August 2009 – Page 3

Some interesting reading

August 11, 2009

Some dead interesting stuff popped up when I logged in this morning – all worth giving a read:

Facebook buys FriendFeed

Lots of people seem to be quite upset about this one. Friendfeed is still a pretty niche service, even by the standards of the social web, so this isn’t that seismic a change. The interesting thing about FriendFeed is that it was founded and developed by a really skilled team of ex-Googlers and it is probably those guys’ brains that Facebook are after.

Google makes new search engine available

Google have responded to the threat of a revitalised Microsoft web search (in the form of the ludicrously named Bing) by starting to re-engineer their core search product. You can test it out on the sandbox site – I found it noticeably quicker and the results are different.

IE team ‘defends’ IE6

There have been a whole bunch of memes on the web around the fact that Internet Explorer 6 sucks and that people should replace it. This was reflected in the UKGovWeb scene with Tom Watson’s parliamentary questions asking when government departments would be upgrading from this ancient bit of tech.

Microsoft’s IE team have responded to this chatter on their blog, not necessarily defending IE6 as a product (they would prefer people to upgrade, too) but explaining the reasons why big organisations – and indeed individuals – might be happy sticking with what they know.

GoogleLocalGov review

August 9, 2009

Here’s a list of some of the coverage of Friday’s event… I’ll keep it updated with everything I come across:

Ingrid Koehler:

Despite all the slickness and the fabulous hospitality, the day was kind of a near miss. Google knows there’s money in the public sector (maybe less than there has been, but still a lot), they know we’d make good customers, they know they have products that we can use to achieve what we need to, but they didn’t quite know how to make the sale.

Michele Ide-Smith:

I have no doubt that the migration to the cloud won’t be driven so much by business strategy so much as by social needs and expectations. As time goes by our experiences of computing in our personal lives will be drastically mis-matched with our computing experiences at work.

Sarah Lay:

We asked for Google to keep speaking to us and get to know the specific issues and challenges we’re facing in local gov and for a space where we can store the developments we’re working on. It was suggested that the /localgov website was expanded to include this sand box and perhaps forums too where we can pitch questions and ideas and Google can get a feel for us.

Alice Ainsworth:

The local gov day at Google’s London HQ this week (#googlelocalgov) definitely gave me some food for thought. No, they didn’t have all the answers, but as a group we do tend to have a LOT of questions.

Sharon O’Dea

Overall, I was a little disappointed that the day wasn’t more of a constructive, two-way session, but nonetheless it was a useful overview of their products. The key is in what happens next. I love Google, and I’m sure there’s potential for them to help us achieve our aims of communicating better with residents while bringing down costs. But this was only a first date; we’ve got a lot of flirting to go before local government will even consider going to bed with Google. Local Government just isn’t that kind of girl, you see.

Al Smith

So that’s what happened. We came. We listened to a (slightly off-topic) sales pitch. We went home.

But it’s a start as I say. Google got plenty of feedback from the day and hopefully there are a few things people can take away and build into what they’re doing.

Carrie Bishop

It was a pretty intense day of presentations by various Googlers about their products, much of which was interesting and applicable to local government, though there wasn’t much talk about local government until the end of the session.

Paul Canning

As the day progressed it was very clear that they were new to this local government lark (they only opened shop in January). Given that the sponsors and the people they have been talking to thus far are Whitehall ones, and local government’s needs and issues are very different, it’s hardly surprising that many of the pitches needed refining.

How to make websites work

August 7, 2009

From Google’s LocalGov event today, Alex Nurenberg talked us through the steps you can take to make sure your website works – in other words that visitors find what they want quickly, especially when they come in via a search engine or advert.

Bring me to the right page
Make your homepage useful
Help me navigate
Give me the right results when I search
Display services clearly
Give me the detail I need
Make registration optional
Make it easy to enquire
Reassure me
Let your users design your website (it’s all about testing)

Also:

Use Adwords to drive the right traffic
Use Analytics to monitor performance
Use Website Optimiser to optimise content

Dave @ Learning Pool

August 7, 2009

I am rather pleased to be able to let everyone know that I’m starting work for Learning Pool this month.

For those that don’t know, Learning Pool provide e-learning services to the public sector, with a focus on local government. Subscribers to the service get access to a whole library of e-learning materials, and can also buy a system known as a dynamic learning environment to run their training on.

But it’s more interesting than that, because the notion of community is at the heart of what Learning Pool do. So, any training designed and developed by a subcriber to the service can be uploaded to the pool for any other members to use, edit and reshare. Awesome!

What’s more, Learning Pool have also started to use their experience of this kind of collaborative working to great effect in building knowledge sharing networks, with one particularly successful one running in the south-east of England with several councils involved.

I’m going to be helping Learning Pool in a number of ways:

Developing a thriving online community for e-learning at learningpool.com, for anyone with an interest, whether a customer or not, to chat with like minded folk about e-learning and related issues
Making the most of the various social media channels to enable Learning Pool’s messages to be disseminated in a conversational style
Developing some e-learning for the public sector on social media: the background, the tools and their application
Special projects – where councils or other organisations need some help on a social media type project, I and the Learning Pool crew can offer a great mix of enthusiasm, inspiration and innovation as well as organisation and reliability

It’s going to be a blast. If you want to know any more, just drop me an email.

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