall and local government. Now why is that?

Those new online maps from DEFRA showing noise in the UK managed to crash on their first day.

On FutureMajority a neat explanation of the ancient rules which stop the US Congress from doing anything on YouTube or social networks.

Franking Rules state that unless you're in the leadership you can't use anything outside the House/Senate firewall. So, YouTube is technically not ok (even though most members are pushing the envelope), no Facebook, or Myspace... nothing…

The article points out how far behind Downing Street the US is.

The Atlantic magazine on how Obama's use of the web has produced The Amazing Money Machine.

Whenever I think about the quarter billion dollars he has raised so far, the image that leaps to mind is Scrooge McDuck diving joyously into his piles of gold.

Picking up my Google Reader clip on being aware of sadists at the US border - Taking your laptop into the US? Be sure to hide all your data first, The Guardian reported.

They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. Customs and Border Patrol has not published any rules regarding this practice, and I and others have written a letter to Congress urging it to investigate and regulate this practice.

But the US is not alone. British customs agents search laptops for pornography. And there are reports on the internet of this sort of thing happening at other borders, too. You might not like it, but it's a fact.

When the New York Times reported on the Pentagon's use of retired generals as 'experts' to push propaganda onto US TV networks, they did so from FOI releases of thousands of documents and audio. This huge archive was then put on dailykos for others to hunt through and it's turned up gem after gem, such as this one from audio of Donald Rumsfeld:

RUMSFELD: [Iraqi militias] know the center of gravity of the thing is here in the United States. It isn't out there. And they're designing their attacks to have maximum effect politically, to weaken the will of the American people. Doing a pretty good job. Hell of a lot more skillful at it than we are. Have a lot greater flexibility. They can lie. Don't have bureaucracy. They have media committees that they operate to manipulate the media. And they do it very skillfully. (mp3)

In the wake of the earthquake, Shanghailist carried the Chinese government's order for websites to 'go dark' for three days national morning:

To all propaganda departments, online propaganda units and foreign affairs offices, and to the various bureaus and websites in all cities and counties:

The State Council has gazetted May 19-21 as national days for mourning. In line with the spirit of the Central Foreign Affairs Office's emergency notice, the requirements are as follows ...

Ethical Corporation Magazine on how the exposure of Yahoo's complicity with Chinese censors has had a positive effect

Former Chinese dissident Harry Wu is administering the new Yahoo human rights fund. As John O’Reilly, a leading human rights commentator, said of the letter to Condeleeza Rice: “This is the first time a company has been so explicit in its condemnation of human rights violations and this, together with the establishment of the new fund, is pretty ground-breaking stuff.”

Same magazine has a feature on Olympics 2008: Beijing games – Sponsors enter rings of fire

Sponsoring companies have difficult choices. They have paid huge sums for rights to global marketing. Limiting that marketing to China seems like a safe last resort, but will undermine their investment. Meanwhile, the moment can be seized by their competitors back home.

Speaking up for human rights, as campaigners want, could now be very risky if the Chinese authorities took it as a “loss of face” and retaliated by making life in China difficult for the companies.

Africa is definitely going digital.

For veteran wildlife ranger Joseph Kimojino, the traditional tools of his trade -- binoculars, off-road jeep and a rifle -- have been supplemented by Twitter, Flickr and a blog.

A ranger in Kenya's acclaimed Mara Triangle wildlife park, Kimojino is a member of the Masai tribe. He first learned how to click a computer mouse in November. Now he blogs about the Mara Triangle and posts wild animal photos on Flickr nearly every day.

WhiteAfrican had more on startups in Nigeria and Techpreneurs in Kenya.

Marco Cantu reports on how Microsoft Blames Users for Vista Problems

An article covering "Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista" claims that all Vista problems are only perceived by users and blames their judgment of the OS. You can get upset, or have a good laugh.

Joe Lieberman tried to hustle Google into censoring YouTube, here's Google telling him to get lost.

Larry Page criticising a potential Microsoft takeover of Yahoo:

Now, if you put 90 percent of communications all in one company ... that's really a big risk, especially one (Microsoft) that has a history of doing bad stuff.

Scott Schmidt used Google AdWords to discover many Americans Searching for Hilary (it's 'Hillary'). He also discovred a method for Republicans to waste Obama's millions.

