Can I recycle it? A plea

The government is to fund a website to help people find recycling facilities, as the winner of its Show Us A Better Way competition

Can I Recycle It? will provide information on what can and cannot be put in recycling bins or has to be carted to a recycling centre based on users' postcodes.

This is a really great idea, especially in places where people aren't sure (because information provision isn't very good). It will be a great supplement for often dry or confusing information on poorly promoted local government websites.

But here's my plea. Instead of simply providing yet another website, widgetise the postcode interface so local authorities can bung it on their webpages and be sent off to the Can I recycle it? website. Like Transport Direct does with public transport information.

It would also be great if the website 'cross-sold' recycling messages and sent people back - perhaps using the data local government webbies submit to directgov - to local government website pages about stuff like hazardous waste disposal and locations of recycling centres.

It does sound, though, that this approach isn't in the planning.

Adam Temple, who came up with the idea, suggested that: "if it is in the database, the householder would get an immediate answer. If not, the question could be forwarded to the appropriate person in the local council. That person could then amend the database, and that way the website would gradually get more useful."

Which is the very definition of duplication.

POSTSCRIPT: Shane McCracken has pointed out (I'd forgotten it) that RecycleNow already does this exact same job. EXACT SAME.



Tom, explain quick. Or something will rub off.

Postscript: Picking up on my point about localdirectgov, Andy Key comments that:
you can link to their search with the postcode pre-set (e.g. Recycling near SO23 8US)
And PSF has picked up on this, finding out that the Cabinet Office will instead direct the winnings to RecycleNow!

The rider is that RecycleNow! needs to get some SEO happening as they ain't appearing in SERPs - the reason they were missed as a duplication for Can I Recycle It? in the first place.

I am very much noticing though that no-one is picking up my widgets point. As I have endlessly pointed out, the thing with widgets is that they drive traffic to your website and you don't lose customers along the way. The RecycleNow! is hidden away in a deadzone on their website.

SEO tips for egov/NFP

I've kindof blogged this stuff before but here's a MarketingSherpa 'inspired' helper to getting your stuff viewed (I'm thinking of egov and community stuff). And search engines will drive 50%+ of your traffic in nearly all instances. Y'know it!

#1 issue in SEO is links. They are ca-ru-cial. All search engines will rank you in their particular algorithm based in some fashion on links. #1 algorithm is Google's (80%+ UK traffic). The more 'authoritative' a link is the better. Think local press, think national brand. And an authoritative site is always popular and always relevant.

1. Have great content
   What this means is something worth linking to.
   In the commercial world this would be considered 'Link baiting'. We (eGov/nonprofit) don't actually need to 'stoop' . We just need to do good PR - tell 'them' you have something worth linking to.
   Describe yourself properly (aka 'keywords') and use said keywords in your content. Here's a good example, instead of 'abandoned vehicle' how about 'abandoned car'? N.B your blogs actually act as ''link baiting''. Blogs seem to be extremely good at boosting Google rankings!
   
   
2. Research your market
   If it's about X service who are the X targets? Where do you want a link from?
   In LOTS of service areas there's someone leaching off it - where are their links coming from?
   On Yahoo! Site Explorer type in the URL of someone doing something around your service, click “explore”. Click “inlinks”. Click “show inlinks: Except from this domain” to exclude internal links. Click “to: Entire site” to see links to every page on the site. You’re then given a list of every page that links to your competitor. Dig through the list to find sites that might link to you.
   
   
3. Select good targets
   MarketingSherpa rates a 'link value' based on:
   

   Content on the page
   Topic of the site
   Number of outbound and inbound links
   Amount of advertising
   Reputation with search engines
   Website age

   OK. What this means is what sites are relevant to the topic and have a high Google rep. For Whitehall that means a limited number of relevant UK sites per topic. For Lgov that means a limited number of local/localised sites - many of which may actually be one-person productions, but they're highly relevant in specific areas. Directories are also relevant because many of them have been set up to capture traffic in specific geographic or subject areas. Talk to them - literally. There's usually a quid pro quo here. Just reject anything which asks for a posting fee, as search engines do the same.
   
   
4. Partners
   Commercial sites set up relationship with people like newspapers - why not you? NB: they may need some help (!), i.e. pages to link from, what content should be on the page, and where the link should target. Think shortcuts. Or making sure the homepage is primed. And pick up the phone!
   
