Puffbox

This can’t be true, can it? The president of Iran has launched a pretty unremarkable blog. Well, unremarkable unless you happen to have an Israeli-registered IP address. In which case – and I stress, apparently – you get a little gift, in the form of a security attack. I’m not inclined to investigate this further, as I don’t typically volunteer for virus assaults, but the sources (O’Reilly, Scoble) seem reliable enough.

(Humble update: er… should have trusted my spider-sense. Of course it was a hoax.)

I was lucky enough to spend some time this afternoon with the ‘Valiant Official’ who looks after Cabinet minister David Miliband’s blog. It was an informal, off-the-record chat over a coffee, and I won’t be divulging any juicy secrets here. But I was struck by the extent to which Miliband himself is driving the project.

I’ve seen evidence that he is writing the blog himself, even when technology conspires against him; and I understand it was his own express wish to take the blog with him to Defra from ODPM.

So why is he doing it? OK, let’s face it, it clearly doesn’t do his public image any harm. But I’m told he’s a very strong public performer, and very keen on engaging with the people. As such, I guess the dialogue inherent in a blog (with comments enabled) is natural territory.

Inevitably, it exists in something of a grey area – between official and personal, Civil Service and party politics, definitive policy and nascent opinion. But perhaps this is actually a good thing, giving him a space free from the historic and procedural baggage of other, more traditional platforms.

I’m more persuaded than ever that blogs represent a very powerful publishing model. But today’s chat was a useful reality check. The channel is nothing without having someone willing and able to talk to (and with) us.

So yes, I’d like to see more blogging in government… but as a symptom of a more communicative and proactively accountable public sector. That’s the real culture change we need.

Data from analysts Hitwise shows that traffic to the MI5 and Home Office websites rocketed last week, when the official national security alert level went from ‘severe’ to ‘critical’. You’d think something like this would merit special, strong treatment on the sites’ homepages, to help you get where you wanted to go. But don’t expect more than an unobtrusive text link… which, in the case of MI5, even comes ‘below the fold’.

They should have used this. 🙂

The IPPR has published some quite shockingly frank research into what government ministers and senior civil servants really think about the public sector. Anonymous quotes from ministers paint a picture of a civil service lacking in expertise, with no accountability – and no culture of either reward or penalty. One quote which sounds all too familiar to me is:

The single biggest challenge in Whitehall is getting things done! It is great in emergencies but on the day-to-day stuff is it amazing what tactics you have to resort to, to get things done, especially if you want to take on conventional thinking. There is an inherent and institutional resistance to serious change.

These are the people supposedly at the top… and if they feel powerless to make change happen, what hope is there for the rest of us?

A press release from Mediasurface:

The Department for Transport (DfT) has confirmed it’s commitment to excellent online communication, announcing the signing of a new £1.2m contract which aims to rationalize the infrastructure of its multiple public facing websites, including www.dft.gov.uk The consolidation project will tie together more than 30 existing websites and will be re-launched using Morello, content management software from Mediasurface.

Leaving aside the vendor’s inability to use an apostrophe properly… one wonders how this reflects on Stellent, which currently underpins www.dft.gov.uk (as any URL will confirm). Yet Stellent experts are in demand within the public sector, as this recent job advert indicates:

Populo have been retained by one of our major clients to recruit a wide range of Stellent Consultants for a strategic project within the Government sector. Populo are seeking to engage all levels of expertise from System Designers and Analysts through to Developers and Configuration Experts. Main tasks will include design work – template creation – interface development – configuration and implementation. These are both exciting and long term roles.

Transport is not currently one of the departments in ‘The Club’ of big Whitehall players (including Directgov) who have signed up to a five-year deal with Xansa, to provide a shared web platform.

One of my objectives for the major government website project I’m currently working on, was wide-ranging support for RSS. I’m fairly sure I implemented Whitehall’s first ever RSS feed (2002? 2003? can’t remember), so I have a reputation to maintain here. 🙂

I thought it might be worth recording a couple of our ideas here on the blog. This time – bringing content into a website via RSS.

RSS feeds come in two distinct types: ‘full text’ and ‘summary’. The latter tend to be more popular with commercial publishers, encouraging you to click through to a ‘proper’ page impression on the source website. ‘Full text’, on the other hand, gives you the whole article without the extra hassle of the clickthrough. I’m tending to favour doing both within the same feed, unless there’s a strong commercial imperative not to.

Just as there are two types of feed, we’re planning two types of RSS consumption (ie. where we take content into our site from someone else’s feed).

‘Deep’ integration will take the items from a given feed, and turn them into self-standing items within our CMS. Having gone through the normal workflow process, they will appear on our site, under our masthead, with page addresses in our domain. They will have become ‘our’ pages (albeit with a sourcing credit).

‘Shallow’ integration will turn a feed into a simple list of links back to the source website. The necessary coding should be pretty minimal: just taking the titles, descriptions and links, and turning them into a list of bullet-points (or however you choose to present them). It’s the sort of thing you might expect to see in a page margin or sidebar.

