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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let down by Comms, and politicians?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Amongst other developments

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

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

Going over the top (in another sense)

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

He says:

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

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

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

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

~~~~~~

One other consequence

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

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

Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

The night before last - and in the night - Birmingham City Council without much fanfare switched over to its rejigged website.

Within moments the twittersphere was alight. It was crashing, it had obvious faults and it looked terrible. Over the next 36 hours reviewer after reviewer found fault after fault.

This would not be news - how often do bad government websites get launched? - if it hadn't been for the efforts of Paul Bradshaw (a lecturer from Birmingham in online journalism) and his project Help Me Investigate.

Following up on local Brummie whispers, they put in an FOI to the council and discovered that the cost of this website revamp was, wait for it, £2.8m.

What they bought

Since the launch the lead for the council, Glyn Evans, director of business transformation, has written two blog posts and done a couple of interviews.

From this - not from information provided as a result of the FOI, because of 'commercial confidentiality' - it is possible to glean that this £2.8m essentially covers building a content management system (CMS, presumably from scratch a commercial java-based CMS called FatWire), transferring the content and building a workflow system (and there's a mention of training staff). Oh and ‘find my local’, which much smaller councils have had for ages.

From this new CMS they will be able to offer better (i.e. now standard) online services integrated into it and basics like RSS feeds - but nothing suggests that the cost of those developments is included and any webbie worth their salt will ask why any CMS should cost that much, even with bells and whistles and silver-service catered training sessions attached. Unfortunately we're unlikely to ever know real details, because of that ever so useful cover-up tool of 'commercial confidentiality'.

On the reality of what it has actually bought, the council admits at much in its response to the FOI:

Yes, the new council website is costing more than was originally estimated but actually it’s not an overspend. Originally, the website replacement project was just that – a replacement for the (obsolete) technology we are using. And then we rethought; the new website will be at the heart of delivering improved services to everyone who lives in, works in or visits Birmingham. This is a totally different proposition, and a totally different approach – and budget – was required.

Also, yes, we did consider Open Source but no, it wasn’t suitable, otherwise we’d be using it.

And again, yes, the website is being delivered later than was originally planned but it’s not the same website as was originally planned."

None of this sounds other than just a CMS upgrade. And someone should ask for the papers on just how they decided that Open Source wasn't a solution.



Expensive leaches

Why was it £2.8m? It is hard to see how it could be that much - other than that the job was outsourced to the infamous public sector contractor Capita.

Says Stuart Harrison (aka pezholio):

By all accounts the web team have had very little involvement and most of the grunt work has been done by the council’s outsourced IT ‘partner’ Service Birmingham – operated by everyone’s favourite outsourcer Capita (or Crapita if you read Private Eye).

Stuart's comment about the rumours of the exclusion of the council's own webbies from the website development process is underlined by a comment on Josh Hart's blog about the irony of the City Council Website Manager giving a presentation about the semantic web presenting about triple-tagging at a local geeky meeting in a personal capacity, something as related to his own website as space travel is to an Indian villager.

I can relate. In my past capacity in local government there was a vast distance between my role in the 'egov community' (respected, invited to speak, present and comment) and my actual - professionally disrespected - influence in the council.

Every local gov webbie will have a tale or a tale told to them about the uselessness of Crapita - I certainly have one, let's just say that usability isn't part of their culture, or knowledge from my experience (and according to reports about Birmingham 'external testing' wasn't included in the original cost estimate) .

When tested the expensive system Crapita produced for Birmingham had a failure which just takes your breath away - it did not recognise pound or euro signs, apostrophes and quotation marks. They are a leach on the public sector who, like Rasputin, refuse to die despite failure after failure.

What they have produced is a disaster with failures thus far noted being:

• It does not meet basic accessibility requirements. Twitterers noted that it launched with one accessibility statement which was changed the next morning to another which was more non-committal ('meets standard' to 'aims to meet standard').
• Stacks of incoming links have broken including those at the top of Google natural search results.
• Masses of internal links are broken.
  
• Content remains often simply appalling such as an empty 'What’s New' page.
• Reviewers say online forms are broken.
• Absolutely no thought given to SEO
• Incomprehensible alt tags and title attributes for links and images
• Lack of validation on many pages

Absent PR or just arrogant PR?

