Over a year ago, I wrote something about ‘the scope for Firefox, plus extensions, plus broadband, plus โWeb 2.0โ projects to negate the need for an operating system (per se)’. A surprisingly prescient statement, if I say so myself… since one of the key players from Mozilla, Robert O’Callahan, has now revealed something potentially monumental: ‘Firefox3 is going to deliver support for offline applications.’ And that could be the key to it all. There’s already plenty of the analysis of this, and its implications, from Richard MacManus and Rod Drury.
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Jakob Nielsen on e-gov usability
Jakob Nielsen has written a piece on whether ‘Government Agencies and Non-Profits Get ROI From Usability‘, which doesn’t really tell you anything you wouldn’t know already – like, er, usability is a good thing, and if you pick some figures out of the air, and total them up, you can put a number on it. But since it’s Dr Nielsen, and since your boss has probably heard of him, it’s worth a glance.
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Can the Civil Service engage with the citizen?
From Saturday’s Guardian (with thanks to David Wilcox for spotting it):
The government is planning to link up with the power of consumer and civic movements on the net by offering funding, permitting civil servants to post information on sites, and releasing information currently locked up in Whitehall. Ministers believe web movements are rapidly transforming the power relationship between government and society. A two-month review inside the Cabinet Office, including ministers, communicaitons (sic) officials, and outside experts such as Tom Steinberg from mysociety, is to be established next week, for the government to consider how to respond. They are discussing whether it is sensible for government to pull back from setting up its own sites if they are going to compete with existing innovative ones. They are instead thinking of providing funding for grassroots sites dedicated to information sharing.
Lovely thought, and with people like Tom involved, there should be the odd sane contribution at least. But bear in mind the radical shift in approach that this would represent. Not only encouraging two-way interaction, but going a step further by putting someone else in charge of it. Good luck, Tom!
Personally I have only mild reservations about the notion. It isn’t much different from private companies engaging in public forums… a case of balancing honesty and transparency, with a need to stay reasonably ‘on message’.
But ministers aren’t the problem here; the civil service is the problem. Ministers know they need to understand what’s happening in the real world, because the clock is always ticking until the next general election, with the inherent risk they might get kicked out. The civil service has no such concerns, with the only ticking clock being the one that counts down to his/her retirement. And senior civil servants simply don’t want to do anything which might put that at risk.
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Economics man Evan Davis joins BBC blogosphere
Delighted to see BBC economics editor Evan Davis entering the world of blogging. I’ve long admired his unique down-to-earth approach to what can be an infuriating subject, and he’s already bringing a similar tone to his blog activity. You won’t find Anatole Kaletsky writing something like this:
Does the world really need a new economics blog? Well: no but yeah but yeah but no, as Vicky Pollard would undoubtedly write if she had a blog of her own. For one thing, Evanomics is not quite a blog. I’m not intending to make entries every day, or to update you with my views on every twist and turn in the financial pages. But Evanomics is designed to have some blog-like characteristics. A place where you’ll find a variety of material, frequently updated, and with plenty of opportunity to comment or contribute.
In fact, Evan was the subject of some conversation last night, as my wife and I polished off a bottle of Stormhoek rosรฉ, whilst watching the first episode of the new series of Dragon’s Den. The previous series had become far too predictable, with only the final candidate in each episode getting a deal. (We used to base our guesses purely on ‘how long is left in the show?’)
But even more annoying, Evan was probably the worst exponent of the growing ‘tell them what they’ve just seen’ phenomenon which is gradually doing my head in. You see it a lot on ITV and Channel4: coming out of an ad-break, they’ll remind you (in some detail) what happened barely three minutes earlier, as if we’d forgotten. But Dragon’s Den was always worse. Barely a second after seeing a man make a pitch for ยฃ100k to expand his widgets business, Evan’s voiceover would tell you that he was asking for ยฃ100k to… etc etc.
To our considerable relief, both problems seem to have been largely cured. Still some repetition, although nowhere near as bad as before. And, without wanting to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it… somebody in the early part of the show strikes a deal. That really only left us discussing how skinny Evan was looking.
(Thanks to Simon Collister for the tipoff.)
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Groundhog day for the Stormhoekers
Me, Cath, Hugh and Namibian expat Rob from our rendezvous in Newbury yesterday. Not Reading, as Cath notes. Their national tour actually began on Groundhog Day (2 February), and I guess it’s starting to affect them…
Anyway, I think I know what the ‘Secret Evil Plan‘ is… and yes, it’s going to be memorable for one or two people at least.
Quick update on the wine itself: the entire bottle disappeared in a single sitting, which is unusual for us these days. We were awoken a few times during the night by Screaming Baby, and my head was a little foggier than I had expected. No undue aftereffects by morning, though. I think that’s a positive review..?
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Tony Blair promises Stephen Fry: I will get IT-literate
Tony Blair’s plans post-Downing Street… chat-show host? I hadn’t picked up on the number of podcasts he has been recording with various celebs lately, from Chris Evans to Seb Coe, and now Stephen Fry. Of course, Stephen Fry is always going to be great to listen to. But he isn’t shy about asking some tricky questions – ‘do you mind knowing that so many people don’t like you’? (I’m not sure that one was cleared in advance?)
