technology – Page 13

20 Apr 2009

e-government, technology

directgov, rss, wordpress

Don't get a feed, get a blog

I didn’t write about Mash The State when I first heard about it, because the ambitions seemed embarrassingly modest: getting each council in the country to offer an RSS feed by Christmas. In 2009? – seriously?

And then I note that, of the three e-government super-sites – Directgov, Businesslink, NHS Choices, annual budget approx £30m each – only the NHS site offers RSS feeds (and even then, only a few). Directgov has recently started offering its first RSS feed, but if you look at the source code, you’ll note that the URLs all begin with slashes. In other words, they aren’t valid RSS. Or in other less diplomatic words, they’re useless. If a guid isn’t globally unique, then it isn’t a guid. Still, at least they’re trying. Businesslink doesn’t seem to have anything in RSS. At all.

Meanwhile, the rest of the web is racing ahead. I’m especially proud of the DFID Bloggers site in that regard: helpful as ever, WordPress offers pretty much every list available through the site as an RSS feed, if you know the right URL to call. Each category has an RSS feed. Each tag has an RSS feed. Each individual author has an RSS feed. Heck, you can even get search queries as RSS feeds: meaning, in effect, you can have a customised RSS feed of ‘every time that WordPress site mentions X’. All out of the box; at zero charge and zero effort. They just happen.

RSS continues to delight me as a website designer and builder. Recent WordPress releases have added some extra – undocumented? – tricks: for example, if you can construct the right URL query string, you can get an RSS feeds of all items except those from a certain category. (Clue: ‘cat=-1’.) And it’s going to get even better imminently, with the inclusion of the brilliant SimplePie, for consuming RSS, into the next WordPress release.

I’ve built entire sites like Real Help Now and onepolitics powered solely by RSS feeds from third-party sites. I’m even building a couple of WordPress sites now which will use their own internal RSS feeds to surface content, rather than me coding ‘proper’ PHP/SQL queries. It’s just easier. And when you’re doing something as an outsider because it’s easier than the ‘proper’ internal method, you know we’ve reached somewhere significant.

The truth is, if your website still isn’t offering an RSS feed, you’re falling further and further behind the rest of the web, and you’re depriving yourself of the magic which eager geeks might bring to your content. But before you go spending money adding an RSS feed to, say, your press release pages – don’t. There’s a content management solution which is optimised for delivering text documents on a rolling basis, presented chronologically. You’re looking at it.
13 Apr 2009

company, technology

cardiff, wordcampuk, wordpress

Matt Mullenweg to attend UK WordCamp

Tickets have just gone on sale for this year’s second WordCamp UK. And if the promise of hearing me banging on about WordPress isn’t quite enough to tempt you to spend a July weekend in Cardiff, here’s some news that might swing it: Matt Mullenweg, basically ‘Mr WordPress’, is coming too.

I’m also proud to confirm that, although we haven’t finalised the details yet, Puffbox will again be sponsoring the event… and for the very same reasons as I described last year. Many good contacts were made in Birmingham: in my own case, some of this year’s more exciting and ambitious projects simply wouldn’t have happened, had I not met certain people last July. I’m better at what I do, as a direct result, and the company proposition is lot stronger too. It’s a chance to say thank you… and to make sure that the event definitely happens, for my own potential benefit… and others’ too.

I’ll almost certainly be leading a session on the progress of WordPress in central government: I’ve got one or two interesting projects to talk about, and I’m sure I’ll touch on these, but it’s probably more interesting for more people if I give a cross-government overview. And I think I might have volunteered to take the opening ‘icebreaker’ session.

Tickets for the event are £25 until the end of May – and with Matt Mullenweg confirmed as attending, it might be wise to snap yours up swiftly. For those who want to give a little something back to the community, there’s also a ‘microsponsor’ option where you can choose to pay nearly three times face value, to attend exactly the same event. (It’s proving quite a popular option, for the record.)
2 Apr 2009

e-government, technology

google, maps

Wiped off the map

I’ve come across a rather curious anomaly in Google’s new Street View. Southampton is one of the cities covered in the initial UK rollout… or rather, most of Southampton. You’ll note the bizarrely unavailable stretch of Romsey Road… and the odd interruption of Wimpson Lane. Here’s a link to it in Street View, to see for yourself.