   
5. Get well-built links
   This is a tekkie note. KEYWORDS: Write good anchor text. The words used in your links’ anchor text (the text users click) will affect your search rankings. The more links you have with the anchor text, the more likely you will have good search results. You want your target search keywords in your link’s anchor text. Also, it's not just the homepage, 'deep links' are most of your traffic. + search engines are likely to give better rankings to pages that attract links over time, rather than only recently or in the past. This is another reason why link building needs to be ongoing and (actually) why most egov sites start from an inbuilt advantage.
   
   
6. PR
   Every single bit of PR should include a link to your site. Always ask for a link.
   
   
7. Strategy
   Lots of tools out there which will track incoming links, record contacts. Allying this with analytics helps with understanding keywords and search terms and what actually drives your traffic and helps refine strategy.
   

HT: MarketingSherpa
and here's their useful links

• Sherpa 101: How to Use Digg to Go Viral -- 10 Strategies
• Problogger: 20 Link baiting techniques
• Google Webmaster Guidelines: Link schemes
• Yahoo! Site Explorer
• SEO Book
• SEO for Firefox Extension

Scrapbook clips catch up

I've been repeatably hearing a bizarre (to my ears) ad running on the Olbermann netcast - Kraft 'natural, 2% milk' cheese with ... drumroll ... "no added growth hormone". Only in America?

I shouldn't mock. We have crap food here too. But something called Velveeta, which "doesn't need to be refrigerated after opening"???

Google has launched a Elections Video Search gadget which use speech recognition.

Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.

+ Google kills the Google bomb :{

Hah (sorry, shouldn't laugh).

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco's new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail.

US 'Department of Homeland Security' is seriously suggesting that airline passengers wear 'security bracelets' which would deliver taser-like shocks if they 'fail to comply' - seriously.

Here's another shock horror story in 'the war against tourism':

And it wasn't enough for another woman to show TSA agents nipple rings that set off a metal detector. The agents forced her to take them out.

Mandi Hamlin said, "I had to get pliers and pull it apart."

In Chicago, people like Robert Perry are subjected to exhaustive security checks. He was patted down, his wheel chair was examined and his hands were swabbed, all in public view in a see-through room at the security checkpoint. Perry, 71, is not alone

"It's humiliation," Perry said.

Perry was also taken to a see-through room by a TSA agent when his artificial knee set off the metal detector.

"He yelled at me to get the belt off. 'I told you to get the belt off.' So I took the belt off. He ran his hands down over and pulled the pants down, they went down around my ankle," Perry said.

At that point, Perry was standing in his underwear in public view. He asked to see a supervisor. That made things worse.

Tracey Ullman has a great character, Chanel Monticello, taking da piss outta this shit.

Delightful story about how Karl Rove, aka 'Bush's brain', threatened a webbie:

If he does not "'take the fall' for election fraud in Ohio".

No wonder they're losing online, who'd want to work for them?

Computing magazine had a good-news story about the NHS IT project - the biggest non-military IT project in the world - focusing on Homerton Hospital. All great, practical, working properly, stuff. Pity that a/ it's not easily found on the web and b/ Labour is making nothing of it.

eGov: New figures from NWEGG shows that:

A ‘self-serviced’ web transaction is 24 times less costly than a telephone transaction and 46 times less costly than a face - to - face transaction.

According to the Daily Mail (FCS):

Ministers had so far failed to put sex education on a statutory footing in the national curriculum.

AND

Attempts to search for advice on school computers were often frustrated by filters which block sites containing sexual words.

New York Times piece on the challenges of being a Tekkie in Kenya:

Consider Wilfred Mworia, a 22-year-old engineering student and freelance code writer in Nairobi, Kenya. In the four weeks leading up to Apple’s much-anticipated release of a new iPhone on July 11, Mr. Mworia created an application for the phone that shows where events in Nairobi are happening and allows people to add details about them.

Mr. Mworia’s desire to develop an application for the iPhone is not unusual: many designers around the world are writing programs for the device. But his location posed some daunting obstacles: the iPhone doesn’t work in Nairobi, and Mr. Mworia doesn’t even own one. He wrote his program on an iPhone simulator.

Here's good CRM for you. From an email:

We couldn't help but notice that it's been a while since you've visited Current.com, and it's bumming us out.

If you have a moment, we'd love to hear from you about your experience on Current.com, what did or didn’t work for you, and how we could make things more enticing for you in the future.

