@PubSecBloggers - follow UK Public Sector Bloggers on Twitter

Using Twitterfeed I've set up a new Twitter account which will be updating with new posts from UK Public Sector Bloggers.

These are the bloggers which are on the page which Dave Briggs set up last year. He says:

The bloggers I have used so far aren’t just civil servants, or local government officers, but anyone who works for or in the UK public service, and who write about it now and again. This is an inclusive kind of thing!

A lot of people I know now get their info from Twitter. I know I now get a lot of traffic to both my blogs via Twitter, and I just don't use my RSS Reader anything like as much as I used to.

So if you follow @PubSecBloggers, you'll get notification of any new posts from this collection of bloggers.

NB: Had to pick an icon and went with Stimpy (of the Ren + Stimpy cartoon series fame), just 'cos I loooove it :]

Scrapbook clips catch up

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

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

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

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

+ Google kills the Google bomb :{

Hah (sorry, shouldn't laugh).

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's humiliation," Perry said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

eGov: New figures from NWEGG shows that:

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

According to the Daily Mail (FCS):

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

AND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's Whitehall's approach:

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

Monbiot point:

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

How guardian.co.uk stays atop the pile:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's cleared some clips :}

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

He raised his hand as if to say stop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Goltz nodded.

And on the right side, you will see ....

I've added a few things to the right-side column and the latest has prompted me to note this.

Dave Briggs aka davepress gets enough praise from everyone else around the egov network (deflate! deflate!) but has made a good start to sainthood with 'one site to rule them all ... ' in PublicSectorBloggers, which I'm running the feed from. It's "Lots of UK Public Sector Blogging in One Place!"

Two points:

1. I am not defined by my job! Do not append my workplace after my name (I think this holds for most of the others too)! Not just for reasons of 'oh, shit', but also because we range far beyond and do not want to be pigeonholed. I think I speak for all ;]
2. Why is everyone not pushing full post feeds? It's embarrassing to see mine, cartoons and pictures 'n'all, in there like a flasher where everyone else is being a little tease.

David Osimo made a good point in a comment about tag clouds for public sector blog interest (thinking globally, mind) - I've shown some practical, useful tag cloud usage in this post about their use in the US primaries.

I seem to have removed other feeds. I actually don't remember (no jokes please). But nobody's seemingly noticed and, but, the only one which actually got clicks was the egov victoria one.

As well as PSB, I've got a few buttons.

Donate to Myanmar cyclone appeal is still running. This is the 'official appeal', Milliband favorite avaaz.org's appeal came without a button! There's two Zim buttons: one for methods of support, which are not pointless, as moans from the regime have made clear; another for donations to relief. The last is a button for Global Voices, which I wanted to highlight. This brings local blog voices from all corners of the world together and promotes them and is inspiring and fascinating. Go look.

I've also added but not noted my own button to encourage signatures to the petition to Gordon Brown about not deporting gay + lesbian refugees. Go look at the site for harrowing story after harrowing story. Support please by signing the petition. Tell your friends. Think about adding the button. Please.

Last point. 'Video' is now my top tag. This must mean something. What is it.

Scrapbook clips catch up

Wait a while and the clips pile up ...



The Berlin gay holocaust memorial is unveiled and among the participants was 95-year-old Rudolf Brazda, who survived incarceration in Buchenwald concentration camp from 1941 to 1945. "It was a terrible time," Brazda said. Asked how he felt now, he responded: "I must say that I feel as though I were in paradise in this democratic society."

What is happening in the Italian blogosphere? I check viral videos regularly and a lot are suddenly Italian. And this is in a list previously 100% dominated by America with occasional Sarkozy interruptions.

Viral, political video on the whole is becoming more international. I've seen (as well as French) some Malaysian and Canadian video pop up with serious numbers of blog postings.

Another, positive, view of the impact of the internet on China:

The Chinese public sphere has become a more freewheeling, interesting and chaotic arena for expressions of opinion than it was. This isn't all due to the Internet (crusading print journalists and activists have also done their part), but bloggers calling attention to official corruption or mocking government policies have definitely helped alter the political landscape.

The politically significant things happening online involve forms of communication, such as efforts to call attention to corrupt acts by local officials, that dovetail with policies that are promoted or at least given lip service by the central authorities.

After racist hiring, another negative against Google Inc: their Daycare arrangements.

The Itch: Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.

Really recommended science feature from the New Yorker:

The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.

...

Researchers at the University of Manchester, in England, have gone a step beyond mirrors and fashioned an immersive virtual-reality system for treating patients with phantom-limb pain. Detectors transpose movement of real limbs into a virtual world where patients feel they are actually moving, stretching, even playing a ballgame. So far, five patients have tried the system, and they have all experienced a reduction in pain. Whether those results will last has yet to be established. But the approach raises the possibility of designing similar systems to help patients with other sensor syndromes. How, one wonders, would someone with chronic back pain fare in a virtual world? The Manchester study suggests that there may be many ways to fight our phantoms.

