Should HMG support IE6?

I’m on the brink of starting another coding project – a blogging initiative on behalf of another central government department, which I won’t name just yet. And I know how it’s going to turn out, because it always turns out the same.

Many a true word, as they say, spoken in jest. But the reality is, most coding jobs would take a fraction of the time if we didn’t feel obliged to support IE6.
I mention this because today, 27 August 2008, is the 7th birthday of Internet Explorer v6. Seven years, people. Yet the latest data from Hitslink shows IE6 still has a market share in excess of 25% – despite the upgrade to v7 being free, despite the availability of better competitors, despite the lack of ongoing support from Microsoft itself.
But there are rumblings in the industry. Apple’s MobileMe service announced back in June that users would need to be using Internet Explorer v7 (the first major service to do so, according to 37signals). Then, 37signals themselves announced that their entire product line – including the well-known project management tool, Basecamp – would stop supporting IE6 as from this month. They wrote:

Continued support of IE 6 means that we can’t optimize our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our apps. Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress. We want to make sure the experience is the best it can be for the vast majority of our customers, and continuing to support IE 6 holds us back.

It’s an even more compelling case when we’re talking about taxpayers’ money. Is it right for a government web project to cost (wild guess) 20% more than necessary, just because some of its potential users can’t be bothered doing a free upgrade – which, since 93.2% of UK internet connections are now broadband, most of them at speeds of 2Mbps or higher (according to the latest ONS data), should take a couple of minutes, at most?
It wouldn’t be difficult for sites to do a quick browser detection, then offer links to download pages for IE7 and some other alternatives you might want to consider (Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc). It’s in everyone’s interests, not least Microsoft’s, to make more people upgrade. We’d be open to allegations of ‘nanny state’… but I wonder if the ‘public finances’ argument would win out?

MySociety completes crowd-sourced video markup

Congratulations (hardly for the first time, of course) to the MySociety crew: in less than two months, it looks like their community of volunteers has completed the work to timestamp the 42,019 video clips supplied to They Work For You by BBC Parliament, covering the entire 2007-8 parliamentary session. Hero status is rightly accorded to Abi Broom, responsible herself for more than 20% of the effort (!)… but it’s interesting to see a few familiar names in the list of ‘top timestampers’.
Of course, the time is ticking down to the start of the new Parliamentary Session, when the work starts all over again. Tom Steinberg tells me they get ‘only’ 3-400 new clips per day, so keeping up to date shouldn’t be too hard. Unless Abi gets sick, obviously. 🙂
Quite seriously, this is a fantastic achievement. The goodwill of a community of people, coupled with a trivially simple tagging tool, achieved something which – realistically – neither speech recognition technology, nor the IT budgets of Hansard and BBC Parliament (combined?) ever could. And it goes without saying, it’s largely down to the MySociety ‘brand’ of charitable activism: if Parliament had asked people to do this, do you think many would? (Not that there should be much anguish in Millbank about this invasion of ‘their’ territory; I bet Parliamentary people will be the ones most grateful for the service.)
About 13% of the video clips were tagged anonymously; my guess is that, like me, many of those were people who were searching for something on TheyWorkForYou, came across an as-yet untagged video clip, and decided to ‘leave a tip’. For me, the magic of the tool was the fact that it made this bit so easy. But that means 87% were tagged by people who went to the trouble of registering – much more than I would have guessed, although admittedly, 7 people were responsible for over 50% of the tagging.

Another reason to use Twitter

I’ve recently noticed people’s Twitter accounts ranking particularly highly on search results for their name. So is the benefit to your search engine ranking good enough reason to get into Twitter, even just as a token gesture?
For example, I run an experimental Twitter account for Puffbox: it’s just a Twitterfeed thing for blog posts specifically about the company. It only has a handful of subscribers, and I’m neither offended nor surprised. But it’s ranking remarkably highly on Google searches for ‘puffbox’: at present, it’s number #3, beneath two results for puffbox.com itself. Setting up a new Twitter account takes seconds; setting up a Twitterfeed something similar; and once it’s up and running, that’s job done.
Of course, a one-way Twitter account isn’t going to win you many plaudits, or indeed many followers. But if it pushes your content up the appropriate search rankings, for zero cost and zero day-to-day (or even month-to-month) effort, surely it’s worth doing? The choice of a sensible, search-term friendly username seems to be the most important factor; but don’t forget to add meaningful ‘personal’ information to your profile, so people know where to go next.

