Just how big is social media? Watch this

Gary Hayes from personalizemedia.com put together this very neat little widget which visualises the hyper-growth in usage of social media.

Council homepages: what's wrong with 'interesting development'?

There's been a great flurry of interest in local government webbie circles because a few councils have gone down the Google route of deliberately reducing homepage content and pushing search as the way to find what you're looking for, what you want to do, what your task is.

Lancashire's Kevin Rainsbury told the lively thread on the Communities of Practice (CoP) website that:

We're at a relatively early stage in development but felt it was worthwhile launching in its current state as it was able to provide customers with something better than what they had previously. We did a fair bit of customer research which led us down this path. We're also aware that the new site might "ruffle a few feathers" given it's such an unorthodox approach for a local authority. The Socitm Better Connected review will be of particular interest this year!

(I asked, via Socitm, for more information on any research or prior-to-launch testing within development by Lancashire and Westminster but as of the time of writing this hasn't appeared.)

Webbies divided

On the rest of the thread and in blog post comments council webbies were divided on the sites. Some cheered the innovative approach - 'It is good to know Lancashire is one of the councils thinking out of the box' - whilst others found fault (eg failed search results) or questioned the usability. .

Feeding back from experience, one webbie said:

When I’ve carried out user testing I’ve often found that participants are fairly evenly split between ‘expert’ users who like to search for information using a search engine and ‘novice’ users, who are less confident and like to browse and click on links. Some people just happen to feel more comfortable when they have some hints about what to click on. Even better if the links they can click on are relevant to their goals. In comparison to Lancashire’s site, the Westminster site does place popular tasks under the search box.

This experience reflects not just use of council websites but longstanding experience of websites in general: it's also common sense that users would be split between novices and experts (and a mass in between). However one comment made clear that this understanding hasn't got through to all council webbies:

Search is something that has to be pushed at people more. I get tired of reading complaints from the public saying “I tried to find X on your site, but I HAD to use the search” – like the search on a website is some sort of last resort form of torture.

Forcing rather than following users

Another reviewer noted that Westminster's design included navigation options 'below-the-fold' (meaning that users have to scoll down). This, and other comments, stood out for me as part of an unfortunately common mentality in the public sector, that a design is fine simply because the 'option' is provided - somewhere on the page or via a link. But a lot of users simply won't scroll, or see something 'obvious' to you.

For example, Jakob Nielsen’s study on how much users scroll (in Prioritizing Web Usability) revealed that only 23% of visitors scroll on their first visit to a website. This means that 77% of visitors won’t scroll.

So Westminster and Lancashire are actually doing what the commentator above wants them to do - effectively 'pushing search at people more'.

Hearing from an expert

I spoke with web design authority Gerry McGovern about Lancashire and Westminster.

There are 'rules' which come and have evolved from best practice which comes from experts over many years now observing how users actually behave. There are 'heuristics' which are established principles for user interface design (web pages).

I said:

My understanding of feedback from user studies is that 'search is the user's lifeline when navigation fails', and also from what you have written and said that navigation should be improved. Therefore it is a mistake to hide it on a homepage.

[You] need to look at who the homepage specific audience is and that most users actually arrive elsewhere so a homepage focus can be a distraction from addressing user's main needs, such as being able to complete tasks from wherever they arrive and ensuring that search and referral traffic is sending them to their goals. As well, that reliance on search means a lot of working on tweaking and refining results and results presentation.

Gerry replied:

I think it’s an interesting experiment, particularly what Lancashire is doing, but I basically agree with your points. Search and navigation should go together. Often what happens is people search to get roughly in the right direction and then navigate the rest of the way. But many will, as you point out, navigate once they’re presented with good logical links.

I think Westminster has got more of a balance; they have brought the top tasks onto the homepage as well as the big search area.

The fact that the search will have to be tweaked is a good thing. Really managing search is very important so to have a big focus on quality search is great.

You’re also right about the decline in homepage importance. Because a great many are starting at Google it means that they will often end up on a deeper page.

Why does this keep happening?

The apparent absence of user-testing within an iterative design process - what I would describe as standard industry best practice - happens in the case of council website design as a result of, as Carl Haggerty:explained in his blog post about the Lancashire and Westminster developments, "a wide range of influencing factors that will impact on the local webteam to make particular choices."

He identified those factors as:

• political pressure
• resources
• role of communications in website
• role of ICT in website
• role of customer services in website
• location of webteam in organisation
• external influences such as Socitm Better Connected, Gerry McGovernp plus many, many others
• which conferences members of the webteam have attended (web, social media etc)
• and yes last but not least our customers needs – all the above shouldn’t matter but they do.

I don't think it's chance that Carl happens to put customers as the last bullet point but I think council webbies are scoring an own goal in their desire for website improvement if they don't prioritise customer feedback, especially through user testing.

For example, and this is one I have cited before. When I conducted guerilla testing for a new design it became immediately obvious that the main link through to online services was simply not being seen by users. All of them were missing it, it might as well not have been there. This was because of a common, known usability issue but one on which I'd found myself over-ruled as I wasn't 'the decider'.

Because I had gone and done some cheap'n'easy testing and got a unanimous result I was able to get that design redone - because what would the counter-argument be? 'I know better than the users'?

The customers are the biggest weapon in a council webbies armory against those factors that Carl cites but how often are they used?