How social networking saved New Orleans: Powered by community, New Orleans residents exposed city hall and the power of social software

Using blogs with names like Fix the Pumps and Squandered Heritage, citizens took up "beats," lending their professional expertise, ingenuity and gumshoe efforts to create a citizens' voice to counter city government rhetoric.

Via David Wilcox: Community networking to tackle climate change

That’s not all, though - I have also been drafted in by Tracey Todhunter to help develop her ideas for a ‘communiversity’ for low carbon communities. She writes about it here. We’re going to start off in my session, so Tracey and her colleagues can develop a strategy using the game; and then take the results into her session to drum up support and refine things.

All about the CivilSerf project:

A global virtual community for teenagers has teamed up with the Matthew Shepard Foundation to educate young online users about dignity and respect.

From next Monday foundation staff will lead discussions twice a week in Habbo.com's InfoBus, which is a virtual room designed to look like the inside of a high-end bus.

Good new resource: The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008

Zugby's blog post about being forced to the ground by armed police in Bournemouth.

I oblige. I'm shocked, confused, scared and embarrassed all at the same time. Most of the bystanders have vacated the platform by now, by police order. And I'm not talking about normal police either. This is the Specialist Firearms Unit, about 8 of them, machine guns, bulletproof vests, police dogs and all. And they're here to arrest ME!

AP feature on Web 2.0 - censoring the right to rant

With online services becoming greater conduits than shopping malls for public communications, however, some advocacy groups believe the federal government needs to guarantee open access to speech. That, of course, could also invite meddling by the government, the way broadcasters now face indecency and other restrictions that are criticised as vague.

Others believe companies shouldn't police content at all, and if they do, they should at least make clearer the rules and the mechanisms for appeal.

Where's Web 2.0 at in the US government?

Local government officials had mixed views about how they see Web 2.0 meshing with their needs, however. Mary Benner, CIO of the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, called it "something that we need to pursue, but it is not an immediate priority".

While Web 2.0 can help residents communicate better with their governments, she says, offering those kinds of features is becoming a key way to lure younger IT workers to take jobs in government where they can build innovative Web 2.0 applications.

Dave Briggs' review of Communities in Control, the new white paper by the Department for Communities and Local Government. It's pretty radical but I commented that if you want to address the 'digital divide', which it references, you could start by ramping up funding for UK Online Centres whose CEO has been screaming about underfunding. Not sexy and seemingly not on anyone's agenda.

Craig Tomley offers (tongue in cheek) 10 reasons government agencies should not advertise online

7) Because our senior executives haven't gotten the hang of email yet, and we know that our executives (who approve our ad design and spend) think and act exactly in the same way as our customers, even though they earn more, are degree-qualified, much older and live in Canberra.

Comment from Belgium about the YouTube/Viacon decision:

Obviously, European Youtube users didn’t ask for their youtube usage to be handed over to Viacom Inc.. Who knows what Viacom will do with this highly private data (which contains highly detailed information about people’s interests such as the videos they watch, the various topics they are interested in, and so on)?

I only hope that enough Europeans will formally protest at their country’s privacy agencies and/or at the European institutions. Although, I fear it won’t matter anymore as privacy nowadays has become far less important than Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.

Anyway, please find the contact details for Belgium here.

In the US, the right-wing Xstian preacher Hagee has through take-down been attempting to get off the viral video circuit, but it's backfired.

More on 'The War On Tourism' @ America's borders from Peter Tatchell:

After being held in custody in appalling conditions for over 26 hours by the department of homeland security, Mengal was refused entry to the US and deported. No reasons given. No right of appeal. This is Bush-style democracy in action.

Patricia Hewitt is Nigerian?

Before my retirement, I personally made an over estimation, and stacked the sum of Six Million Three Hundred Thousand Great Britain Pounds which I totally intend for the purpose of charity and none other which will be supervised Attorney as he will also be the one in charge of securing these funds into your custody.

The historic victory for UK bloggers of Alan Murray in Northern Ireland.

'During my testimony in court I said I was only trying to criticise those in power or those that would speak for us. That right has been upheld by the judge's decision. If the judge had ruled against me, then every blogger would have been vulnerable to charges of intimidation because those at the end of their criticism could claim they were being picked upon. A very bad precedent would have been set,' he said.

Revealed: The ten members of Web’s ‘500 million club’ - Via NetImperative: Only 10 websites and applications - led by MSN Messenger, eBay and Facebook – have averaged at least 500 million UK minutes per month over the last year, according to new research. Facebook, YouTube and Second Life are the fastest growing sites in terms of total UK minutes.

AP: Uncertainty aplenty as Web, media leaders convene

Both media and online leaders are grappling with the Internet's increasing fragmentation. And they're all looking for more advertising revenue online, where media companies have recouped only a small fraction of what they lost in print and where Web companies want to maximize their investments.

