Volkswagen have launched a left-field marketing campaign through a Swedish agency dedicated, they say, "to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better."
The two videos released for it so far are very original and have gone viral.
Alongside them they're launching a competition about "finding fun ways to change behaviour".
Fun Theory is the field of knowledge that deals in questions such as "How much fun is there in the universe?", "Will we ever run out of fun?", "Are we having fun yet?" and "Could we be having more fun?"
Fun Theory is serious business. The prospect of endless boredom is routinely fielded by conservatives as a knockdown argument against research on lifespan extension, against cryonics, against all transhumanism, and occasionally against the entire Enlightenment ideal of a better future.
Many critics (including George Orwell) have commented on the inability of authors to imagine Utopias where anyone would actually want to live. If no one can imagine a Future where anyone would want to live, that may drain off motivation to work on the project. But there are some quite understandable biases that get in the way of such visualization.
Fun Theory is also the fully general reply to religious theodicy (attempts to justify why God permits evil). Our present world has flaws even from the standpoint of such eudaimonic considerations as freedom, personal responsibility, and self-reliance. Fun Theory tries to describe the dimensions along which a benevolently designed world can and should be optimized, and our present world is clearly not the result of such optimization - there is room for improvement. Fun Theory also highlights the flaws of any particular religion's perfect afterlife - you wouldn't want to go to their Heaven.
Peter Barton, who heads up Lincolnshire's web team, is one of the most experienced local government (LG) webbies around and also a great thinker. We have chimed very often on his usual hang-out, the Public Sector Forums Bulletin Board.
Managing LG web sites has developed into a specialism in itself requiring a varied set of skills not singularly found within either of the web’s conventional current homes in the Comms or IT teams of a council.
What's interesting is that at a Better Connected event in Birmingham two months ago, where myself and Vicky Sergeant of Socitm held a well-attended discussion about the forming Public Sectors Web Professionals body, this came up in a lighthearted way, because it seemed, I think, a radical wish to the webbies there, but got nodding acceptance in the room.
As Peter points out, good LG webbies draw on skills found in the commercial sector (many actually originate from web experience there) in particular from Sales and Marketing.
In order for there to be a good local government website experience and for users to take-up online services in a big way those commercial skills are exactly the sort you need. Plus, as he argues, you need a customer focused perspective which understands that this user experience needs to match that found on successful commercial websites to have any hope of achieving 'transformation' of service delivery.
The print media publishing industry in this country has huge web sites compared to LG so where are they going? Some years ago it became clear where the management of web sites should sit within their organisational structure. Publishing web sites are not run by IT departments nor are they generally run by journalists, the sector’s equivalent of our Comms departments. They are run by dedicated digital publishers who utilise platforms and services from IT and content provided by the journalists. Furthermore the web sits front and centre within their business. It is the first, and sometimes only, port of call for a large and growing proportion of their customers. And of course the publishing web sites are about making money from their expensively sourced and produced content.
Thus:
The role of managing the ever changing and volatile, digital stream is best served by having an independent view; a view where the customer is king; a view not hampered by the old, over-simplistic and clumsy, shorthand labels of “Comms or IT”.
The plain fact is that within current LG structures 'webbies' do not have clout. This is why a lot of debate is about how to win arguments, make cases, get champions, struggle for resources - because 'webbies' don't actually run web (or digital) in the final analysis.
Peter's argument, which I completely agree with, is:
So what is this Digital Stream Manager? It’s a new, or perhaps evolved, role for a new age.
An age in which the majority of contacts[if measured by number count of clients served] made to a local government organisation are made through a web site or service.
An age in which the “on-line” is becoming the norm.
An age in which immediacy is key.
An age in which clients “expect”
An age in which we are being compared to sites which are commercially driven.
And especially an age in which satisfying the customer is king.
