Blogging

Civil servants, blogs and anonymity

Back onto one of my favourite subjects: bloggers’ anonymity. There’s plenty of background here.

Paul Johnston wrote in the comments:

Great to see this upswing in civil servant blogging, but quite understandably they seem to be anonymous. Very understandable in my opinion and in my view quite acceptable if that is what suits the individuals best. I assume these civil servants want to remain anonymous a) to reduce the likelihood of the media doing anything silly with what they write b) to emphasize that what they say has nothing to do with the views of their employer. Are you still uncomfortable with that, Dave?

I replied that it doesn’t make me uncomfortable, just that I think transparency is always preferable. Besides, Mark O’Neill of DCMS has revealed his identity, it’s just Chris the Digital Pioneer who is staying in the shadows for now. I guess it depends on what you are doing, and one of the victims of the brevity of the guidance is that it’s hard to apply it all to every way a civil servant can participate online.

Take the recent example of Dylan Jeffrey from DCLG posting a comment on this blog, giving his department’s position on a topic under discussion. Had he done this anonymously, it would have been pretty useless.

Jeremy Gould blogs openly as himself, and as a result has become influential in the world of eGov, and has done a significant amount to push the agenda forward. This wouldn’t have been posible if no-one knew who he was.

As for the liklihood of media twisting words or messages – well, Civil Serf pretty much answers that one. Point one is that the media will report it even if it is anonymous; and number two is that discovering the identity of the blogger becomes part of the game. In the meantime, the anonymous blogger, perhaps lulled into a false sense of security, has blogged things that perhaps they really shouldn’t and ends up in even more trouble once they are outed, which is inevitable.

I don’t really have that much of a problem with anonymous bloggers, really, I just think that nobody really stays anonymous for long and that whatever they are trying to achieve with their blog in the vast majority of cases would be more successful if their identity is known. There are exceptions: people in oppressive regimes, etc, but for civil servants, as the guidance says, “be a civil servant”!

A New Civil Servant Blogger

In what is, as far as I am aware, the first instance of  civil servant starting a blog because the new guidelines freed him up to do so, Mark O’Neill of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has begun a blog called Lost ConsCIOusness.

Good on him.

Do we need to start a list somewhere?

Edit: Justin points out in the comments that Digital Pioneer was also very quick out of the blocks. Welcome, Chris! You might just grab the gold medal if only for linking to me on just the second post…

Who’s left blogging?

Charlie Beckett writes entertainingly about the state of the presence of the political left in the UK blogosphere:

The Online Socialists have various problems.

No-one reads them. Guido Fawkes and his wicked Right-wing pals are far more entertaining and they know how to write for an online audience: scurriously, succinctly, directly. They are much more committed and actually contribute facts, stories and vitriol to the debate…

The Left bloggers want to change the world but they don’t want any responsibility. In this they are a mirror image of the right-wing blogosphere in the States.

This is a topic that Simon Dickson has picked up on several occasions, once pointing the finger at The Guardian‘s Comment is Free platform as overly-dominating online debate amongst liberals and left-wingers:

My theory, still in development, is that Comment Is Free is too big. If you want to read left-leaning blog content, you could start and finish on that one website, and wouldn’t miss much. And if you’re a leftie blogger, getting an item on Comment Is Free would put your rant in front of many times more readers than any solo blog.

It’s an interesting discussion. Can conservatives really be better at online than lefties in this country? And does it fit with other media – newspapers, magazines etc? I think there is probably an argument that The Spectator is a better read than The New Statesman, but then Prospect is better than Standpoint, so that’s kind of cancels itself out.

Online is important though, especially at time of political change, and of course we have one of those coming up in the next couple of years when we have a general election. Not only will comment-based blogs come to the fore, but parties and candidates will need to leverage the online during their campaigns just as Obama and others did in the States. I would hope they are planning what they are going to do now, otherwise it can end up being a bit of a mess.

Postscript: Charlie Beckett is going to be talking at 2gether08. Am signed up to go along for what should be a really interesting session.

WordPressers – make your URLs readable!

I’ve noticed that quite a few folk who have installed their own version of WordPress (as opposed to those that use WordPress.com) haven’t got round to making the URLs (the bit that appears in the address bar of a browser) of their posts ‘human readable’.

In other words, they look like http://www.myblog.com/?p=1027 rather than http://www.myblog.com/postsubject.

Why would you want to make your links appear in this way?

  1. It helps in search engine optimisation – if the link says something about the content, Google etc like it
  2. It makes it easier for people to know what they are getting before they follow a link to your site
  3. It probably helps accesibility-wise
  4. IT JUST LOOKS NICER!

That’s enough reasons. Anyway, if you are a WordPress user, changing the way your post URLs – or ‘permalinks’ as they are known – is pretty easy. All the options are in the control panel, just click Settings then Permalinks and choose an option from:

  • Default: http://davepress.net/?p=123
  • Day and name: http://davepress.net/2008/06/17/sample-post/
  • Month and name: http://davepress.net/2008/06/sample-post/
  • Numeric: http://davepress.net/archives/123

I use the second option, day and name. Once you have made your choice, just hit Save. That should be it.

The only complication because of the way a file is setup on your server, called .htaccess. For WordPress to make the changes to your post URLs, it needs access to write to this file. If it, can’t, it will provide you with the code you need to paste into your .htaccess file to get it all to work. Don’t worry, this is pretty simple and you should be able to do it within your web host’s control panel.

Another thing not to worry about are all those links out there on the web linking to your old, number based, post URLs – these will still work!

John Hayes: Another Bloggin’ Boss

John Hayes, a Director at the Improvement & Development Agency, has started a blog – and started it really promisingly, too:

So, having taking my own personal plunge into this Web 2 pool with this my first blog, I’m hoping I can encourage other local government staff and councilors to use this medium as an additional channel for dialogue and debate, and that the transparency will serve to illustrate that we are all working towards the same goals of better government and improved services for our citizens.

Just the sort of thing we need to hear following the events of the last week!

Load more posts!