In the US government gateway site there’s a page listing the active and past official Blogs from the U.S. Government. Looking through the list of 43 blogs, there’s a wide range of topics on which this medium has been used – from AIDs education, through Art, Environmental issues and Foreign policy to Defense. If your…
There’s a great article up on BuzzMachine titled Google as the new press room. It makes the point that newspapers are in the content business, not the printing and distribution or website business. As such they should focus on what they do well (create excellent content) and outsource the non-core activities. The specific example is…
I’ve been reading about a presentation given by Michael Specht at PubCamp Sydney, an event that brought together old and new media people to look at opportunities and threats facing the industry. He gave a an impromptu presentation on Enterprise 2.0, which contained a number of insights that apply equally to the public sector. The…
The Federal Mobility 2.0 Study, released a couple of days ago in the US, has reported that wireless internet access for Federal public servants improves their productivity. In fact over 70% of respondents, who all used wireless internet, reported that it improved their productivity. At the same time only 40% of Federal agencies reported that…
Nathanael Boehm has provided more details on what may be the first official joint Commonwealth/State/Territory government blog in Australia. In Government Blog: blog.training.gov.au, he talks about the purpose behind the site and how it was constructed, using opensource technologies to deliver a fast, cheap and secure solution. This achievement is a great example of how…
This is a very worthwhile event with a simple theme. As described on its website, what you need to do on 1 August 2008 is: Find a usability problem – it could be a poorly designed toaster, a confusing or redundant letter from your bank, or even a problem with your experience boarding, flying and…
Following from my post yesterday regarding the US senate debate over the use of social media by congressmen, several congressmen have launched a campaign to remove restrictions on internet use by the US congress. The campaign is entitled Let Our Congress Tweet and, as you’d expect, makes extensive use of social media to put across…
I regularly struggle with how to best evaluate the success of my agency’s intranet. In generaly there are six different sets of metrics I use, grouped into ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ as follows: Hard (numerical) Statistics – traffic (visits/pageviews), Content (age/timeliness/findability), Soft (subjective) Design – usability/accessibility/attraction (task completion, screen reading), Development – standards (code validation) User…
The Australian government has an opportunity to expand its support for national fixed line broadband to include mobile broadband, spearheaded by the release of the Apple iPhone this week. The phone is a revolutionary device and reports out of the US indicate that people using the phone are using internet data services 50x as frequently…
I keep an eye on my agency’s Wikipedia entry to make sure the information it contains is timely, factual, apolitical and objective. Where possible I try to edit it as little as possible, allowing the community of Wikipedia to determine what is relevant in the entry – we have our own website for detailed information….
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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