When egov is glacial

Never mind the joys of social media, egov still has numerous extreme basics to get right ...

GC Weekly has another telling tale about the state of Whitehall run IT:

The Department for Work and Pensions is covertly supporting Royal Mail and the Northern Irish economy, Loose Wires can reveal.

A colleague's brother recently signed on for Jobseeker's Allowance for the first time. Attending Jobcentre Plus as instructed, he was asked to fill in forms to apply for the allowance, housing benefits and help with council tax.

He surprised the staff by asking if he could fill out forms on the spot - the expectation was that he would post them back. He was then told the forms would be posted to Belfast. Someone there might contact him - by post - for further information. That office would then contact his local authority - by post - regarding benefits.

The council concerned has since written, referring throughout the letter to the jobseeker's brother as Mr Dave (colleague's first name changed to protect the innocent). As the Jobcentre staffer misspelt the applicant's occupation after having checked how it was spelt - and he is not a xylophonist - this was not a big surprise.

Tomorrow, our brave jobseeker will return (after more than a fortnight) to find out what progress they have made. This news will have presumably been chiselled on a stone tablet by someone in the Falkland Islands.

And this is the same department doing interesting and good innovation via DirectGov (which they're responsible for).

I've been in a jobcentre and they've got touchscreens with jobs on, had them for years. Why in 2009 aren't applicants filling out forms on computers in jobcentres? ... for example ...

Scrapbook clips catch up

Make your own at whatever.wecanbelievein.com

lastfm has a new design which I'm slowly getting used to. It appears to have a couple - that's all - new features, but they're useful. Techcrunch thinks it's buggy. The Times nails the business model, which is rather good, boasting the "'smartest' ads on the web".

An example of the new "smart" adverts displays an image of a mobile phone handset which changes according to what the Last.fm user is doing. For instance, if someone is listening to Bon Jovi, the phone would appear to start playing a Bon Jovi track, showing off its MP3 player.

Hotel chains will be able to tap into a Last.fm user's list of favourite artists and display adverts for hotels in cities where those artists have upcoming gigs. Train companies, similarly, will be able to advertise services running to other music-based events that may be of interest to the user.

iphonic madness? Behold: "I Am Rich," a $999.99 app from Armin Heinrich, which just displays a red gem on the phone's screen — nothing else.



directgov is soon to launch a tellmeonce tool, which has some designs leaking out here. PSF has the story noting that it's the much-anticipated 'Citizens Account'.

Here we see the Citizen's Account is split into two sections, the first showing an inbox of messages from government departments, and a second listing the user's relationships with given individuals.

A further page shows how the user manages these relationships. An explanatory states: 'Please note that most relationships need to be created by having a face-to-face interview with an officer at the Department for Work and Pensions'.

North East Connects, a consortium of local councils, has raised urgent and serious concerns about councils' readiness for NI 14 (measuring avoidable contact). It says:

Avoidable contact' figure which councils need to report to CLG [Whitehall], and which will be published nationally, is 'relatively meaningless', despite it underpinning one of the Government's two key progress measures for service transformation.

When parliament wanted "improved design and navigation" and "simpler presentation" of bills and a "greatly improved" search engine it cost £3,644,000. But to show us our MPs speaking in the house cost virtually nothing, because MySociety volunteers did it. Sheesh.

The Tiananmen Massacre Map (PDF)

Smart of China to parade an earthquake victim in the opening ceremony. In Schezuan, parents whose kids died in collapsed, shoddily built government schools (where schools for kids of officials didn't collape) are being repressed from protesting.



Yu Tingyun, left, lost his daughter, Yang, in the May earthquake in southwest China, and Huang Lianfen, right, lost a nephew. Ms. Huang holds an agreement that Chinese officials want parents to sign, saying they will not hold protests about collapsed schools.

avaaz.org's latest campaign is the Olympic Handshake.