So… who do you think operates from this unmapped building? If you need a clue, read this piece I wrote late last year: ‘Ordnance Survey ban Google Maps‘.

Of course, I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason.
31 Mar 2009

e-government, technology

analytics, coi, coigovuk, digigov, opensource, piwik

The open source answer to website auditing
I wrote the other week about ‘the implications of free‘: how the widespread availability of high-quality technology changed the rules when it comes to project management. Another example struck me today, around COI’s ongoing consultation on improving government websites.

There’s a lengthy section on measuring website usage, with detailed proposals around the new requirement for website auditing, kicking in imminently with the aim of ensuring that ‘the rules for measuring the number of Unique User/Browsers, Page Impressions, Visits and Visit Duration have been implemented correctly’. Government websites’ data will be audited twice a year, at a minimum cost of £1,740 per audit.

So what’s the alternative in the post-free world? How about a centrally managed, mandatory, open-source web analytics package – like Piwik?
- It would place the absolute minimum demand on individual departments: all they’d have to do is include a few lines of javascript at the bottom of their page templates – just like Google Analytics.
- It wouldn’t stop departments running their own analytics packages, if they so desired. Not that many would want or need to.
- Implementation of appropriate standards – statistical, technical, privacy, transparency, etc – could be guaranteed by experts at the centre.
- Lower overall cost: in terms of purchase, ongoing licensing & support, and of course, auditing.
- Freedom to tailor it to particular government requirements, if any.
I must say at this point, I’ve got no direct experience of Piwik myself: but the demo looks great, and it’s used by people I respect – such as Sourceforge and MySociety (eg TheyWorkForYou). Plus, as TWFY demonstrates, you can use Piwik alongside other tracking methods: they seem to have two others on the page too. It’s still at version 0.something, but they’re pledging to hit v1.0 ‘in 2009‘. (Actually, can any of the MySociety gang share their experiences?)

Instead, where will the COI guidance leave us? Website owners will face a financial penalty (admittedly a relatively modest one) if they aren’t using a 2-star rated ABCe Associate Subscriber. And how many of these ‘recommended’ analytics tools are open source, do you think?

Perhaps COI might want to take another look at the Open Source Strategy, (re)published just a month ago: for example, the part where Tom Watson says in his foreword:

We need to increase the pace. We want to ensure that we continue to use the best possible solutions for public services at the best value for money; and that we pay a fair price for what we have to buy. We want to share and re-use what the taxpayer has already purchased across the public sector – not just to avoid paying twice, but to reduce risks and to drive common, joined up solutions to the common needs of government. We want to encourage innovation and innovators – inside Government by encouraging open source thinking, and outside Government by helping to develop a vibrant market. We want to give leadership to the IT industry and to the wider economy to benefit from the information we generate and the software we develop in Government.

I’d be grateful if COI would consider this as Puffbox Ltd’s contribution to the consultation exercise. Thank you.
27 Mar 2009

company, e-government, technology

directgov, firefox, microsoft

Search tools for Directgov: Puffbox vs Microsoft

Directgov has announced a ‘partnership’ with Microsoft, promising to make it ‘easier than ever to find government information and services online’. In practice, this means they’re using the new ‘accelerator’ feature in Internet Explorer v8: you can select some text on any web page, then right-click to access a ‘search Directgov’ link which fires that word directly into the Directgov search engine as a search query. I don’t think it’ll be life-changing for anyone, and my suspicion is that there’s more in it for Microsoft than Directgov – but hey, it’s not a bad thing.

But how many people are using IE8? What about the much greater number of people using, say, IE7… or Firefox? Puffbox to the rescue! I’ve thrown together a quick search plugin for Directgov, which will allow you to search Directgov directly from the browser interface. ~~You will have to do the copying and pasting manually though, so apologies for the lack of acceleration.~~

And if you’re using Firefox, and you happen to have Directgov selected as your browser-bar search engine at the time – behold! you’ll have the same ‘search Directgov’ option in your right-click menu! (Thx to Stuart in the comments.)