Lincolnshire is truly pioneering with eGov. Apart from the ads they are:

As part of their “Accessibility tested by humans” strategy, Lincolnshire’s website will be tested every 3 months by a panel of disabled users with disabilities ranging from cerebral palsy through to dyslexia. Results will then be published on Lincolnshire’s website for anyone to see.

I completely agree with this more 'social' attitude to accessibility.

Here's Whitehall's approach:

The draft had threatened to switch off non-compliant websites altogether, warning: "websites which fail to meet the mandated level of conformance shall be subject to the withdrawal process for .gov.uk domain names". The final guidance issues a similar warning, but using the softer formula 'may be at risk' instead of 'shall be subject to': "Government website owners are reminded to follow the conditions of use for a .gov.uk name (Registering .gov.uk domain names (TG114)). Websites which fail to meet the .gov.uk accessibility requirements may be at risk of having their domain name withdrawn".

Monbiot point:

A few weeks ago the writer Mark Lynas found a counter-intuitive revelation buried in the small print of an ICM survey. The number of people in social classes D and E who thought the government should prioritise the environment over the economy was higher (56%) than the proportion in classes A and B (47%). It is counter-intuitive only because a vast and well-funded denial industry has spent years persuading us that environmentalism is a middle-class caprice

How guardian.co.uk stays atop the pile:

In the past two months, we have started to combine search engine optimisation - talking to the news desk on the paper about SEO-friendly headlines and underlining SEO with our subs desk [on the website] - with our marketing and pay-per-click activity. If you do two to three small things at one time that can be very significant.

Etre (newsletter only) had a great post about 'cognitive illusions', relating this to usability. Citing Bruce Tognazzi from 1989 it notes that:

1) Users consistently report that using the keyboard is faster than using the mouse.

2) The stopwatch consistently proves that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard.

This illusion reveals a much more important learning: Users' perception of reality and reality itself are not the same thing - which means that you should always verify their claims through research. You should also take pains to validate your own intuitions, because even when you're certain of something, you can still be very wrong.

Etre's blog had an interesting post about a new ATM interface for Wells Fargo. ATMs are thirty years old - proving that usability is an ongoing and never-ending process.

Dave Briggs is running an event in Peterborough relating the ReadWriteWeb to the needs of local government. Check it out.

Featuring case studies from both local and central government, practical exercises to learn more about how social media could be used within a local authority context and plenty of time for networking and chats over coffee.

eGov AU on why UK lgov sites are better than Australian ones. Unfortunately he cites Redbridge :{

Information ain't free. After a long break with no email, I had a notification about a citation of that suicide and the internet BMJ article (which I went to work on). But of course I couldn't read it because JAMA's medical research is behind a paywall.

That's cleared some clips :}

Just this to add - from the online journo Michael J Totten: The Truth About Russia in Georgia:

He raised his hand as if to say stop.

“That was the formal start of the war,” he said. “Because of the peace agreement they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than 80mm. Okay, so that's the formal start of the war. It wasn't the attack on Tskhinvali. Now stop me.”

“Okay,” I said. “All the reports I've read say Saakashvili started the war.”

“I'm not yet on the 7th,” he said. “I'm on the 6th.”

“Okay,” I said. He had given this explanation to reporters before, and he knew exactly what I was thinking.

“Saakashvili is accused of starting this war on the 7th,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “But that sounds like complete bs to me if what you say is true.”

Thomas Goltz nodded.

Scrapbook clips catch up

Chinwag looks (back?) at 'Black Hat marketing: the dark side of search':

I can’t definitely claim a connection between a willingness to embrace black hat SEO and a willingness to cut corners in other areas of business but it’s testament to the ease with which black hat rules can be applied.

Millennial Marketing and the Obama campaign:

Design guru Michael Bierut[says] that the stand-alone logo, consistent use of the Gotham typeface ("very American ... conversational and pleasant") and his online look and feel make Mr. Obama the first candidate with a "coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. ... There's an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients."

Another lesson from the campaign: Integrating Social Networking Tools into Political Campaigns

Profile pages, badges, buttons and even widgets are easy to build (believe me, if e.politics can have a widget, anyone can). In other words, campaigns don't have to dive right into the deep end — sometimes a dipping a toe or two into the pool of Facebook and MySpace fans will be enough.