The handshake began with the Dalai Lama, passing through the streets of London, now it's gone online where all of us can join in -- help the handshake travel toward Beijing, where our message will be delivered through a big Olympic media campaign before the closing ceremonies. Join the handshake, and see yourself and others as it goes around the globe!

art.com has a set of stunning exhibits. Here's one, a kinetic sculpture, which seems terribly early 80s to me ...



Anyone using a filter, created by US technology company SonicWall, which gives employers the option to block access to websites simply because they “promote or cater to gay and lesbian lifestyles” could be breaking the law. Here's one UK school using them.

SonicWall’s Anna Wright declined to say if the company would warn its UK customers they could be unwittingly breaking the law by using the gay-blocking setting.

Wired's great take on those photoshopped Iranian missiles.



Matthew Inman's great take on the 'state of the web, summer 2008'.




Quote of the week:

"These brainstorming meetings at Guantanamo produced animated discussion," writes Sands. "'Who has the glassy eyes?" Beaver asked herself as she surveyed the men around the room, thirty or more of them. She was invariably the only woman in the room, keeping control of the boys. The younger men would get excited, agitated, even: "You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas" [reported Beaver]. A wan smile crossed Beaver's face: "And I said to myself, you know what, I don't have a dick to get hard, I can stay detached."' [Sands, p 63]

From Naomi Wolf, Sex Crimes in the White House.

Directionless gov part 573

PSF reports today that LocalDirectGov, primary hate object for local government webbies, is to be revived after a twelve month 'hiatus'.

Like a delicate flower gently awakening from a long dark Winter's slumber, Local Directgov made its return last week – and immediately announced plans for another of its famous national link-gathering exercises (famed mainly for having cost millions and delivered next to nothing), this time involving around 150 councils in England.

Cameroon? Osboon? Millions (and it really was millions), wasted? LibDems? Scandal? Anyone?

Presumably the first job will be to correct all the now broken links after the 'hiatus' ... Only it won't be a Whitehall bureaucrat doing this but a far more expensive so-called method involving people with far better things to do.

Any thoughts Minister Watson? Thought not.

• My past posting: Yet more birth pangs of government 2.0

More: in that past post (August 2007) I discussed the DCLG's then new web 2.0 efforts. I just clicked through and there's nothing about localdirectgov in their highly controlled and pretty empty forums and a grand total of one blog.

Drat, drat, and double drat!

Public Sector Forums has a gem in coverage of 'Directgov - A Vision of the Future' (coming soon to a multiplex near you) — from a presentation given by Directgov and Businesslink to the Government's 'Civil Service Live' conference in London very recently on their 'Vision for 2011'.

The un-deleted speaker notes for Slide 11 suggest neither Directgov and Businesslink, currently anyway, appear certain about how they should respond to this opportunity/threat (the increasingly decentralised information 'mash-up' that the Web is evolving into) – and nor do they seem particularly well prepared.

"Should we be throwing government information into the mixer?", state the speaker notes. "What would the implications of that be? Would the inevitable loss of control be worth the increased exposure we might gain for our messages?"

"Any step down this road would mean we'd have to operate in very different ways from now", states the notes. "Moving away from the static delivery of information on government-controlled websites and towards something much looser, much more fluid and responsive to immediate need. This is our challenge going forward…"

Bloody web ... mucking up our nicely laid out plans ...

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.

One year on: Ten answers for Minister Watson

I wrote a response to egov Minister Tom Watson's latest speech, dissecting the interim report into The Power of Information report by Tom Steinberg and friends: Leadership in egov: what's missing? And Tom challenged me to, well, put up!

What should we be doing that we're not?

I usually imagine these challenges coming from between gritted teeth and with arms crossed (I am picturing actually seeing this from others), but Tom has already shown himself actually dialoguing with stirrers like moi so here goes.

The timing is neat and slightly spooky - it's one year since I started this blog, something I should have done much earlier. And so I have one year's worth of egov posts to scour for the missing ideas which Tom wants to hear but actually it just pops out because, as my egov friends know, I am the proverbial 'stuck record' on this stuff. This also may explain my occasionally ragged and cynical tone. Please forgive me.