Visit this page on the MozDev website to find Puffbox’s brand new Directgov search plugin. Click on the word Directgov, and it’ll ask you if you want to install – say yes. If you then consult the list of search engines available from your browser’s built-in search box, you should now see a Directgov option. Enter a word, and it’ll take you straight to a search query for that word.

Puffbox principal consultant Simon Dickson said: ‘Directgov is taking advantage of long-established capabilities within Internet Explorer 7, and better alternatives such as Firefox, to make it easier for members of the public to find information on the Directgov website – whether they realise it or not. Directgov is among the forward-thinking organisations using modern technologies to benefit their target audience, and we are delighted to be helping them.’

I’ll link to the Directgov newsroom article as soon as it’s been posted.
23 Mar 2009

e-government, technology

downingstreet, jasoncalacanis, twitter

No10's Twitter status worth $250,000?

By getting involved early and enthusiastically in the whole Twitter thing, has DowningStreet earned itself $250,000 of free digital engagement? Well-known internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis (number of followers: 63,000) has offered Twitter a cool quarter of a million bucks – as I believe our American friends would describe it – to secure himself a two-year stay on their list of people you might like to follow when you open a new account. This is, of course, the same list which has done so much to boost DowningStreet’s follower count, now standing at 276,000.

There’s breathless excitement in a piece on TechCrunch:

[Calacanis] wants to lock in the price now because he thinks it is a great marketing opportunity. It is not unusual for people on the suggested list to gain 10,000 new followers every day. That comes to 3.6 million a year, and even if half unsubscribe, that is still a direct channel to more than a million potential customers. Those are customers who feel a connection with you because of the personal nature of Twitter messages.

There’s additional detail in John Naughton’s piece from yesterday’s Observer:

“I was only half-bluffing with this move,” he wrote in his weekly newsletter. “I was 90% sure Twitter wouldn’t take the money and I wouldn’t have to pony up …. However, if they did call my bluff … I would have gotten what I wanted: two to 10 million Twitter followers and the ability to drive one to two million visits to Mahalo a month from Twitter.”

This is a serious entrepreneur, a guy who has made serious money from the internet, reckoning that $120,000 for one year, or $250,000 to cover himself for the likely price rise in year two, was good value to buy something which 10 Downing Street already owns. One wonders, then, whether Francis Maude might want to reconsider his comments about No10’s experimentation with ‘the latest digital gimmicks’?
19 Mar 2009

e-government, technology

coi, jquery, opensource

The implications of free

I’m in the early stages of spec’ing up a new site build. The client helpfully provided a wireframe sketch of the homepage, which included – deep breath – a news ticker. And for the first time in living memory, I haven’t recoiled in horror. In fact, I’m quite happy to give it to them.

Previously, my response would have been to open up a cost-vs-benefit discussion. In my experience, people (arguably the less web-literate?) like to see tickers, but they don’t actually ever use them. So is it worth me programming a function nobody really wants, just so you can pretend to be the BBC? Maybe, maybe not. Generally speaking, the ticker idea soon falls off the mockups.

But the new reality is that it’ll take me a matter of a few minutes to program. I’ll use WordPress to generate a normal HTML bullet-list. I’ll include a reference to the fantastic (free) JQuery javascript library – if there isn’t one already, and these days, there probably will be. Then I’ll include one of several free JQuery ‘plugins’ to do ticker functionality: probably this one. Then we’ll have a ticker. A couple of lines of CSS to pretty it up, and we’re done. Yes folks, that really is all there is to it.

Suddenly, any approach based on cost-benefit analyses goes out the window. The cost is virtually zero, so if there’s any potential benefit to be derived from doing something, the test is passed. That doesn’t mean we should throw everything at any given project; but it does mean we might as well drop it in, and see if it works.

For me, this is the challenge of the Open Source Era for big corporate clients like government. Procurement and project management processes have been built up to handle projects costing millions. We spend huge amounts of money ensuring that we don’t waste all the money. But what if the cost of the job is zero, or something close to it?

