Puffbox

I’m told – understandably – that the Cabinet Office has hurriedly issued new advice regarding the use of government laptops. There’s nothing on their site about it, so you’ll have to make do with this article at silicon.com. But whilst looking, I did spot a press release from earlier this month, announcing the creation of a ‘new Board to oversee Government marketing in new media age‘.

There’s no argument with the assertion that things need to change to ‘better reflect the changing way in which government communicates with the public. Government now uses a much broader range of marketing tools and advertising is not the sole channel of paid-for communication.’ But should I be disappointed by the lack of obviously ‘new media marketing’ people on the new Board?

During the late 1990s, the figurehead for the Inland Revenue was one Hector the Inspector. A cute cartoon character originally conceived to soften the impact of introducing Self Assessment, and voiced by Sir Alec Guinness (er, no BBC, not Alex) – he was eventually killed off in 2001. As the Telegraph reported, ‘Hector’s popularity appear(ed) to have got out of control.’ Indeed… how many articles have you read lately marking the end of a government ad campaign?

Now we’re being gently nagged by Adam Hart-Davis to get our tax returns in, or face a fine. I wonder how much they’re paying for the airtime, or indeed the celebrity endorsement. So instead, I think it’s time to bring back Hector!

I’m feeling generous after receiving a tax refund at the weekend, so here’s a free tip for HMRC. Get on to Facebook, and set up Hector The Inspector as a person. Encourage people to make him their friend. Then, when Hector updates his status – ‘Hector reminds you to get your tax return in before the 31st’, for example – they’ll see it in their Facebook feed. Hey, if you can find further fun in finance and fiscal matters, Hector could become quite the comedian. Even better… set up a Twitter account (‘hectortheinspector‘ is still available, as I write this). Then use the Twittersync application to update Facebook automatically. That way, you can hit two communities for the price of one.

Setup cost: zero. Setup time: maybe 15 minutes? Potential audience – well, granted, getting people to make friends with Hector is the hard part, but with 2% of all UK internet visits going to Facebook, the potential is huge. As I’ve mused before, Facebook’s news feed is doing for the mass audience what RSS has done for (us) geeks. And in Hector, HMRC have a ready-made personification, ready to go.

Hmm, interesting. Directgov is looking for three non-executive directors. Who’s up for it?

Fascinating data from Hitwise’s Robin Goad on the apparent success of the recent Act On CO2 campaign. Not only has it pushed up the number of search queries (and one assumes, traffic to the site); but it’s a very pleasant surprise to see two of the top 5 destinations for searches on ‘CO2’ are government sites. A third is Wikipedia, which is almost a given these days. The other two are US-based.

Update: caught the TV advert earlier today… and I see they’ve reverted back to the ‘search for Act On CO2‘ tagline, as opposed to quoting the Directgov URL. Well, I guess that would explain why searches for that particular phrase are up – I doubt many search terms have a TV campaign dedicated to them. Plus, I guess it means they were happy that the ‘no URL’ approach worked last time.

(Oh – and I was going to embed the advert in question for your viewing pleasure, but can’t find it anywhere on YouTube. This despite the fact there is an Act On CO2 user registered. No activity there post-Miliband, by the look of it. Are we far enough into this revolution to be shocked when you can’t find something on YouTube?)

Becta, the technology-in-education agency chaired by former e-Envoy Andrew Pinder, put out a report earlier this week telling schools and colleges that the time was still not right to upgrade to either Windows Vista or Office 2007. If you’re extending an existing network, their recommendation is to stick with XP; I can sympathise. It took my Vista laptop nearly half an hour to shut down last night.

If you’re using Office 2007, they say, you should continue saving stuff in the old .doc / .xls / .ppt formats. Plus – ‘pupils, teachers and parents should also be made aware of the wide range of free-to-use products currently available and on how to use and access them.’ Hear hear.

Schoolsweb was/is going to be one of the biggest web projects in e-government, bringing together a number of education-centric websites into a single 50,000-page service, with personalisation and email alerting and all that. But as the Guardian noted a year ago today, it was in ‘a bit of a tangle’.

‘The £12m Schoolsweb is to be one of the first “eChannels” to be run on a government-wide web infrastructure… Schoolsweb was due to be launched at the end of 2005. However, the project team was told at the end of (2006) that “poor delivery quality of the first release of this infrastructure has led to significant delays, preventing work from starting on content migration”. The latest go-live date is September.’

Well, September 2007 came and went; and the page at www.schoolsweb.gov.uk is still the placeholder which first appeared in 2006. Heroically though, I note that Fluent Interaction, the agency who designed (and to a large extent, specified) the Schoolsweb site are listing the (still unpublished) work in their company portfolio. Their caveat – ‘challenging build phase pending the full launch of the website shortly’ – is most diplomatic, although still in the present tense.

I’m currently ploughing through some old content on behalf of a Whitehall client, dutifully migrating all the ‘public record’ stuff ahead of an imminent site relaunch (of which more next week). I just came across a press release from April 2000, which promised:

A groundbreaking Government portal to be launched in July – the first of its kind. This will provide a single electronic point of entry to central and local Government which will be able to access all services. It will be capable of personalisation – with citizens able to match the home page to their own interests. It will also use push technology, so it can send reminders about changes in services or important dates. A future example could be, receiving a personal e-mail when your TV licence or car tax needs renewing.

Er, whatever happened? (Two years earlier, I’d produced the groundbreaking Foreign Office website which included homepage personalisation and push technology, so yes – it was possible.)

Interesting to note the Scottish media’s concern at the prospect of a launch of a jobs portal by the Scottish Executive Government ‘which poses a threat to the advertising businesses of every newspaper in the country’. Of course, we’ve had a centralised jobs portal in the form of the Civil Service Recruitment Gateway for several years, and I’m pretty sure the Guardian is still going. And despite the rosy picture painted by the official best practice guide, now in its second edition, I find it slightly galling to see CSRG advising people to ‘take advantage of developing technologies’. A few years ago now, I tried (and failed) to persuade them to adopt RSS. A single central publishing solution, with the ability to syndicate vacancies back to source departments’ corporate sites in a standardised XML format, would have been a killer app. I thought I had them sold on it several years ago; it never happened. (Thanks to Martin for the tip.)

Word reaches me that the Brazilian Ministry of Culture uses WordPress to power the vast majority of its website. At first glance, you’d never guess – but there’s a credit in the page footer, and a number of tell-tale URLs. Plus they’ve left the WordPress ‘generator’ credit in the RSS feed template. (That’s a handy hint if you’re ever curious to find out what server software people are running.)

I could be wrong, but it looks like they’ve got a number of independent WordPress (ie not MU) installations ojn the same server: you’ve got the main site, then a group of separate blogs in a separate directory on the server. This gives them tons of flexibility: the corporate site can concentrate on being a pseudo-CMS, whilst the blogs get on with being, er, blogs. Check out the main site’s site map page, showing all the available RSS category feeds. Enough orange buttons for ya? And with the latest pages having (sequential) page IDs of 9550-odd, it’s clear they’ve put some serious effort into it.

It’s a really nice example of WordPress in the civil service, which I’ll no doubt be showing people as proof that yes, it can be done. So… how long until we see a British Cabinet-level department powering its entire corporate website with WordPress? Between you and me, I’d say about a fortnight. (Ssssh.)