Bill Thompson on the reaction to copyright infringement by big corps:

EMI, Warner, V2, Sony BMG and the other four hundred or so members of the BPI want to cut people off from that network for copyright infringement.

Imagine if you had a child who was excluded from school for cheating in an exam, and you were told that they weren't allowed to watch TV, listen to music, read books, talk to their friends or go into any shop during the exclusion.

Oh, and you and your entire family were subject to the same restrictions.

Wal-Mart: Ethical retailing? Hmmm.

The company has been churning out dozens of white papers on sustainability, publicly available on its website, addressing everything from how to change eating and exercise habits to green charities; holding state-of-the art conferences on greening the supply chain; building environmentally efficient stores with open sky lighting and motion sensors to reduce energy consumption; rolling out green products in almost every department; and basing its promotion structure of its own employees, including senior staff, on how successful they are in convincing vendors to adopt measurable environmental standards.

Monbiot: Trawlermen cling on as oceans empty of fish - and the ecosystem is gasping

From PSF, this story made me think of numerous Fairy Tale analogies:, largely involving wolves

Ministers have declared another major sweeping 'new' pan-government efficiency drive aiming to cut down IT spending and slash back-office costs.

The 'Operational' Efficiency Programme kicked off last week with the launch of a series of 'cross-cutting' reviews headed up by a veritable host of business leaders. Each review will report back in March with news of where £££ billions of savings can be made across the public sector.

The first review, led by Martin Jay, chairman of technology and engineering group and former stock market darling Invensys.

Talk about desperation ... in Slate: the movie I'm rushing out to see, Wall-E, is allegedly fattist:

This stereotype of the "obese lifestyle" is simply false. How fat you are has a lot more to do with your genes than with your behavior. As much as 80 percent of the variation in human body weight can be explained by differences in our DNA.

Genius take on all those stories about science's quest to find the cause of gayness by David Ehrensten, merging a “feminized brain” with Plan 9 From Outer Space:

That’s because, Lord Saletan, we know full well who WILL be doing the controlling — Eros from Plan 9 !
Can’t you see him now explaining it all to us? Why is this happening, O Visitors From Another World?
“Because of death. Because all you of Earth are idiots! You see! You see! Your stupid female brains! Stupid! Stupid!”

Fabulous

If ever anything summed up that British "stiff upper lip", this Keep Calm And Carry On poster is it. During the early spring of 1939 and the war with Germany almost inevitable the British Government commissioned this poster to be displayed throughout the country upon the out-break of war. The plan for the poster was to relay a message from the King to his people that all capable measures to defend the country were being taken. This original World War II poster lay undiscovered and forgotten until a copy turned up over 50 years later within a pile of dusty old books bought from an auction, it's soothing message is still relevant today - it understands that you are a little bit stressed but knows you'll be ok. You can purchase heaps of great products that feature the Keep Calm and Carry On logo from this fab site. www.keepcalmandcarryon.com.au

The Onion has been celebrating Gay Pride march month (for want of a better word) by pulling together past posts, including this: New Dad Thinks Baby Might Be Gay.

The great Yossi Alpher falls for Sasha Baron-Cohen's latest creation:

"Vait, vait. Vat’s zee connection between a political movement and food. Vy hummus?”

Quote of the week
John Harris on Any Questions?, about the Islington Registrar being allowed to discriminate against gay couples:

It's about privileged beliefs. I'm a vegetarian. If I worked at Tesco and said I'm not going to put meat through the checkout they'd be quite justified in saying 'you're not right for the job'.

egov bloggers and news sources

Dave Briggs has started publicsectorblogs.org, (and included me, thanks ;] ) and had a lot of suggestions to add to the site.

These are the feeds I've got in my Reader - and Dave's post + comments following mean I have a number of others to add. (There are some sources without feeds - shock - which are in my links list in the right column).


Getting very hard to keep up ;{ I certainly have ones I make a point to check (hey Dave!) but some mechanism to float more interesting stuff to the surface is definitely needed. I can't really see a way of automating this, it needs a human editor.

This is kindof what egov Victoria does, maybe somewhere like Public Sector Forums (only not just .gov.uk accessible?) could do it sustainably? Would be terribly useful!

It's also about the money

Several colleagues have blogged about David Lammy MP’s speech to the Fabian Society, in which he drew inspiration from Barack Obama's internet-led campaign and internet-empowered base. Comparing with Labour, Lammy said:

This is light years away from the caution that can come either from the long shadow of opposition in the 1980s, or the straightjacket that being in office can feel like.

--
It has put together a web strategy premised on connecting activists and supporters to one another, not just pushing out tightly controlled messages from campaign HQ.

Suddenly in the US the web is being used to connect people with politics again – at a time when people are using it to circumvent politics in the UK.

And the huge lesson for us is that the technology is neither particularly complicated, nor especially expensive or labour-intensive to run.

Obama’s web strategy is focused solely on making the vital work which goes on in town halls and on doorsteps work better.