It’s a multi-faceted role that requires the ability to pull together all the diverse resources required to populate a content-rich site; to manage the application of technology to efficiently deliver that content; to act as the intermediary between the various sources of content; to ensure quality across the output and user experience; and - critically in a world of user-generated content - to manage the delicate and increasingly complex balance between ALL the stakeholders.
Marketing is one of the biggest influencers on our world, yet when did you last see a TV show devoted to it?
Australia's ABC (the equivalent of the BBC or PBS) has the Gruen Transfer, a fantastic show which is a 101 on how to do two things: make the subject extremely entertaining and also make US stop and think about how this huge industry works and affects our lives.
Where does the title come from?
In shopping mall design, 'the Gruen transfer' refers to the moment when consumers respond to 'scripted disorientation' cues in the environment. It is named for Austrian architect Victor Gruen (who disavowed such manipulative techniques). Recently, the Gruen transfer has been popularised by Douglas Rushkoff.
The show is hosted by comedian Wil Anderson with a panel of advertising industry experts. The two regular panelists are Russel Howcroft of George Patterson Y&R and Todd Sampson of Leo Burnett. Apparently the concept has been sold to TV production companies in the UK, Denmark, France, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, and Spain.
Here's an example of how they combine entertainment with stuff to make you think. Each week they ask two agencies to 'sell the unsellable'.
During last season's penultimate show one agency took the pitch of 'fat pride' one step too far for the ABC's lawyers and produced an ad which didn't get shown. It also didn't win the panelists over - and I agree with them. Here's the ad along with a panel discussion which was only made available online.
It's interesting that the professionals get that the in-your-face abuse of other groups represented in the ad's content, in order to say discrimination-is-discrimination, smothers the overall point. As straight non-Jewish blokes they didn't viscerally feel this but knew it was there. The poofter joke does smack me in the face and totally downgrades what the ad-maker is trying to achieve.
In the best traditions of publicly funded broadcasters failing to police their distributed content, both series can be found on YouTube.
Postscript: I spoke too soon, this has been removed for 'copyright violations'. The spot where the pitch and the discussion was supposed to be hosted - http://www.antiprejudicead.net - is down. The pitch's existence seems to have been removed from the ABC entirely. The pitch itself is still on YouTube, but the debate has been removed.
Now I know Aussie TV and it has some crapolistic shows which make the worst of UK TV look Shakespearean. But it also has a whole terrestrial channel, SBS, devoted to largely 'foreign' programming.
The only non-English speaking UK (non-cable) TV programming we see is out-of-the-park brilliant Wallander and the occasional French film on BBC4. The former is only being shown here three years after Swedish broadcast because we deigned to make an English version of it. We have a shrunken world view as a result of bad programming.
Another thing Aussie TV has is lots of US imports which our rather Little-Englander viewpoint keeps away from primetime. This means that all Aussies know one of the best comedies of all time - Seinfeld - well and - because of the BBC's antics - Brits only know of it through word-of-mouth.
Another thing many a Brit has commented on is how bad UK TV comedy has got over the past few years and in one area this has got politically serious: satire. Yes, there are plenty of Radio Four series which take the piss in a sharp, upset-the-government way, but apart from the (rather weak) Bremner, Bird and Fortune what have we got which stacks up?
Google UK launched it's local government division on Friday August 8 with a day-long event held at their London offices and attended by around 65 people.
As I have been talking and writing about their stuff (aka promoting!) for a few years now this day was pretty exciting for me.
I wondered how many actual local government webbies would be there, given how many not .gov people (consultants) I knew were going but there turned out to be lots.
As predicted, there was a certain magic to being @google with very funky offices, pretty funky people, a nice meet-up room (though the seats with little tables reminded me of old school desks and were a bit too easily tripped over), a smattering of 'Google gifts' ('Google goo'?) - including £300 of AdWords - and the most fantastic food I have ever had at a meeting/conference in my life.
As the day progressed it was very clear that they were new to this local government lark (they only opened shop in January). Given that the sponsors and the people they have been talking to thus far are Whitehall ones, and local government's needs and issues are very different, it's hardly surprising that many of the pitches needed refining.