Is design consistency a bad thing?

Carl asks:

Why are we all taking a separate view, if we all have the same goals in mind, why haven’t we all developed identical looking sites with just a logo or some colour change as the main difference?

Shouldn’t we all agree to a consistent approach, purpose and some principles for local government websites (including the homepage) that we can at sign up to?

I wonder about this too.




Many governments, such as in Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore, have adopted common look'n'feel policies, which dictate design boundaries. Others, such as the American government and various Australian states, have provided for some years now both policy and guidance as aides for government webbies.

The UK doesn't have any of this.

The new COI usability guidance isn't meant for local government sites - and doesn't mention guerrilla testing. Socitm's Better Connected has radically improved from being a lengthy tick-box list to honing its message but still has some way to go.

Exercises such as my friend Dave Briggs' 'crowd-sourced' What makes for a decent Council website? have serious problems in my opinion with introducing bias, their usability and not necessarily being customer-led. I also remain unconvinced by Idea's developing 'Knowledge Hub', for similar reasons.

To answer Carl's question - "why are we all taking a separate view, if we all have the same goals in mind?" - I would look at:

• how webbies are being and have been led (hello DCLG)
• what resources they have (why they are so disparate or non-existent, why so many 'best practice' experiments keep getting funded and keep failing) and 
• why, a decade into very well-funded national egov/transformation policy, council webbies still remain all over the place on the basics of designing successful, customer-driven websites

You have to ask these sort of hard questions (and others, such as I'm not at all sure if "we all have the same goals in mind") to truly answer Carl's.

Simply put: I would question, with I think good cause, a rush for 'innovation' whilst some extremely basic yet to me obviously un/der-recognised problems still exist.

~~~~~~

Addendum: Following a Twitter exchange with local gov web manager Julian Scarlett, a point occured to me with both common look'n'feel and better information provision and general support for local government web development.

'Interesting development' requires resources and - with a few exceptional exceptions - this is not found in smaller population districts. This is another reason why there is such a huge disparity with the quality of local government websites.

Google UK offers free webinar to council webbies on 'conversions'

As part of Google UK's increasing local engagement it is running the first in a series of Webinar's next week.

This one is about 'conversions', getting users through a process on your website and sucessfully out the other end. This process may start from them clicking on an ad or being directed from the homepage or entering the process from an organic search result.

All websites lose people as they drive them towards a goal - which can be paying for a book or ordering a new rubbish bin.

When I presented at the Google local government event I mentioned that even top websites like Amazon - for whom this means lost revenue, lost profits - lose significant numbers of people along the way despite testing and testing and testing again. From memory this was anything up to 20% but, as I was with folks who know way, way more about this stuff than me I double checked. 'Yes' the Googlers nodded ...

For local government I suspect that a lot more than 20% of transactions are lost and this means a number of things:

• ' Service transformation' is in large part about encouraging self-service which is in large part about getting people to do stuff online - if the process doesn't work for many or even most of them 'transformation' simply isn't going to happen.
• If people have a bad experience with a process it will be that much harder to improve it and get them back. Plus they will tell people about their failure.
• If the numbers of people successfully completing online transactions are below expectations then this undermines those promoting and developing them - including budget allocation.
• Conversely, if expectations are too low - as I believe they usually are - bad processes become tolerated and it is that much harder to argue for money to be spent on improving them, for example of user testing

The webinar marketing is aimed at commercial organisations, it talks about "converting into paying customers". But for users a process is a process online, so for local government every single point made will be applicable and this is why Google's UK local government people want council webbies to watch.

Here's what it will cover:

A. Understanding Your Visitors
B. Maximising Your Traffic
C. Traffic Sources
D. The Homepage
E. Landing Pages
F. Bouncing Visitors
G. Visitor Journey Steps
H. Exits
I. Site Search
J. Go

It will be conducted by one of Google UK's certified Conversion Experts and the first one takes place 24 September at 3pm.

• Register to take part.
  

Web stats for egov: a starter

After I posted in March about Issues with Better Connected's webstats use, Better Connected (BC) author, Socitm, kindly invited me to present at an event in London in May (a presentation partly repeated at #googlelocalgov). Following a conversation with BC's Martin Greenwood I've been invited to contribute more to their development of BC's web stats use section and how council's are judged on the subject in the annual report.

(Better Connected is the annual review and report on UK local government websites).

The Central Office of Information (COI) published guidance on web stats earlier this year.

The following are some initial notes and so I would welcome comment and input on them. There are issues with how the BC review team is practically able to judge councils on their stats use but first I think we need some idea of what best practice is on how they should be using them.

~~~~~~~

The use of web stats for web development is best tied to goals, and through defining those key goals and associated metrics at all levels of a council: business, web team, other teams (such as comms), and then individual services.

Unfortunately internal politics often means that reporting (upwards) usually takes priority. So how a council better allocates stats resources (mainly time) is entirely consistent with BC's prime task of improving council websites.

Business/ marketing

• Customer–driven, which usually means tied to online service delivery through processes but could be information-delivery as well as process.

• Linked to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — unclear (to me) as to whether there are standardised (apples vs apples) measurement?