The lesson is that internet campaigning should also be about giving supporters the tools they need to get their own message across in their neighbourhood or local area.

However both Simon Dickson and Dave Briggs echo Lammy's talk about web tools being 'cheap, often free, and easy'. They are but the ones Barack employed aren't cheap (e.g. phone banks) , infact they are the legacy of marketing industry tools first deployed by Karl Rove in 2000, and the advisors who created the online campaign come from several years experience (and probably aren't cheap). Plus the traditional marketing spend - TV ads - outweighed it many, many times over. See my post Turning web buzz into votes: how Obama does it for more about the tools the campaign employed.

How they did it was new, in contrast to Hillary there wasn't the normal degree of top-down messaging during the primaries - although this may well change as we get closer to the general election and the 'netroots' is already squirming about that.

And they didn't get everything right - Hillary did better and earlier online marketing - plus one really big lesson is that email remains the killer app.

Plus US politics is very different to UK politics. Plus the US is 6x bigger - scale matters. Plus the campaign is oppositional (one reason why the right are bigger online in the UK).

In short, Barack's campaign is very inspiring but very open to picking up from it the wrong lessons.

Here's some for Lammy:

1. once November is past, Labour should go hiring
2. he should be arguing for a shift in party spending to online
3. (and this was the meat of his speech) - he should also look at how Labour can adapt to become less top-down and encourage and empower the base (but this goes against the actions of the last twenty years or so).

And I think those points are in decreasing order of likelihood.

Google Reader clips catch up

Sneak preview of iplayer 2.0.

The most important change is that we combined TV and Radio in the same iPlayer interface.

Which will be great for introducing a lot of radio comedy to new audiences and entirely appropriate for the viewing circumstance - via computer or via mobile.

There's a stack of other great user-driven new features in it.

Elizabeth Pisani: Washington has more HIV than Nigeria

In part because Congress has until just a few months ago stood in the way of clean needles for injectors in the city, the capital of the world’s largest economy has HIV rates similar to those in many African countries.

Much web 2.0 isn't accessible but this looks set to rapidly change. Accesify reports that Firefox 3 is "a big accessibility enhancement in the form of WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications) support."

And the RNIB’s Web Access Centre Blog says:

This is an exciting time in the browser area as support for the Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) suite gathers pace in the next generation of browsers. Browsers with support, partial support and planned support for WAI-ARIA include Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Opera and Web Kit based browsers including Apple’s Safari.

Leading industry commentator John Battelle declares that with search It's Over. Google Wins.

MP Tom Harris got roasted in the MSM for comments on his blog and Minister and longtime blogger Tom Watson's points to hypocrisy and lack of MSM coverage of that hypocrisy by one of Harris' tormentors - Tory MP Philip Hammond.

If ever there was a time for British bloggers to pick up on a story that the mainstream press have missed/ignored, this is it.

Steve Dale artfully dismisses a CBI claim that Browsing websites costs billions in lost productivity.

I just hope that managers will not use this report as further ammunition to restrict workers from using the web for anything other than browsing their own company’s web site. Let’s not apply 19th century working practices to 21st century workers!

The BarCamp idea just happened in Nairobi!

• Wiki. Flickr.

Fantastic idea posted by Simon Dickson, The power of postcodes.

Postcodes are the country’s greatest example of the Power Of Information. I believe we would unlock significant power if we enshrined postcodes as our key national geography, asking Royal Mail to bequeath them to the nation. All statistical and political geography should be aligned with postcodes, with a commitment not to change them for 10 years, perhaps coinciding with the Census cycle. I don’t care if there are marginally more meaningful statistical boundaries; a flawed system we all understand beats a perfect system nobody understands. Oh, and it’s cheaper too.

Shane McCracken channeling Steve Webb posts that MPs are only just now being allowed to utilise laptops in HofC committee meetings.

Dave Briggs issues Three cheers for Dylan Jeffrey, a civil servant who took part in the debate about ICELE by commenting on his blog in Jeffrey's official capacity.

Of course, this week saw the publication of the guidance for civil servants engaging with the social web. Of the five main points, three were: be credible, be responsive and be a civil servant. Dylan hit all three of these.

Let’s hope other civil servants take note, and that Dylan’s colleagues at CLG thank him for doing this on their behalf.

The guidance has been the subject of much justified, excited comment within egov. It's genesis behind the scenes should be noted for some future history of this period. The actual movers here know who they are and deserve, unfortunately anonymous, thanks. The guidance just needs extending now beyond Whitehall!

John Edwards for CIO examines how new text analytics technology is being deployed in the US to examine customer comments on surveys and e-mail as well as monitor blogs, text messages, online chats, phone calls (through speech-to-text conversion) and social network profiles.

For content management products, Halper notes, text analytics can be a complementary technology; for example, text analytics can help categorize or enrich content, analyze content in a data repository, or improve workflow.