But they were completely open about not knowing, about having lots to learn, and given that so much of their offering is free some of the slight bitching I picked up on the way the day was pitched seemed a bit rich.
My only thought with this is to wonder why - it appears - they didn't try to hire someone/some people with local government experience when they started? There's enough commonality of experience in the sector for anyone who has worked in it to be able to steer them better towards what's likely to be of most interest to most local government people. I would imagine that one outcome of the day will be talking to and maybe partnering with groups like Socitm and IDEA.
Producing better websites
The sessions about their products worked best for this audience when there was a self-evident cross-over from commercial to public sector experience, as what they generally did was simply present the pitch which they would make to any company about their products.
For example, the one about producing better websites, which boiled this down to ten things they'd learned, was spot on as to a very great extent a website is a website is a website from a user's perspective. This is the exact same message which people like Gerry McGovern are sending to local government via Socitm's 'Better Connected' work.
As well, the OpenSocial and Enterprise Solutions sessions demonstrated that these Google products have self-evident potential local government uses and they chimed with existing use by individuals present and existing discussion within the 'local government community' such as, for example, around open-source/'free' and nationally with 'cloud computing'. (Following the event they set up LocalGovCloud, 'a place for local government folk in the UK to have a play with some of Google's enterprise tools' - this needs pitching at IT bods in lgov)
Video for visual explanation
Less successful were the YouTube, Adsense and Adwords sessions because they weren't tailored for the audience. I understand that the Google Maps session didn't address in the presentation it's issues for local government (to do with Ordnance Survey copyright), despite this being a major discussion is local government circles (though I'd left by then).
I wasn't impressed that the YouTube presenter felt that 150 hits was quite a lot. Though he did mention the use of video for visual explanation unfortunately he hit on a recycling example.
I've presented on YouTube use and written previously highlighting one video on littering which honestly seemed like a few council officers having fun rather than a well thought through online marketing exercise. To do both littering or recycling needs thinking through (i.e. 'what's our views target?' 'who are we targeting?') and is probably best done by professionals and either nationally or with a group of councils chipping in.
It appears to me that, at the moment, the most likely growth area for YouTube use is with politicians and maybe senior council officers using it.
This has enormous potential to go wrong, as I showed with a hilarious and viral mash-up of Gordon Brown's now infamous twitch-to-camera video. As well, the clout of those making use of it has the potential to waste budget/officer's time better employed elsewhere.
Yes, video can be a excellent medium for communication but only if it makes use of being a visual medium. As the Google guy did say, anything which needs to be shown, to be demonstrated, has this potential.
For example, in my presentation I picked a video of a council officer teaching students in a college about local building regulations. That's a obvious case where the benefit is self-evident and the entry/skill level for production is low. But in order to be sustainable and embedded in local government practice it does need a business case, it needs to be watched, which means marketed, and my presentation gave some ideas on how to do this. This example doesn't appear to have been promoted properly as it's only had 50 views - there must be more than that number of local apprentices, architects, joiners and builders for whom it would be useful?
Allerdale Borough Council's Building Control officers visited Lakes College West Cumbria
Most if not all of the people there were webbies rather than marketeers or communications people and the YouTube product - as well as, as Ingrid Koeler pointed out, tools like Google Reader and Google Alerts - could perhaps be best demonstrated to a separate audience of those council officers who can get best use of them.
Advertising
It is also the case with AdWords and AdSense that Google needs to be talking to people other than webbies in local councils, tapping into other networks of officers.
The presentation by Nottingham on their implementation was by a webbie and ended, after some discussion of whether the number should be revealed, with the income being stated as around £15k a year, which I don't think is a lot.
It was said that this money was used for website development but a missed danger here is that budgets will simply be reduced by that amount in a time of squeezed budgets and backed by arguments that other spending, such as on social services, is 'more deserving'. If website budgets become expected to be partly raised through advertising what happens when there's a recession and income drops?