Search for either candidate and their own website is the sponsored link that returns - at a cost of somewhere near $3 each time someone clicks on the link, a fortune in click-through ad rates.

Slate details why although Microsoft's new 'cashback' scheme for boosting LiveSearch looks radical on the surface, underneath the hood it's actually all about the same old - limited and hence hardly useful for users - dealmaking.

Google search results can now be tweaked to provide top categories and in-site search. Yahoo has announced the general public availability of their SearchMonkey program. This is a program that has been in beta testing with limited partners. It allows the partner to provide Yahoo with structured data that provides advanced information about a web page. This information is then used by Yahoo to influence the presentation of organic search listing results for that page. This includes building apps into the search results.

From Bootstrapper (no, not a gay porn site) : 50+ Google Reader Productivity Hacks. Keyboard shortcuts, firefox add-ons and time-savers. Very useful.

The generation gap defined:

Ralph Nader showed up at the Google offices to talk about his presidential campaign. About 5 minutes in, he says the Internet has been a "disappointment," and then, "don't get me going on the Internet." He goes on to say that "it hasn't shown much by way of mobilizing, except on Internet issues..."

Here's a gem from Master Miliband's recent trip with Condi to Mountain View:

Finally, Rice and Miliband came out of the auditorium and walked over to the microphones at the edge of our grassy pen.

Miliband remarked that he was thankful that Secretary Rice rescued him from the chilliness of the United Kingdom for the warmth and sunshine of "Southern California."

"Northern California!" Rice corrected him. "Oh, sorry!" Miliband said. Scattered laughs.

In a damned radical move, Comedy Central said it will soon start streaming full episodes of The Daily Show, Colbert Report and South Park. As you might imagine, this raises some eyebrows with cable companies, in this case, Time Warner. “They can’t have it both ways. If they put content they ask cable companies to pay for online for free, they are making it less valuable and we should be expected to pay less for it.”

Great cover story in Prospect Magazine about the moral panic surrounding Gaming.

A generational rift has opened that is in many ways more profound than the equivalent shifts associated with radio or television: more alienating for those unfamiliar with new technologies, more immersive for those who are. How do lawmakers regulate something that is too fluid to be fully comprehended or controlled; how do teachers persuade students of the value of an education when what they learn at play often seems more relevant to their future than anything they hear in a classroom?

So far, the dire predictions many have made about the "death" of traditional narratives and imaginative thought at the hands of video games have at best equivocal evidence to support them. Television and cinema may be suffering, economically, at the hands of interactive media. But literacy standards and book sales have failed to nosedive, and both books and radio are happily expanding into an age that increasingly looks like it will be anything but lived on-screen. Young people still enjoy sport, going out and listening to music. They like playing games with their friends, and using the internet to keep in touch and arrange meetings rather than to isolate themselves. And most research—including a recent $1.5m study funded by the US government—suggests that even pre-teens are not in the habit of blurring game and real worlds. This finding chimes with an obvious truth: that a large proportion of "problem behaviours" in relation to any medium or substance exist for resolutely old-fashioned reasons—lack of education, parental attention, security, support and experience.

Unintentional laugh of the week, from an article about 'lifting the ban' on US soldiers in Afghanistan having sex:

According to Helixon's staff, 28 soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade have been punished for having sex in Afghanistan or for violating the no-entry rule in the past year. Those punishments ranged from letters of reprimand to field-grade Article 15s.

Google Reader clips catch up

• V2 Day - how social media is helping roil Italian politics
  Colin McKay plugs a new movement in Italy to change their dire politics and media. Featuring the fabulous Beppe Grillo ("Imagine Robin Williams, but with a lot more impact on the electorate."). and numerous links.
• CellBazaar: A SMS Marketplace in Bangladesh
  Imagine you're in Bangladesh and you want to buy a cow [I know, just so easy to imagine]. You pull your mobile phone out of your pocket and start sending text messages to 3838, the shortcode for CellBazaar, a mobile phone marketplace which some have called the "Craigslist of Bangladesh." You look through the relevant ads and look at the ages, locations, and number of teeth of the 187 cows that are currently for sale. After another SMS, you are connected with the phone number of the the seller, ready to make your new purchase.
• BBC Homepage Two Months On
  Widgets are a'coming. Better not be endless Gavin'n'Stacey promos ...
  