Here's a top ten but #1 just leaps out from my latest post on online suicide prevention.

~~~~~~

Ten things not happening in eGov

1. Findability

Search is the prime route to content and is followed by links from other websites. How government addresses this is through newspaper ads - see DirectGov - or, slowly, very limited textads and rare banner ads. I'm not aware of any strategy which looks at how people find services or information in the real world online. Most pages are not optimised for search, most top results are by fluke rather than design and most links by legacy. All of that is and will continue to end - there is competition online. If they can't find you, what's the point?

2. Disengagement from the wider web and those damned walled gardens

This is part and parcel of the reasons why findability is so bad for services and information - like suicide prevention. Links into government sites aren't there due to any effort, they're there because of luck - we're government so people sometimes refer to us. But as you can see with the growth of health websites, this isn't a given. We tend to still live in the world of 'build it and they will come' or 'look at our sexy website'. Not good enough any more. There seems to be no understanding of how to drive traffic, let alone how to target the audience online. It's offline strategy pasted onto online, largely. This all comes from a disengagement, possibly a mistrust, of the wider web. And it's about way more than just sexy social networks and 'engagement' with them.


3. Engaging the industry

How many government seminars and conferences include people from the wider web industry? If the people aren't there and if webbies in government have no power (Jeremy Gould has a recent rant about this) and if web development in government isn't by webbies and if a self-reinforcing circle exists whereby public servants just talk to public servants, how will #2 ever evolve? In Australia, very early on, they brought the guru of usability, Jacob Nielsen, in to give a speech at the big annual shindig. That one speech reached the key people (Al Gore's strategy on climate change) and set the trend and embedded usability thinking in Aussie egov people. Outside engagement just isn't happening and it should. It's vital.

4. Marketing

Online marketing is increasingly sophisticated but it's also very basic. Asking for links, giving people content - anyone can do this, small websites do it all the time and it gets them traffic which has a reinforcing effect. Banner ads are the norm on the rare occasions when government does it (some rare, clunky, textads), but I would say this is the pick simply because it's comprehensible to Communications. Wider industry has been there and done that and is changing its attitude. Unfortunately, banner ads aren't anywhere near as efficient as other methods, such as search marketing. The failure around marketing is no more clearly shown than in the complete waste of millions than is e-citizen. Again, if they can't find you, what's the point?

5. Widgetising services

This is my particular bugbear because, to me, it's all about going to where people are online rather than forcing them through hoops to you and hence losing them on the way. That's the reason that widgets are all over the web nowadays - they work. The classic idea (well, mine) is to offer a widget which tells you when the bins are emptied - and slips in messages you want, such as recycling tips - to the local newspaper. Or the local social group. Or the specialist website. Or whoever the heck wants it. This still takes people back to you but it's a win-win. Any Google Maps work can be shared as well. Free content for them, traffic for you. Transport Direct already do one (though it's not promoted) but otherwise they're no-existent - we're still stuck in old methods.

6. Engaging the local

The general trend will be for local websites, including hyper-local and localised versions of services like Google Maps, and we already have targeted websites - the proverbial NetMums - but also ones most disabled people would pass through. What engaging means is things like offering free content such as guides - you have links for 'more details' at the end back to your pages, rather than ageneral link so they end up lost in your site. And widgets. You can even offer politician's best wishes to satisfy the enablers. This is another win-win because they'd all like the engagement, you help their users find your stuff, including services, and you both look good and get more traffic.

7. Cheaper usability methods

Usability is still thought of as tied into hiring professionals and mastering very complex ideas - that's rubbish. Cheap methods work in straightforward ways and this has been proved. Yes, professionals are needed and they are worth their weight, but most government websites cannot afford them or can't keep using them. Simple methods should be proselytized through government - like they are through the wider web - but they're not, it's still seen as a 'black art'. And do I have to explain why ensuring usability is absolutely essential?

8. Content

This relates back to other issues which we do do well. I'm particularly thinking of accessibility, which egov is very good at beating itself up about. Yes, there are some issues with disabled people being able to use our sites (though that's as nothing compared to the disaster that is commercial website accessibility) but what's the point of being able to more easily click through to content when that content makes no sense. Much content, both Whitehall and local government remains all about Ministers, Councillors, programs, what we're doing - It doesn't answer the question, the task which the user is there for. Website content isn't 'user-focussed'. It's usually 'rah rah, look at how brilliant we are and, oh, here's some complex routes to some content you might actually want'.

9. Fixations on 'engagement'

This particular 'bleeding edge' is all very well but it has lead to a severe imbalance in both resources and interest. I am actually quite fed up with being seemingly the only government webbie who has a basic grasp of stuff which webbies in the wider world take for granted like search engine optimisation or online marketing or usability methods - or any of the other issues above. Simply put, politicians love this but what good is it for users compared to the preceeding issues? From the outside looking in, do you really think edemocracy or finding out every last detail of the council's budget or whether we're adding comments to social networks is the #1 priority for citizens? This isn't to say it's not important or interesting or shouldn't happen, it's just way, way over prioritised.


10. Utilising reputation

With all of the above the difference with us is - we are government. We are generally trying to help people (no, really) and in many areas - like, for example, suicide prevention - services are pretty much politically neutral. This means we can ask for and get help, very often for free, from a wide range of the rest of the web. We also come with a built in online reputation simply because of who we are which, most clearly in search, is a solid foundation on which to build.