• CTR (Click-throughs) — actions, exits, abandonment rates; sources being email, direct/search, shortcut, ads, referrer, drill-down, onsite cross-promotion

• Keywords — search referral, SEO, content relevance

• Content strength — time on page, pageviews

• Benchmarking — against call volume, against other councils (NB, apples vs. apples issues, note city profiles), goal valuation (ROI)

Use of Google Analytics by many if not most councils provides an opportunity for benchmarking.

• Is view access shared?

Web Team/marketing/comms

• Trends — pageview, keywords

• Finding problem pages — drop out rates, low/high time on page, click backs to indexes, broken funnels (CTR, with follow ups eg surveys, customer services data, focus groups, usability testing application)

• Other council comparisons — eg Google Analytics view share comparative page drop out rates, low/high time on page, click backs to indexes, broken funnels

• Establishing goal use practice/policy to measure funnels

• Testing different designs

• Goal measurement tied to marketing — landing pages, funnels

• Keywords — search referral, SEO, content relevance (primarily relationship to Google search but audience segment)

• Marketing — external link tagging for CTR (click through) measurement

Departments

• Linked to business needs

• Reporting needs

• Work/resource allocation — cost/time benefit measurement

General issues

• Is the stats package correctly set up? — are secure sites (forms, payments), other sites, email links, downloads tagged

• Is there integration with CRM?
  

• Is internal/ other use segmented?
  

• Planning timelines for reporting — also automating
  

• Training — is this resourced, is there buy-in/ comprehension

• Benchmarking – how to set, what to compare to (should be apples vs. apples)

• Segmenting — sourcing demographic audience data

• Use of more than one stats provider

• When to hire expert guidance and for what purposes
  

A win-win in the cloud for UK Public Sector?

Image via Wikipedia

News that Portsmouth Uni has moved all of its students into the cloud with free, multi-lingual access to an advertising free version of Google Apps, including webmail with 7gb capacity, online documents, spreadsheets and calendars, chat and collaboration and site building functions.

They have around 30,000 students who will get @myport.ac.uk addresses.

In a deal with Google - which runs a similar discount exception for academe in the US - they get it for free for four years with no ads (Google quoted a commercial price of $33 per annum per user at the #googlelocalgov event last month). They will also - for free - establish application programme interfaces allowing data to be exported if the university decides to move.

The Uni believes that despite recent brief downtime, Google will provide a better service than doing it in-house. Answering critics, they repeat that Google is signed up to the Safe Harbour Act which commits a US company to comply with European data protection standards, even when information is stored outside Europe.

One of the best received presentations at their recent local government event was about Google Enterprise Tools. Given that the Government's CIO, John Suffolk, is promoting the take up of cloud computing it would seem that Google is kicking at an open door and pushing apps will be a key task for them (disclosure: I am currently in talks with Google).

This task is one they are taking up. Their local government targeted website has a savings calculator which specifically compares Google Apps with Microsoft Exchange 2007. Socitm 2009 in Edinburgh in October has Adrian Joseph, Managing Director of Google Enterprise, as a key speaker.

However, furious debate over the take-up of Google cloud in US local government should flash some warning signs about their potential progress, and where a backlash might come from, in the UK.

The discussion over the pond on the cloud computing push by White House lead Vivek Kundra has generated heat and light over issues such as transparency and how the regulatory constraints and certification and authorization should be handled and managed. This shows the potential for the cloud's seemingly, cost-savingly, obvious UK local government advance to become bogged down.

Those with most to lose, such as Microsoft, will undoubtedly have their own strategy to throw mud and it will be fascinating to see how this plays out, including how the incoming agenda and policy setters in Whitehall react.

Repost: Fear the Google, don't fear the Google

I came back from a break (which included a fab visit to Wardman Towers) to the missed news that Google has settled out of court in its clash with US Publishers over its Google Books project.

Looking over last Friday's news coverage what immediately struck me as someone who has an interest in the story was the repetition that Google was the only one engaged in digitising books. Ben Cohen's Channel Four report even featured him at the British Library who are part of a competing book digitisation project!