• The Best Copyright-Free and Government Video Libraries
  From the US, quality variable but some of very high production values. They seem to have some sort of corporate deal with RealPlayer though and nothing's embeddable (except Condi's greatest hits), or copied to YouTube ... they're behind Gordon Brown!
  
• Customer insight and technology
  The eGov Minister puts his size 12 in it by pushing NHS choices and ignoring PatientOpinion. At least he's blogging about it so he can told. That's progress.
  
  
• Pentagon Suspends Military Media Analysts Program
  The power of the New York Times when it girds its loins.
• A paper to sum up the discussion on this blog
  Not the best title in the universe but interesting stuff on Benchmarking in gov 2.0.
• Murdoch The Google Monger?
  "There's a very interesting dynamic going on there in that world where Google is going forward, marching forward, with tremendous momentum," Murdoch said.
• Obama Supporters Using Wiki to Reach Superdelegates, Text Messages to Reach Your Momma
  
  
• A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search
  They're throwing a lot at it but it appears to be an unreachable goal.
• Press releases: spin and propaganda
  HT: Mr Gould. The public aren't fools, most PR assumes they are.
• Answers to the judge’s questions
  James Ball re-asks a Judge's questions to journalists on how they understand the real nature of crime in the UK - it's usually widely wrong.
• Google Maps Now Offers Traffic Predictions
• What the world (and his dog) is thinking about the London Mayoral elections
  Really good but very late tool from Delib which is tracking blog opinion - a UK first I think?
  OpinionTracker
  
  
  
  

Not on Reader

• Bill Vs Barack
  Really bitchy yet oddly touching overview from the New Yorker on the spousest with the leastest who's 'out of time' in a 15' soundbite era.
• Last week's Jeremiah Wright interview on Bill Moyers (PBS) (part 1 of six, other parts)
  Gives a proper context and background. The more I see, the more I like. Wonderful line to Moyers about 'you go to Nigeria and they're wearing a tie in 140 degree Fahrenheit weather because they think that's what it means to be a Christian' - take that (Nigerian Anglican Bishop) Peter Akinola. He also says there have been death threats and bomb threats (which I haven't read).
• Wright At National Press Club This I didn't like. Neither did previous Wright defenders.
  
• Linden Labs is developing a hands free interface (inspired by the Segway. yes, I laughed) and Ren Reynolds sees sexual implications. The dirty bastard. HT. J. Gould.
• Chinese execute Tibetans - "they're shooting them like dogs". NSFW video.
  
  
• Also NSFW video, Amnesty International's new anti-waterboarding advert
• World Leaders. From FirstPost. Far, far funnier 3D than Headcases.
• TES: Liberate and disseminate. How Parliament is handling access to Hansard - you must pay! HT: Radio 4.
  
• Among the archives: America does it bigger and better Guardian reviews Photography museum websites.
  'In the Science Museum, for example, you will find the best selection of photographs online in the Science and Society Photo Library under the heading Doing Business with Us.'
  
• How children’s rights are violated on Facebook Mail & Guardian (CapeTown) - just one form letter after another. Crap customer service kills companies in the end.
  
  
• Remaining posts from TechPresident from the Politics Web 2.0 conference in London (all fascinating):

The Rise of Trickle-Up Politics

Lessons from Dean, John Kerry and Beppe Grillo

Visibility Reach, Participation, & Peer Production

Facebook and Clustering of Ideological Types

Rating Candidate Sites, Dealing with Communication Overload

• And finally, is this not the classic example of a Moral Panic? From the Daily Mail: 'How the web stole our children: Chilling report reveals under-16s spend more than 20 hours a week online'

Another toothless Commons review of eGov web strategy

Looking at the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee's report on government delivery of online services, released today. a few things leap out.

Firstly, the PDF document I'm looking at is text images. It's not searchable and it's not 'accessible'. Yes, it's the PR version but that's hardly the point. (Though maybe good government PR is to make lengthy, text-heavy docs unsearchable ... ?) Practice/preach ...