They touch on some interesting territory – the way new communication channels and challenges mean having to ‘conduct politics in a different way’, but disappointingly, it doesn’t really go anywhere. Instead, we end up on the old familiar territory of ‘oh, I’m rubbish with computers’. But at least we get a pledge: ‘It is something that when I leave I am going to have to devote a lot of time to.’ About time too, Prime Minister.
I have no idea what these podcasts are meant to achieve, other than some vague sense of improving engagement with the ordinary voters, by involving ‘that bloke off the telly’. I doubt it’s working particularly well. But it’s an entertaining listen (or read) nonetheless.
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Stormhoek roadshow hits Newbury
It’s quite a strange experience to find yourself in a conversation which quotes Doc Searls, standing by the discounted CDs rack in your local Tesco’s. But with Hugh MacLeod passing through on his 12-day odyssey to promote Stormhoek wine in time for Valentine’s Day, I felt obliged to down tools for an hour or so and meet a man who almost counts as a celebrity.Hugh’s a man on a mission to find a Valentine; to convince Tesco’s to stock his vineyard’s fine produce; to make a mini-road movie; all of these and, er, whatever tomorrow brings, by the sounds of it. Regardless, it was great to chew the cud with a truly influential figure, someone who really ‘gets it’ – and to come away with a legendary business card.
Oh, and I had a taste of the wine itself. If you look closely at the Stormhoek push, you’ll notice that it’s the one thing they don’t ever talk about. I asked why: the answer, which is fair enough, being that you inevitably find yourself getting into ‘whoosh of hollyhocks’ territory. Suffice to say, I tried the new ‘Big Love’ rosรฉ and found it to be very nice indeed; not at all bitter, and with enough depth to satisfy my red-wine-only preference.
Hi to Colin and Cath, Hugh’s partners in crime… and good luck all, with your continued quest. I hope you can get the stickers off the Land Rover OK.
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Strong opinions on new Mirror site
I’m actually staggered by the comments of Steve Busfield on the Guardian’s organgrinder blog: ‘the Mirror site certainly gives Sun online a run for its money and makes the Sun’s site look, well, a little bit tacky.’ —briefly speechless— We are talking about the same Mirror site, Steve, aren’t we?
Roy Greenslade is a bit nearer the mark:
Since I started this blog in early summer last year I have visited hundreds of newspaper websites across Britain and across the world. I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. But I have never come across one quite as inept as this new Mirror offering.
Well Roy, I’ve been following online news for over a decade – and I can’t think of many worse myself.
To his credit, Mirror web editor Steve Purcell acknowledges there has been ‘good and bad’ reaction to the new design – although only after an earlier piece which claimed ‘on the whole the response has been very positive‘. You’re kidding, right?
Steve, the bulk of this isn’t about ‘biased sniping from others who appear to have forgotten that they live in glass houses’. I have no connections with the newspaper business, and I have no axe to grind. There are some really bad examples of web practice, from an objective and scientifically measurable viewpoint. Failure to ensure it worked satisfactorily in two out of the three major web browsers, for example – that isn’t a ‘teething trouble’, that’s just plain negligent. Or the total lack of image compression: your ‘welcome’ graphic on the homepage weighs in at a staggering 88k. OR YOUR TOTAL RELIANCE ON CAPITAL LETTERS, WHICH IS A BASIC USABILITY NO-NO.
OK, being entirely fair, it’s a little less bad today than it was yesterday. At least the video streams don’t all fire off automatically any more. But it’s still appalling.
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What is the Mirror's new website trying to be?
There’s a new-look website over at The Mirror too… and this one’s even more bonkers than the new Times site. Load up the homepage, and on my Firefox setup anyway, two video streams fire off at once. Hey guys, by all means take inspiration from the success of MySpace… but not this! (Doesn’t seem to affect IE, though.) And that’s before we mention the fact that the first video content you see is American… and way out of date. A Superbowl preview, chaps? Er, that went out of date at 11pm on Sunday night. Not exactly ‘up to the minute’, as the editor claims.
In their defence, there are RSS feeds a-plenty, Digg and del.icio.us buttons, a load of blogs (powered by irBlog, the same engine as at the Telegraph), and – apparently – the full Daily Mirror archive ‘going back 103 years’, although I didn’t see it anywhere in the navigation. But I’m afraid it still feels very, very rough round the edges – just like the old Mirror site. A LOT OF CAPITAL LETTERS, and no real sense of (true) design.
How they justify their claim to be ‘the best newspaper on the web’ is simply beyond me. It looks like a site which is desperately trying to copy bits from each of its various competitors, without really knowing why. And none of it successfully.
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Five years of gov.uk metatagging… and?
I see Steve Dale’s stirring again ๐ – with further noises of discontent regarding that mandatory government subject taxonomy, the IPSV.
I picked up a report on a recent meeting of local authority webmasters and managers held in Birmingham (England), where most present appeared to conclude that IPSV, now the official Government Metadata Standard, served no useful purpose and should be ignored and not implemented.
In the comments which follow, Dan Champion notes:
We (local gov web managers) have been expected to invest time and energy in implementing and maintaining the LGCL and now IPSV on our sites, for nothing more than a promise of riches to come. We should be questioning why we’re making that investment.
And that absolutely hits the nail on the head. These initiatives (and don’t forget the GCL, too) began because people (generally librarians, let’s be honest) assumed that they would pay dividends in the long run. Well, version 1.0 of the GCL was issued in January 2002 – a full five years ago. Can anyone point to a single substantial end-user benefit yet? How much longer should that ‘long run’ be?
