Friday, June 29, 2007

Blog Report

Thomas Beck's blog contains some great information on e-government and web 2.0. It looks like he is involved with the Pennsylvania Business Solutions Center of Excellence and has a good idea how to integrate new solutions into improvement of existing government processes.

Kirk Keller's blog is about using social media in government.

The Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog was initiated by Secretary Leavitt of HHS who had more than a passing interest in blogs when he was the Governor of Utah. Yesterday was the final day of its 5 weeks of life. With respect to the blog, Secretary Leavitt states,
We have only been online for a little over a week and already more than 6,000 unique visitors have participated. People seem to be spending a fair amount of time on the blog once they get here so there is reason to be optimistic. We will learn as we go but I expect we will continue to expand this kind of discourse at HHS.
CDC Chatter is a forum for discussing issues at the Center for Disease Control.

The CDC Director also has a blog, although not well maintained.

Jeff Barson discusses Squarespace.com at ConnectBlogs. What looks interesting is the Squarespace form builder.

The eGov unit in Northern Ireland maintains this blog.

Lorenzo Cantoni mentions that 72% of online adults are using their PC to listen to audio content.

John Montgomery of Microsoft Popfly has recommendations for government. We'll probably want to do a review of Silverlight shortly.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

The Blogging Revolution and Government

Dr. David Wyld from Southeastern Louisiana University has written an interesting report, entitled The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0, in which he takes a brief look at the history of blogging in government. Overall, he has done a pretty good job of covering the topic in the last few years, although he misses some of the very interesting things that happened back in 2002-2004 and some of the rationale behind tech bloggers in government with more of a focus on the political bloggers that came later and entirely misses some of the best international egov bloggers like John Gotze, Alan Mather, and Carlos Guadian. Overall, he does a very good job of capturing the more recent history however. He also has some interesting thoughts on RFID.

Here's an executive powerpoint of the report which is covered here, here, and here.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

W3C and eGovernment

While I was away, the W3C sponsored a workshop on eGovernment and the web. They covered some great topics, including TBL's keynote on Widescale Data Integration. Other topics of note:
Kevin and Michelle got into some very interesting areas. I guess I didn't understand how much the Library of Congress had done with blogs and RSS feeds. And I certainly didn't realize that they were looking at Second Life and virtual worlds. Kevin provides some good statistics on why this is important as we look to the future of government online.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

National Information Exchange Model

Here's the latest NIEM executive presentation (6/26/07):

Translation Browser Buttons

I love Google's new translation browser buttons. You just drag the appropriate translate button to your bookmark toolbar and now you have instant translations. I have used Altavista's Babelfish for years, but this makes it even easier. The only problem is that I am using up all the space on my toolbar; "Swivel it", translate, "post to del.icio.us", etc. (even with high res on my 22" monitor).

Example: Utah.gov in Spanish , Utah.gov in Arabic (I can't validate the quality of Arabic)

Mindmapping eGov

I have been using Mindomo to map eGov within my context.



We are really trying to help people find what they are looking for when they visit Utah.gov, but even with the new site, in June I have created a list of over 100 things that people were looking for, but for some reason couldn't find. They include Social Security info, apartments in Brigham City, Horizon food card application, building codes, paying for speeding tickets, I-15 rest areas, Title 5 for older workers, etc. Some of these are not state services, but we still need to help people find them... others they are just not finding for whatever reason. We will create and evaluate this list on at least a monthly basis to continue to refine and improve the user experience.

The Economist has always been a favorite read for me. They published the 2007 e-readiness rankings sometime this year. Denmark and the U.S are at the top of their list again. No surprise there. More interesting than the rankings is some of the commentary about where the internet is headed regionally and globally.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

New eGov Sites

A number of new government sites that are worth noting...
  1. State of Kansas - Kansas has added a drag-and-drop portlet type of functionality to their portal. It is the first government site that I have seen do that.
  2. Center for Disease Control - The CDC has always had lots of good content and services. Their new site makes it easier to get to.
  3. State of Indiana - A very professional look.
Directgov (U.K) performed a survey of what new online services citizens want from their government. One idea that caught my interest was that one in seven 35-44 year olds want to be able to have face-to-face meetings such as job interviews or benefit claims renewals online. What do you think?

Techpresident reports that one of the candidates is now running around in Second Life. He'd probably make even a greater stir if he was running around in Ironforge as a night elf. It's also fun to see candidates like Mitt Romney creating a presence on YouTube.

Saturday, June 02, 2007

Where are we headed

I picked these up from Slideshare, one of many new great Web 2.0 services that I use regularly...



BBC's Creative Use of Web 2.0



This CIO agenda from Baseline makes the IT agenda look pretty stale and avoids some of the most interesting ways to create new value for the enterprise... or at least puts them down the list a ways so they lack priority and focus.