Secondly, they keep referring to Direct.gov.uk and businesslink.gov.uk. They're not the brands, it's 'directgov' and 'businesslink'. If they don't understand this and use the right brand name what does that say about the strength of the brand?

Lastly, their main obsession is the 'digital divide' and they do ask that the government spells out that:

1. services won't be removed for the excluded
2. savings will feed back to the excluded

They didn't hear evidence from the civil servants who formed their witnesses that anyone seemed to be checking this and no-one could convince them this wasn't happening or wouldn't happen.

Chairman Edward Leigh (Con., Bright Eyes, Red Nose) said:

Those gazing towards the sunlit digital uplands must not forget those among our citizens - including three-quarters of socially excluded people and a half of people on low incomes - who have no access to the internet or do not use it. They must not be left behind as the government's use of the internet gathers pace.

This is good but they haven't hit the headlines with this point and they need to adopt the Dunwoody strategy if they aren't going to be hearing the same excuses next time they review. Cameron should pay attention as well, there's politics to be played.

Committee member Austin Mitchell, doing little but play politics, appears to have a particular thang about 'my constituents', 'the middle classes' (not his constituents maybe?) and 'fashion', as he said in evidence giving:

"I have now found a channel called something like TalkToThem.com which allowed people to communicate with their MPs and I am now receiving enormous amounts of abuse every day - every day there is fresh abuse! .. I get the impression that that is 'transformation of government' ... I get the impression that that has also happened with government, that it became the subject of fashion, everybody must do this ... It is only now really that [online government can provide a decent service] for those middle class people who will use it? Would that be a correct interpretation? The mistakes arose from goodwill and over enthusiasm?"

Naturally, Mitchell has comments turned off on his 'blog'. In committee, he also refers to a 'lad' who looks after his website and something else that 'my wife' looks after. Does Mitchell think the Internet is a 'middle class' thing and not for the 'working classes'? Is he the very definition of a technophobe? How is he 'excluded' from using technology? Ignorance? Fear? Can't be bovverred? It's just 'fashion' and the wife takes care of it?

Seriously, so-called champions of 'the working classes' like Mitchell should take a good look at themselves and set an example for their excluded constituents rather than shift the problem elsewhere. You are the problem, Austin. Learn how to use this instead of expecting someone else to, let alone a patronised 'lad'. You're not leading your constituents into 'sunlit digital uplands' are you? You're just acting like a luddite.

The evidence also has some gems from Government Services Transformer Tsar John Suffolk, one of which bashes Google:

We all probably use searches in this room and if you key in anything you will get two million references and [most] are useless. this is because all the search engines do not really know in a sensible way what you are looking for.

News to Google, I'm sure. And this after saying:

I am not going to pretend to bluff my way on the technology of search engines.

Because Google is useless, he argues, we need a destination 'holiday' page of directgov ... look, John, I just searched on 'passport'. #1 result on google.com isn't UK government, #1 on UK Google isn't directgov. Past result #3 clicks drop off a cliff. Plus there's a very prominent commercial advert. This is a classic example - there are lots - of where commerce is way ahead of you and you haven't taken any strategic account of that fact whatsoever in online service delivery. Do catch up John.

Apart from some obvious points about 'customer focus' being a mirage because there's little understanding of metrics and another bang-on about accessibility in it's disability sense, one thing struck me hard about the report.

Edward Leigh said:

The time has long passed for getting a firm grip on the growth of government websites which has been almost uncontrolled. The streamlining of web services around the key websites Direct.gov.uk and businesslink.gov.uk is a very welcome development. It is essential that the DWP, the department responsible for these sites, should arrange for regular independent reviews of how they are developing and the associated risks.

In the PR they say:

The government has embarked on an ambitious strategy to move most citizen and business facing internet services and related information to two websites, Direct.gov.uk and businesslink.gov.uk, by 2011. These sites are well regarded by the public and industry and both have received awards.

The problem being that the strategy itself is a risk, as Helen Margetts, of the Oxford Internet Institute, told a recent conference (speech notes reported here):

Right now the UK govt has embarked on a high risk "supersite" strategy of centralizing e-govt services on two sites: DirectGov and BusinessLink (while closing down 2500 disparate e-govt sites at the same time). Both have low brand recognition and problems competing with other sources.