Also, vertical industries, such as the legal industry, are becoming increasingly intrigued by text analytics' ability to add insight to an array of routine business tasks, she says.

Today, many text analytics users believe that the technology provides a useful bridge to help nontechnical staff members get a handle on complex problems without running high-level searches.

"You can have business users who are not analysts really understand 'What are my top 10 problems?' or 'How is this issue trending over time?'" Bodoh says.

All new and early days though.

But while text analytics can rapidly generate vast amounts of deep customer insight, the technology is still far away from becoming an out-of-the-box solution.

"For our purposes, in order to get full value from the application, we will have to train analysts to use the software, invest in tuning the taxonomy to produce more granular analyses and integrate the output...with our enterprise data warehouse so we can use the combined data for even greater customer insight."

Emma Mulqueeny really likes Hazel Blears work on citizen empowerment.

* I can’t precis Ms Blears’ intro, you need to read it then come back for the rest if you need :)
* Bearing in mind that it is based on the GOB Green Paper, you need to know this bit of it: It aims to give citizens the means of participating in decision-making at every level; to clarify the role of Government, both at central and local level; to rebalance power between Parliament and government and give British people a stronger sense of what it means to be British (FWIW: I do not agree with the importance of the second point but hey ho)
* This paper is an action plan covering three areas:
1. Widening and deepening empowerment opportunities locally
2. Supporting and enabling people to take up empowerment opportunities
3. Strengthening local representative democracy
* In Summer 2008 there will be a review of this action plan, with a further plan set out thereafter (I know, I KNOW… these things take time)

One line which leapt out at me was:

Give citizens a greater role in planning
• Build an e-consultation hub: 2007 link every local authority and 2008 open the hub to the general public.

I wonder if this will replace, duplicate or actually means the much-loved, semi-privatised Planning Portal.

Off with the pixies

HT: Dave Briggs

Here's Phil Hope MP - no, it says here that's his real name - who is allegedly 'Minister for the Third Sector', babbling away at some conference.



OK Mr Hope, if that is indeed your real name: How do the great British public find all this stuff? How much use do these fabulous 'initiatives' actually get - I believe you may understand this in your language as 'take-up'? What happens when the funding runs out? How does this play against your government's underfunding of UK Online Centres? Shall I go on? Would you like a moment to answer questions 1,2,3 and 4?

This sort of excited waffle has been going on for years. Give me a grounded-in-reality politician any day of the week. The Phil Hope's are ten-a-penny. The good ones vis egov are thin on the ground to non-existent.

nb: Don't get me wrong, most of the people doing this stuff, these initiatives, are great people trying to do good works. They're ill-served.

ICELE and how out-of-touch Gordon is with egov

There's been a long thread going this week on the UKIE-Edem network (European edemocracy) about what appears to be the last death thrashes of the International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy (ICELE). This was a 'National Project' funded by the government, then defunded, then thrown to the wolves.

Although there has been deserved criticism of the project, for duplicating blog products for example, much of the work has been very useful, not least their basic resources on blogging etc.

All will, apparently, be lost.

I can't think of a better example of how out of touch Downing Street is with the state of egov in the UK; that this is happening and they aren't interested, actually they're probably completely unaware.

So whilst we have them pioneering good edem initiatives like Twitter and epetitions, at the grass roots it's chaos.

Here's a summary from Dave Briggs of the thread discussion. And here's what I posted to the thread:

Two points:

1. How much money has been wasted on this and other national projects? Is anyone other than Public Sector Forums paying attention?

2. This just highlights for me the absence of any national central point of reference for egov. It's splintered all over the place, so no one actually working in the area has 'heard of' most of the worthy stuff.

We need an intro point as well as one for researchers - ICELE at least tried to be the former with its introductions.

It just pains me that the Australian state of Victoria and other governments like Hong Kong and New Zealand have managed 'one stop shop' portals to egov for practitioners but all Downing St has led with is endless, endless different initiatives with different websites whilst at the same time preaching to the rest of us about 'just' directgov and businesslink.

We've got truly bad leadership on egov in the country and I'd hope us practitioners could say that with a collective voice rather than 'well, on the other hand ... '

I can't get no satisfaction

Rather than wait for his local council to start listening to 'customers', blogger Jon Bounds used the new getsatisfaction.com website to set up a channel for 'customer feedback' about a Council.

So he did one for his - Birmingham City Council, the biggest in the country - and it's already got some damned reasonable questions on it like:

• Helpin people to remember which week is recycling colection (sic)
• Pedestrian crossings on Poplar Rd roundabout, Kings Heath

etc.

The trouble with both this and also with fixmystreet (what was neighbourhoodfixit) is the connections between ignoring such sites and their complaints/ideas and the consequences — especially the political consequences. And councils are ignoring them, I added something recently to fixmystreet and noticed that there were many others in my local area which hadn't been addressed one year on. And by 'not addressed' I mean ignored, because the email generated went somewhere.