The manager sent out to respond to all this, Glyn Davies, has been rapidly digging himself into a bigger and bigger hole. Completely refusing to address any of the major faults found instead he has been reduced to accusing questioners of being members of the 'Twitterati' and pulling the stunt of finding his own expert to claim the website is all shades of stunning.

It is a major irony that the council's PR department actually isn't within the website, a while back they launched their own separate site complete with YouTube channel and Twitter feed. They obviously have the power to shape their own online destiny but not the power to control the council's messaging - Davies' statements have been a PR disaster with the Birmingham Post's editor furious and undoubtedly vengeful.

The effect on the city

Another element to the PR disaster is the effect on the attempts by the city to grow its digital sector.

They have reacted with sharp intakes of breath, expressions of horror and rapid distancing.

Martin Belam presaged this in his comment on the first news of the cost:

There is a rather fantastic irony of it happening in the city outside of London which has perhaps the most vibrant and vocal digital scene in the UK.

Successful local enterprise Clarity Digital said:

The most frustrating part is that on the one hand the City Council, AWM [Advantage West Midlands] and others want to develop the regions’ creative offering. On the one hand the City is encouraging digital and talking up the region’s ability to lead the economic recovery through a thriving, innovative digital industries. And then they release this nonsense that does nothing to help the credibility of these ambitions.
The Council’s response was that the site is for the residents and not the Twitterati. That comment alone shows the sheer lack of understanding of digital in general and social media in particular. Most of those commenting were residents, business owners or people working in the City. Twitter enabled us to discuss this, for people to air their views. Prior to the Internet, a story like this would have resulted in a pile of letters to the local newspaper. Now people can discuss and debate via a range of sites, blogs and of course Twitter.

In a brilliant post which attracted a stack of comments Jon Hickman, from the research centre of the Birmingham School of Media at Birmingham City University, looked at the problems of managing such a large project, and the possible solutions.

The mass of concerned contributors points to the wealth of local - and national - professional goodwill which a local authority could draw on to improve its website if only it would get its head out of the sand (or its arse) and stop digging itself deeper into a hole of its own making.

Said Jon:

So if the root of the problem is the procurement process, what would I suggest instead? I’m going to be completely idealistic, and I do realise that there are quite huge barriers to this sort of change, but I have an answer. Here’s a manifesto for better procurement of web projects (it would work for IT projects and service design too):

1. Let’s focus on needs and the original problem, not best guess briefs by well meaning non-experts.
2. Let’s be aware from the outset that your best guess cost is going to be wrong, and the project will be late.
3. Let’s allow for changes in a radical way: not just contingency days in the spec, or a change management process.
4. Let’s budget for innovation.
5. Let’s open up the project and let users shape the end result.

Amongst the fascinating comments Jake Grimley (Managing Director of Made Media Ltd. in Birmingham) said:

In my experience, the developers and project managers tend to care deeply about the problems they’re solving and feel that they are fighting a daily battle against organisational politics, third-party software vendors, and basic client-misunderstandings to get those problems solved. For that reason all websites are usually a compromise between the ideal, and the practicalities that have to be accepted in order to deliver.

And that last word is key. Steve Jobs said that ‘real artists ship’. Solving the problems in new and innovative ways is nice, but delivering *something that works* is more important. When we work with larger public sector organisations at Made, we sometimes find that delivery is not really at the core of the organisation’s ethos. For that reason it has to be us chasing the client, driving delivery rather than the other way around. That commitment to delivery takes sustained effort and joint experience, which is what would make me sceptical about your ‘hire a bunch of freelancers and give them six years’ approach.

Other than that, what you’re describing is similar to agile software development methodologies. These always appeal to programmers because they saves one from having to think it all through before you start coding. However this methodology is completely at odds with the classic public sector tendering system, which attempts to specify the project in its entirity before even speaking to prospective developers. But then, if you had £600K to spend, wouldn’t you want to know what you were going to get for it before you signed the contract? In addition, agile methodologies do not work well in large political organisations, because they rely on a client sponsor who’s not afraid to take quick decisions when presented with alternatives. Does that sound like Birmingham City Council to you?

[Solution?] This one’s quite simple I think:

Commission a specialist website development company with a track record of delivering complex websites to budget and to timescale, rather than – say – a generic IT outsourcing company.

The irony here is that the reality of the web team putting together the new BCC site is possibly uncannily similar to the ‘ideal’ process Jon outlined.

Another commentator was Brummie developer Stef Lewandowski:

From experience of public sector tendering if you don’t match the brief fully in the pre-qualification stage then you have no chance of getting shortlisted. So the larger the project, the smaller the chance that the commissioned web company will have to influence the brief they are responding to?