This is why I’m bit perplexed by COI’s new WordPress-based 🙂 consultation on Improving Government Websites. There’s a huge section on measuring costs: they’re suggesting you might/should report an associated cost against each of nearly 200 activities. But how can you put a cost against something like (for example) RSS feeds in a WordPress build, when they’re built-in, in numerous different ways, whether you like it or not?
10 Mar 2009

e-government, technology

Explaining No10's startling Twitter success

Downing Street’s remarkable Twitter popularity reaches new heights today, with the number of followers passing the 200,000 mark. But as some of you may know, an explanation has finally emerged courtesy of Matt Wardman – which should hopefully calm some of the general excitement I’m seeing around Whitehall.

At some point in January, so it turns out, Twitter began suggesting possible friends to new registrants… and Downing Street was one of the lucky few who made the cut. It’s my understanding that they were chosen ‘on merit’, as an example of a famous name making interesting use of the service; they didn’t ask for this prestigious position, and I don’t even think they were notified about it.

Pic from mattwardman.com

So suddenly, unexpectedly, their follower count began surging upwards. But of course, with so many ‘industry people’ already being Twitter users, none of us spotted this new matchmaking stage in the sign-up process. So perhaps it’s not the new dawn of popular political engagement that it might have seemed.

Now, I still see it as an unquestionably good thing. It doesn’t really matter how people found out about the account. And it doesn’t really matter if it’s a ‘tick this box’ or ‘untick this box’ scenario. (Speaking of which, I genuinely don’t know which it is… can someone enlighten me?) People are still opting into – or at least, not opting out of – a government ‘mailing list’. Even if they’re not really listening, they’re certainly hearing… and that’s more than a good start.

I don’t even think it matters if a large proportion are outside the UK (although again, I don’t know if the list of suggestions is geo-targeted). The messages may not be directly relevant to a foreign audience, but they certainly present the UK government as forward-thinking in the online space. The FCO would call that ‘public diplomacy’.

What Matt’s revelation does show is that @downingstreet is a fortunate exception. It demonstrates an interest, certainly, but a passive interest, rather than anything proactive. Other government initiatives simply will not receive Twitter’s special blessing as No10 did; and hence, will not receive anything like the same level of interest. Sorry to disappoint, guys.

That isn’t to do down the role that Twitter can play in (much as I hate the term) stakeholder engagement. You’ll just have to work at it, like any other Twitterer, to build your sphere of influence. There may only be a couple of hundred people interested in tweets on a given project; but if it’s the right couple of hundred people, the number doesn’t matter. Think quality, not quantity.

But it does suggest one possible use for the @downingstreet account: introducing people to other HMG activity on Twitter – and elsewhere online. It would be very interesting to see how much traffic a tweeted link could generate, for example. Time for a bit of bit.ly, gang?
25 Feb 2009

e-government, technology

opensource, ukgovoss

Gov.UK tips scales in open source's favour

The line which jumps out at me from today’s new government ‘Action Plan’ on open source software is quite a neat encapsulation of the entire document:

Where there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non-open source products, open source will be selected on the basis of its additional inherent flexibility.

Fundamentally, the policy on Open Source hasn’t changed much, if at all. Instead of just considering Open Source, civil servants now have to ‘actively and fairly’ consider it. I’m not sure what practical difference that tweak will make: but the subtext is pretty clear.

Likewise, I don’t imagine the ‘tiebreaker’ clause will be invoked very often, not explicitly. But what’s important is that it doesn’t say there’s potential to be more flexible, it says – rightly – that the flexibility is inherent.

The Action Plan reads like a document which wanted to say more, but didn’t feel able to. It sets out to reassure the bureaucrats that Open Source isn’t a risk, is already widely used, and can be taken seriously. It talks up the notion of ‘open source culture’, and warns against procedural barriers. It goes as far as it can towards saying ‘please use it more!’ – but in the world of procurement politics, and billion-pound budgets, perhaps you can’t realistically expect it to go any further. Opposition politicians aren’t under such restraint, of course.

Will this make a difference to me, as someone who ultimately makes most of his living from selling open source to government? Not really. In fact, I feel as if Puffbox has been putting a lot of these principles into practice for some time. We didn’t need to be told to; we just felt it was right to do so.