This area needs much more serious work by Google, primarily I'd argue with the more commercial arms of councils. I would bet that most of these operations in councils - tourism, events, sport - are sorely lacking in any knowledge of how to maximise revenue from their web operations, so Google would be pushing at an open door.
The Google USB Stick Man pressie
Lincolnshire pioneered advertising on their council website but moved from using a big national operator with no experience in local government to one which specialised in council advertising (partly because the revenues were so low). The company they chose had the specific experience selling ads in council print and billboard but no experience in online so will take time to learn how to maximise revenue - there is an example of a gap where Google could move in but it needs to be talking to a different group than council webbies.
Usability and analytics
I did a session on Google Analytics at short notice (slides below). This followed on from the Site Conversion and optimisation bit, which had the excellent ten things they'd learned which ended on a #1 thing to do being usability testing. This meant that despite not being a pre-arranged tag-team with the Google presenter it ended up as a tag-team as we were both essentially talking about the same thing; the basics of producing a good website experience for users.
Both usability and analytics are something deprioritised and deskilled (usually explained as due to a lack of resources) in local government and this is reflected in most of the reviews of the day published thus far (links below). Yet both are vital to users and also to the aim of driving more users through online services. They need way more attention.
Sales funnel
As I said on the day, my impression is that local government has low expectations of service use - the bar is somehow lower. Socitm and others are trying to do something about this, through benchmarking for example, but this is an unsexy area yet an essential one politically because it explains to those making the decisions why budgets need to be maintained and the worth of investing in web.
As Charles Arthur argues in his piece about Birmingham's website, yes, moving away from exorbitantly priced monoliths like Serco and Microsoft to open source should be happening but it:
won't mean in the real world of local government just lower development budgets but staff cuts as well;
will still produce unoptimised sites and less successful 'funnels' to services if usability and understanding of web stats isn't similarly prioritised;
if the political case for the value of websites isn't made and backed up with facts and examples.
The answer here is education, with both a surface exercise and a deeper one as well available to people online skills development and through face-to-face training. Sorting out how to do both usability and analytics often leads to a haze where the amount of information, options and ideas confuses. The required skill level for entry is perceived wrongly far too often as high. For example, doing simple 'guerrilla' user testing is not hard.
I think people need plans and business cases in order to be able to get the resources they need to get the most out of usability and analytics and to know when they need them as well as online education resources to show them what they can do themselves.
Here Google can play an enormously useful role I think. As they have a huge and diverse customer base, they have developed excellent, usable learning tools which have both simple, grounded take-aways and great detail. The Public Sector Web Professionals group has skills development as one of its main aims, so a collaboration seems like an obvious road to go down.
Sarah Lay had written up her extensive notes from the sessions "Every conversation has to start somewhere and I think the relevance of yesterday will be best judged on what happens next."
Ingrid Koehler picks up on similar themes to mine "Google knows there’s money in the public sector (maybe less than there has been, but still a lot), they know we’d make good customers, they know they have products that we can use to achieve what we need to, but they didn’t quite know how to make the sale. And the key to this one was helping the people in the room make the sale to internal stakeholders."
Michele Ide-Smith "Very thought provoking and Google were great hosts."
Al Smith "The day was not very well tailored to the audience. But it's best not to dwell on the negatives"
Sharon O'Dea "This was only a first date; we’ve got a lot of flirting to go before local government will even consider going to bed with Google. Local Government just isn’t that kind of girl, you see."
Carrie Bishop "The new local authority role will be as a service enabler – the glue that holds a locality together and supports other organisations to provide services that residents need, as well as helping to create the conditions in which residents can meet their own needs – from neighbourhoods getting together to share the cost of green energy through to social startups and local businesses. It’s a new model for local government and a radical adjustment that I just don’t think Google have got their heads around."
I wrote recently about what I felt are misplaced (literally) fears about Google. Particularly the fears of intrusive advertising.