These comments show both the willingness of professionals to help but also the frustration and drawing away from government which the actions and comments of so many 'lets-pat-ourselves-on-the-back' bureaucrats like Glyn Evans provoke.



Lessons

What is the number one lesson I'd like readers in local government to take from this abject disaster? Rebellion.

Local government webbies did not cause this (as Stuart Harrison points out) and would not have made the series of bad decisions which led to the ship hitting the iceberg. Why? Because they're professional webbies and know what the heck they are doing.

This project was not run by them, it was outsourced by non-webbies to a company which is not about the web and doesn't live to build brilliant websites and which operates in an uncompetitive environment. Put simply, organisations like Crapita can get away with this and move on to the next excess and profits binge.

This disaster is the best argument for the new Public Sector Web Professionals organisation. Webbies need to develop the clout to call out those responsible for this and for the other council website disasters coming down the pipe.

Another point here is that local government website disasters know no party - all of them are responsible somewhere in the country for crap websites. In Birmingham it was Tories and LibDems, elsewhere it is Labour.
In Brum Deputy council leader Paul Tilsley, who has overall responsibility for 'business transformation', admitted that he was wary of switching on the revamped website.
He said he feared journalists would be logging on at 9am on the first morning in an attempt to identify any “glitches”. Little did he know it would be webbies (aka Evans' dismissive and patronisingly described 'Twitterati') demolishing his council's website. One can only hope some Brummies make this political and hold Tilsley's feet to the proverbial fire.

What unites those wanting change is not party but profession. Those webbies in Conservative HQ and Tories elsewhere need to link up with the rest of us to raise our collective status.

We all need to reach out professionally to those who have commented, those who have shown anger and interest in this disaster and raise our collective voices and shout 'NO MORE!' We need to get together and elbow the Glyn Evans' of this world of ours out of the way because we are citizens as well as webbies and as such we know we can do better than this crap served up to us as 'transformation'.

This episode should be used a an object lesson in how-not-to-do-it and it should mark a turning point for web professionals in local government.

Make it so. Yes we can. You have the power.

• Postscript

Another kick at councils on accessibility

E-access Bulletin has another go at council web site accessibility, citing SOCITM's annual Better Connected Review. It claims that this had shown minimal progress and therefore there's a "a gloomy picture".

Several colleagues on twitter have reacted badly, as well they might. Government in general is the only sector which actually has policy to implement the Disability Discrimination Act online and it's not like all disabled people access is government. Who knows, they might just want to buy stuff or play games!

Commercial websites have never been seriously challenged by the accessibility industry, despite it being a much more lucrative sector to potentially target.

What gets me is that they then say the following:

It is not all bad news this year, however. Some encouragement can be drawn from the implementation of a new additional qualitative assessment system, carried out for Socitm by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), and designed to give an overall picture of council website accessibility. The system used its own 0-3 rating, with 0 representing a frequent absence of accessibility and 3 representing a site that was functionally fully accessible. Under this system, 136 councils (33%) were rated by the RNIB as satisfactory or excellent; a far more encouraging statistic than the 8% who achieved WCAG Level A.

Now WCAG is the international standard. It was replaced in December 2008 by a revision which takes into account the developments online as well as a much wider interpretation of disability. All measurement against WCAG 1.0 was therefore carried out (last November) against - effectively - a deprecated standard. In WCAG Level A context is irrelevant, it just gives a (literal) machine score on which councils are judged.

What using someone like the RNIB to give 'qualitative' feedback tells me is that the machine does so much but here's some actual disabled people putting things in context.

It's striking in its absence that much of the industry selling 'accessibility' to government is not disabled people. What their actual needs are isn't the key selling point - it's 'meeting a standard'.

To my mind this lets people off the hook. All councils have the ability to engage with actual disabled people about their websites but instead they're encouraged to keep a distance and follow some coding requirements. So no-one actually knows whether this is actually helping actual disabled people.

For example, is this correctly coded content of any use? Or can the key tasks which disabled people have on sites be easily performed?

These are the same sorts of issues sites should consider for others so why when it comes to disabled people do we take another approach?

Surely that is the very definition of discrimination.

Just as with usability, it pays massive dividends if the coders and designers come out their cubicles and engage with the audience (not that councils do usability well either but hey-ho ... ).

Bim Egan, Senior Web Access Consultant at the RNIB, told E-access Bulletin: "we noticed a significant improvement in the real accessibility of most of the websites we assessed. Unfortunately that doesn’t always show in a strict conformance check.”

The key concept here being 'real accessibility'.

HT: PSFBuzz

NB: reedit following JackP's comment.

Downing Street's website circle of hell