Mail report on the world's oldest Facebooker, Ivy Bean. Alleged I'd have to say. Post media coverage she now has '4823 friends'. It's all seemingly facilitated and I can't see anything saying she's actually using the web herself. Unlike many another so-called 'silver surfer'.

Blogging’s Glass Ceiling. NYT on just why women bloggers are a distinct minority.

All about the cyber attacks which preceded the war in Georgia. More from Wired.

"Another interesting aspect is seeing how certain countries are what I call 'cyberlocked,'" cybersecurity veteran Richard Bejtlich tells Danger Room. "We know a land-locked country has no access to the sea. Countries like .ge [Georgia] might rely too heavily on one or a handful of connections, potentially through hostile countries (eg, .ru [Russia]), for their physical connectivity. As a result, an adversary can control their network access to the outside world. A diagram from the Packet Clearing House, shows Georgia's network dilemma.

Who exactly is supporting the Great Firewall of China: XSGuard Management System, who are Dutch; Cisco, American; Radware, Israeli.

Also on board are Lucent, Sun Microsystems, Nokia, Ericsson, Acsys Biometrics and Nortel Networks.

Cisco are the main offender, it seems.

Somehow missed from the who-ha headlines about the plan for refunds if your council isn't 'performing' (arf! arf!) is that the central 'new idea' from Whitehall is something called a 'Place Survey'. This will drop through your letter box and ask you to fill in a form containing no less than 174 questions!

PSF estimates that this will cost up to £50k per council. None of which is funded by Whitehall.

But neither is the cost of the concessionary bus fares scheme, which is carving huge holes in selscted council's budgets around the country.

Pressures on councils to reduce headcounts to meet efficiency targets and the shared services agenda are exacerbating a looming skills shortage of experienced staff in London local authorities, it has been claimed.

No shit Sherlock. This is according to "a report to Capital Ambition, London's regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership body, disclosed in minutes of a meeting of its Programme Board", and reported by PSF. This comes as a poll from local government IT supplier Civica showed that the majority of council managers surveyed say their local authority lacks the necessary in-house skills for transformation programmes and that 'transformation' is actually leading to a workforce skewed to the over 50s and a 'talent drought'.

If 'transformation' is to a big extent about the web and 'online services', which it is, then some 'talent' injected from the real world and released from the usual strictures is needed.

How to get them? Neither Hazel, Tom or the opposition have the vaguest clue ...

The Electoral Commission can be added to the list of those concerned about the use of electronic counting systems in the London Mayoral count.

Very cool rip on gmaps from XKCD



Coming to a ditzy red-top near you soon? 'Binaural beats' aka 'digital drugs'. Despite being actually 169 years old.

Very bizarre first 'interactive' YouTube video, from Mexico.

Here's another tool to add to those silly wordmaps of your blog and undoubtedly others, this one 'maps' Twitter.

And another expansion on Google Trends, which I likee.

Wired carried a great analysis of Twitter's, um' 'business model' ...

Cuil? I think not.

This made me laugh out laugh when it popped in my inbox.

The Association of Online Publishers (AOP)'s 'Digital Publishing Summit's keynote is to be delivered by (drum roll) ... Trinity Mirror CEO, Sly Bailey:

on the expanding role of digital publishing, and the future of local news. Sly runs a portfolio of more than 350 local and national brands - can you afford to miss this rare appearance from the former IPC Media CEO, who led the sale of the magazine group to AOL Time Warner?

And also the loss of circa £35m @ IPC in one of the biggest f*ups during the f*up heavy dotcom crash and whose failure to improve the amateur-hour Mirror Online has amused us all for many years?

I think not.

Following another business character who I love to lampoon, Michael Grade attempted to blame ITV's failure to make money online to:

"Non-UK companies like Google and Apple [who] are free to build market-dominating positions online in the UK without so much as a regulatory murmur".

Bah, humbug.

dailymail.co.uk has introduced a new section called 'The best of the web - digested' which, when it started at least, was dominated by The Independent and The Guardian.

More when I catch up ;]

IT rules? No, no Mister Steel

| View | Upload your own

[Presentation reproduced with permission]

At the PSF event in June to discuss Better Connected, SOCITM's president Richard Steel presented 'Why we should no longer distinguish web from ICT'.

Some of this made me applaud madly, some made me inwardly groan.