I wrote about Google books on my blog in another context back in April and, reviewing the content, it seems appropriate to repost.

~~~~~~~~


There's been a lot of paranoia around lately about Google. We've had Street View arriving in the UK and provoking posh protests blocking their camera car. Now we've got requests for investigations on the info they hold about their users.

The former seems bizarre to me in the country which has accepted more cameras looking down on us than anywhere else in the world. The latter appears worrying when it's suggested that they might disclose that information to states, but states can get far more from internet service providers (and already trawl our digital use anyway).

What's really exercised some though has been the Google business proposition, which is to use that data to better target ads.

Here's why I find this a bit ridiculous: Google just aren't very good at it.

I have been using Gmail for ages and send and receive heaps of email. Besides each one are text ads targeted at me using all the text in all that email plus the content of the particular email I'm looking at.

They're consistently mistargeted .






I swear I don't know why they think I might want Lionel Richie tickets. or have a legal problem.

After hunting I found one which is vaguely near to the content of the email. But only vaguely.



The area where we should be the most concerned is the one which I've yet to see British media really pick up on. And it's actually concerns Google's mission - to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Google Books is their project to make available digital copies of out-of-copyright books and make copyright book text searchable.

They've signed up Oxford University amongst other big name partners.

Trouble is there are several rivals to Google and they're open-source, not proprietary. Services like PublicDomainReprints.org and the Internet Archive.

Recently Google changed it's terms to specifically disallow any of these services from using books they'd digitised - public domain books. There's not been any legal action thus far but why change the terms if they didn't want to challenge others, like the Internet Archive which hosts over half a million public domain books downloaded from Google.

Google has also 'locked up' some public domain books.

Here's an example of a public domain book on Google that was once 'Full access' and is now 'Snippet only': The American Historical Review, 1920. For the time being, there is a copy on Internet Archive.

The agreements with libraries (which are mainly university libraries), which were only made public by legal action, means that they give Google all of their books for free, and in return they are given scans that they effectively cannot use for anything.

If they want access to the corpus, they have to subscribe just like everyone else. This means that Google is requiring them to buy back their own copyrighted books, if anyone wants to actually use them on or off the campus.

Their recent deal with publishers which includes the setting up of a Books Rights Registry appears to give Google different, more favourable terms to anyone else who enters into agreements with the Registry.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) is a consortium with the Internet Archive at its centre which wants to build (a virtual) Alexandria Library II (a physical Bibliotheca Alexandrina exists). The OCA includes the British Library, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and a number of corporations - though neither Google nor Microsoft, who recently left it after funding the scanning of 750,000 books to launch their own book scanning project.

Brewster Kahle, who founded the Internet Archive and heads the Open Content Alliance, warns of "the consequences of the consolidation of information into the hands of a few private organizations".

Google is digitizing some great libraries. But their contracts (which were actually secret contracts with libraries – which is bizarre, but anyway, they were secret until they got sued out of them by some governments) are under such restrictions that they’re pretty useless... the copies that go back to the libraries. Pretty much Google is trying to set themselves up as the only place to get to these materials; the only library; the only access. The idea of having only one company control the library of human knowledge is a nightmare. I mean this is 1984 – a book about how bad the world would be if this really came about, if a few governments’ control and corporations’ control on information goes too far.

There's other issues here too with Google's relationship with libraries:

Some may have second thoughts if Google’s system isn’t set up to recognize some of their digital copies, said Gregory Crane, a Tufts University professor who is currently studying the difficulty accessing some digital content.

For instance, Tufts worries Google’s optical reader won’t recognize some books written in classical Greek. If the same problem were to crop up with a digital book in the Open Content Alliance, Crane thinks it will be more easily addressed because the group is allowing outside access to the material.

The OCA is trying to establish a standard and both Google and now Microsoft have opted out. Not only is there duplication (triplication) of these vital efforts for human knowledge but Google also refuses to even talk to them, it sees them as a rival.

The OCA are building a "permanent, publicly accessible archive" of digitized texts. Both Google and Microsoft are doing it to make money - not that there's anything wrong with that but it is right to fear when such knowledge is only available via corporate, proprietorial means.


Postscript: Thanks to Stefan Czerniawski for pointing me to this excellent piece by Doc Searls on the Google settlement.

I hope some journos are reading this because, thus far, the UK media's coverage of the Google settlement has been dire. And we're talking about an enormous, extremely significant issue here!

Google moves into local government

Twitpic Ross L Grant

Google UK launched it's local government division on Friday August 8 with a day-long event held at their London offices and attended by around 65 people.

As I have been talking and writing about their stuff (aka promoting!) for a few years now this day was pretty exciting for me.

I wondered how many actual local government webbies would be there, given how many not .gov people (consultants) I knew were going but there turned out to be lots.

As predicted, there was a certain magic to being @google with very funky offices, pretty funky people, a nice meet-up room (though the seats with little tables reminded me of old school desks and were a bit too easily tripped over), a smattering of 'Google gifts' ('Google goo'?) - including £300 of AdWords - and the most fantastic food I have ever had at a meeting/conference in my life.

As the day progressed it was very clear that they were new to this local government lark (they only opened shop in January). Given that the sponsors and the people they have been talking to thus far are Whitehall ones, and local government's needs and issues are very different, it's hardly surprising that many of the pitches needed refining.

But they were completely open about not knowing, about having lots to learn, and given that so much of their offering is free some of the slight bitching I picked up on the way the day was pitched seemed a bit rich.