Sad to report but the blogging platform I'm using appears to be letting down disabled readers.

I was emailed by one that they'd attempted to comment on a post but were unable to because the alternative to the spam-preventing 'captcha' word verification wasn't working.

Well, I just logged out and tried it and it wasn't working for me either. It just 'hiccuped'

So I've complained to Blogger but in the process noticed that they don't seem to respond at all to accessibility issues. Have a look around the Google Group.

Other things about Blogger in this regard have irritated me for a while, such as not adding a simple field to add Alt tags to images (you have to rawcode). Hardly rocket science.

Wordpress does have this simple field, and link titling - are they the better option if you are serious, but lazy, with accessibility? Or something else?

Captcha seems to be a particular pain in the rear for those using text-to-speech.

Robin Christopherson, head of accessibility at technology access charity AbilityNet, recently examined the Number 10 Downing Street website. While he found it comparatively accessible (in a 'low-bar' field) it still had:

• 'click here' links, and - the horror!
• auto-start videos, with unlabelled control buttons

What the latter means is that blind users are confronted with Gordon Brown drowning out their own audio controls and cannot work out how to turn it off. Sounds like one circle of hell.

What my correspondent complained about in Blogger with captcha is also happening elsewhere, says Christopherson. He says that the sounds created in order to confuse audio recognition software are so distorted that they cannot be recognised by humans either.

Even more patronisingly, when testing Google he saw that it has a third option - contact the site's owners directly for assistance. When Christopherson was eventually contacted two days after applying for this option he was informed that everyone had to register online!

My correspondent also finds the whole accessibility attempt somewhat patronisingly unuseful:

I can't pass the eyetest and I think the wheelchair (what does wheelchair use have to do with poor eyesight anyway?) is meant to link to a hearing test, which is also a problem for me because I damaged my hearing doing factory work when I was young.

Anyway, that's irrelevant because the wheelchair actually links to a page that says "Not Found Error 404" for me. I can't even try a hearing test.

Need an accessibility advocate?

I can't think of a better accessibility champion, exponent, evangelist and spokesperson than Stevie Wonder.

From an interview with Popular Science:

Though blind, Wonder has mastered the visually-oriented personal computer—both PCs and Macs. He edits all his music using sophisticated programs such as Steinberg Cubase and Apple Logic Pro. When a program presents a roadblock (for example, not providing audio feedback to direct him), he uses third-party accessibility software or asks [Lamar Mitchell, one of his technology assistants] to write macros that automate complex tasks.

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Wonder presented his Vision Free awards to 19 companies and organizations for making products that the blind can use. Some were deliberate efforts, such as a news reading service for the blind created by National Public Radio, iBiquity Digital and radio manufacturer DICE Electronics. Others made accessible products "without even realizing that they were doing it," said Wonder. BlueAnt's V1 Voice Control Headset was designed because even sighted people can't see the buttons or LCD of a device on the side of their heads. But those features also make the Bluetooth headset useable for blind people.

POPSCI: Do you think the blind and visually impaired, and perhaps also deaf and hearing impaired, are more tech savvy because technology helps them in some ways?

WONDER: Well I think obviously it is important for them to gravitate to what can possibly give them some ways into the things that they have to do…For a blind person, if you hear about a thing like a camera that can take a picture of a page and speak it out to you, of course you want to use that.

So the key is for the government to subsidize such things so they are, cost-wise, what a normal person can afford.

POPSCI: Do you think the huge advances in technology in the past ten, twenty years have made life easier or harder for people who have any impairment? Or has it been a mixed bag?

WONDER: I think it's definitely made life easier. But if you're going to make products easier for a person who can see, to have this more convenient, then make it accessible for the person who is blind or deaf. I hear manufacturers say, "Oh, we forgot about that," or "Oh, that's interesting." Well, think! Make your products a convenience for everyone. Be an all-inclusive company.

[Pet peeves?] A lot of the things with a touch screen. It's impossible to use. So if you're going to do that, then maybe provide some kind of overlay that will allow accessibility to the product for users who are blind…

I think the more that people understand and are able to have information, then the more possibility that someone will find a key to peace.

I have this song that I wrote which is called All About the Love Again… And it says:

What if someone made a soda that caused everyone to love each other.

Ummm, oh yeah, sounds good, so good to me

And if just a tiny pill would make us see that we're all truly sisters and brothers

Ummm, oh yeah that sounds so nice to me

...

You know, GPS is an incredible thing…When I have it on and I'm riding around, I notice the different signs. And I see that the spelling of what they are saying for those names isn't anything like how I thought they would be spelled.

And what I've learned is that because sighted people are able to read all the time and see things, it becomes like second nature…So I understand now why a person who's sighted can really read more fluently—because they are always seeing these letters, seeing these words in some form or another.

And then it allows you to understand the ways and the habits of a sighted world.

HT: Chris