Well if you want something to fear/campaign about, try this:
What RemoteMedia are doing is writing software which allows the screens to spot your gender and decide which ad might interest you more. And if this were not enough, such discrimination is soon to spread to race and age.
All you have to do is walk past the screen and it will recognise you for what you are; but being of a contrary turn of mind, I immediately have to ask how will the bearded lady fare, the pony-tailed chap? Apparently the software can cope with this sort of thing without turning a hair.
In cinemas we are moving towards foyer-based advertising and film trailers which will be selected according to the people present, big people, little people, sensed for size.
Go into a Teleflorist outlet and the software will spot your gender and play a rather mean trick: "If you are a man the ad on the screen will be for big bouquets which are probably about saying sorry and will cost a lot, the floral suggestions for women customers will be different. It's all powerful stuff," Jason says.
British American Tobacco have asked RemoteMedia to come up with software for a hidden system at point-of-sale to check whether customers are the right age to buy booze and cigarettes, the retailers themselves want the systems to protect themselves from prosecution.
The system can track you around a store and clock the way you walk, of your gait pattern, and, somehow, based on this, will be able to trigger ads around the store aimed specifically at you, a whole new take on "they saw you coming".
"It's gone way beyond generic placing on an advertising loop," Jason says. "Why not an ad that comes on as a door opens, for instance, when you are leaving an airport, it could be for a car hire company.
"You are rifle-shooting these days, the scattergun has gone."
A next version of Signagelive, will complement the existing ticker-tape facility for news and weather, breaking messages, with the addition of real-time video. And there's more in the pipeline, but as Jason says:
"We're sitting here now with our software waiting for the rest of the technology to catch up." So very Cambridge, don't you just love it.
"One of the Internet's strengths is that it can help diverse communities to come together to insure that everybody's views and actions can really be made to count." Prince of Wales
As you'd expect the Prince of Wales' online rainforest campaign attracted huge media attention. Like undoubtedly thousands of others this prompted me to visit the website rainforestsos.org. Unfortunately that's where the problems start.
Yes, you can sign something, add your email address to the pile, and pass on a message to friends (which does have the facility to load your address book) but apart from that it doesn't appear to be enabled to let you do much else. You can sign up to be "able to record your own frog message with The Prince's Rainforests Project frog" ("and we will be in touch as soon as this section of the site is live!") and the sidebar says you can "grab our widget and place on your social network page or blog so you can count how many people have signed up because of you."
What the latter loads is a really over complicated widget with what appears to be either a slow host or a 'straining-to-cope' host (I suspect the former). As I've noted before, you really don't want a slow host for widgets as they will crash/slow down any web pages who chose to use them.
As it was, the click on 'grab this' did nothing, so I don't know if they were offering what should be the standard armory of virality: various sizes, various levels of complication (and code size) as well as various banners.
Other absent standard stuff are links to youtube, myspace (which was trailed in the PR) etc. There are design issues and navigation issues too.
Some press claimed that Charles' crew had hired Obama's crew to come up with this campaign. Surely not? This is way below par for them if that's truly the case.
And not just because of the website mistakes. The main thrust of the online US election campaigns (not just Obama's, Hillary's too) went beyond 'raising awareness' to connecting people so they could do stuff together, like get people onto electoral roles or to knock on doors.
I suppose it's difficult for the Prince to encourage people to lobby the powers that be but the impression left is 'support me in doing good work on your behalf' - and that's hardly "bottom up".
There's been a lot of paranoia around lately about Google. We've had Street View arriving in the UK and provoking posh protests blocking their camera car. Now we've got requests for investigations on the info they hold about their users.
The former seems bizarre to me in the country which has accepted more cameras looking down on us than anywhere else in the world. The latter appears worrying when it's suggested that they might disclose that information to states, but states can get far more from internet service providers (and already trawl our digital use anyway).
What's really exercised some though has been the Google business proposition, which is to use that data to better target ads.
Here's why I find this a bit ridiculous: Google just aren't very good at it.