It was deliberately provocative and Richard comes from a strong base with his argument; his borough, Newham, is doing some great, ground-breaking stuff (including free wireless, no fixed desks including Chief Exec.) for this deprived part of London. In his presentation he laid a lot of that out, but what I completely disagreed with was his conclusion: that web must be 'run' by IT, they are 'indistinguishable'.

What made me applaud was his line that, basically, senior managers who don't understand the basics with IT no longer have the requisite skills to do the job, they should go. He, like me, is sick of senior people who wear their ignorance 'like a badge of honour'. I also liked that he was arguing that services must take more day-to-day responsibility for what they do online and that government gains from being subject to the same forces as business.

He was looking to the future convergence of technology and especially the coming growth of web access through mobiles or other devices: a 'network of networks'. Government is about services and information and as web access becomes more ubiquitous what matters is that we provide information in a way that can be easily pushed through these channels and found. What he cited as key technologies were identification and data integration.

Here's part of his presentation about his vision of this from three years ago:

By 2012 (Olympics) mobiles morphed into ‘personal communicators’

Technologies like ‘smart chip’, biometrics and GPS, will enable:

• authenticated ‘e’ order & payment
• e-tickets for chosen events delivered to your device.
• e-directions to venue/your seat
• your ID and ticket electronically checked,.
• commentary provided in your own language
• option to follow a particular team or athlete
• view instant playbacks of exciting moments
• personal calls/messages delivered plus appointment reminders.
• remote control of home environment also likely

Device selects the most appropriate combination of fixed and wireless networks - balancing task, cost and performance.

A couple of quotes he used talked about 2018, ten years from now, when this convergence should be in full throttle.

Let's look back ten years and see what's changed: yes, everyone has a website and yes, services are 'online'. But as I've noted in other posts on my blog, there are still many things we, government, don't do and as a sector we are walled off from influences from wider web development - a primary driver for change - or any sense that we are in a competitive environment, online.

I don't see anything suggesting that in another ten years either of these factors will change, that we will be doing the things we don't or that we will be absorbing the right influences. However we will probably be in a more competitive environment simply because many more businesses will be in our territory - people selling recycling bins, people promising to better handle your passport enquiries, people trying to make money from your health enquiry, other services like charities. When this is happening, how do customers find you and steer past the commercial providers?

Richard's ideas come entirely from one part of what makes a web presence and it's not surprising: all websites have come from a few sectors other than IT but that's, largely, where government websites have grown out from.

Take 'content' for one other source of websites - newspaper websites are built on content and the IT development entirely revolves around servicing the editor's needs, rather than the other way around. There it has to be a partnership but you couldn't argue 'Why we should no longer distinguish web from ICT' because there it's understood that 'web' largely means content - which needs it own skill base - supported by IT. Richard's proposition doesn't make sense. Same goes for websites which have grown out of marketing and sales departments, there it's a partnership but there's another primary skill base than the IT one.

Why do we think we are different from other websites, especially when there's little evidence customers behave radically differently with us? I would say this is because we live in our own world without the sort of influences which would shake us out of it. Other sectors largely don't; they absolutely have to understand their customers and hire the right skill base to create a web presence which will meet needs in a rapidly evolving and competitive environment. Doesn't sound like us does it?

Another difference is that the web is becoming more central to businesses, meaning that all aspects of the business have to take it seriously and skill up. Here, this does connect with one of Richard's points about the vital need for engagement by government services - the pointy end - rather than being disempowered (although that's not how he puts it).

The problem with Richard's proposal is not just where it's coming from - as I commented to him, he and the analysis come from IT as opposed to, say, sales - but the impact.

Web skills are very specific, you need to be across a lot of terrain. You need to understand SEO, usability, web content, have good people skills, be across various and ever changing IT, visual design, accessibility, marketing, PR ... Even the very best IT managers don't have this skill range so they can't make informed decisions or informed choices across the range of issues which constitute good and most importantly successful web. In his presentation Richard alludes to this when he talks about the problems in benchmarking, take-up and engagement.

I understand that Richard's forward focus is 'non-web', or 'post-web', thinking of mobile devices for example, but I see no future in which all the other skills involved won't be any the less vital in making a successful, used and useful service/product for government online.

What we need is exactly the opposite of Richard's argument: ICT needs to be in its place and web needs to be raised. It needs to be properly understood as a new profession, a unique skill set and assume its place at the table in government. Because at the moment it doesn't have one.

