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…
Forrester Research has released a report critiquing the navigation of the websites of John McCain and Barack Obama, claiming that both fail basic navigation tests by potential voters. Nextgov reported in the article, Web sites of both presidential candidates fail to connect with users, that, Forrester used five criteria in its evaluation: clear labels and…
Google is releasing the beta of its first web browser on Tuesday 2 September – US time, and if the media information Google has released is accurate, the product could reshape the face of web browsing over the next few years.Google Chrome is the company’s first foray into the web browsing market – but represents…
I installed the public beta of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 on my personal laptop last week to look at how well my agency’s sites were reflected in the browser, and to get more of a feel for the new features it adds to the mix.I’m pleased to say that just about all the sites I…
One of my mantras in professional life is ‘you can’t manage what you don’t measure‘. Therefore it always worries me when I encounter organisations or individuals with a less than firm grasp on how to measure the success or failure of their online properties. Depending on the type of web property, different metrics are most…
Brookings University recently released its report Improving Technology Utilization in Electronic Government around the World, 2008 (link to PDF). This ranks the government websites of 198 nations, reviewing 6-10 sites in each nation. Australia ranked 6th, behind South Korea, Taiwan, the US, Singapore and Canada, up from 8th position last year. As a benchmark this…
I’ve just been reading the State of the eNation report on the Beijing Olympics website, where they invited disabled web users to test the accessibility features of the site. While they found a number of the worst issues commonly reported by these users had been addressed, the remaining accessibility problems still made it very difficult…
My team’s web designer forwarded me the article Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign from A List Apart earlier this week. It looks at the justification behind design decisions – whether to change the design, layout and information architecture of a website or product – dividing it into two camps. Redesigners – who base their…
Next Monday (25 August) I’ll be speaking at the Ark Group’s conference on Driving Interoperability and Collaboration in eGovernment in Brisbane on the topic of Driving ongoing improvements in online services provision. If you’re attending, please come and introduce yourself at some stage through the conference. If you won’t be there, I’ll be making my…
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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