She's right, but the committee has just taken the strategy at face value and simply not asked the right, informed questions or invited critics.

This is underlined if you look at what evidence is cited in the report that directgov and businesslink are "well regarded" - the evidence comes from the sites themselves. It's self-serving, it's not objective evidence. A bit like the evidence cited when this strategy was launched that people wanted a portal, a one-stop shop. Very 'push polling'. Find the evidence to back up what you wanted to do in the first place rather than actually be 'customer focussed' and be prepared to iterate your strategy based on real evidence of behaviour. Like wot commercial sites do

As for the 'awards', who hands them out?

Like a lot of strategy, by the time it's adopted it's dated: 'supersites' are a bit yesteryear elsewhere and other big organisations are moving away from them (see Tesco). But just to take one example of a risk, when you centralise the side-effect is to disempower. Why should the organisation learn and become more focussed around the web if 'that's someone else's job'? Why should the actual service provider learn how to repurpose and retool? It just waits to be told and the corporate knowledge goes backwards.

One news nugget in the report is that, as I had heard rumours of, Google is talking to the Cabinet Office and this appears to follow on someone's engagement with the US government who have a cross government search portal (though not run by Google). This is good but history shows, however, that this may not end up going anywhere except into another piecemeal strategy which is dated before it arrives and fails to 'trickle down'.

So why is this report ultimately useless? No critics giving evidence, in a nutshell. Members proud in their ignorance (see Austin Mitchell). They spoke just to civil servants, critics giving evidence would immediately shake the whole shebang up. It's another version of the bigger 'walled garden' egov problem which means that progress is so bloody slow, partial and 'two steps forward' and the review function that this committee is supposed to do on our behalf is utterly toothless.

Google Reader clips catch up

• Twitter at the tipping point
  [NB: I'm leaving my original text but Rory tells me this is meant completely ironically - read it now in that light!] From BBC dot.life. Contains an opening paragraph of such sheer onanistic pretentiousness it's worth repeating for a good belly-laugh:
  

  Suddenly everyone is talking Twitter. Just as Facebook hit the mainstream a year ago, so the short message social network has become the media flavour of this month - to such an extent you can even find me talking about it on the Today programme.
  
  But I'm not convinced that Twitter is really going to spread, in the way Facebook did, beyond the digerati into millions of people's lives. What's more, I'm struggling to understand the business model.

• Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand (David Barstow/New York Times)
  Investigative reporting, the sort they didn't do before the war.
  
• Mail Online's new look
  Jemina Kiss @ the grauniad. According to comments, it's a 2MB load! Really bad design as well.
  
• New ways into blogs
  The BBC's blog comments problem fixed (but not the 502/404 error message, now several years old)
• No Whining About the Media - Three quick points on the Democratic debate last night: (David Brooks/Campaign Stops)
  Memorandum has Brooks' defence and the critics of Brooks (that's why I like their presentational format for such online debate).
  
  
• Postcards From Yo Momma
  HT: Etre. Really funny true-life emails to offspring.
  
• PoliticsWeb2.0: On the Future of Government in the Digital Era
  TechPresident has a good series of 'semi-liveblogging' from a London conference. Opens with a report of Helen Margetts, of the Oxford Internet Institute, presentation covering UK eGov.
  

  Right now the UK govt has embarked on a high risk "supersite" strategy of centralizing e-govt services on two sites: DirectGov and BusinessLink (while closing down 2500 disparate e-govt sites at the same time). Both have low brand recognition and problems competing with other sources.

  This is what I've been saying for a year!
  
  
• Obama Targets Pennsylvania Voters with Pure Persuasion Ads
  ClickZ. This is new. Before they were just pleas for money.
  
• Blog On Blogging
  More BBC.
  

  The act of blogging wasn't, and still isn't, entirely uncontroversial, even here at the BBC
  

• Twitter spam spirals out of control
• If Robert Scoble is right, then Web 2.0 is dead
  A current Silicon Valley meme. Something to do with content being repurposed.
• Networking Journalism
  Great stuff from Bill Thompson who says:
  

  What has happened so far [to MSM] can be compared to the mild tremors felt before an earthquake.
  