Scrapbook clips catch up

Quickie job this week ;]

Will highlight a comment left with Off with the pixies from Dan McQuillan.

As the guy with the job of delivering the UK Catalyst Awards, I'd of course prefer to take more optimistic view.

But I agree that the critical thing is to move from excited blah blah to real impact. I'm trying to bring to catalyst as much grit as I can from my experience in co-founding social innovation camp.

We'll have to wait and see whether catalyst phase two can produce the kind of mentoring, incubating and financing that will deliver dynamic social startups.

Gerry McGovern, always worth reading, has started a series on What is the role of government on the Web?

For the government to truly serve its customers on the Web it needs to address the following issues:
1. Get away from a technology obsession
2. Manage customer top tasks, not government websites
3. Get politicians off government websites
4. Stop government vanity publishing
5. Develop a government archive

Federal Times has a very interesting piece on Gov’t. 2.0: Wikis, blogs and more - use in the US government.

The blog is a bold move for TSA [Transportation Security Administration | U.S. Department of Homeland Security] because it fully embraces public comments on what the agency is doing wrong, said Stephen Goldsmith, director of Harvard University’s Innovations in American Government program.

“They’re going to insult you whether you have a blog or not,” Goldsmith said. “You might as well learn from what they’re saying.”

Using discussion boards and e-mails, [Environment Protection Agency] EPA’s new social Web site, called National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information, has pulled comments from across government and the country to help [EPA’s chief information officer, Molly] O’Neill as she fashions a new information-sharing policy.

Since O’Neill came on board last year, EPA has embarked on four such projects that integrate blogs, wikis, discussion boards and other social networking Web tools, which are collectively referred to as Web 2.0, into EPA’s business.

“The technology is not complicated, it’s just a different way of doing business. And getting people to do business in a different way is culture change and that’s a challenge,” O’Neill said.

New Canadian survey on the public's attitudes to use of web 2.0 in government.

When asked to consider specific ways that government might use social media, the respondents showed strongest support for:

1. Websites where government scientists or experts could answer the public’s questions
2. Websites that would allow Canadians to express their views on different issues
3. Audio tours or pod casts of historical and natural sites across Canada that could be downloaded.

Jakob Nielsen updates his guidance on Writing Style for Print vs. Web

Summary: Linear vs. non-linear. Author-driven vs. reader-driven. Storytelling vs. ruthless pursuit of actionable content. Anecdotal examples vs. comprehensive data. Sentences vs. fragments.

We should accept that the Web is too fast-paced for big-picture learning. No problem; we have other media, and each has its strengths. At the same time, the Web is perfect for narrow, just-in-time learning of information nuggets — so long as the learner already has the conceptual framework in place to make sense of the facts.

For example, I dated "learning around the campfire" to 32,000 years ago to coincide with the emergence of high culture and the Cro-Magnons. Not that the Neanderthals didn't have campfires — they simply didn't have the cultural depth of modern humans, so I don't think their storytelling was equal to my seminars. So, did I actually remember that Cro-Magnon culture started 32,000 years ago with the Lascaux cave paintings? No, I looked that little fact up online.

Now where do you think this clip is from?

More than 10 new e-Government services will be launched in the next six months, while more than 15 e-Government services will come online within two years, Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Frederick Ma says.

He told the Legislative Council today the e-Government services include the transport information system and the electronic health record system.

The bureau will also launch a geographical user interface to help users locate information and implement a unified identity management framework to verify their identity and safeguard their personal data.

A pilot scheme in forming district cyber centres will be conducted to provide hardware and technical support for children in low-income families and needy residents to access online resources.

Mr Ma added all Government bureaux and departments have revamped their websites to comply with Internet accessibility standards stated in the internal guidelines for information dissemination since 2003.

An inter-departmental committee regularly reviews the guidelines and released the latest version early this year.

Guessed? Hong Kong.

Facebook over? Only in Islington says Rory Cellan-Jones on BBC/dot.life

The social networking scene is settling down into separate camps. The very young are with Bebo. The music crowd are still on MySpace. The obsessive technophiles are on Twitter - latest Tweet from one sad West Coast blogger: "I have 3,500 unanswered direct messages. Please do not send more." But the mass of students and young professionals seem to be gravitating towards Facebook.

Is the Daily Mail editing the government too?

"In the same way that there are standards that are essential to broadcasting, in this converging world I believe there should be a set of standards online".