I have been using Gmail for ages and send and receive heaps of email. Besides each one are text ads targeted at me using all the text in all that email plus the content of the particular email I'm looking at.
They're consistently mistargeted .
I swear I don't know why they think I might want Lionel Richie tickets. or have a legal problem.
After hunting I found one which is vaguely near to the content of the email. But only vaguely.
The area where we should be the most concerned is the one which I've yet to see British media really pick up on. And it's actually concerns Google's mission - to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Google Books is their project to make available digital copies of out-of-copyright books and make copyright book text searchable.
They've signed up Oxford University amongst other big name partners.
Recently Google changed it's terms to specifically disallow any of these services from using books they'd digitised - public domain books. There's not been any legal action thus far but why change the terms if they didn't want to challenge others, like the Internet Archive which hosts over half a million public domain books downloaded from Google.
Google has also 'locked up' some public domain books.
The agreements with libraries (which are mainly university libraries), which were only made public by legal action, means that they give Google all of their books for free, and in return they are given scans that they effectively cannot use for anything.
If they want access to the corpus, they have to subscribe just like everyone else. This means that Google is requiring them to buy back their own copyrighted books, if anyone wants to actually use them on or off the campus.
Their recent deal with publishers which includes the setting up of a Books Rights Registry appears to give Google different, more favourable terms to anyone else who enters into agreements with the Registry. The Open Content Alliance (OCA) is a consortium with the Internet Archive at its centre which wants to build (a virtual) Alexandria Library II (a physical Bibliotheca Alexandrina exists). The OCA includes the British Library, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and a number of corporations - though neither Google nor Microsoft, who recently left it after funding the scanning of 750,000 books to launch their own book scanning project.
Brewster Kahle, who founded the Internet Archive and heads the Open Content Alliance, warns of "the consequences of the consolidation of information into the hands of a few private organizations".
Google is digitizing some great libraries. But their contracts (which were actually secret contracts with libraries – which is bizarre, but anyway, they were secret until they got sued out of them by some governments) are under such restrictions that they’re pretty useless... the copies that go back to the libraries. Pretty much Google is trying to set themselves up as the only place to get to these materials; the only library; the only access. The idea of having only one company control the library of human knowledge is a nightmare. I mean this is 1984 – a book about how bad the world would be if this really came about, if a few governments’ control and corporations’ control on information goes too far.
Some may have second thoughts if Google’s system isn’t set up to recognize some of their digital copies, said Gregory Crane, a Tufts University professor who is currently studying the difficulty accessing some digital content.
For instance, Tufts worries Google’s optical reader won’t recognize some books written in classical Greek. If the same problem were to crop up with a digital book in the Open Content Alliance, Crane thinks it will be more easily addressed because the group is allowing outside access to the material.
The OCA is trying to establish a standard and both Google and now Microsoft have opted out. Not only is there duplication (triplication) of these vital efforts for human knowledge but Google also refuses to even talk to them, it sees them as a rival.
The OCA are building a "permanent, publicly accessible archive" of digitized texts. Both Google and Microsoft are doing it to make money - not that there's anything wrong with that but it is right to fear when such knowledge is only available via coporate, proprietorial means.
It's not. There have been similar studies, though very few, going back years which have shown the same issues this one apparently does.
Its authors have said it undermines myth of gay affluence and demonstrates that lesbian, gay and bisexual citizens are as likely, or more likely, to be poor than heterosexuals.
They added: "Because the U.S. Census Bureau does not explicitly ask questions about sexual orientation, LGB families have been invisible in poverty statistics.
"This first analysis of the poor and low-income lesbian, gay and bisexual population reveals that LGB adults and families are as likely - and, in the case of some subgroups, more likely - to be poor than their heterosexual counterparts, contrary to the popular myth of gay and lesbian affluence."
The review will include a discussion of the social and political factors that may lead to higher rates of LGB poverty, including vulnerability to employee discrimination, inability to marry and higher numbers of those who are uninsured.