  As the internet spreads there are more and more places where we can simply ask those who are living through the events what they think of them and seek insights and analysis from those who know the people and the places involved.
  

  This would be the death of the 'foreign correspondent' (that's you, Orla Guerin, praise be).
  
• The Pleasures of the Flesh
  George Monbiot on why we should eat less meat.
  
• Downing Street removes Labour Party link
  I had a delightful spar with the fierce looking (check the typeface on his blog) Tory wideboy who found a hole in Downing Street's bleedin' edge. Yes, the phrase 'grow up' was used.
  
  
• Civicsurf in action
  Shane McCracken has blogged at Cllr 2.0 about the experience of Norfolk County Councillor Tony Tomkinson who started blogging at the beginning of this year.
• Hillary Clinton To Appear On "Colbert Report"
  And it was dull. As was Stephen dazzled by Michelle Obama. Is he morphing into David Letterman?
  
• [Paul Bradshaw] User generated content? Or great place for a prank? Sky gets photoshopped on Marathon day
  This was truly hysterical.
  
• Social media and the dark side of doing PR
  Simon Collister on the growth of 'ghost blogging'.
• Top 10 UK search terms: social networks dominate the list

Not on Reader:

• The First 21st-Century Campaign
  National Journal overview by Ronald Brownstein on how the Democrats are reaching new heights in raising money, recruiting volunteers, hiring staff, buying TV ads, contacting voters, and generating turnout (and hence have a big edge for November).
  Time also has a piece on this - Why Democrats Rule the Web
• Youth Work and Social Networking Research Project
  Very interesting blog with some new research.
• Will economics put newspapers to bed before the readers do?
  Justin Williams blogging in the Telegraph
• Implications of Google Transit in the UK
  Tim Howgego has a very in-depth analysis on Google's latest project.
• Could the web win it in London?
  The BBC adds a bit more detail on my post Ken's already lost online but doesn't actually answer that question

Search and suicide

My work on critiquing the British Medical Journal (BMJ)'s research article last week on search and suicide has now been published on PublicRadar, in an article form.

I'm republishing it below as it's more digestible than the original post.

Been much boosted by positive responses from several psychologists who use the web, SEO and SEM full-timers and others who know this stuff far better than me.

As well, I was blanked for a week by the BMJ but am now waiting for either a response as to why they won't publish my criticism or if they actually will.

Unfortunately the BMJ PR went around the world and was published in a lot of media. They really need to unpublish the research article and issue PR explaining why but as one psychologist correspondent told me, "the BMJ is in a very conservative world where they still think that hiding or ignoring negative comment works".