That's culture secretary, Andy Burnham. Sweetheart, talk to some Aussies about the 'issues' of going down this road. Pa-leaze!

Worth a read on cyber-censorship is Seth Finkelsten.

Also worth pointing out that repeated testing has shown the failures of censorware (filters), including one done earlier this year for San Jose libraries, plus, of course, that anyone can find out how to Bypass Internet Censorship.

House of Lords two-up now on the Commons as they launch a YouTube Channel.

The five videos aim to explain the "role, impact and relevance" of the House of Lords and "reach out to young people and other audiences who may not be involved in politics or well informed about the role of parliament".

Wired's Thomas Goetz makes a great point about Obama's FightTheSmears.com.

By putting their own website out there front-and-center, and then getting everybody to link to it (starting with all the media covering the launch of the site), the result will be to drive fightthesmears.com towards the top of a Google search on, say, "obama muslim" or "michelle obama whitey". Ideally, if enough of the pro-Obama network links to fightthesmears.com, it'll drive the sites that peddle in the rumor-mongering, which are now the first results on said searches, off the top of the results list. Ideal long term result: any curious low-information voter who eventually bothers to google these pesky rumors will immediately be led to the debunking rather than the rumor.

And this is coming over here too. The disgusting Melanie Philips repeats the dirt for The Spectator.

Eric Schmidt thinks Google should extend a helping hand to 'old media'. He "hopes its recently acquired advertising service DoubleClick will aid newspapers as they struggle to corral more online revenue".

Bob Ostertag has some warnings about Obama's Internet Money Machine and the Future.

Yes, this is a wonderful thing that the Internet has democratized political financing in an unprecedented way. What is even better, the fact that the progressive guy figured out the new money regime first may catapult him from freshman senator to the White House, opening one of the most exciting chapters in American political history.

But it is not insignificant that in the process, vast sums of money are flooding into the political arena.

Worth something in twenty years will be ... McCain condoms! (Barack ones too).

Christopher Ciccone, brother to Madonna Ritchie (nee Ciccone), is writing a book. Met them both (if by meet you can count 'hello, this is ...' 'hello, goodbye') in my gossip column days. Some daft queen thought she'd enjoy a tacky drag troupe and being showered by glitter at a not-that-glamorous 'do' and birthday bash for Chris by the harbour in Sydney. As I recall, they didn't enjoy Oz very much .. wonder if that'll make his book ... ?

Quote of the week from GC Weekly:

Earls Court, location of this week's GC 2008 Expo, was replete with [sic] beautiful people and futuristic technology.

The fact that the venue was also hosting Graduate Fashion Week and a Doctor Who exhibition may have contributed in some small way to these qualities. But you could not beat Kable's conference when it came to threatening behaviour from chairpeople.

Brian Derry of Assist said he would expel people from the session he chaired if they violated the no-mobile policy - dancing to the tunes of their ringtones. Alternatively, they could pay £10 to the charity of his choice.

Mark Logsdon of Barclays, speaking at a session on security, revealed that his organisation charges £50 for rogue mobile vocalisations. But after adjusting for banking salaries, that works out around a hafpenny.

It might not have been appropriate for Dave Mitchell of BT, chairing a session on the NHS National Programme for IT, to have punished the use of telephones. But he did threaten a collective punishment for the audience, if it failed to show suitable interest: a video nasty on the auditorium's big screen.

Luckily, Mitchell decided it was necessary to deploy a video of former National Programme guvnor Richard Granger on his holidays. The threat was enough.

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

er, way behind here what with other work to do and all that. So quite a lot, some may become posts, starting a new Firefox Scapbook thread sounds like a good idea ...

• Questions to the Prime Minister!
  Simon D reports that the PM is inviting questions to him via YouTube. And here's the man himself
  

• TechPresident noted that "the Brits are continuing to lap the U.S." and "In the U.S., we’ll have to first get around those archaic rules barring Congress from even using YouTube. Then we can talk about those conversations."
  
  
• Testing Color Contrast for WCAG 1 & 2
  Via Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design very comprehensive and useful - and often forgotten - stuff
• CRM turned upside down and inside out
  Ruth Kennedy @ IdealGovernment pointing out that bizness has moved onto VRM from CRM and maybe government should pay attention ...
• Google Translate adds 10 new languages...
  As well as translations between languages. Still no Persian ...
  

