Puffbox

Discussing some potential new business this morning, it was noted that I’m lacking in direct experience of ‘intranet’ (as opposed to ‘internet’) management. But I really don’t think it’s a valid or fair distinction to draw these days – and the case for its separation grows ever weaker.

People use intranet sites in exactly the same conditions as they use the public web. Sat in the same seat, looking at the same screen, running the same browser. They are probably forced to look at the intranet homepage when they boot up; but I suspect they’re looking at Google or the BBC within a matter of seconds.

Their expectations of intranet transactions are shaped by their experience of Amazon, eBay, etc. Like it or not, intranet managers, you are on the same playing field.

But, I’d suggest, the playing field isn’t actually level – it slopes in the intranet’s favour. Intranet has an audience which is compelled to read the content, and use the facilities. In a ‘web 2.0’ world where projects succeed or fail on their ability to build communities, intranet managers have so much community they don’t know what to do with it.

Large corporations stand to be the great beneficiaries of the ‘participative web’. All that knowledge sloshing around, and finally something to do with it. Imagine the potential of a company image library that looked and worked like Flickr; or a social bookmarking library that mimics del.icio.us. And even better, an intranet homepage like the many ‘start page’ rivals – Netvibes, Protopage, Live.com, and all that. All the knowledge you need, being fed to you automatically via RSS feeds.

The tools are there; the community is there. All it needs is an intranet manager with enough imagination.

In the meantime, the (outside) web teams plough their own furrow 2.0… with blogs, podcasts and all that, aimed at better engaging with clients, partners and suppliers. Such channels are intended to extend the insider’s view to the outside world. All too often, they prove to be the best information source for others inside the organisation too. (Example: I learned more from Robert Scoble’s blog than I ever did from MSWeb, the intranet at Microsoft.)

The outside comes in, and the inside is heading out. The dividing line between internal and external just isn’t there any more; and if you insist on maintaining it, I think you’re mistaken.

Robert Scoble – who still matters, even though he’s left Microsoft – makes an interesting point about ‘engagement’. All the talk these days is about it. Yet there’s no easy way to measure it. He offers a few interesting numbers as a starting point, though:

When the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you’ll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don’t just read. They get involved. Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400.

It’s another nail in the coffin of straightforward hit counting. The e-commerce world had to realise this long ago, but it’s much easier for them – since ‘engagement’ in their world equals sales. All today’s coverage of Amazon’s results is about profits and profit margins. I don’t see anyone talking about the number of hits – and why should they? Assuming every website has a purpose, we need to remember that we should be measuring performance against that purpose… and nothing else.

Any initiative which attempts to break down the ‘us vs them’ mentality in any business, and particularly the public services, has to be a good thing. (Engagement, Cluetrain, etc etc.) So I was initially interested to read about ‘an original approach to shaping better public services’, put forward by the National Consumer Council and the union Unison.

It’s only when you read on that you discover that their idea of going ‘way beyond the usual consultation exercises, surveys and public meetings’ is to… um… organise a one-day workshop for 15 social housing tenants in Newcastle, and 10 local housing officers. I’m really not convinced that’s enough to constitute ‘tried and tested’. In fact, by their own admission, it was only the ‘beginning of a process’.

Thanks to egovmonitor for the link.

Tech Digest reckons Firefox v2 is out tomorrow (Tuesday)… but if you can’t wait until then, you might want to click here. 😉 Just don’t expect anything too earth-shattering in terms of new functionality. And beware: if you’re reliant on any particular Firefox extensions, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be compatible with the new version. Bloglines, I’m looking at you right now.

Linking back to the source material has to be a good thing. But I’m really quite surprised to see ‘News release (ford.com)’ appearing alongside the top story on the New York Times homepage. Good on them though… they make it clear that it’s an external link, so there’s no scope for confusion… as long as you realise that the large-print headline at the top is a link to the NYT’s own story. I’m not sure that’s made clear enough.

BBC world news editor Jon Williams is a bit of a latecomer to the ‘news judgement by statistics’ party. In my time with the Sky News web team, I made a special point of analysing the statistics every single day; and we had a regular weekly date in the diary to look back over the previous seven days, and consider what it told us about our audience and our coverage. I think we’re talking 1999 or 2000 here… so Jon just isn’t right to say ‘just a few years ago, audience involvement was restricted to letters of complaint, requests for record (sic) on the radio – and of course the staple of radio, the phone-in.’ Unless the BBC weren’t reviewing their own stats…?

He concludes that some stories inherently deserve to top the running order, whether the audience deems them ‘popular’ or not. And vice-versa: cute animal photos get lots of clicks, but aren’t inherently newsworthy. Fair enough, Jon, but I didn’t hear anyone saying the opposite. (He might at least have drawn comparisons with online news sites like Digg, where popularity absolutely does decide the running order.)

This subject always recalls a story which made me wonder if I’d pushed it too far. Having spotted a recurring trend in the weekly ‘most popular stories’, one of my journalist colleagues decided to open a story on human cloning with the words: ‘There could soon be two Britney Spearses walking the earth…’ 🙂

Always remember: with a website, you can see the sort of live usage data which marketing professionals in any other discipline spend (literally) millions on. And you’re getting it free of charge.

It’s here. Internet Explorer v7 has arrived… so it’s time to download, cross your fingers, and hope that all the pages on your site work properly. If they don’t, you’ve got a few weeks before it gets delivered to (more or less) every Windows PC on the planet via Microsoft’s automatic update service.