~~~~~~~~~

MJ Ray has emailed me to point to an interview on BBC News 24's Click with Stevie.

'E-democracy' and, er, democracy

Jakob Nielsen has produced for Pew a very interesting usability study of voter information websites from all 50 united states and the District of Columbia.

Some points of interest. He identifies these neglected usability aspects:

• Homepage usability
• Search
• Accessibility
• Web presence (that is, how users get to content from outside the site, or "usability-in-the-large")
  

And makes this spot-on comment on his results:

there's a negative correlation of r=-.1 between homepage usability and accessibility ... the negative correlation indicates that designers aren't treating accessibility as a component of user experience quality. Most likely, government agencies are focused on complying with legalistic accessibility regulations instead of trying to make the sites easy for people with disabilities to use.

As an observer of 'e-democracy', where's usability in the mix? Well it's nowhere - because it's simultaneously nowhere in egov. That's true of the UK and - Nielsen suggests - the US also.

Not very democratic, I'd venture to suggest.

According to E-Access blog, Robin Christensen now of AbilityNet and formally of the RNIB reviewed the FAB! NEW! WEB 2.0! Number 10 Downing Street website and found it wanting:

While relatively accessible in many ways, still has various untagged links which read simply ‘click here’ [sic], offering the audio browser no clue as to what lies behind. The website also features auto-start videos, with unlabelled control buttons, so that blind users are confronted with video noise drowning out their own audio controls and cannot work out how to turn it off.

A very polite way to put it. Picture the scene ....

Again with the not-very-democratic.

Sez Jakob:

There's a reason that we have a "total user experience" concept to encompass everything that users encounter. It's not enough to have a great design for part of the user interface. Good navigation, say, is certainly a necessity for a great user experience, but it's not sufficient. Offer a bad homepage, and users might turn away before they even start navigating.

We can liken a website's user experience to the metaphorical chain that's no stronger than its weakest link. If any one usability attribute fails, the overall user experience is compromised and many users will fail.

It's all very obvious, really - auto-start videos FCS!! Unless one is sitting inside a walled garden ....

Say that again

Kiwi designers DDB created this cool billboard for New Zealand's National Foundation for the Deaf (NZNFD).

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.

HT: Etre

Forgotten heroes

Our current Paralympics medal tally, with one day to go. Am I missing something here? Why is this not 'news'?

Both Gordon and the Olympics fail disabled web users

HT: Ian Cuddy.

Downing Street's move towards a more 2.0 version of its website has left behind part of its audience - disabled web users.

More4 News hired Ability Net to run tests and it appears that little attempt has been made to cater for this slice of the electorate, it was obviously not part of the site-build plan otherwise at least something would be there in the new site.

More4 says they were told that "they actually spent more on researching that [accessibility] than building the site". Er, apparently not. But other errors are truly basic usability mistakes.