How this serves medical practitioners, let alone the suicidal, completely eludes me.


~~~~~~~~

Suicide on Search Engines

April 17th, 2008 PublicRadar

Last week the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published research headlined ‘Suicide and the internet‘.

Recent reports of suicide by young people have highlighted the possible influence of internet sites. Lucy Biddle and colleagues investigate what a web search is likely to find.

Those recent reports are of the Bridgend, Wales suicide cluster. Shock horror newspaper headlines often pointed at the web as a reason why a bunch of young people might have killed themselves or at least encouraged them. Of course, virtually none of the media reports looked at the research which has repeatedly shown that the media itself, particularly when it describes methods, has been demonstrated to encourage so-called ‘copycat’ suicide, but that’s for another day.

What Biddle and colleagues from Bristol, Oxford and Manchester universities claimed to find, and what the BBC and media around the world subsequently and dutifully reported, was that it’s search engines that encourage suicide. Methods are “easy to find” - and they’d proved it.

“The three most frequently occurring sites were all pro-suicide, prompting researchers to call for anti-suicide web pages to be prioritised.”

The trouble was the research was flawed in its methodology and Biddle et al aren’t experts in how search actually works. Worse, ways in which pro-suicide websites can be countered online are relatively easy and the methods used well established - so how this ‘prioritisation’ might happen wasn’t explained.

Starting with their idea of “most frequently occurring sites”, this is nonsense as the vast, vast majority of searchers don’t get past the first ten results and most of those don’t get past the top three.

So to rank, as they did, the ‘top ten’ searches as having equal value is false. This alone discounts their findings.

They also counted from searches on four search engines. Yet fully 86% of UK searches are via Google - they’d again counted each search on each search engine as having equal value.

As well, they gave each of ten search terms equal value when those terms have vastly different uses. Using a keyword suggestion tool, you can see that ‘Suicide’ has a daily UK search number of 7788 whereas one they picked, ‘Most effective methods for committing suicide’, has 0. This tool also throws up terms they didn’t use, such as ’suicide poetry’.

You can actually see this vast different in usage recognised by commercial sites as well as church and other small charity bodies who pay for advertising next to search results (’Cremated ashes made into glass: “Keep the memory”‘). They will naturally only pick the terms of most value.

Most tellingly they failed to understand that two terms they used ‘Methods of suicide’ and ‘Suicide methods’ are exactly the same term because ‘of’ is discounted.

In their paper they state that their ‘Search strategy’ was:

“To replicate the results of a typical search that might be undertaken by a person seeking information about methods of suicide. We conducted searches using the four most popular UK search engines and 12 broad search terms—a total of 48 searches. The terms entered were those likely to be used by distressed individuals, determined partly from interview data collected in an ongoing qualitative study of near-fatal suicide attempts and by using search suggestions provided by the engines upon entering terms such as ’suicide.’”

There isn’t any further detail on just how they could know what search terms were actually entered ‘by distressed individuals’ as opposed to ones without distress or how relevant ‘interview data’ would be in working that out.

If they had even bothered to ask some of the search marketing/search optimisation specialists probably around the corner from them, or possibly even within the same universities, they would have realised that their methodology doesn’t show anything. But as a result of this article being in the hallowed BMJ we now have web-bashing headlines around the world.

I would suggest that this article devalues the BMJ itself as a source of scientific information unless it is withdrawn. There was nothing scientific about this study.

It is notable that in a comment on my blog Graham Jones who runs the Internet Psychology web site said that he’d met some people who were connected to the research and “they were suitably embarrassed in private when I pointed out the simple flaws in the research”.

Biddle told the BBC that:

“This research shows it is very easy to obtain detailed technical information about methods of suicide.”

Her research did not demonstrate that finding pro-suicide websites is “very easy”. But, yes, if you are determined to find it you will find it. Just like the determined can find bomb making recipes and the Chinese in China can find rants against the Chinese government.

But this is not how most people operate, which you can see from what gets typed in most frequently.

Contrary to assumptions, I haven’t seen any evidence that shows that kids and teens are that much better, if at all, at finding things online using search engines than anyone else.

What I can say is that, using Google Trends, which covers searches going back four years, for general searches for ’suicide’ (tweaked to exclude unrelated Iraq/Afghanistan ’suicide bombers’ searches), the trend is clearly down. There’s some good news you won’t read in reporting.

Apart from no numbers on what the actual usage is of ‘pro-suicide’ sites, another point is whether the websites which charities and government create are actually helping kids and teens. I don’t know but I’d like to - there’s nothing about that in this research, why some kids and teens might be turning to these pro-suicide websites instead of ‘official’ ones.

The BBC quoted Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity Sane, saying the proverbial ’something should be done’. There’s actually a lot which could be done. For example:

1. How about running text ads next to more search terms than just ’suicide’.
2. Or employing some Search Engine Optimisation specialists to make sure that your pages come up first. They might even do it for nothing or just the publicity.
3. Or working with other charities to make sure you cover every possible term and intervene via content and ads on other sites or through social networks (simply creating a page on Mind’s website, already high-up results, which is titled ‘How to commit suicide’ would immediately help).
4. Or fixing your own websites, not only to make them more appealing to your target audience but also to fix errors such as the first result on a search for ’suicide’ on Sane’s website being ‘The National Suicide Prevention Strategy report’.

On one term you can see how smaller, more agile bodies aren’t moaning but are learning how to use the web to their own ends. ‘How to commit suicide‘ includes a top result which redirects people to an anti-suicide web page.

My issue with the research and its reaction is that the complainants are making no effort to ensure that their pages turn up tops on such search terms as ‘How to commit suicide’ . There are no excuses for this and to behave as if this is someone else’s responsibility - let alone ISPs - is childish and pathetic

Simply put, it is not ISPs but health practitioners, charities and government who are not doing their job properly online. They are failing the very kids and teens they claim to be helping and looking for someone else to blame - there’s an abdication of responsibility.

This is exactly what happens when you set up online walled gardens and fail to relate to the wider web - I am not seeing the NHS or government portal directgov anywhere in these results - and that ‘can’t be bothered’ ‘it’s all too complicated’ mentality apparently dominates the charity sector as well.

Hardly surprising when the ‘National suicide prevention strategy for England‘ contains no mention of either the web, the internet or even chatrooms.

Here’s what could be done:

1. Talk to the search engines, they are very interested in getting results right and can and do ‘tweak’ them. They won’t ‘censor’ sites or stop indexing the whole web but they will help and advise on improving positioning.
2. Don’t talk to the ISPs! Talk to the search engine experts such as the Search Marketing Association.
3. Talk to social networks about teaming up with them and others to create widgets and other tools so kids and teens can help others.

As well, these people would potentially do it for free or cheaply or for publicity. It would be very straightforward to out-manoeuvre the pro-suicide websites - what resources do they have vs. what resources do you have?

Research on how search may contribute to actual suicide may well be valuable, but it needs to be done by specialists who can use the tools established by the industry to track and analyse which sites are the most dangerous and where the traffic to them is coming from - it may well not be primarily search. That could be done. But the best course is a concerted effort by charities and government to direct ‘distressed individuals’ to websites which can really help them.

I am afraid that none of these people are listening though. What they are instead developing is an righteous effort, like has happened in Australia, which will end up in a censored Internet for all of us - and no real help for those they claim to be helping.