Tom Loosemore to Channel4

I’m probably the last to pick up on this news, but for the sake of completeness, I should note the announcement last week of Tom Loosemore‘s imminent move from Ofcom to Channel 4’s 4IP.
With the demise of the notion of a Public Service Publisher online, quoted by Tom as ‘one of [his] areas of focus’ in moving to Ofcom, and 4IP’s stated vision of ‘re-inventing the way public service media is developed, commissioned, funded and delivered’, it seems like a natural move. Hopefully it’ll give 4’s efforts a sense of direction; I’m really not sure what their efforts are actually aimed at, and their new media efforts rarely shake the foundations.
Tom’s an occasional commenter on the Puffbox blog, so let’s see if he rises to the bait: does this affect your involvement with Tom Watson’s Power Of Information Taskforce?

WordPress runs America too

A fascinating photo from WordPress chief Matt Mullenweg’s keynote address at last weekend’s WordCamp in San Francisco revealed a list of (US) ‘government agencies using WordPress’:
US gov agencies using WP
So that’s all the armed services, NSA, CIA and FBI… which kind of puts the ‘(in)security’ argument in some context. Hey, the Marine Corps love it so much, they’re listed twice! But no reference to 10 Downing Street, that I’ve seen reported anyway. Whassup Matt, no love for the UK? Ah well, it’s good to know that we’re not alone.

COI's instant response to RSS request – blimey!


I’m pinching myself. Wednesday, 08:30am: Justin Kerr-Stevens makes a request via OPSI’s Public Sector Information Unlocking Service. A couple of dozen people sign up to say ‘good idea’. A few people (me included) add some more substantial comments. Fast forward two days to Friday, 12:32pm: COI publishes details of RSS feeds for (virtually) every Cabinet-level government department.
I say ‘virtually’ every Cabinet-level department: the exceptions are the Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland Offices. I can’t see an RSS feed on the Scotland Office site; the NIO site’s feed is curious to say the least, showing just one update since Christmas (which clearly isn’t right). But the Wales Office is happily pumping out beautiful RSS. Puffbox and WordPress may have had something to do with that.
Gripes? The URLs are truly revolting. But that’s the biggest nit I can pick. Justin, COI, OPSI, Mr Watson – thank you all. Did that really just happen?
Update: I’m told they were on the site somewhere, just not obvious. Even knowing that now, I still can’t find where they were. And if you can’t find them, they might as well not be there. Next steps, please: an entry in the site’s primary navigation, nicer URLs, and auto-discovery tags on each department’s homepage.

Met launches London crime maps

London’s Metropolitan Police has launched the first test of its planned ‘crime mapping’ application, and at first glance, it’s really quite nice. There’s data from borough to ‘sub-ward’ (a few streets), although at the moment it’s only carrying aggregated totals of ‘burglary, robbery and vehicle crime’.
The ‘high/average/low’ colour coding makes it easy to take in; and navigation is pretty good. The selection of statistical geography is inferred from the zoom level of the map – a method which has its ups and downs. But with a postcode search, it’s easy to go directly to ‘your patch’. (I’m a bit dubious about the accuracy of the boundaries, though.) Throw in some nice little Javascript-y UI touches, and you’ve got an excellent start – with the promise of ‘further enhancements … prior to the formal launch of the service in September.’
But what’s most striking about this? It’s done on Google Maps. Here’s a extra-high-profile government mapping application, and they’ve made a conscious – and entirely predictable – decision not to build it using the tool provided by the government’s own mapping agency.
It’s not a million miles away from the vision put forward by the Power of Information taskforce; Tom Loosemore calls it ‘a decent first effort’, but laments the ‘lack of proper profile for your local coppers’.

Ofcom's commentable documents

Ofcom’s Tom Loosemore shows there’s still plenty that can be done with Typepad; an ‘interactive’ version of their Communications Market Review has just gone up on the same account used to host their Public Service Broadcasting review blog. It’s actually the second time they’ve done this; there was a similar trial earlier this year, with the PSB Review itself.
It works very much along the same lines as CommentOnThis; or the CommentPress theme for WordPress, as used by Steph at DIUS. But it’s one of the more innovative uses of Typepad you’ll see.
I must admit, I’ve gone off Typepad as a platform: I was finding it too restrictive, too tied to the concept of blogging (where WordPress was open to being used as a lightweight CMS). However, the single biggest thing in its favour remains the ease of setup: £75.90 per year, giving you full design control (unlike, say WordPress.com), generous disk space and bandwidth allocations, a custom domain, and the IT department need never know. News of a next generation platform is intriguing, with the promise of new features in time… but it’ll take a lot to wean me off WordPress now.
Given Typepad’s restrictions, Tom’s interactive approach is quite an achievement. Each paragraph in the document is its own blog ‘post’, with its own comment stream. It looks as if Tom may have spent a few hours last Friday, painstakingly creating each post in reverse order, to ensure they appeared in numerical order on the site’s (reverse chronological) homepage. Not something you’d want to do regularly… and WordPress ‘pages’ would have made it much easier. But hey, full marks for inventiveness!
(Thanks to Ross Ferguson.)