All those people come away with a negative impression of the council as their consequence, and perhaps most importantly the people in charge of the council.

I don't think councillors, almost all of them anyway, have yet seen what's happening on such websites and thought - ahah! if I don't address these community issues I might lose my seat. Whereas if these issues made it into the local paper even in one letter to the editor, they would.

There's a tipping point of recognition which none of the political parties and only a few councillors have made.

It will happen but there's a political recognition here as much as anything else which they need to make and perhaps those advocating this type of engagement need to bang on about.


HT: Dave Briggs

Hits and anniversaries

Dave Briggs posted something about his stats and Jeremy Gould missed his anniversary.

Dave also posted something along the lines of 'wail! Is anyone listening!'. I've now gone past my anniversary so they're both reminding me to cover this terrain ...

I actually started this because I was posting long thoughts elsewhere and I clipped a lot and passed that on - which can become annoying. I should have done this earlier but really the blog is primarily for me! I dig up ideas and clips all the time; it's an online dump for me, this blog.

I actually got a comment from someone on one of my Google Reader dumps complaining that I 'didn't know how to have a structured conversation'. Well, doh! Some posts definitely are worked up in that sense and others aren't. What's a 'my del.icio.us links' dump? Not a 'conversation', that's for sure.

Some posts are more about my trying to get attention for something - like my recent stuff on searches for suicide and trying to take on the BMJ. That's also how my Mehdi Kazemi work started. Doing this attention-seeking is hard work though - I know this from doing online work for Mehdi, hours of adding comments and sending out email (worked though - we won).

Mostly I'm not thinking that hard about getting attention, it's me working through an argument and stretching myself a bit or just following an interest - like the use of web in the US primaries. It definitely isn't some kind of service! If it was an extension of my business I'd pay more attention to promotion - but my work is on the other side of a Chinese Wall.

There's a lot of posts I've done I'm quite pleased/proud about and the blog's been extremely useful for networking and raising issues in my main area of interest - egov.

Some others I've done, like the Kenyan blogosphere posts, have given me a big smile when I've had feedback from people working in that area. Same happened with the BMJ stuff actually.

So, since last April I've done 616 posts. These have covered a lot of subjects because I have fairly wide interests though most have been web related in some way.

The web is something I've lived with now for thirteen years. I've a post which I'll finish (soon!) which is about how I first saw it in 1994 (wait, that's fourteen years ... ). And I've seen numerous times, first-hand, the power of it in changing lives of people and communities. I'm pretty much an evangelist on that score, both commercially and socially.

I've been and gone with looking too closely at stats or technorati authority. I do look sometimes to see if certain people have been (i.p. address tells you a lot), and to see if I have a new referrer. But doing this has been about learning how to understand stats more than anything. I now have three sources, so Google Analytics tels me only part of the picture. I now get some RSS numbers through Feedster for example. In a year I've had 21,000 vists but the best number is 3000 returning visitors. Must be doing something right.

Most of my traffic comes from Google search, so my top content has included:

• How to open a safe
• Iran killing more gay men
• How to disable web filter software
• The Science of Gaydar
• My life in serious organised crime
• The oilman and the rentboy

All got hundreds of hits, a couple got over a thousand.

Which tells me a lot about the power of titles.

When I have had a major referrer this has blown out traffic. So

• BBC blogs: why bother?
• Update: Iranian gay deportee, Mahdi Kazemi
• Urgent appeal; Mehdi Kazemi; please help
• BBC News redesign: Can someone powerful please yell at them?
• Zimbabwe Embassy phone call prank
• Civil Serf was a mistake and a privileged moan, that's all

All also got hundreds. The BBC link still sends lots of clicks through but this also shows to some extent how viral happens because none were sought and some were from very odd referrers (there's been 724 in all)

Almost all of these pages are recent but some older content has also built up hundreds of hits, such as:

• More birth pangs of government 2.0
• Greenland glacier melt accelerating
• Australian racism

Hits in general have been going up and that's a reflection of Google, including Image Search, being my main referrer and positioning improving, as well as some other new or growing referrers like BBC, GoogleBlog and technorati.

What doesn't get huge numbers is egov posts, but I know this doesn't mean they don't get read.

I'm also not hugely bothered by getting comments or not. When I see something I just agree with, I rarely comment. So I'm often assuming that!

Enough. Not really one for too much self-analysis and this is plenty ;]

Google Reader clips catch up

• The Five Mistakes Clinton Made
  Karen Tumulty in Time. One mistake is simply not understanding the rules for primaries and delegate counting - she has a quite astonishing tale of Mark Penn's idiocy.
• Firefox: Can browsers make bucks?
  Rory Cellan-Jones gets a demo of v. 3.0 for BBC NEWS | dot.life and he thinks he sees how they'll do it, via Google.
• Disintermediation of minds?
  Via Media Influencer
  'There has been a proliferation of tools that help me aggregate but there are still very few tools that help me filter. Part of the reason may be that the human mind is the best filter of all but, surely, there is room for tools that can help me to it easier and better.'
• Street View Sabotage!
  Google Sightseeing has this funny tale
  'The saboteurs must have been extremely quick on their feet of course, as the bag appeared without any warning while the car was travelling at speed.'
• It’s not just video
  Dave Briggs explains on the DC10plus blog about the importance of tagging to pull in content and create a legacy from an event.
  