Says Ability Net:

• Some links open in a new window with no warning which can confuse the inexperienced user or those with a cognitive difficulty.
• The No. 10 TV page includes multiple videos, none of which have text transcripts or captions (subtitles) for the hearing impaired. Moreover, they aren't able to be used from the keyboard (In internet Explorer at least) which is a major flaw for those unable to use a mouse.
• The site is almost unusable for those with a vision impairment when text is set to the 'Largest' setting (in Internet Explorer) - with text in both the navigation and page content becoming overlapped and difficult to read.
• No pages checked had valid HTML code which can cause problems with a range of access technologies - such as screen readers (used by blind visitors) and voice recognition software.
• A 'skip to content' link is available, but as it is permanently hidden, keyboard users are not aware it is there and hence still end up pressing the Tab key numerous times to get through the navigation to select a link in the main part of the page.
• The virtual tour of No. 10 is an embedded interactive 'Flash movie' which has not been coded correctly. With unlabelled buttons, and minimal descriptions of what is being viewed, blind users have no access to this feature.

Very galling for other egov workers when the government has threatened to remove .gov.uk domains from sites which fail basic accessibility checks.

Here's Ben Cohen's report:



Ability Net has also found the Beijing Olympics website lacking. Recommended reading for explaining exactly what the frustrations are for end users.

I wonder if they'll (both of them) be sued?

Scrapbook clips catch up

According to the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM:

More and more German citizens use the Internet to performing authorities courses. 43 percent of Germans in 2007, electronic services of public administration claimed.

And the UK is slipping down the rankings (p. excuse translation).

Putting a spanner in the gears of the drive to council web ads, Accessible banner adverts, from the RNIB.

Jack Pickard says Better Connected: Sigh - Here we go again…

Perchance, I agrees. Forsooth I said ..

There are methods for discovering what terms people use ‘in the street’, that’s how people spend money with search marketing.

One reviewer doesn’t constitute testing best practice, there are well-developed methods used elsewhere which enumerate the issues with this.

The central theme being a disconnection to web best practice.

I am sure that professionals in such areas would find these methods odd.

Webcredible has issued a highly related report 'Local Council Websites: Good, But No Cigar'. PDF download and fairly damning.

Usability will undoubtedly prove to be a key factor in the success of the online channel, particularly when it comes to transactional support for key user services. Compared to last year’s average score of just 45.5%, this year’s sample has performed a lot better against our guidelines. However, there is still significant scope for improvement

Tops for Webcredible? Dan Champion's old stamping ground: Clackmannanshire.

New blog for your Reader: blindaccessjournal.

Business leaders call for accessible technology

"The business case for accessible technology is compelling. IT that is accessible for disabled people is easier for everyone to use and improves everyone's productivity.

"Indeed, it's estimated that over 60 per cent of the workforce would be more efficient were they to use existing accessibility features."

HMRC chief operating officer Steve Lamey said: "We want to raise the profile of the business case for having a disability competent IT sector, not just to suppliers but to every chief information officer in Europe.

Microsoft is lining up Senior PC for the UK. "The PC will come with simplified software for email, word processing as well as managing prescriptions, finances, travel planning and photographs." Age Concern and Help the Aged are the co-conspirators.

HT to Headstar for breaking the walled garden - they have Gerry McGovern starring at an upcoming function.

theconnectedrepublic.org is a new community space, developed by Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group. The aim is to create a space where people with ideas can meet, share their thinking and link up with each other. The site is open to anyone who wants to get involved. They want this to be a user-led, user-dominated space :}

• PDF White paper - The Connected Republic 2.0: New Possibilities & New Value for the Public Sector

The Cabinet Office has set up a competition for people to develop their own mash-ups from public sector information, according to Kable.

Actually it's Minister Watson. Praise where praise due.

Great primer from Jack Aaronson at ClickZ on new developments in ecommerce producing A Widget World?

Companies like Citibank should hop on this bandwagon and create true mini ATM interfaces that allow users to perform various banking transactions via the iPhone. The iPhone interface would need to operate more like an ATM and less like a Web site (which is how existing online banking tools are designed).

Authoritarian Governments Can Lock Up Bloggers, But Not Outwit Them

What do Barbra Streisand and the Tunisian president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, have in common? They both tried to block material they dislike from appearing on the internet. And they were both spectacularly unsuccessful.

CIA collaborates online

Although people do not generally think of the spy agency as an information-sharing organization, that's an important function of the CIA. And like executives of news organizations, [it's] feeling pressure to make content accessible to an audience that now expects to stay connected from any location.

"People don't always sit at their desks," he said. "If we are really going to be successful, we need to get information to our customers whenever, wherever…by whatever means necessary."