~~~~~

Postscript: Published in BMJ with one edit.

Google Reader clips catch up

• Virgin Begins Assault on Net Neutrality : Ten Percent
  'Bollocks', apparently. iPlayer has set off one heck of a storm.
• Stop the Generation Gaffe and Evolve Already
  According to .gov watch, there's systematic discrimination against the under 30s in US eGov,
• Daily Digest: Grassroots Fundraising vs. Public Financing
  More on how Obama's funding is redefining US political campaigning.
• Aussie Internet usage overtakes TV viewing for the first time
• Opt-in / Opt-out upsell practices: the fine line between salesmanship and sneakiness
  Easyjet and RyanAir being sneaky bastards? Who'd have thought.
  
  
• Sex Survey: Gayers in the Westminster Village : Iain Dale's Diary
• Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?
  Why shifting blog users to Readers might be a/ happening and b/ not good.
• The Independent gains online market share in the UK
  The Mirror and Express are doomed I tell ye, doomed!
• Resist redesign
  More wisdom from Gerry McGovern.
• Journalism remains a smart career, despite shrinking newsrooms
  I should blog this. Amy Gahan on what's not happening is Journalism training in US universities.
  
  
• Microsoft's dumb switch to Multimap
• Gay Eurovision fans threatened by Serb thugs
• Robert Baer: The Saudis do not give up their secrets, Mr Blair
• Empowerment packs from the gov’t
  Dave Briggs is 'glass half full', me less so.
• Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 5 - The Newspapers vs Google
  Martin Belam dissects just how bad UK newspaper internal search is.
  
  
• Oliver Stone's Bush Flick: Fade in on Turdblossom, Frat Hazing
  It's a movie. Before November. Not looking forward to it ...
• How to reach Joe Sixpack on climate issues
  Your BEER will become more expensive.
• A More Helpful Help Site
  The BBC, excellent on the waffly PR. Now if they only fixed the search ....

Not on Reader:

• The New Media Moguls Talk Politics: With Jeff Jarvis moderating, Arianna Huffington, Jay Rosen, Micah Sifry and Lisa Tozzi talked about how the 2008 presidential elections have evolved, and what will come next.
  
  "If it were not for the internet, I think it would clearly be the case that Hillary would be the presumptive nominee today. It has made a huge difference for Obama’s viability."
  
  
• IBM: Planning a Semantic Web site. This article discusses what you need to know to make your Web site part of the Semantic Web. It starts with a discussion of the problems the Semantic Web tries to solve and then moves to the technologies involved.

• dot.com decade. Excellent, More4 News's series by Ben Cohen. Featuring Chris Bryant MP on Gaydar and a warning from Sir Tim and others.