There is a overwhelming myth about gays and lesbians which is tied to their public profile, particularly of well-known people, that gay=better-off. This has been deliberately fanned by gay commercial business because it's in their interests.
When I worked for a gay newspaper in Australia we used some of the earliest marketing data about the so-called 'Pink Dollar' to attract then reluctant advertisers. Of course we did, and, shamefully, we also bought into the myth.
I've learnt since that gays and lesbians come in the most rainbow of varieties and most are not very visible. They are the ones affected by factors like poor educational outcomes due to harassment at school, and vulnerability to employee discrimination. They are the ones represented disproportionately in the ranks of the homeless. I'd also suggest that a certain 'ghettoisation' into accepting jobs - such as lower paid social work or working in service industries - would play a role.
Someone like Stonewall needs to fund a similar study here. This myth needs busting.
It's an old story. Your first record is a smash, your first novel wins the Booker - then what? Can you top that or forever live in its shadow.
So it is with viral video and after hitting the sweet spot with a 10m views message about watching out for cyclists, Transport for London is getting diminishing returns.
You take your headphones out of your ears and hold them against the large image of an ear printed on the billboard. If the ear goes green, you're safe. If the ear goes red however, the volume of your headphones may be permanently damaging your hearing.
The NZNFD say seven out of ten under 30-year olds are experiencing symptoms of permanent hearing damage after listening to loud music – yet do nothing to prevent it.
Motion Charts add sophisticated multi-dimensional analysis to most Analytics reports. Select metrics for the x-axis, y-axis, bubble size, and bubble color and view how they interact over time.
Starting today, they hoped to raise £5,500 to run 30 buses across the capital for four weeks with the slogan: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." At mid-morning they'd already shot over this amount!
Professor Richard Dawkins, bestselling author of The God Delusion, is matching all donations up to a maximum of £5,500, so he's giving a total of £11,000.
The aim of it all?
We can brighten people's days on the way to work, help raise awareness of atheism in the UK, and hopefully encourage more people to come out as atheists. We can also counter the religious adverts which are currently running on London buses, and help people think for themselves.
As Richard Dawkins says: "This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think - and thinking is anathema to religion."
Danny Finkelstein likes the new Conservative website and, er, so do I. It doesn't actually just adopt the US template (like Paddick did) and has some innovations. Like Danny I fancied the Conservative Wall with its pop out voters.
And two thumbs up for a strong accessibility statement.
Via fivethirtyeight:Intrade Betting is Suspicious. Very interesting post about how some partisans are - apparently - gaming this major online betting shop, one which is often reported on as an impartial predictor.
HT: Tom Watson: Election 08 on Twitter. V. Useful pull-together of related twitter feeds.
"The fact that 4 billion subscribers have been registered worldwide indicates that it is technically feasible to connect the world to the benefits of information communications technology."
You'd have to think that much of the innovation will not come from the first world in this area (e.g. micropayments). Google has some good ideas though in this recent official blog post.
Two egov 'production' blogs - ones like the BBC's where the team feeds back and sources comment. Parliament and Aberdeenshire.
Very neat website add-on tool. odiogo converts text to speech for download or playing right there.
An SNP councillor suing a Labour blogger for mentioning something that was already in the public domain is going to do more harm to the councillor and his party than ignoring it would have done. I hope that Alex Salmond has the sense to publicly distance the party from the individual actions of the councillor, otherwise the SNP will be open to attack for using the law to silence its critics.