Fowler said the WIRe, which has been online in its current form for less than two years, includes several Web 2.0 tools from text and video to social bookmarks and Really Simple Syndication feeds. "We are really trying to push the envelope," Fowler said.

Content is published seven days a week, and Fowler was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit in 2007 for his work on the unique, user-driven format of the publication. The WIRe's newspaper-like interface, which reflects editorial decisions about what should go above the fold, is released six times weekly, he said.

In a sense, Fowler added, the product is like a wire service but more scholarly in style. Reports combine field intelligence, open-source information and analysis.

Fowler said the goal is to use various online tools to make the reports more interlinked for the customer, and there's an opportunity for readers to comment on a particular article and follow links to other, related articles.

The collaborative tools "are a means to an end," he said.

Latest PEW Internet & American Life Project survey says 46% Of Americans Partake In Politics Online. A. Lot.

McCain appears to have, finally, hit a NetNerve with an online appeal for more drilling.

BBC: Supermarket of the future.

It's all about the mobiles. But I find the robot scares me.

Al-Qaeda's Growing Online Offensive

Every three or four days, on average, a new video or audio from one of al-Qaeda's commanders is released online by as-Sahab, the terrorist network's in-house propaganda studio. Even as its masters dodge a global manhunt, as-Sahab produces documentary-quality films, iPod files and cellphone videos. Last year it released 97 original videos, a sixfold increase from 2005.

Jakob has been bizzy:

The 1% of websites that don't suck can be made even better by strengthening exceptional user performance, eliminating miscues, and targeting company-wide use and unmet needs.

Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews.

More wisdom.

It's unfair to blame Google for the facts of information foraging. The easier it is to get around an information space, the earlier people will leave any one location and surf to the next beckoning hit. That's a fact, and Google is just designing the best product it can.

If we didn't have Google, it would be Yahoo and Live Search that were making us stupid, even though maybe they wouldn't make us quite as stupid, because they would make it a little harder to find the next promising place to go, and thus make people dig a bit deeper at each site.

Also, I have observed the same reading behavior in user research since 1997 (the year before Google was founded) so it's definitely not Google's fault that the very nature of the Web makes users treat individual websites contemptuously. Yes, the behavior is stronger now, with more people that ever using search and diving into sites for very short dips, but fundamentally it's the same style of behavior.

After all, I talked about the importance of designing and writing for search long before Google, and the guidelines are pretty much the same. It's simply become more important to follow them.

The guilty party is not Google, it's the Web.

And, from salesforce.com numbers:

Remember that IE7 was released in October 2006: 20 months ago.

Thus, the UPTAKE SPEED is slightly less than 2% per month (in terms of IE users upgrading from the old version to the new one).

Ten years ago, in 1998, I noted that the uptake speed for new browser versions was 1% per week. Thus, users are now twice as conservative as they used to be.

Here's a usability tip: it never ends. ATMs are over 30 years old but they're still up for improvement.

Study Ranks Twenty Best Country Portals: Singapore, Argentina, Costa Rica Take Top Spots

The study is from this guy, but I haven't been able to find the actual study ;[ The portals are great though. Google them.

Personal Democracy Forum 2008.

Absolutely heaps of good stuff. Barely. Scratched. Surface. Also check this tag.

John Edwards' surprise appearance:



Google redefining 'community standards'?

In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

Very neat idea: non-stop trains:



Line of the week from BBC Radio News: "there's been an 18% reduction in the carbon dioxide Prince Charles produces"

And an added extra, from Chris Kelly:

What if Obama spent the next week calling McCain Dracula?

No offense, right?

He wouldn't really be calling him a macabre horny corpse that only sunlight can stop. He'd just be kidding around. About his energy policy.

And to mention that I've been rated "8.0 in the Society category of Blogged.com". Sorry Amy Liu, no link for you. No 'benefit' sold ;{

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.

Scrapbook clips catch up

My piece on 'Why Obama could be good for gays' has been republished by PinkNews, unfortunately the formatting fell through their template ;[

Arianna Huffington has been all over the UK media this week as she made a flying visit to London. I have been reading HuffPost since it started and am still waiting for it to do international news. It now has a green section and a 'living' section and, in London, much focus was on her move into local news.

The big, huge gap in American news reporting is international. It is very clear from reading HuffPost that even the liberals are plain ignorant. And why? Lack of decent reporting. It is pretty damming of Arianna's enterprise that she is putting local US news before developing a truly international section to her, now, very influential website — I just wish someone would say this to her and that didn't appear to happen on her flying visit.