My only thought with this is to wonder why - it appears - they didn't try to hire someone/some people with local government experience when they started? There's enough commonality of experience in the sector for anyone who has worked in it to be able to steer them better towards what's likely to be of most interest to most local government people. I would imagine that one outcome of the day will be talking to and maybe partnering with groups like Socitm and IDEA.

Producing better websites

The sessions about their products worked best for this audience when there was a self-evident cross-over from commercial to public sector experience, as what they generally did was simply present the pitch which they would make to any company about their products.

For example, the one about producing better websites, which boiled this down to ten things they'd learned, was spot on as to a very great extent a website is a website is a website from a user's perspective. This is the exact same message which people like Gerry McGovern are sending to local government via Socitm's 'Better Connected' work.



As well, the OpenSocial and Enterprise Solutions sessions demonstrated that these Google products have self-evident potential local government uses and they chimed with existing use by individuals present and existing discussion within the 'local government community' such as, for example, around open-source/'free' and nationally with 'cloud computing'. (Following the event they set up LocalGovCloud, 'a place for local government folk in the UK to have a play with some of Google's enterprise tools' - this needs pitching at IT bods in lgov)

Video for visual explanation

Less successful were the YouTube, Adsense and Adwords sessions because they weren't tailored for the audience. I understand that the Google Maps session didn't address in the presentation it's issues for local government (to do with Ordnance Survey copyright), despite this being a major discussion is local government circles (though I'd left by then).

I wasn't impressed that the YouTube presenter felt that 150 hits was quite a lot. Though he did mention the use of video for visual explanation unfortunately he hit on a recycling example.

I've presented on YouTube use and written previously highlighting one video on littering which honestly seemed like a few council officers having fun rather than a well thought through online marketing exercise. To do both littering or recycling needs thinking through (i.e. 'what's our views target?' 'who are we targeting?') and is probably best done by professionals and either nationally or with a group of councils chipping in.

Better use of Youtube

View more presentations from Paul Canning.

It appears to me that, at the moment, the most likely growth area for YouTube use is with politicians and maybe senior council officers using it.

This has enormous potential to go wrong, as I showed with a hilarious and viral mash-up of Gordon Brown's now infamous twitch-to-camera video. As well, the clout of those making use of it has the potential to waste budget/officer's time better employed elsewhere.

Yes, video can be a excellent medium for communication but only if it makes use of being a visual medium. As the Google guy did say, anything which needs to be shown, to be demonstrated, has this potential.

For example, in my presentation I picked a video of a council officer teaching students in a college about local building regulations. That's a obvious case where the benefit is self-evident and the entry/skill level for production is low. But in order to be sustainable and embedded in local government practice it does need a business case, it needs to be watched, which means marketed, and my presentation gave some ideas on how to do this. This example doesn't appear to have been promoted properly as it's only had 50 views - there must be more than that number of local apprentices, architects, joiners and builders for whom it would be useful?


Allerdale Borough Council's Building Control officers visited Lakes College West Cumbria

Most if not all of the people there were webbies rather than marketeers or communications people and the YouTube product - as well as, as Ingrid Koeler pointed out, tools like Google Reader and Google Alerts - could perhaps be best demonstrated to a separate audience of those council officers who can get best use of them.

Advertising

It is also the case with AdWords and AdSense that Google needs to be talking to people other than webbies in local councils, tapping into other networks of officers.

I have written about advertising on local government websites, expanding on the issues for local government.

The presentation by Nottingham on their implementation was by a webbie and ended, after some discussion of whether the number should be revealed, with the income being stated as around £15k a year, which I don't think is a lot.

It was said that this money was used for website development but a missed danger here is that budgets will simply be reduced by that amount in a time of squeezed budgets and backed by arguments that other spending, such as on social services, is 'more deserving'. If website budgets become expected to be partly raised through advertising what happens when there's a recession and income drops?

This area needs much more serious work by Google, primarily I'd argue with the more commercial arms of councils. I would bet that most of these operations in councils - tourism, events, sport - are sorely lacking in any knowledge of how to maximise revenue from their web operations, so Google would be pushing at an open door.

The Google USB Stick Man pressie

Lincolnshire pioneered advertising on their council website but moved from using a big national operator with no experience in local government to one which specialised in council advertising (partly because the revenues were so low). The company they chose had the specific experience selling ads in council print and billboard but no experience in online so will take time to learn how to maximise revenue - there is an example of a gap where Google could move in but it needs to be talking to a different group than council webbies.

Usability and analytics

I did a session on Google Analytics at short notice (slides below). This followed on from the Site Conversion and optimisation bit, which had the excellent ten things they'd learned which ended on a #1 thing to do being usability testing. This meant that despite not being a pre-arranged tag-team with the Google presenter it ended up as a tag-team as we were both essentially talking about the same thing; the basics of producing a good website experience for users.

Both usability and analytics are something deprioritised and deskilled (usually explained as due to a lack of resources) in local government and this is reflected in most of the reviews of the day published thus far (links below). Yet both are vital to users and also to the aim of driving more users through online services. They need way more attention.


Sales funnel

As I said on the day, my impression is that local government has low expectations of service use - the bar is somehow lower. Socitm and others are trying to do something about this, through benchmarking for example, but this is an unsexy area yet an essential one politically because it explains to those making the decisions why budgets need to be maintained and the worth of investing in web.