Final Digital Dialogues report

The third – and final – report from the Hansard Society‘s Digital Dialogues new media experiments emerged on Tuesday, although I very nearly missed it in all the excitement around Downing Street. The press release offers ‘a few simple rules’ for those wanting to use the internet for engagement and consultation, based on the experience of its 25 case studies:

  • Government departments must be adaptable and willing to take risks
  • Transparency and timely feedback to participants is essential
  • Government departments must be clear about the purpose of the consultation and the ways that participants’ contributions will be used
  • The right people – ministers and senior policy makers – must be involved
  • Evaluation is essential to ensure that departments learn and improve on the basis of experience.

Clarity, commitment, reciprocity – fairly predictable stuff. But as Andy Williamson notes: ‘I hope it will allay some of the fears and concerns and encourage more government departments to take up the online challenge.’ The report, and its predecessors, give us a portfolio of specific, real-life examples – some successes, some flops – to reflect on. And we need that.
I’m not at all surprised to see the Food Standards Agency’s blog and FCO Bloggers platform faring best in the reviews. At heart these were both straightforward blogs: personal expression, steady running commentary, nothing too clever. The projects which tried too hard haven’t done nearly so well; nor did projects which attempted to force artificial timeframes or tight restrictions. The report doesn’t shy away from its criticism.
For me, the most important single message comes in the core guidance:

Online engagement exercises require time to gather momentum; simply setting up a website in the hope that people will come to it achieves little. Sites might initially spark interest, but this is not sustainable enough to enhance public engagement and political efficacy.

Point your manager to the executive summary, which concludes:

  • ‘Moderators were not required to manage as large a volume of traffic as many had initially feared.’
  • ‘Distrust was overcome when moderators facilitated open discussion and provided information to website users. […] Some websites failed to gain traction because users did not believe that anyone was listening or responding to their perspectives; in such cases, departments were paralysed by a sense of risk and failed to harness the range of engagement opportunities at their disposal – responding only on topics deemed safe.’
  • ‘Websites that were disconnected from their policy or ministerial brief, or constrained by a long chain of command, engendered less user satisfaction (both among participants and the government officials running the exercise).’
  • ‘Where government departments were too fixed in their approach, they failed to capitalise on their investment; those with a reflexive and experimental approach were able to adapt to meet the challenges posed by online engagement.’

If that’s the last time we hear of Digital Dialogues: farewell, and thanks.

New Number10 site goes live

Today sees the long-awaited launch of the new Number10 website, based on WordPress and built by New Media Maze with occasional interventions by yours truly. The reaction so far has been positive, although as the team have admitted to Twitter contacts, there are numerous rough edges still to be smoothed out. (Some more serious than others: as I write this, the site’s gone down.)
Although I’ve been contributing to this project for several months, today’s public activation is the first time I’ve actually seen it ‘for real’ – and I’m struck by just how stripped-back it really is. The homepage really does feel like a blog; and it’s a pleasant surprise to see quite how much prominence has been given to the Twitter, Flickr and YouTube activity. The image / video unit at the top of the homepage really is huge, and represents a brave move: keeping it fresh will be quite a challenge, but good on them for trying nonetheless.
The exciting aspect for me is the sheer potential opened up by the move to WordPress. There has been a lot of hard (and frankly unglamorous) work done by the guys from New Media Maze to migrate everything to the new platform. But now that’s done, we can all start thinking about extra functionality and presentation ideas, and add them into the site with relative ease.
The ‘beta’ label in the header isn’t just an industry in-joke, or an attempt to excuse any temporary difficulties: it’s a statement of future intent.
PS: If anyone’s interested in the background to today’s launch, you can look back through the Puffbox.com archives. And please note the URL of that link, for another cool WordPress trick. 🙂