It’s here. Internet Explorer v7 has arrived… so it’s time to download, cross your fingers, and hope that all the pages on your site work properly. If they don’t, you’ve got a few weeks before it gets delivered to (more or less) every Windows PC on the planet via Microsoft’s automatic update service.
-
First government campaign on Myspace?
I can’t really go without commenting on the ‘Better Backs‘ campaign being run at the moment by the Health and Safety Executive. An interactive rollover Flash advert caught my attention… one of the first I’ve seen from the public sector. Click on it, and you find yourself on the site for BAACKPAIN, an 80s heavy metal band on its reunion tour (or something). Click a bit further, and bloody ‘ell, if you don’t end up on Myspace.Hey, it’s certainly an attention grabber… and I bet the creative team had a right laugh doing it. I’m imagining a whiteboard with the word ‘back’, then ‘spine’, and then ‘Spinal Tap’. But speaking as someone who can recite more or less the entire script from memory, I don’t see the references going any further. The Darkness, maybe. Lita Ford
, even. (Never knew she was a Brit, incidentally.) No sign of Nigel, David or Derek
.
This is not your run-of-the-mill government campaign website. And full credit to them for that, at the very least.
-
The multimedia newsroom: pro and con
They were published a month ago, but I’ve only just seen a picture of the much-heralded ‘hub and spoke’ integrated newsroom at the (Daily) Telegraph‘s new offices in Buckingham Palace Road. Ian Douglas, writing on his technology blog, defends the concept in the face of criticism in today’s Independent from a former editor of the Express:There are myriads of small skills involved in writing a good headline or producing a decent story that are individually not especially complex but collectively make all the difference. These skills do not transfer well from print to radio or from video to column writing… Convergence encourages the wrong kind of journalism. The stuff that does translate well is precisely the stuff that we want less of, the journalism of very little value.
The joint commissioning process for print and online, the hub-and-spoke office layout with all departments within hailing distance of each other, the daily touchpoints creating rolling deadlines, all these things are designed to create insightful and reporter-led news coverage when itโs wanted rather than once a day.
I think both are probably right. Some old-school colleagues probably won’t adapt too well to the new approach. Some people just don’t have good faces for video, or good voices for audio. And likewise, those from a TV background will need time to get away from the rather pithy style of a video voiceover. It will take time. But the rolling news revolution has already happened, and it’s high-time you all got with it.
-
IPSV taxonomy: 'a waste of time'
Knowledge management expert Steve Dale reports that ‘the debate on the (ir)relevance of IPSV (Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary) has burst out into the open again.’ He muses:
The schema is uneccessarily detailed/over-complicated, and these days most search engines do not rely on subject metadata alone (or even at all) to classify or organise results. Who will be brave enough to admit that the huge intellectual investment put into developing and implementing IPSV has been largely a waste of time?!
Er, I will.
Steve is absolutely right: it’s far too big to be practically useful, with over 3000 primary terms (that’s before you get into synonyms)… and it’s getting bigger, with an extra 350 primary terms added as part of the April 2006 update. And that’s before several major government departments get round to fleshing out the branches which should notionally be their domain. Which, of course, means the production of further revisions… which, inevitably, means everyone has to go back and review the subject tagging they did against the previous versions. And so it goes on.
I just don’t believe big taxonomies can ever work. I think there’s a reason Google (free text) deposed Yahoo (big classification structure) as the web’s #1 search engine. And if you’re writing decent web content anyway, you’ll have all the important keywords in your important fields – like the page title, the H1 heading, and so on. Just your standard Search Engine Optimisation tactics, which you should be doing anyway. Amount of additional effort required: zero.
But I do think a smaller-scale subject tree can be useful. I’ve recently led an exercise to produce a mini-taxonomy. We set very tight limits: a maximum 100 terms, ideally two levels, but three at a push. And I’m very happy with the structure we produced. It prints nicely on a single sheet of A4; people could keep it by their PCs, and refer to it as necessary. (Mind you, with only 100 terms, I’d expect people to know it by heart fairly quickly.) I’d much rather have a guarantee of a ‘near enough’ match, than a situation where exact matches are dependent on people being bothered to tag exactly.