~~~~~~

There could be more but ten is enough. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think The Power of Information covered any of these points, although implementing it would help with some.

Why suicide prevention charities are idiots

Another rubbish piece of web reporting from the BBC (and now all over) - only because it has a medical/doctor aura it's accepted as gospel.

People searching the web for information on suicide are more likely to find sites encouraging the act than offering support, a study says.

Researchers used four search engines to look for suicide-related sites, the British Medical Journal [BMJ] said.

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

'Frequently occurring ' means bugger all. 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

I cannot know what exactly their methods were because this information isn't in the public domain - it's behind a payment firewall. (NB: Postscript below - terms and full research is now available)

So unless they send me the research, I (or joe/jill public) has no way of countering this biased reporting and what appears to be shoddy research except what's in this article and what we can guess happened.

The researchers, from Bristol, Oxford and Manchester universities, typed in 12 simple suicide-related search terms into the internet engines.

They analysed the first 10 sites in each search, giving a total of 480 hits.

Altogether 240 different sites were found. A fifth were dedicated suicides sites, while a further tenth were sites that gave factual or jokey information about suicide.

Meanwhile, 13% of sites were focused on suicide prevention while another 12% actively discouraged it.

Well I just did a Google search - 70% of UK web searches, mostly to google.com rather than google.co.uk - on 'suicide' (NB: with 'safesearch' off) and Wikipedia was #1, as usual. Yes, this includes a link to a 'suicide methods' page - it's an encyclopedia. It also has a page about torture and one on necrophilia. What do they propose to do about that? Have Wikipedia be filtered through a charity? Or the government?

• the next result directs people to the Samaritans
• next is suicide.com, run by an author called Melody Clark - doesn't appear to be 'encouraging it' from what I saw
• then news sites links
• then Mind's website
• then Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• then a page from kidshealth.org
• then a page from SOON Ministries (anti)
• then a Times article
• then netdoctor

Alongside this were a number of text ads from suicide prevention charities, including Samaritans but mainly small or religious ones, and one business ('Cremated ashes made into glass: "Keep the memory"'). I scanned Yahoo and MSN - almost exactly the same.

On google.co.uk, Mind is #1, some smaller charities appear as well as the BBC but otherwise it's similar to google.com. The Samaritans are way, way down - they need the text ad - and Sane not in the first 100 results.

