Nice post from BIS’ Neil Williams on deciding up on a commenting system for the department’s website.
Go read the whole thing, but he summarises:
So what have we learned?
- People blogging about what they are up to is dead handy. Stephen and Jimmy writing their posts, me reading them, has saved you thousands of pounds. Direct cause and effect.
- Having the flexibility to embed stuff is awesome. Insist on it next time you buy a CMS. Hats off to the guys at Eduserv for really coming through for us on this one. We couldn’t put pages together like this and this and this without it.
- The growing availability of embeddable stuff is way cool. I’m excited about what else we might be able to achieve without dev work – like page ratings using Bazaarvoice and forums using Talki.
- We all need to think differently now. Few things we might want our website to do are going to be unique to us. Gov webbies, and suppliers of government web services, need to adapt and thoroughly check out 3rd party plugins before embarking on any kind of jiggery-bespokery. Why pay for our own learning curve when others have already been through it?
My take (which pretty much repeats what Neil has said:
- People sharing stuff via blogs is good and has measurable impact.
- In whatever you do, being flexible and open means you can make the most of developments in technology, or whatever.