The frankly laughable move by an individual through FOI requests to benchmark the value of council websites as well as the expose of the cost of Birmingham City Council's website and the hostility of media like the Daily Mail should serve as a warning of what's down the road.

As Charles Arthur argues in his piece about Birmingham's website, yes, moving away from exorbitantly priced monoliths like Serco and Microsoft to open source should be happening but it:

1. won't mean in the real world of local government just lower development budgets but staff cuts as well;
2. will still produce unoptimised sites and less successful 'funnels' to services if usability and understanding of web stats isn't similarly prioritised;

if the political case for the value of websites isn't made and backed up with facts and examples.

The answer here is education, with both a surface exercise and a deeper one as well available to people online skills development and through face-to-face training. Sorting out how to do both usability and analytics often leads to a haze where the amount of information, options and ideas confuses. The required skill level for entry is perceived wrongly far too often as high. For example, doing simple 'guerrilla' user testing is not hard.

I think people need plans and business cases in order to be able to get the resources they need to get the most out of usability and analytics and to know when they need them as well as online education resources to show them what they can do themselves.

Here Google can play an enormously useful role I think. As they have a huge and diverse customer base, they have developed excellent, usable learning tools which have both simple, grounded take-aways and great detail. The Public Sector Web Professionals group has skills development as one of its main aims, so a collaboration seems like an obvious road to go down.

Here's my slides from the analytics presentation.

Localgov Google Analytics

View more presentations from Paul Canning.

Others on #googlelocalgov:

• Sarah Lay had written up her extensive notes from the sessions
  "Every conversation has to start somewhere and I think the relevance of yesterday will be best judged on what happens next."
  

• Ingrid Koehler picks up on similar themes to mine
  "Google knows there’s money in the public sector (maybe less than there has been, but still a lot), they know we’d make good customers, they know they have products that we can use to achieve what we need to, but they didn’t quite know how to make the sale. And the key to this one was helping the people in the room make the sale to internal stakeholders."
  

• Michele Ide-Smith
  "Very thought provoking and Google were great hosts."

• Al Smith
  "The day was not very well tailored to the audience. But it's best not to dwell on the negatives"

• Sharon O'Dea
  "This was only a first date; we’ve got a lot of flirting to go before local government will even consider going to bed with Google. Local Government just isn’t that kind of girl, you see."

• Carrie Bishop
  "The new local authority role will be as a service enabler – the glue that holds a locality together and supports other organisations to provide services that residents need, as well as helping to create the conditions in which residents can meet their own needs – from neighbourhoods getting together to share the cost of green energy through to social startups and local businesses. It’s a new model for local government and a radical adjustment that I just don’t think Google have got their heads around."
  

Swineflu: NHS #fail

Not only do we have a crashing website. Not only do we have a phone line four months late. We also have an #fail for how most people will seek information about swineflu online - search.



Mate Jack reports that he is #1 in Google result for 'have I got cold or swine flu'. Although the NHS is advertising on this search this isn't good enough because click through on text ads is very low.

NHS is #5 'natural' result - below my 'fold' on this search. They must also be optimising their site to appear at #1 in such results. But they have not.

Not. Good. Enough.

Either NHS online fixes this - quick, Google indexes pretty damn quickly - or they hire someone who can. Thousands, if not millions, of Brits will be looking for swine flu advice online via search NOW. If this is what they will see the NHS is #fail-ing them.

Gmail now rocks even more

I had the unfortunate experience recently of having to access a Yahoo account. Could I work out how to do some simple tasks? No, not easily.

Yahoo seem to be on a self-destruct bender with a badly received homepage redesign and increasingly dodgy search results containing paid-for entries.

And don't get me started on the horrors of Hotmail.

Gmail - in sharp contrast - just gets better and better.

I just added a bunch of useful stuff to my set-up from Gmail Labs. To find them go to settings > labs.

Such as? Auto non-English message translation, signature tweaks (this places your signature before the quoted text in a reply and removes the "--" line that appears before signatures), 'Canned Responses' (save and then send your common messages using a button next to the compose form), quote selected text (just text you have highlighted when you reply to a message), a tweak which lets you specify starting and ending dates for the out of office autoreply, adding a Mark as Read button, Undo Send functionality, and a tweak which allows insertion of images into a message body.

As well, Gmail now lets you automatically unsubscribe from mailing lists when you hit 'spam' for a message.

Like with Firefox, I just love this type of functionality personalisation. Why use anything else?

HT: Craig Elder/thenextweb.com

Using a translation widget

On LGBT Asylum News I recently added a Google Translation widget. I've just got my first feedback on it and it's good, apparently it's a useful add-on!

The widget is from madtomato and shows flags for six languages. You click and it sends you to Google Translate, where you can pick another language.



It's not perfect - the widget should say the following 'Click any flag to select another language' - I've modified it to say that.

Google Translate isn't perfect either - it misses the titles of posts on LGBT Asylum News for some strange reason - but I use the service often and find you can generally get the sense of what an article is about and fill in most mistranslations or non-translations.

It also now has a much wider range of languages. They recently added Fasi (Persian) due to demand and I know that's been heavily used, and useful.

Postscript: Fear the Google, don't fear the Google

I wrote recently about what I felt are misplaced (literally) fears about Google. Particularly the fears of intrusive advertising.

Well if you want something to fear/campaign about, try this:

What RemoteMedia are doing is writing software which allows the screens to spot your gender and decide which ad might interest you more. And if this were not enough, such discrimination is soon to spread to race and age.

All you have to do is walk past the screen and it will recognise you for what you are; but being of a contrary turn of mind, I immediately have to ask how will the bearded lady fare, the pony-tailed chap? Apparently the software can cope with this sort of thing without turning a hair.