Deep integration will probably work best with full text feeds, coming from specific partner websites within the Department’s area of responsibility or influence. (That isn’t to say we won’t consume summary feeds deeply; but they will make for rather short pages.) I suspect we will make more use of shallow feeds: as well as being less effort, it maintains a certain distance which might be seen as editorially beneficial.

I’m hoping that a combination of the two approaches will help bridge the inevitable divide between the new site and a couple of specific applications which won’t be migrated in Phase One. As long as we can get the legacy systems to produce RSS, we can bring their content – even if it’s just the latest ‘headlines’ – into the new site context. It’ll be a huge improvement on a single static link to the legacy area’s homepage.

Why RSS? Why not XML more generally? Quite simply, because RSS is a rigidly defined format, which has reached critical mass. We can point people to the RSS specification, and tell them to generate feeds which comply with the spec. Otherwise, we would need to come up with some kind of GUI-led XSLT routine – and XSLT is tricky enough at the best of times.

The implications for ‘joined up government’ are potentially huge. Here’s hoping it delivers on the promise. 😉

The New Statesman handed out its 2006 awards last night. These have never been especially high-profile, but they do tend to reward the more ‘grass-rootsy’ work, and as such it’s worth taking notice. Big winners were (inevitably) the MySociety crew and the BBC. A speech by David Miliband opened proceedings, but I can’t find the text on either of his websites.

The education secretary, Alan Johnson makes some very interesting and perceptive remarks on the subject of blogs and electronic engagement in the democratic process, during a speech today to the UK Youth Parliament. Some of it is inevitable ‘playing to the gallery’, of course, but overall it’s a very well-informed set of remarks by a very senior government minister.

He talks about ‘the exodus from collectivism’, which he attributes to two big factors:

First, any institution which grows runs the risk of depersonalisation. There are paradoxes at play here: by expanding its market, it can contract its appeal; through trying to please everyone, it could end up pleasing no-one; and, while the use of technology can open doors to massive new audiences, it can also close them down.

Second, we are all growing more confident and demanding as citizens and consumers. Aided by new technology, we expect instant gratification – such as the EBay ‘Buy it now’ option. We demand a personalised service which, if people can’t access, they just walk away. In many ways, this is the age of individual.

The solutions he proposes: ‘a more local and personal feel’… ‘reach out to people in a more emotional way’… and ‘seize the full potential of modern technologies.’ You can guess where this is going… but he goes well beyond the kind of superficial endorsement of the blogosphere that you might expect.

Some of you might be amongst the 90 million people with sites on MySpace. Virtual communities are increasingly places people we go to make friends, have fun, do business or share knowledge. Something like 100,000 blog sites are created every day; and political blog sites now receive more hits than official party websites.

Blog sites spread seemingly authoritative information without accountability or the need for accuracy, although, to be fair, newspapers have been doing that for years. Political parties should try to emulate the immediacy, interactivity and excitement of blogs. These days dull, standard automatically generated emails are beginning to look as ancient as the telegram.

The challenge for politicians is not to use technology to replace the ‘doorstep experience’, but to replicate it. There’s no reason why dissent and cynicism should be the only messages spread on the internet. We should promote activism and participation to counter apathy and scorn.

It’s a tremendous improvement on the comments by John Prescott in his now notorious Today Programme interview – ‘I think it’s called the internet, isn’t it, or blogs or something, I’ve only just got used to letters, John, I haven’t got into all this new technology.’ It’s easy to see why Alan Johnson might be considered one of the Cabinet’s rising stars, and indeed, a possible replacement for Mr Prescott as deputy prime minister.

But what’s really disappointing is how these comments have been completely ignored by the newspapers, who prefer to cover his ‘pre-emptive attack‘ on those who hark back to a ‘mythical golden age‘ of harder exams and more meaningful results.

(PS: Yes, I’m currently doing some work for Mr Johnson’s department, and I know people who know people who write the speeches. But I can’t claim any direct credit for this one.)

Once again, the guys at 37signals just get it right. People often think that the best system is the one with the most options, the most flexibility. Absolutely, scientifically-provably wrong:

Offering shoppers samples of six items yields more sales than offering samples of 24, students who are offered six extra credit topics are more likely to write a paper than students who are offered 30, etc. In some cases, just one additional choice can produce outright analysis paralysis. People wind up frozen by indecision.

There’s a direct application to government IT projects here. We talk all the time about ‘stakeholders’, capturing requirements from all and sundry, and (inevitably) designing by committee. This is precisely why we’re wrong to do so.

Don’t take it from me… take it from Professor Barry Schwartz. He wrote the book on it. See him describe his thinking at Google.

I think I’m starting to buy into the ‘bloggers vs Prescott’ story. Heather at Hitwise publishes some interesting data, which suggests Iain Dale’s blog is currently more popular than the Tory or Labour party sites. And Guido Fawkes is more popular still. Heather makes one extremely telling comment:

While the news media have been madly covering the supercasino scandal, consumers are searching for news of John Prescott’s affairs.

You’ll note the plural ‘affairs’ there. Certainly I’ve heard the same kinds of rumours, couched in similar terms to those used when referring to Charles Kennedy and alcohol. And we all know how that turned out.