And here’s a rough sketch of the major beliefs or key themes that separate these two schools of thinking about the impact of the Internet on our culture and economy:
Beliefs / Themes
Internet Optimists
Internet Pessimists
Culture / Social
Net is Participatory
Net is Polarizing
Net yields Personalization
Net yields Fragmentation
a “Global village”
Balkanization
Heterogeneity / Diversity of Thought
Homogeneity / Close-mindedness
Net breeds pro-democratic tendencies
Net breeds anti-democratic tendencies
Tool of liberation & empowerment
Tool of frequent misuse & abuse
Economics / Business
Benefits of “free” (“Free” = future of media / business)
Costs of “free” (“Free” = end of media / business)
Increasing importance of “Gift economy”
Continuing importance of property rights, profits, firms
“Wiki” model = wisdom of crowds; power of collective intelligence
“Wiki” model = stupidity of crowds; errors of collective intelligence
Mass collaboration
Individual effort
Academics need guidance on how to make best use of web 2.0 technologies, according to a report from the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA).
UCISA also says that higher education institutions need dedicated local champions to promote and develop the new methods. It calls for academics to be given the time to learn and develop the skills to use technology based tools.
Two local councils, Wyre and Flynde, are in the Mail after producing a DVD guide to recycling. The negative story says that it cost just over £2k but I suspect that's less than the total cost. And for that they got 1000 DVDs.
Who uses DVDs as promotional tools these days? DVD content's best served up online in nearly all circumstances. The council didn't put the video on YouTube - humour website Anorak's done that, so it's been 'virally enhanced' I suppose. Though not for the reasons they'd like.
At the time of writing Wyre's homepage link about the DVD is crashing and Flyde's link is to PR that says 'the video is available to view on the website', then links straight back to the homepage ... there's no obvious link to the 'video on the website' and I also notice that the PR asks residents to 'call the council' - rather than or as well as email them.
Doh!
A few points ...
Why is every council doing this separately? Good on the two councils for sharing the cost but what - really - is the difference between vast numbers of councils on what goes in what bin?
There's also extensive message duplication - and dilution - about this issue with countless other departments and agencies saying exactly the same stuff.
This means the resources and talent hire to really get strong messages out, do the research and target just aren't there.
I know how hard it is to track down UK digital resources for reuse on green issues like recycling. There are some but I should be fed up hearing from some central agency pushing a selection of useful and preferably tailorable resources at me - I'm not.
There are a few councils trying things out - applause - and a few doing stuff like YouTube channels. Allendale has one video which made me laugh and actually has viral potential I think:
you need to make syndication easy - promote and encourage the embed code and encourage subscription to your channel
create a short, preferably memorable, description which can be passed around
tag the video correctly with good keywords
you can pay numerous agencies to do all this for you - and maybe pay them on results.
Of course it helps if the content's great but agencies know you need to learn and get better, plus you need 'product' out there and some of it will hit home and boost everything else. Amateurish also has a different meaning in this space. That Allendale video is delightfully amateurish - and that helps, it's received as authentic.
There's also a lot of other tricks which professionals use - like making sure the exact middle of your video is right as that's what produces the YouTube thumbnail, designing it so it can be 'remixed', beefing up the comments and ratings yourself and using shock headlines - but those are best left to said professionals.
The shortlist above might sound complicated, it might sound hard, it might sound time-consuming - but why are you producing this stuff in the first place? You want it seen by more than a few councilors - who are impressed until the local paper or, worse, the Daily Mail comes a-knocking and a-cursing about 'wasting tax payers money'.
Postscript: I asked Richard Steel of Newham if he knew why they'd had hit videos. In comments he's said he's going to ask around. I just dug a bit deeper and I think I can see how. Most of the videos actually have numbers similar to other councils, but several have large (for UK eGov) numbers - one is 26k. But these are from a local entertainment event run by the council and are linked from numerous other sites including Facebook and are of BBC Asian Network stars (I assume). One is on a site in Vietnam.
Bristol have one minor hit about Getting Caught - Graffiti and the Law but it appears this got to 18k not virally. No Facebook/Bebo I could find. Here's the PR. Something must have happened to push one of these vids numbers way above the others. The only thing I can spot is a technorati post and video response.
Both, I think, show how with the smallest ammount of even inadvertent seeding, video view numbers can be pushed above the very low levels most council's are currently getting.
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"???
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.ukdomain 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
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.
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.
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 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.”
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