In cinemas we are moving towards foyer-based advertising and film trailers which will be selected according to the people present, big people, little people, sensed for size.

Go into a Teleflorist outlet and the software will spot your gender and play a rather mean trick: "If you are a man the ad on the screen will be for big bouquets which are probably about saying sorry and will cost a lot, the floral suggestions for women customers will be different. It's all powerful stuff," Jason says.

British American Tobacco have asked RemoteMedia to come up with software for a hidden system at point-of-sale to check whether customers are the right age to buy booze and cigarettes, the retailers themselves want the systems to protect themselves from prosecution.

The system can track you around a store and clock the way you walk, of your gait pattern, and, somehow, based on this, will be able to trigger ads around the store aimed specifically at you, a whole new take on "they saw you coming".

"It's gone way beyond generic placing on an advertising loop," Jason says. "Why not an ad that comes on as a door opens, for instance, when you are leaving an airport, it could be for a car hire company.

"You are rifle-shooting these days, the scattergun has gone."

A next version of Signagelive, will complement the existing ticker-tape facility for news and weather, breaking messages, with the addition of real-time video. And there's more in the pipeline, but as Jason says:

"We're sitting here now with our software waiting for the rest of the technology to catch up." So very Cambridge, don't you just love it.

Now that's 'intrusive'.

Fear the Google, don't fear the Google

There's been a lot of paranoia around lately about Google. We've had Street View arriving in the UK and provoking posh protests blocking their camera car. Now we've got requests for investigations on the info they hold about their users.

The former seems bizarre to me in the country which has accepted more cameras looking down on us than anywhere else in the world. The latter appears worrying when it's suggested that they might disclose that information to states, but states can get far more from internet service providers (and already trawl our digital use anyway).

What's really exercised some though has been the Google business proposition, which is to use that data to better target ads.

Here's why I find this a bit ridiculous: Google just aren't very good at it.

I have been using Gmail for ages and send and receive heaps of email. Besides each one are text ads targeted at me using all the text in all that email plus the content of the particular email I'm looking at.

They're consistently mistargeted .






I swear I don't know why they think I might want Lionel Richie tickets. or have a legal problem.

After hunting I found one which is vaguely near to the content of the email. But only vaguely.



The area where we should be the most concerned is the one which I've yet to see British media really pick up on. And it's actually concerns Google's mission - to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Google Books is their project to make available digital copies of out-of-copyright books and make copyright book text searchable.

They've signed up Oxford University amongst other big name partners.

Trouble is there are several rivals to Google and they're open-source, not proprietary. Services like PublicDomainReprints.org and the Internet Archive.

Recently Google changed it's terms to specifically disallow any of these services from using books they'd digitised - public domain books. There's not been any legal action thus far but why change the terms if they didn't want to challenge others, like the Internet Archive which hosts over half a million public domain books downloaded from Google.

Google has also 'locked up' some public domain books.

Here's an example of a public domain book on Google that was once 'Full access' and is now 'Snippet only': The American Historical Review, 1920. For the time being, there is a copy on Internet Archive.

The agreements with libraries (which are mainly university libraries), which were only made public by legal action, means that they give Google all of their books for free, and in return they are given scans that they effectively cannot use for anything.

If they want access to the corpus, they have to subscribe just like everyone else. This means that Google is requiring them to buy back their own copyrighted books, if anyone wants to actually use them on or off the campus.

Their recent deal with publishers which includes the setting up of a Books Rights Registry appears to give Google different, more favourable terms to anyone else who enters into agreements with the Registry.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) is a consortium with the Internet Archive at its centre which wants to build (a virtual) Alexandria Library II (a physical Bibliotheca Alexandrina exists). The OCA includes the British Library, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and a number of corporations - though neither Google nor Microsoft, who recently left it after funding the scanning of 750,000 books to launch their own book scanning project.

Brewster Kahle, who founded the Internet Archive and heads the Open Content Alliance, warns of "the consequences of the consolidation of information into the hands of a few private organizations".

Google is digitizing some great libraries. But their contracts (which were actually secret contracts with libraries – which is bizarre, but anyway, they were secret until they got sued out of them by some governments) are under such restrictions that they’re pretty useless... the copies that go back to the libraries. Pretty much Google is trying to set themselves up as the only place to get to these materials; the only library; the only access. The idea of having only one company control the library of human knowledge is a nightmare. I mean this is 1984 – a book about how bad the world would be if this really came about, if a few governments’ control and corporations’ control on information goes too far.

There's other issues here too with Google's relationship with libraries:

Some may have second thoughts if Google’s system isn’t set up to recognize some of their digital copies, said Gregory Crane, a Tufts University professor who is currently studying the difficulty accessing some digital content.

For instance, Tufts worries Google’s optical reader won’t recognize some books written in classical Greek. If the same problem were to crop up with a digital book in the Open Content Alliance, Crane thinks it will be more easily addressed because the group is allowing outside access to the material.

The OCA is trying to establish a standard and both Google and now Microsoft have opted out. Not only is there duplication (triplication) of these vital efforts for human knowledge but Google also refuses to even talk to them, it sees them as a rival.

The OCA are building a "permanent, publicly accessible archive" of digitized texts. Both Google and Microsoft are doing it to make money - not that there's anything wrong with that but it is right to fear when such knowledge is only available via coporate, proprietorial means.

Shit! My House is on StreetView!

UK Street View Has Arrived