  
• New Web Content Accessibility Guidelines ready to test drive
• More Gov live blogging
  Simon Dickson is at it again with the video and the bleeding edge and takes my point about the yet-to-be-demonstrated worth of liveblogging of election coverage.
  'But for something like this, it can provide an excellent channel for colour commentary, or even ‘context sensitive links’: when we did the ProGov event, people were contributing URLs providing additional background on the points being raised, for people who didn’t know the subjects. (Like, for example, me.)' — I agree.
  
• Come Together, Now? The World Live Web and Politics
  Micah L. Sifry was watching the Indiana/NC coverage with sound down and ended up focusing on the quite fascinating comment streams on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's official blogs.
• Should TV news bias be overt?
  Roy Greenslade says no.
  
• Lawrence O'Donnell: Hillary Will Drop Out by June 15
  
  
• Girls turned off IT careers by lack of role models - ComputerWeekly.com
  No role models. Even though they're there - see my post on this.
  
• Has Facebook Jumped the Shark as a Political Tool?
  Colin Delany says
  
  • Facebook is Not (Yet) a Mass-Communications Tool
  • Facebook Advocacy: Too Many Groups, Too Little Attention
  • The Presidential Experience: Facebook Is Nice To Have, But...
  He does provide Elements of a Successful Political Facebook Strategy.
• Art Brodsky: Why The 'Right' Gets Net Neutrality Wrong
  'Those [profits from netbiz] results were achieved under mandated Net Neutrality, the original, fundamental characteristic of the Internet that protects the individual consumer's freedom to innovate without permission and to receive, and pay for, the services he or she chooses. Why a conservative opposes that, I'll never know.'
• Operation Anti-Chaos: The Narrative on "White Voters" Is Fiction
  Al Giordano: 'So, to sum up: Look at the damn graphs. You can see that Clinton is in a staggering free-fall among African-American voters, her favorability is down 36 points while 17 percent view her more negatively than before, while Obama's favorable and negative ratings among whites have paired at five point increases.'
  

Not on Reader:

• barackobamaisyournewbicycle
  Neat timewaster — 'Barack Obama wanted you to have some cupcakes ... Barack Obama recited a poem that reminded him of you .... '
  
• Barack Obama delegates wiki
  Not been done before - really. Another outcome of the Obama method, they did this themselves, learning from previous campaign efforts and nobody came from HQ and took them over ...

• Ya Libnan Lebanon News Live from Beirut
  Breaking News Live coverage of the Situation in Lebanon - 'liveblogging', indeed.
• Networks reportedly refused to appear on PBS' NewsHour to respond to NY Times' military analysts story; several continue blackout
  MediaMatters documenting just how the US TV News networks are trying to kill the story off, blogosphere is keeping it alive and kicking.
• Killing by the numbers
  Shocking tale from Iraq
  'In 2007 elite U.S. snipers executed an unarmed Iraqi prisoner in cold blood. Have the insidious tactics that led to atrocities in Vietnam reemerged in Iraq?'
  'Top battalion leaders, who had to sign off on the charges, have faced no serious questions about whether their demand for more bodies, their vague rules of engagement or the confusion sown by the secret program might have contributed to the events of spring 2007.'
• Political Commentariat in Group Circle Jerk
  Iain Dale, with top political bloggers list: 'The one thing which the report immediately provokes me into asking, is just who the Commentariat influences apart from its own members? How many 'normal' people are influenced by newspaper leader columns or indeed blogs? Do we all not feed each other in some amorphous way rather than be a crucial individual influence on a particular debate?'
  
  
• Face to face with climate change
  The Sun is running a blog from Alaska in their Climate Change section. Stop spluttering. Good stuff and a great object lesson in Plain English.
• The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online
  HT: Stephen Colbert!
  Hasan Elahi is tracking his entire waking moments online at trackingtransience.net.Why? Because he was once mistakenly picked up by the FBI.
  'So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away,"'
  'For now, though, Big Brother is still on the case. At least according to Elahi's server logs. "It's really weird watching the government watch me," he says. But it sure beats Guantanamo.'
• When Democrats Go Post-al
  James Wolcott in Vanity Fair: 'The vicious Clinton-versus-Obama rupture at Daily Kos, the most activist site in the liberal blogosphere, reflects a party-wide split. What really rankles, as Democrats tear at one another, is the free pass they’ve given McCain—and the White House.'
• Young Video Makers Try to Alter Islam’s Face
  New York Times: 'When Ali Ardekani started fishing around on the Internet a couple of years ago for video blogs about Muslims, he did not like what he found: either the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims were depicted as bloodthirsty zealots, or they were offering defensive explanations as to why they were not.'
  “Arabic sounds foreign and scary — you don’t know what is going on,” Mr. Ardekani said in an interview at his small Sherman Oaks apartment, its walls decorated with Koranic verses. “Or they show a woman with the veil, who doesn’t speak, and it is assumed if she did speak she would say, ‘Help me!’ ”

Silver surfer advocacy

HT: Dave Briggs. Bob Holmes of Digital Unite, who are encouraging ’silver surfers’ to get online and make the most of what the web has to offer. He's a great advocate + this all rings true to me!