The article isn't telling me what the other terms used were. But I can run a keyword suggestion tool. That gives me (for UK market) the number of daily searches for the particular keyword :

suicide 7788
suicide girls 4921 - a band
suicide girl 438 - fans of that band
teen suicide 429
how to commit suicide 408
suicide methods 375
assisted suicide 349
suicide poems 237
teenage suicide 205
physician assisted suicide 190

As you can see, searches on the simple term 'suicide' are far more prevalent and this list is almost identical to the USA's. As I don't have the details on these 'twelve terms' they researched I don't know what the prevalence/total number of searches on them actually are, let alone if that can be broken down by age group by any method. But I can guess that metric didn't feature in the research.

'How to commit suicide'

Again, Wikipedia, news and religious sites make up the top ten for 'how to commit suicide' on google.com. Only at #9 do I get a website about suicide methods. And this is a very long tract by anarchists. Further down there's the Hemlock Society and some others

These top tens change. Particularly because 'freshness' is more of a consideration than it used to be - hence news results. These researchers don't mention video, but that is now prominent in Google results (the ones in results are all jokey).

Notably, no UK charity like the Samaritans and with the exception of Mind shows up until way down the list on that search term on google.com or google.co.uk.

On both google.co.uk and google.com the Samaritans and some smaller charities and businesses advertise and survive.org.uk appears also in top ten search results on google.co.uk though these are dominated by news.

Lead researcher Lucy Biddle said that because of the law, self-regulation by internet providers and the use of filtering software by parents were the main methods used to try and prevent use of pro-suicide sites.

But she added: "This research shows it is very easy to obtain detailed technical information about methods of suicide."

Yes, if you are determined to find it you will find it. Doh! Just like bomb making recipies and rants against the Chinese government if you are Chinese in China. Filtering software is notoriously about sales and fear and only really 'works' with white lists or massive over-blocking/policing ('Great Firewall').

Her research did not demonstrate that finding pro-suicide websites is "very easy". Contrary to assumptions, I haven't seen 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 searches for 'suicide' are going down. This is a Google Trends search using the terms 'suicide -attack -Iraq -Afghanistan' to roughly exclude suicide bombers (I checked common keywords in news reports).



This does not include the press coverage of the Bridgend, Wales suicide cluster from earlier this year tied to peaks, because that volume is too low to display in that graph, but would likely be responsible for the early 2008 peak. See 'Bridgend' vs 'suicide' below.



For general searches for 'suicide', the general trend appears to be clearly down. 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 obviously nothing about that in this research, why some kids and teens might be turning to these sites they want to ban in the first place instead of 'official' ones.

She said internet service providers could pursue strategies that would maximise the likelihood that sites aimed at preventing suicide are sourced first.

Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity Sane, agreed something should be done.

Well

• how about running your ads next to more search terms than just 'suicide'. (Only Sane isn't doing any in the first place.)
• 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.
  
• 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).
  
• Or fixing your own website where the first result on a search for 'suicide' is 'The National Suicide Prevention Strategy report'.
  

Here's the beef - I would class the actions of such charities in making NO effort to ensure that their pages turn up tops on such search terms as 'How to commit suicide' as IRRESPONSIBLE. There are no excuses and to behave as if this is someone else's responsibility - let alone ISPs - is childish and pathetic PLUS it lets down kids and teens. Yes, this makes me very angry!

"We remain deeply concerned about the possible influence of the internet on suicide rates, not least the ease with which information about particular methods can be found with a simple web search."

"These sites are preying on vulnerable and lonely people."

And you, Marjorie Wallace, are not doing your job properly, you are failing the very kids and teens you claim to be helping and you are simply looking for someone else to blame.

As for the BMJ and these so-called researchers ... and as for the BBC. Who the heck do they think this actually helps? This is badly researched scare mongering.

This is exactly what happens when you set up 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' mentality 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.

The same goes for health information for teens and kids on a wider scale than just suicide prevention - we're looking at an abdication of responsibility online and a willingness to blame others.

What Sane and other charities should do:

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 probably do it for free or cheaply. It would be very straightforward to out-manoeuvre the sites you hate online. What resources do they have vs. what resources do you have?

But for kids sake stop behaving with fear and horror about the web and start using it rather than expecting someone else to do your job.

