The Investments blog posted a thought-provoking post a few days ago, asking Should Government Websites Be Allowed to Post Google Ads to Offset Deficient Budgets? This was based on a question put to ‘Father of the internet’ and Google head evangelist, Vinton Cerf, who was asked at an eGovernment seminar, “if he thought that there…
Search, search, search – it’s been a popular topic for years but most people I talk to still only pay lip service to ensuring that their website is appropriately findable on the web, or that their own website and intranet’s search tools work effectively. With the large number of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) companies around,…
The Victorian government released the results of it’s year-long internet usage survey last week, providing a Demographic Profiling of Victorian Government Website Visitors. Taking into account nearly 250,000 respondents, this is the largest sample I’ve seen for an egovernment usage survey within Australia. The full results are available from Victoria’s eGovernment Resource Centre, however I’ve…
The Web Industry Professionals Association (WIPA) have published a guide to help webmasters migrating websites from the the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 1.0 to the soon-to-be-released WCAG 2.0.The HTML version of “Migrating from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0” is at http://wipa.org.au/papers/wcag-migration.htm As WCAG 1.0 is mandatory for Australian government agency websites, this…
I was reading a very interesting blog post the other day regarding the experiences of someone who is colourblind, Confessions of a colourblind man. It raised a number of accessibility issues with printed material, moving images and websites that the author had experienced during their life. Despite the requirement for government in Australia to ensure…
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…
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…
Google recently released a report on web browser security, conducted in June 2008, which found that more than 630 million internet users were not using the most secure version of their chosen web browser. Mainly this reflected Internet Explorer use – 577 million users were not using the most secure version of the browser –…
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….
One of the biggest issues I’ve seen in government websites is excessive use of words. Government agencies often treat each website page as a stand-alone fact sheet. This means they err on the side on completeness, leading to wordiness. Most of us have seen the research. People don’t read wordy, jargon-filled pages – they skim….
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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