I’ve always felt perfectly comfortable making the case for open source on its own merits, and had plenty of success too, without having to wave around a Cabinet Office document – the 2004 policy has literally never come up in conversation. And whilst it might be useful to have a list of officially approved products (action point #4), I don’t expect departments to accept documentation in OpenOffice format (#8) any time soon.
24 Feb 2009

politics, technology

douglascarswell, hansardsociety, lynnefeatherstone, MPs, tomharris

Creative Commons: 3 MPs on blogging

A shock conclusion emerges from the Hansard Society’s latest research into MPs’ use of new-fangled technology: they are normal people. Well, ‘kind of normal-ish’, Labour’s Tom Harris clarifies. We’re here at Microsoft’s relatively new London offices to hear from three MPs, one from each of the main parties, on what they put in, and what they get out of blogging.

As things kick off, I’m feeling mildly subversive. Partly because I’m using a Linux laptop on Microsoft’s patch. But mainly because I’m the only person in a room of 50, here to talk about technological matters, with a laptop in front of them.

Tory MP Douglas Carswell is first up: he’s in a rush off. He makes, on the face of it, some provocative statements. Technology is ‘having a transformative effect on the disadvantaged’, he says, citing a specific example of local parents of special needs kids, who got information from similar support groups around the country, and used it to take him and the local authority to task. Westminster will need to adopt open source politics, he says, or new entrants will take market share; and it will ultimately lead, he suggests, to more grown-up politics. And with that, he makes the dash up Victoria Street to obey a three line whip. To be fair though, he did blog it up before I did.

Next it’s LibDem MP Lynne Featherstone: a blogger since 2003, but – she insists – she’s so not a geek. For her, it’s a way to prove she isn’t ‘lazy’ like ‘all the rest’; she extols the blog’s value in local campaigning. ‘I pay no mind to the dangers of blogging,’ she says – although, she admits, she does have someone check her stuff for anything ‘politically suicidal’.

Finally, at the top table anyway, it’s Tom Harris – who, he reminds us (to my own surprise), has been blogging less than a year. Straight away, he confronts the ‘received wisdom’ that he lost his ministerial job because of his blog: he genuinely doesn’t know if that’s true, and he hopes it isn’t a signal that ministers shouldn’t blog (or at least, shouldn’t be worth reading). He rejects suggestions that he’s some kind of maverick – in fact, he says, he takes ‘the party line’ very seriously, and assures us you won’t find much in his archives that deviates from it.

He started blogging as an outlet for the opinions which didn’t otherwise get a platform; and as a conscious effort to balance out the right-leaning dominance of the ‘blogscape’. As a former journalist, he finds the writing very easy: but interestingly, he reveals that he spends more time moderating comments than writing posts. (Andy Williamson tells us the majority of MPs’ ‘blogs’ don’t accept comments, incidentally. Hmm.)

Several times, particularly in the concluding Q&A, Tom speaks in favour of a liberal, almost anarchic position. It’s probably inevitable, he says, that every candidate at a forthcoming election will have a blog; it’ll be impossible for the parties to control centrally – ‘and that’s great’. He has a bit of a dig at ‘an unnamed individual’ displaying control-freak tendencies – but doesn’t name him. Whoever could he have meant?

I’m struck by Tom’s and Lynne’s differing routes into blogging. Lynne isn’t being too self-deprecating when she talks down her technical skills; but she’s astute enough to see the value in it all, and is surrounding herself with people whose skills complement hers. It makes her such an interesting appointment to head up the LibDems’ online efforts: she’s a campaigner at heart, and she’ll ensure that the party doesn’t get carried away with tech for tech’s sake.

Tom meanwhile comes across as ‘one of us’. Over a glass of wine afterwards, he expands a bit on the control freakery, naming a couple of names which I won’t repeat here. He isn’t too bothered how many of his blog’s readers are local constituents. Even if his blog cost him his ministerial job, I don’t hear any regret in his voice when he talks about it. He’s blogging for exactly the same reasons I do.

I leave feeling we’re in quite a happy position just now. Those MPs who are blogging (properly) are doing it because they want to, and/or because they want to get something constructive from it. We haven’t yet reached the point where all candidates need to be seen to do it – as, say, with tedious printed constituency newsletters. But there were signs tonight that it’s starting to happen… and that, fundamentally, is a bad thing.