There are a variety of ways to simply and cost-effectively offer customer support online and, given that it’s not yet common in the Australian public sector, I thought I’d quickly outline my own thinking on the case for and against offering this type of service.In this post I’ll focus on text chat – the simplest…
The 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study in the US, has found that 93 percent of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media, while 85 percent believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its customers via social media. With 60 percent of Americans…
Reflecting Forrester’s Groundswell report, Universal McCann has released a study detailing how the internet has turned all customers (citizens) into influencers. Titled INTERNET USERS, THE NEW INFLUENCERS – When did we start trusting strangers? (PDF), the study included around 17,000 internet users from 29 countries, finding that enmasse customers have moved from being passive consumers…
The most exciting change I’m seeing in US politics at the moment is the degree of top level support and enthusiasm for transparency in government. Nextgov has published an article, Obama says he would use IT to open government, which details the strategies the Democrat nominee for President says he will mandate for the US…
I am a reasonably active LinkedIn user (view my profile here). It’s one of my professional networking tools for keeping track of ‘people of interest’ to me – from business contacts to potential employees and employers. It, and similar social and professional networks, are also useful recruiting tools for managers and HR professionals seeking to…
Fresh+New, a blog written by Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum, has brought to my attention Aza Raskin’s Ubiquity, a very interested look at the possible web of the future, using semantic browsers to provide a more connected experience. More details are in Seb’s post, More powerful browsers – Mozilla Labs Ubiquity, or on Aza’s…
On Monday this week United Airlines in the US experienced a 75% drop in their share price (from $12.30 to $3.00 per share). This was due to a 6-year old news story on a newspaper website that was accidentally tagged as current and distributed across the US financial press through Bloomberg’s online News Service. The story has…
The US Patent and Trademarks Office (USPTO), is trialing opening the patent examination process to public participation. This allows members of the public to review pending patent applications and provide input and feedback into the process of assessing patent claims. In effect, the patent office is acknowledging that the US public has the capacity to…
The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US is investigating the legalities of website linking, putting forward a policy proposal stating that companies should be held liable for linking to other sites containing information related to their share value. Basically, if a link from a company’s website pointed to false or misleading information about the…
I’ve spent about four hours putting Google Chrome through the wringer and overall are impressed with the browser, despite some rather large functional gaps. In checking a range of Australian government sites I did not observe any significant usability or display issues – none more than users of Safari (which uses the same renderer, WebKit)…
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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