Steph Gray‘s latest production at DIUS is a work of genius and beauty. It’s a collaboratively managed catalogue of ‘web 2.0’ innovation in UK government, central and local… powered not by a wiki, but using the bookmarking tool of general preference, Delicious. Brilliantly simple, simply brilliant.
Basically, if you ‘tag’ anything with the term ‘digitalgovuk’ (via your Delicious method of choice), it’ll show up in Steph’s collection. Add some extra tags for added granularity, and they’ll show up in the site’s tag cloud. The site is powered by Delicious’s wonderful RSS feed functionality, with bells and whistles in the form of commenting, thumbnail previews and even a Lightbox-style ‘suggestion box’ popup, powered by Uservoice. I’m in awe.
Use it, people.
8 thoughts on “Delicious list of UK gov 2.0”
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It rocks doesn’t it?
Is this only on delicious? No way to link other (open, social and free) bookmarking services to it?
@MJ: It is. Fancy contributing something using the Delicious API so people can contribute via the open web? Alternatively, there’s an RSS feed out from the site so feel free to reuse the data in your own applications.
@Steph: It’s not possible for me to use the Delicious API without signing up with Yahoo, is it? So I’ll have to leave it to someone who is willing to accept their terms of use. It’s disappointing how much gov.uk-related activity is bundled to Yahoo, Adobe and other large foreign corporations with dark dealings in their pasts.
I’m not sure that’s strictly true, MJ… if you count RSS feeds as being ‘an API’ (and that’s a whole other argument I don’t want to start here). You should be able to access the RSS feed for Steph’s digitalgovuk tag without having to sign up; although of course, that’s read-only.
Sure, I can read but not write. I could combine Steph’s efforts with an open API system, but I think my efforts are unlikely to rank above Steph’s in the gov.uk space any time soon, so I’ll do something more effective.
So, to summarise: I was asked if I “Fancy contributing something using the Delicious API so people can contribute via the open web?” and the answer appears to be “I fancy it, but only someone who accepts Yahoo’s terms can do it”.
Why do lead digitalgovuk people keep using these tied services? They may be cool if you can access them, but I think the reasons not to do it are similar to the reasons we don’t hold council meetings in pubs or cigarette factories.
@MJ: OK, help me understand the options here, ‘cos I’m genuinely open to ideas and I don’t mind if I use a tool owned by Yahoo, Google or the open source community as long as it works and people can use it.
What service(s) could we use instead of Delicious to achieve the same or better result? Magnolia?
@Steph: I’ve been testing a few over the last few weeks and Magnolia looks like the only viable hosted option at the moment. All other useful ones are install-it-yourself.
It would be great to keep such things in the UK (and so subject to our laws!) but Nature’s Connotea displays eye-tests, which I feel discriminates against visually-impaired people (is that allowed under DDA? If not, why do so many UK sites do it? If only these sites were subject to UK laws(!)).
I remembered seeing http://tom.acrewoods.net/blog/2006/sep/green-party-motion-boycott-google-yahoo-and-micros but I doubt that particular motion got passed (can’t find any record of it). That there are enough Green supporters even to get such a motion debated seriously at conference should make people stop and think before using their tools for UK politics – and presumably discourage those pesky greens.