I am afraid that none of these people are listening, though, (the news media is already known to be a bigger encourager of suicide than the web). What they are developing is an righteous effort, like has happened in Australia, which will result in a censored Internet for all of us - and no real help for those they claim to be helping.

~~~~~

Postscript: I have submitted a response to the BMJ, pointing them to this blog post. I have also written to Marjorie Wallace of Sane pointing her to this blog post and making plain that I would freely offer my help and contact others willing to help them improve their search positioning and online help for the suicidal.

Postscript: An anonymous commentator says that the 12 search terms were:

a) suicide; (b) suicide methods; (c) suicide sure methods; (d) most effective methods of suicide; (e) methods of suicide; (f) ways to commit suicide; (g) how to commit suicide; (h) how to kill yourself; (i) easy suicide methods; (j) best suicide methods; (k) pain-free suicide, and (l) quick suicide.

And those showed:

Top 4 sites were Alt Suicide Holiday, Satan Service, Suicide methods.net and wikipedia. In that order first 3 were catigorised as pro suicide wikipedia as Information site: factual.

But as you can see from the keyword search numbers above only 'how to commit suicide' and 'suicide methods ' are frequently used search terms and both are dwafted by searches on 'suicide'.

The daily search numbers for 'how to kill yourself', 216. But for 'suicide poems', not a term they used, 237. 'Suicide sure methods' (Used), 0. 'Most effective methods for committing suicide', 0. 'Methods of suicide' is exactly the same term as 'suicide methods'. 'Ways to commit suicide' 158. 'Easy suicide methods', 11. 'Pain-free suicide', 0 (But 'painless suicide methods', not used, 53). ' Quick suicide', 4.

'Suicide', 7788.

If these are indeed the variants, by what method were those twelve search terms picked? It doesn't appear very scientific, unless I'm missing some additional information.

And none of this lets charities (or government) off the hook because churches and others are already in there topping results by generating links and picking page titles which put them at the top for terms which are searched on.

Postscript: The full text of the article has now been made available on the BMJ website.

This says:

Search strategy
We sought 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. My look at keywords suggests that they picked the wrong ones anyway and to include both 'methods of suicide' and 'suicide methods' is just inept.

I repeat that the conclusions of the study don't match any real data on what 'distressed individuals' might search on, let alone which terms are most frequently used (a metric which was clearly irrelevant in this study), let alone what we know about search patterns - the sort of information which has been researched to death because it has commercial value, let alone which search engine they probably used. The tenth in a top ten of search results is far less likely to be clicked on than the first, just to pick one example, yet their 'results' are predicated on them having the same value. There is clearly very little understanding of search behaviour by these researchers and this renders all the rest of the study entirely meaningless.

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 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.

This is not to say that analysis of how search may contribute to actual suicide isn't 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. As well, as I have explained at length, the best course is a concerted effort by charities and government to direct 'distressed individuals' to websites which can really help them.

Postscript: I actually got Google search share wrong. It's not 70%, it's 86%. And most of those are to google.co.uk rather than google.com - which has changed dramatically from the last time I looked at this, presumably because Google is getting better at presenting more relevant results and presenting .co.uk because it knows that's where you're searching from.

Postscript: In a comment, Graham Jones who runs the Internet Psychology web site, says that he 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". Another critic of the research is John M. Grohol, Psy.D. at the PsychCentral website.

Leadership in egov: what's missing?

Compared to what we're used to, egov Minister Tom Watson is a breath of fresh air.

A number of people have examined today's speech by him and interim report on last year's landmark The Power of Information report.

Simon Dickson is struck by Tom's call for:

more use of techniques commonplace now in the wider world, internal blogs, wikis, discussion forums, shared workspaces, all still quite rare within the machine.

And in the report it's amusing claim that

The government supported a Barcamp initiated by the Ministry of Justice.

Well at least they didn't claim 'initiated' ...

Simon Wheatley:

It’s very heartening stuff and Tom hits many buzzwords, let’s hope he has the power and gets the support to deliver on some of these ideas.

SimonR:

The problem is they are playing catchup, which is a long way away from the innovation that they need to be showing. But it's all good - really good.

Dave Briggs also notes Tom's promotion of blogging by civil servants and picks up on Tom's analogy about:

the relationship between online collaborative communities and the co-operative movement. The point is that while the tools are new, the relationships aren’t, and people have been working together to tackle problems since the year dot. What the tools do is make the process easier and more transparent and because they also make it easier to do without forming institutions or organisations, they also remove some of the political undercurrents too. More needs to be written on this, I think.

I smiled at Tom's memory of using an old 'manual duplication machine' (a Roneo). Ink stains ain't missed. I groaned at reading about Netmums yet again. I was pleased to see talk of 'search insight' but disturbed that this appeared new and came from a chance encounter with a DirectGov employee.

There is the use of the word 'radical' in Tom's speech - which we know from Yes Minister as code for 'doomed'. But Tom is the first egov Minister who has got a clue, so he's the best hope thus far.

Can't see any of this translating easily to local government because lgov and whitehall are different beasts. Be interesting to see if lgov Minister Hazel Blears in her briefly mentioned (dismissively?) due follow-up exactly echoes Tom and offers leadership or loses some stuff along the way - and in the translation. Her bog-standard, out-of-the-box Labour website certainly doesn't bode well, neither does her record thus far.

Echoing SimonR, my sole problem with The Power of Information is: is that it? Is this the only landmark eGov report we're going to see? I can think of several areas besides the specific ones in that report which could equally 'shake things up'. MySociety is part of a particular area within egov: it ain't everything. And we do tend to accept crumbs of movement rather than say 'where's the cake?'

As I have said before, the Tom's in power should invite Jakob Nielsen (or Don Norman) around for tea. It's that sort of commercial experience which - excepting pilgrimages to the Googleplex for a photo-op - isn't being heard and encouraging those connections within egov to help break down the walled garden would truly end the circularity of public servants talking to other public servants (or their contractors).

Trying really, really hard

I wasn't going to blog this because I'm too kind :} but an email from Shadow Chancellor George Osborne's office claiming that the government eGov Minister, Tom Watson, is stealing George's lines landed with me and a lot of others yesterday. It came from a - I'm guessing - young staffer and George (maybe) nodded OK. Ya live, ya learn ...

Into the sharks lair ...

Simon Dickson

Amusingly, it condemns the Watson speech as a ‘mashup’. But hold on. Surely it’s entirely in keeping with the whole ethos of open source, to take good ideas and build on them? Didn’t you say mass collaboration was a good thing?

Yep, keep the humour in. It is funny :} We're not laughing at you, young staffer, but with you ...

Dave Briggs

Why not post this on a blog somewhere, point us to it and start a discussion around it?

Yes, told them that. Didn't seem that bovvered.

Mick Fealty in the Torygraph:

.. this is not exactly a secret. The free economy of the Internet means a lot of this stuff is common knowledge.

Funny how NetMums is somewhat of a meme here though, eh?

Nick Booth

To accuse the other party of stealing ideas simply because you are making the same argument is very tired Government 1.0. If you really believe in the power of collaboration then get involved in a conversation online with Tom, recognise your common understanding and ambitions and get on with improving the way we are governed, not disapproving of the fact that you agree.

Ministry of Truth go to town on the detail

Where shall we start?

Dizzy (he bites!)

Do we need more evidence of a Government that is really being led by the Opposition?

So that's one blogger on side with the plagiarism idea.

I am kind, and was in responding to the staffer. So, apart from Simon and others points, from those freebie tips:

• Don't do this stuff if you're not going to put it on a blog with full links backup etc. — especially if you want follow up.
  
• Expect the lot you've sent it to to examine it closely and not receive it as gospel.
• 'We said it first!' is a bit schoolboyish/Westminster Village.

And my main point

• This isn't of much interest to the public — meaning, try looking at what's actually not happening/going wrong. Directgov anyone? Or try 'India + sms' maybe to start?

Maybe they could get some ideas by actually reading some of the blogs they mass BCCed? As the staffer wrote back to me:

It is slightly frustrating that we haven't punched past the blogosphere with some of our online policies.

And ..

We are trying really hard.

Be kind, Paul, be kind ...

Tories and standards and walled gardens

Shane McCracken @ Gallomanor has thrown me a sideways question. Sideways because he's linked to me from "some others in local Govt IT" (n.b. Shane, I'm 'web' not 'IT', there's a difference) whilst discussing David Cameron's call that 'councils should be publishing data using common standards so that the public and other groups can re-use the data to compare councils and provide services'.

He links to the e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) and Simon Dickson's comments - which I'll sum up as 'it's difficult'.

Basically, Cameron is on the right track but probably for the wrong reasons.

I've consistently argued that the problem with egov in the UK is it's 'walled garden', that it operates without consideration of the wider web, doesn't behave like the wider web and - largely because of a lag effect caused by bureaucracy and lack of marketing knowledge - ignores the wider web where most web users are. Search being the most obvious example.

Cameron is talking correctly when he aligns with the Guardian's 'Free Our Data' campaign in terms of the uses this information can be put to, including commercial uses. The Guardian has detailed how the problem isn't generally interoperability but freedom of access - 'walled gardens'. Obviously if other well-funded interests want information they can help/fund breaking down interoperability.

eGif, which most Council web operations experience as simply adding numbers to pages which specify which service is described, is a good example of this because it appears to be mainly about DirectGov. The pointlessness of which is a constant moan because DirectGov is not how most people find those services. However others could make use of this data, which is mostly already there.

The far bigger picture though is Cameron's assault on the Walled Garden (I'm reading it that way). Here, he is attacking an attitude which is all-pervasive (and I mean all) within eGov - the rest of the web is irrelevant, policy is out of date, traffic isn't important, expectations are low. This is exacerbated by a seeming desire to head to the frontier (e-democracy) when the basics on which the rest of the web operates aren't in place

Cameron talks about They Work For You and is presumably another person who loves MySociety's good works. I do too but in the wider scheme of things they're a blip. He should talk about NetMums etc. instead and how they should/could be using government data.

I wrote last year about a new online service which was ignoring it's key online audience to promote itself. That service talked about all sorts of data compatibility issues being barriers. This reminds me of my recent exchanges with the BBC over it's blog comments technical problems.

Neither of these issues were primarily about tech, they were really about communications and marketing — everyone has tech issues online, even Google sometimes, but they know how to not lose audience when they have them. They made things usable and they explain what's happening when they're not - they have to.

With the BBC the technical issues weren't communicated - users were left floundering.

With the major eGov project it was the same. Because the component government bodies making up the project operated on slightly different timescales it was actually about harvesting contact points (text/email) from users and sending reminders when to sign up. A simple challenge which numerous commercial operations have already dealt with but because of the government mindset and a tekkie viewpoint simply wasn't thought of.

In fact the experience for me was an eye opener because of the blinkers which people had on - I was coming from a commercial web background and this was seen as irrelevant, even hostile, when I was just trying to help.

If Cameron wants to go for the government's web stance - hurrah! I have met a few Tories now around eGov and have always found them to come from the right place. Even when they appear to have 'savings!' brightening up their eyes. My experience of Ministers and their lackeys is the direct opposite. Deliberate ignorance and patronising arrogance.

The plain fact is that the operation is not properly led and never has been. There's been no consistency or real vision. Blair was a technophobe and Brown appears to be one too. Who they've appointed has been the equivalent of 'Northern Ireland Minister' rather than something more prominent. This has been going on for years.

This is also why I've highlighted what's happening overseas and this would be my suggestion for Cameron — point to embarrassing counter-examples, of which there are many, where a much poorer country is doing something we can't get right. That'll get you in the Daily Mail and therefore the government might pay attention. Promoting MySociety (much as I adore those lovely boys) ? Not so much.

Alright, Shane. You set me off. Job done :}