Have glove, will demonstrate

David Wilcox using a Uni.of Cambridge glove. It demonstrates what it's like to have limited mobility and is aimed at designers, to show them first-hand what accessibility issues they should be taking into account.



Dave Briggs has a whole load more video content, links to more and detail on the practicalities from last week's £295-a-ticket 'Social Inclusion' conference (ahem).

Google Reader clips catch up

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

Not on Reader:

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

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

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 ...

Bytes · When managers read - Social networks regionalised - Incentivisation

Thanks to Jeff Kaplan for spotting this.

• According to the new Hitwise Election 2008 Data Center, Ron Paul is demolishing the rest of the Republican field with a 44.2% market share in the week ending August 4, compared to 16.1% for Mitt Romney and 11.8% for Rudy Giuliani. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama has the lead with 40.6% compared to 24.2% for Hillary Clinton and 18.4% for John Edwards. When you stack all the candidate websites against each other, Obama and Clinton jointly eat up 43% of the entire market, with Paul in third at 15%.
  
  
• David Wilcox has posted yesterday's Public Sector Forums story about the dodgy bidding process for a new 'online Innovation Exchange for the Third Sector'.
• Dave Briggs also comments on the innovative bid (which lost, and which Wilcox was involved with) and how they used Facebook.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Top social networks by global region

Worldwide Growth of Selected* Social Networking Sites June 2007 vs. June 2006 Total Worldwide Home/Work Locations Among Internet Users Age 15+ Source: comScore World Metrix
Social Networking Site	Total Unique Visitors (000)
	Jun-06	Jun-07	% Change
MySpace	66,401	114,147	72
Facebook	14,083	52,167	270
Hi5	18,098	28,174	56
Friendster	14,917	24,675	65
Orkut	13,588	24,120	78
Bebo	6,694	18,200	172
Tagged	1,506	13,167	774

Worldwide Daily Visitation of Selected Social Networking Sites June 2007 vs. June 2006 Total Worldwide Home/Work Locations Among Internet Users Age 15+ Source: comScore World Metrix
Social Networking Site	Average Daily Visitors (000)
	Jun-06	Jun-07	% Change
MySpace	16,764	28,786	72
Facebook	3,742	14,917	299
Hi5	2,873	4,727	65
Friendster	3,037	5,966	96
Orkut	5,488	9,628	75
Bebo	1,188	4,833	307
Tagged	202	983	386

Visitation to Selected Social Networking Sites by Worldwide Region June 2007 Total Worldwide Home/Work Locations Among Internet Users Age 15+ Source: comScore World Metrix
Social Networking Site	Share (%) of Unique Visitors
	Worldwide	North America	Latin America	Europe	Middle East-Africa	Asia Pacific
MySpace	100.0%	62.1%	3.8%	24.7%	1.3%	8.1%
Facebook	100.0%	68.4%	2.0%	16.8%	5.7%	7.1%
Hi5	100.0%	15.3%	24.1%	31.0%	8.7%	20.8%
Friendster	100.0%	7.7%	0.4%	2.5%	0.8%	88.7%
Orkut	100.0%	2.9%	48.9%	4.6%	0.6%	43.0%
Bebo	100.0%	21.8%	0.5%	62.5%	1.3%	13.9%
Tagged	100.0%	22.7%	14.6%	23.4%	10.0%	29.2%

~~~~~~~~~~~

• ClickZ good stuff> The Site Map: Gateway to Optimization + Is Web Analytics Really That Difficult?
  
  
• eGovernment@large talks incentivisation: he thinks financial incentives for doing government business, like paying tax, online "may have had their moment" but he's basing this on "we might have reached the point of critical mass in e-government" because there are hundreds of "government services online."
  
  Huh? Even 'transactional' can well mean an unusable form, at best, in the current rating mechanisms. That's not really 'services online'. Incentives are about taking this stuff seriously, it's the sort of action a 'normal' website would do, and would have the side-effect of driving usability and driving customer-focus. These sort of baselines always strike me as dodgy. Success/'take-up' is defined against what? Who?
  
  I would love to know where we really stand against Singapore, Latvia, Canada and others — who's measuring that? (+ no I mean eGov, not broadband take-up).
  

> Me: Online transactions: 18% > 25% - how?