Nick Mudge’s Technology and Government Weblog

David Fletcher: "Each year, the number of political and government blogs grows at a rate faster than the previous."

2:27pm | government resources - egovernment - blogs - open government | no comments

From Neville Hobson:

Looking for something on one of the British government websites, I came across this - the blog being written by David Miliband, Minister of Communities and Local Government.

Not only a government minister but also a member of the Cabinet, the committee at the center of the British political system and the supreme decision-making body in government.

Just started blogging publicly in March.

Found it through Barbara Haven, a blogger and employee at the California Department of Technology Services.

12:36pm | government resources - egovernment - blogs - open government | no comments

Wayne Hall points out David Fletcher has a new post about Utah IT.

I liked Scoble's post today about blogging. I like the small things in blogs.

Forrester has come out with an interesting report about social computing. I think this is some interesting traction if Forrester is giving it thumbs up.

From the executive summary:

Individuals increasingly take cues from one another rather than from institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions, and political bodies. To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists.

I've heard that word of mouth is the most effective form of promotion or dissemination. I'm certainly more interested in what the people around me have to say about things than what I see on TV. I feel the same way about blogs. So this makes sense to me. It seems to me however that the internet and electronic communication gives individual word of mouth a microphone it never had before, and which has always been the great advantage of mass communication mediums.

Kansas City Star has a good piece on blogging.

I found the Kansas City Star story and Forrester report from Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion, which I'm liking.

I recently sent some emails to some bloggers and I got emailed back. I love it so much. That's one of my favorite things about blogs and the blogosphere is that when you are looking at a blog, the person is right there, ready to talk to you -- they are talking to you. If you are there, being a person, the person on the other end is there for you to talk to. I've had some of the best communication/email exchanges with bloggers. Connections are pure joy.

I told Alice Marshall about Govtech's new buttons. Government Technology has added a "Bookmark to Del.icio.us" button to all the news stories on the homepage, and to the GT Mag stories, and the Digital Communities stories.

The eRepublic IT department also recently informed me that they are also adding the del.icio.us bookmark to all the stories in the content categories, such as E-Government, GIS, Homeland etc. I think this is really cool, and I think this will then encompass all the stories on govtech.net. One of the things I've wanted and I know executives at eRepublic (the parent company) have wanted was to build more of a community around the subject of egovernment and technology in government on the internet. There are bloggers around interested in technology in government, so I think this is a nice step in the direction of involving govtech more with people online. Government Technology has also added a feedback button, so people can now easily send feedback about articles.

11:44am | web technology - egovernment | no comments

If unconferences are of any interest to you, you'll probably find this post by David Berlind very interesting: Old-school conferences R.I.P.

This post expains how a recent unconference was done and how it went.

I think regular conferences are good and I enjoy them. This unconference thing though seems rather fun and exciting to me as well.

I did a little news item about this unconference that this post talks about because ChicagoCrime.org won second place for best mashup.

10:32am | government resources - technology governance - egovernment - open government - public relations | no comments

I like this definition of social software from Wikipedia:

Social software lets people rendezvous, connect or collaborate by use of a computer network. The term came into more common usage in 2002, largely credited to Clay Shirky who organized a "Social Software Summit" in November of that year. Shirky defines social software as "stuff that gets spammed."

5:04pm | web technology - egovernment - blogs | no comments

Has anybody seen David Fletcher on the web recently? He hasn't blogged on his blog for awhile but I know he sometimes starts other blogs other places. His del.icio.us account also hasn't been active since January 13, which is kind of odd.

I check his blog about 5 days a week. It occurred to me that I'd probably keep checking his blog for about 6 months before I gave up.

11:49am | web technology - egovernment - blogs | no comments

Ramon Padilla wrote an interesting piece called Open source=political suicide?

4:56pm | government resources - egovernment - enterprise architecture | no comments

Gartner recently announced results of a survey of 1,400 CIOs.

Looks like organizations will be looking for innovative uses of technology to get ahead.

"Business leaders expect CIOs to run an effective technology operation," said Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP. "With that in place, executives are looking for ways in which IT can make the company more prominent in a competitive market. CIOs are looking to help the business stand out with strategic and innovative use of information, business processes, and intelligence in products and services. They are looking to use technology tools, rather than buying package solutions, to support competitive difference."