The effect of Jacqui Smith on 'Fitna' views

This is the increase in blogs posting Geert Wilders' film after Jacqui Smith gave it the 'oxygen of publicity'.

Now at 1,279,896 views.

Serious point. This film contains images which are filtered from 'western eyes' but circulate widely in the rest of the world. This doesn't just mean images of terrorist aftermaths but images of wars we support. Images which turned public opinion against the Vietnam war. Images which allow us to judge wars.

Fitna attacks a religion but all religions have ancient texts which can be misinterpreted. Wilder's problem is in attacking a people rather than an ideology. He critiques Muslims rather than just Islamists. But he does not advocate violence.

Smith, in banning him, is a hypocrite. Not least because she allows violent homophobes entry. And the 'bounce' he enjoys from her actions demolishes her stated purpose.

Change you can believe in

Obama promises 'transparency'. Obama delivers 'transparency'.

At least as far as Google Maps is concerned.

Cheney (aka 'Dr Strangelove') has spent the past few years under a blur. His official residence, the Naval Observatory, hidden from close, satellite inspection.

No longer.

Google announced yesterday:

Our most recent update, which went live last week, included updated imagery of the Washington D.C. area from several providers. The imagery of the Naval Observatory comes from Digital Globe.

And they're unblurred.

Remember, this is the guy who - secretively (he thought) - invented his own logo.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

You Don't Know Dick- Logo

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Eric Schmidt on Obama's Internet plans

Really cool Google Analytics video

Motion Charts add sophisticated multi-dimensional analysis to most Analytics reports. Select metrics for the x-axis, y-axis, bubble size, and bubble color and view how they interact over time.

More

Scrapbook clips catch up

Shockingly slow catch-up ... so sue me!

Danny Finkelstein likes the new Conservative website and, er, so do I. It doesn't actually just adopt the US template (like Paddick did) and has some innovations. Like Danny I fancied the Conservative Wall with its pop out voters.

And two thumbs up for a strong accessibility statement.

Via arstechnica: Fake popup study sadly confirms most users are idiots

Via techpresident: Tracking a Political Meme: McCain vs Paris Hilton. This has some fab animated 'maps' showing the meme's spread across the blogosphere.

Via fivethirtyeight:Intrade Betting is Suspicious. Very interesting post about how some partisans are - apparently - gaming this major online betting shop, one which is often reported on as an impartial predictor.

HT: Tom Watson: Election 08 on Twitter. V. Useful pull-together of related twitter feeds.

These tools were also used to great effect during the Republican convention, where mass arrests, including of many journalists, and 'pre-emptive' raids occurred.



Andy Burnham threatened web regulation in a recent speech, which contained the following daft quote:

"The internet as a whole is an excellent source of casual opinion. TV is where people often look for expert or authoritative opinion."

Half world's population 'will have mobile phone by end of year', apparently. Speaking at a conference, Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the International Telecom Union, said:

"The fact that 4 billion subscribers have been registered worldwide indicates that it is technically feasible to connect the world to the benefits of information communications technology."

You'd have to think that much of the innovation will not come from the first world in this area (e.g. micropayments). Google has some good ideas though in this recent official blog post.

Two egov 'production' blogs - ones like the BBC's where the team feeds back and sources comment. Parliament and Aberdeenshire.

Very neat website add-on tool. odiogo converts text to speech for download or playing right there.

Another bit of political blogosphere content attracting shut-down notices and legal action, this time in Scotland.

An SNP councillor suing a Labour blogger for mentioning something that was already in the public domain is going to do more harm to the councillor and his party than ignoring it would have done. I hope that Alex Salmond has the sense to publicly distance the party from the individual actions of the councillor, otherwise the SNP will be open to attack for using the law to silence its critics.

Matt Wardman has more detail on blogger Christopher Glamorganshire's sacking from the Welsh Assembly and more from Wales. Plus a Welsh LibDem confirms that the recently worked out civil service blogging guidance doesn't apply to Wales (as they're writing their own)

Search text advertising has taken off big time in 08 election: Our Brand Is Crisis: Prez Candidates Buy Words To Brand Each Other Online.

Electronic voting machines are going to be extensively deployed in the election and a lot of people don't trust them. So a campaign is being organised to get tekkies to sign-up as supervisors - citizen undercover monitoring.

FT on how Google doesn't rule all of the world: It's mainly to do with language.

New York becomes first city to accept photos and video from computers and cell phones for emergency services (they already handle text).

“Internet optimists” versus “Internet Pessimists”: TLF groups recent books.

Adherents & Their Books / Writings

Internet Optimist	Internet Pessimists
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks	Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur
Chris Anderson, The Long Tail and “Free!”	Lee Siegel, Against the Machine
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody	Nick Carr, The Big Switch
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia	Cass Sunstein, Republic.com
Don Tapscott, Wikinomics	Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited
Kevin Kelly & Wired mag in general	Alex Iskold, “The Danger of Free”
Mike Masnick & TechDirt blog	Mark Cuban

And here’s a rough sketch of the major beliefs or key themes that separate these two schools of thinking about the impact of the Internet on our culture and economy:

Beliefs / Themes

Internet Optimists	Internet Pessimists
Culture / Social
Net is Participatory	Net is Polarizing
Net yields Personalization	Net yields Fragmentation
a “Global village”	Balkanization
Heterogeneity / Diversity of Thought	Homogeneity / Close-mindedness
Net breeds pro-democratic tendencies	Net breeds anti-democratic tendencies
Tool of liberation & empowerment	Tool of frequent misuse & abuse
Economics / Business
Benefits of “free” (“Free” = future of media / business)	Costs of “free” (“Free” = end of media / business)
Increasing importance of “Gift economy”	Continuing importance of property rights, profits, firms
“Wiki” model = wisdom of crowds; power of collective intelligence	“Wiki” model = stupidity of crowds; errors of collective intelligence
Mass collaboration	Individual effort

Academics need guidance on how to make best use of web 2.0 technologies, according to a report from the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA).

UCISA also says that higher education institutions need dedicated local champions to promote and develop the new methods. It calls for academics to be given the time to learn and develop the skills to use technology based tools.