But I’m quite relaxed about it, really. Yes, it’s mandatory… but, theoretically, so was IPSV’s predecessor, GCL. I don’t remember too many people actually implementing it properly either. And I certainly don’t remember the Taxonomy Police rounding people up.
PS: Note to Steve… nice blog, nice photo, but you need to make it easier for us to tell who you are. It took quite a lot of research to find your name?!
-
Your calendar meets my website
RSS is by far the best known means of taking information out of the browser, and onto the desktop… and even then, admittedly, it isn’t that well-known yet. Of course, with IE7 about to drop, it’s going to be a big few days for RSS consumption – suddenly, without realising it, a whole lot of people will have some pretty sophisticated RSS reader software on their PCs. But there’s a lot more to this than just RSS.
As part of the big UK government content management project I’m currently working on, I’m pushing an idea to deliver a feed of new – and perhaps more importantly, future – website content via the iCal calendar format.
We reckon our website will add maybe half a dozen new items on a typical day. A lot of these will be news items or new publications. As they go into the system, they will all (inevitably) have a date attached. So we’re going to offer a ‘calendar view’ showing all the major additions to the website for each day of the week. We’re shamelessly basing the presentation on Outlook’s seven-day view: so at a glance, you’ll see all the items posted on Monday, on Tuesday, etc through to Sunday. Note, we’re not just talking about ‘dates for your diary’ – more like a rolling ‘what’s new’ listing.
You’ll be able to go back to previous weeks, perhaps to catch up on new items posted while you were on holiday. But you’ll also be able to go forwards, to see details of anything that has been pre-announced. For example, the publication dates for government statistics are often set months in advance. So in our calendar view, you’ll be able to click on ‘next week’ to see anything which is planned to happen, assuming of course that it has been publicly declared. (And there are plenty of reasons why that might not be the case, not least security.)
And if it can be done as a calendar, we want to put it into your calendar. iCal, as a feed format, is built into Apple’s iCal software, Firefox’s calendar cousins Sunbird and Lightning, and online services like 30boxes or Google Calendar. But Microsoft’s new versions of Windows and Office will (finally) bring proper iCal integration to the masses. Just as you do with RSS feeds, you’ll be able to pick up the URL of a feed, and subscribe to it in your calendar application (say, Outlook). Then, as if by magic, our dates will be shown alongside your dates.
There are plenty of examples out there in terms of calendar sharing; there’s a whole website dedicated to sharing calendars in iCal format. This one, for example, lists all Arsenal’s forthcoming games – and the guy even updates it after each game with details of the scorers, etc. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen iCal used as a ‘content feed’ like I’m planning.
It probably isn’t all that revolutionary. I’m not sure how many people will ever use it… but it won’t put any additional demands on authors’ time. The whole beauty of content management is to allow re-use of your web content in other forms and formats… so why not? ๐
-
NHS cancellations: IT can't make it worse, can it?
Government’s poor reputation as regards IT isn’t entirely undeserved. But all too often, it’s no worse than the non-IT processes it’s trying to replace. For example – can it really be true, as reported this morning, that ‘the NHS is cancelling more than 620 operations every day because of administrative errors… such as notes being lost, miscommunication between hospital departments, and booking errors’? The IT solution might not be perfect, but the status quo is indefensible.
Interestingly, the Department of Health doesn’t try to deny these figures – it only advises that they are treated ‘with caution’, as it’s an extrapolation. Which is fair enough. But it’s a bit much to try and score some points, on the basis that ‘we don’t collect data on all cancelled operations to minimise the burden on the NHS.’
This is quite an interesting case of some Freedom Of Information research yielding information we didn’t know before… and, arguably, should have. Tory MP Grant Shapps told BBC Radio Five Live this morning that he was looking into another matter, when this better story emerged. It’s just a pity there’s nowhere (so far) – either on shapps.com or conservatives.com – where we can see the full background. Otherwise, I hate to say it, we do have to pinch some salt here, as DH recommends.