• Italian's Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face
  From the New York Times. Yet more from what some US commentators are calling 'The War on Tourism'. Quite astonishing warning for those visiting the USA. Whether you're besuited, connected, whatever - beware, the sadists seem to run the border posts. Comes after the news of them stopping firetrucks and ambulances. Plus, if one of the 20% of British adults who smoke, be prepared for harassment.
  
  
• Here come the tube-steppers
  via Delib, their final 'Opinion Tracker' analysis for the Mayoral elections showing "what looks like a final surge of buzz and positive sentiment for Boris".
• What did happen to all those London mayoral votes?
  via The Register. They observed the election count, done using machines, and didn't see fraud. But I was reminded of another recent experience — The Bedford Elections 2007 and the electronic counting fiasco.
• Becta asks EC to probe Microsoft school deals
  via The Register. Another multi-million dollar fine on its way?
• The Day Is Coming
  via John Battelle's Searchblog. He reports on a Bloomberg story via IWantMedia: 'Google is considering running display advertisements alongside the results of Web queries for pictures, moving beyond text-based ads. "There's lot of potential for advertising revenue there," says VP Marissa Mayer. Google is seeking new revenue sources as its growth slows.'
• "Gagging librarians is horrendous." The Internet V. FBI: Net Wins
  The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has withdrawn a secret demand that the Internet Archive, an online library, provide the agency with a user's personal information after the Web site challenged the records request in court.
  Danny Sullivan also covers it here.
  
  

• The Food Vision project
  via IDeA Knowledge. Website "promoting good practice and projects that deliver safe, sustainable and nutritious food and improve local community health and wellbeing. The case studies and toolkits within the site are designed to help and inspire those intending to set up similar initiatives." Phew! Hardly 'plain english' and government creating another website? Shurely shome misshtake?
  
  

• Web Accessibility - The Power of Five
  via E-Access Blog Socitm says that five errors account for 76% of all website accessibility failures, and it asked Robin Christopherson, Head of Accessibility Services at the charity AbilityNet, to describe their impact. Robin is blind and uses the popular ‘JAWS’ screen reader software to access the web.
• 2 Spanish visions and values of Government 2.0
  via Benchmarking e-gov in web 2.0 'The people at Goldmundus have started an interesting exercise. They propose future narrative scenario of an ideal government 2.0, based on the possible usage of web2.0 tools such as Twitter and GCal in government.I really like the idea. '
• Crime mapping for London, Boris? We’ll start the clock now
  via Free Our Data: the blog - they can foresee 'issues' ...
  
  

• Councils Urged To Mix Technical Web Tests With User Tests
  via E-Access Blog - accessibility is a social issue as well as technical!
  

• Voter File 2.0: Catalist, Democratic Tool
  via techPresident
  Catalist is building on the lessons of 2004 (where Democrats had a database meltdown) and working to build a 50 state national database with the names of 180 million registered voters, plus 75 million unregistered people (for use by voter registration groups), enhanced with commercial data, specialty data (like who owns hunting licenses), integrated it with the Democrat's VAN application, and with a tool for subscribers to mine the data. Catalist's goal is to be a permanent piece of progressive infrastructure.

• Don't cry for her, Democratic Party
  via Citizen Crain "The festering Clinton boil is finally being lanced within the Democratic Party, at least for this election cycle" - Kevin hopes this finally breaks her stranglehold on GLBT.

• BBC's embedded player boosts traffic by 50%
  via PDA by Jemima Kiss
• Change 101
  via BuzzMachine - Jeff Jarvis
  I’ve been teaching the faculty itself in all the tools of online: blogs, wikis, RSS, video, SEO, and on and on. The best part of this has not been my colleagues’ receptivity to, curiosity about, and eagerness to adapt the tools themselves in their classes but the discussion we have shared about the impact of these tools on journalism and education. We’ve had rich back and forth on the new architecture of media and news that the impact of this change on journalism education.
  Here’s the Keynote we’ve been using as notes for this discussion.
  

| View | Upload your own

Here are the relevant slides about the interactive program

| View | Upload your own

• Sorry - this page cannot be found': How newspapers handle 404 errors - Part 1
  via currybetdotnet by martin.belam
  'Sorry - this page cannot be found': How newspapers handle 404 errors - Part 2
  
  Conclusions

	Newspapers
Feature
Apology
Standard navigation
Site map or directory
Search box
Contact link
Retains URL