One recent instance where HuffPost behaved badly was during the Burmese cyclone. They just reported and didn't link to donation sites — whereas the old school aka the New York Times did, and immediately.

Via Netimperative: Mobile advertising is the most unpopular ad format in the UK, according to new research from Dynamic Logic.

The study indicated that print advertising generates the most positive reaction with UK consumers and is seen as having the most relevance.

The Dynamic Logic ‘AdReaction’ study gauged consumer’s opinions of advertising.



Jonathan Zittrain interview on BBC News 24's Click.

His new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, develops the theme about how the commercial world's platform dominance will spike the sorts of developments which we need to drive the Internet further. I have always been queasy about the odd attitudes towards corps like Apple and their closed, exclusive partnership relationships. Zittrain nails why and I have to read the book.

I think that Tim Berners-Lee would agree. In a speech last week he said:

"How can we make the Web be an infrastructure that allows more than one person to think more effectively than one person can? There's no proof yet that for creative thinking we've done that," he said. "The challenge is to build a system that allows the formation of half-formed ideas and allows collective creativity."

HT: nomensa

Age Concern is developing an online campaign to encourage people to become more organised.

Cancer Research UK has launched a blog to tackle cancer myths.

Barack Obama is mentioning Google a lot on the trail to contrast himself with McCain (who cannot use a computer at all).

The authoritative Pew Internet Project has released a report on the election campaign thus far and found:

• 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others.
• 35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos.
• 10% say they have used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved. This is particularly popular with younger voters: Two-thirds of internet users under the age of 30 have a social networking profile, and half of these use social networking sites to get or share information about politics or the campaigns.
  
• 6% of Americans have made political contributions online.
• 39% of online Americans have used the internet to access "unfiltered" campaign materials, which includes video of candidate debates, speeches and announcements, as well as position papers and speech transcripts.
  
• 5% of Americans have posted their own original commentary or analysis.
  

That's a lot.

One of the least reported aspect of the disaster that is Zimbabwe is the ecological crisis. This organization is trying to do something about it.

Shake hands with killers... Harare Tribune article on the history behind today's suffering.

At Zimbabwe's Independence then Prime Minister R. G. Mugabe established a government of apparent reconciliation including Zapu leader, Nkomo. The apparent integration of former warring combatants, Zanu's ZANLA and Zapu's ZPRA, into one Zimbabwe National Army proceeded. But, behind what eventually was revealed as a continuing charade, the ruthless accumulation of all power by Zanu (PF) proceeded apace.

BBC News Online Magazine, 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate.

"The latest that's stuck in my head is we are still optimistic things will feed through the sales and delivery pipeline (ie: we actually haven't sold anything to anyone yet but maybe we will one day)."

Would Australia's PM ban Botticelli? Germaine has a good 'ole go at Australia's Catholic PM.

Rudd would not recoil in horror from Botticelli's Birth of Venus, one hopes, but that, too, is the image of an adolescent. For some months, travellers on the London underground have been unable to escape the image of a naked pre-teen, fully lit and meticulously detailed down to her faint cloud of pubic fuzz. But no child protection campaigners have picketed the Royal Academy.

The Village Voice's annual Queer issues had lots of good stuff, including Triumph of the Lipstick Lesbians.

Today's middle-class and wealthy lesbians, however, look mainstream. "I've certainly noticed a more glamorous element among lesbians," said Julie Bolcer, the news editor of Go magazine, a monthly based in New York that is this group's bible. Bolcer can be seen many nights prowling hot-girl clubs for news tips. She's surprised by how many women wear long hair and how "flagrantly feminine" many of her peers dress.

21st Century ad from Heinz:



Quote of the week 1, from Radio 4's The Learning Curve:

"Up to 20% of school pupils could be classed as disabled under the Disability Discrimination Act".

Quote of the week 2, from Tim Footman's The gay priests row is a holy smokescreen:

"Let's be clear: removing all the gay priests from the Anglican communion would provoke a serious staffing shortage; although they're better off than the Roman Catholic church, which would probably cease to exist if all the Hail Marys had to find alternative employment."

Google Reader clips catch up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

| View | Upload your own

Here are the relevant slides about the interactive program

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

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