-
Yes I do want a camera on my smartphone
One of the most valuable lessons I picked up during a stint in proper journalism (with Sky News) was the maxim that ‘if you can’t be bothered writing it, nobody will be bothered reading it.’ So with that in mind, I’ve just deleted a half-finished post about the Sony Ericsson M600 mobile phone. I was going to spend a few hundred words wondering how such a gorgeous smartphone – which, finally, might be the perfect combination of phone and PDA – can possibly be shipped without a camera of any sort. But one sentence is probably adequate. Still a lovely bit of kit, though. -
Ulster Unionists defend talks blog
Fascinating political progress at the Northern Ireland talks being held just now at St Andrew’s… although not necessarily on the Northern Ireland situation. Basically, the party is ‘blogging’ the peace talks – and they’ve been told off for breaking the ‘spirit of confidentiality’ of the talks. Quoted by the BBC, party spokesman Alex Benjamin says, with some merit:
These summits cost taxpayers, and this one in particular up to about ยฃ500,000. We thought it was time that people should have a chance to see what is actually happening inside. In reality, there’s a lot of time spent sitting around, a lot of time spent having coffee or watching television, so it’s not quite the perception that people think it is.
Assuming they continue to apply some common-sense discretion (at least until the recriminations start), this is a remarkably forward-thinking move by a typically more conservative party. A look behind the scenes, no matter how mundane, will certainly help build voter engagement.
The UUP is a party in serious decline, with a need to refresh its image (and its membership). Its rival on the pro-London side, Ian Paisley’s DUP, has fresher faces in its front-bench team (apart from the Big Man of course), and has generally done a better job online, too.
-
Sion Simon does David Cameron
I’ve noticed a couple of people have arrived here looking for the video of Sion Simon MP pretending (er, I think) to be David Cameron. So here it is, courtesy of Youtube.
[youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=X9DYULkAhWI]
For the record, its original location is here; and you’ll note that the offending uploader is ‘baggymp‘ – aka Tom Watson, Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East. You’ll also note that the community’s reaction is less than favourable – featuring a remarkably broad array of words like ‘moron’, ‘muppet’, ‘loser’, ‘idiot’, ‘tosser’, ‘fanny’, ‘cretin’.
-
Rating the NHS hospital trust ratings
If you’re having trouble locating the new quality ratings for your local NHS, and it’s much harder than it should be given its place at the top of the news agenda – you’ll find them at a special website, annualhealthcheckratings.healthcarecommission.org.uk. Gotta love that address, guys.
There’s a link to ‘search our findings‘. First mistake, and it’s a big one: wrong words. I’m not interested in your findings, I’m interested in my local area, my hospital, myself. For one thing, it tells me that your process is more important than my access. But more importantly, we know people scan rather than read pages… and having the right ‘scan word’ is essential. (It’ll also help your search engine optimisation.) Overall score:
Lots of search options – name, A-Zlisting, type of NHS trust, code number, distance from a given postcode. (Lose a point for using non-standard English regions: there’s no such thing as South Central.) Nice hover effects in the search results (with clear evidence that they’ve coded for Firefox first, rather than IE6 – try the hover effect). Overall score:
Then when I get to the page for my local area… it all looks so generic. I can see the scores for ‘quality of services’ and ‘use of resources’ (although I probably saw those already in the search results), but everything else looks like it’s produced by a template. Too much use of ‘this organisation’, and not its name. I don’t feel like I’m looking at a page that’s truly about my area. Overall score:
(sorry)The pages of more detailed scores don’t feel quite so generic; but what is going on with the merged graphs? The designer has tried to find a creative way to force two graphs into the same physical space; having stared at it for a while, I think I understand it, but I don’t know if many people would have my patience. But hey, the ratings are there in big letters, so you know how they did. Overall score:
So it’s a mixed picture to be honest. It’s clear that they’ve made an effort… and good on them for that. But as with so many projects, I can see aspects where the editorial (or ‘user experience’) person should have been a bit more proactive. Even the smallest changes could make big differences to the site’s usability. Don’t get me wrong, it’s
… but it could have been .