Commenting on the fact that business concerns over security breaches and disruptions fell from the second to the seventh ranked priority, Dr Blosch said, "This does not mean that security is no longer an issue. Rather, it indicates that in 2006 the business expects IT to be secure and is looking to the CIO to keep it that way." Overall, the survey found that IT spending on security related tools remains healthy at a projected average increase of 4.5 percent in 2006.

3:51pm | egovernment - workforce | no comments

Government Technology now has a Government Contract News site. It consists of newly awarded IT contracts awarded by state, local, and federal governments.

For years Government Technology has been sending out through email weekly, biweekly and monthly enewsletters about government IT. (GTEN is a daily) These newsletters are now being put on the govtech.net website as well. A brand new archive of these newsletters is on the lower part of the publications web page.

5:41pm | government resources - egovernment | no comments

There's a state blog about rural Utah.

Here's part of the description:

The primary purpose of "What's Happening in Rural Utah" is to share good news about economic development across rural Utah. In addition, we will share information about important economic development issues impacting rural Utah.

2:15pm | web technology - government resources - egovernment - blogs | no comments

About 3 weeks ago I went to the 2005 California Best of the Web.

I was standing in the hall and a lady got my attention. She told me she does the Experimental Space blog. I instantly knew who she was. I often check over at that blog because it has some good tech and egov news there sometimes and I like it. Recently I decided to post the New Oxford American Dictionary: 'Podcast' Is the Word of the Year story in GT News after seeing her mention it in her blog.

This is the first time I've met in person another blogger I knew about through the web, and who knew me through my blog (and we never directly communicated or address each other before, through email or anything. Just read each other's blogs.) It was exciting and I really enjoyed it, and I'm amazed by how similar our knowledge and action is. I asked her if she uses del.icio.us. She said yes, and said she reads David Fletcher's bookmarks. That's awesome. I told her I read his bookmarks too. (For a Govtech News editor, a Gov IT director's travels around the Web is an amazing resource.) I asked her how she knew it was me that does this blog that you're seeing right now. She said she read my name tag I was wearing; it said Nick Mudge.

I've read about other bloggers and people meeting in person. It's nice to experience it.

Afterwards I realized that one of the person's bookmarks I have within my del.icio.us account is bhaven, and I realized that those are Barbara Haven's bookmarks. I had been looking at her bookmarks without knowing who she was. I recently blogged about Tim Berners-Lee starting a blog, which I found through her bookmarks, though I knew it was her by then.

9:35pm | web technology - government resources - egovernment - blogs | no comments

This Hole in the Wall story was interesting.

2:23pm | egovernment - workforce | no comments

The state of Nevada has an Information Technology Research Unit.

Here's its Mission:

To research current and emerging areas of technology and other states trends to ensure efficient and cost effective deployment of government services, reduce the risks of innovation through IT analysis, and disseminate relevant information via various outlets.

On it's website to the left it has current links to the information technology departments of all 50 states, and to the right it is displaying GT News using the GT News RSS feed.

10:01am | web technology - government resources - govtech web site - technology governance - egovernment - rss - best practices | no comments

I found Dan Champion's new blog, Blether. He's a local government web manager for Clackmannanshire, Scotland.

Today he writes about Clackmannanshire's website ClacksWeb, accessibility, and usability testing.

I wonder how much usability testing like he says in his post is done in general for websites. I think usability testing is a great thing to do. I read a great book about it called Don't Make Me Think.

What does blether mean?

He says:

Blether is a Scots word which can be used as a verb or a noun. The verb means to chat idly, to chew the fat, to pass the time of day (you get the idea), for example "we were just blethering", as my wife tells me after an hour on the telephone to her sister.

7:41pm | web technology - egovernment - blogs | 1 comment

I've seen a lot of talk about Web 2.0 lately. Lot's of discussion about it and what it is. One of the next big buzzword in cyberspace.

I'm actually really excited about it because, to me, it summarizes down to a word many of the great new websites, applications and services I see coming on the Web. The Web as a platform, the Web as an OS.

In the past the idea of the Web has been a bunch of "pages" linked together. With Web 2.0 it's evolving more and more towards the more generic idea of streams of information. A Web page is only one format, one way of displaying an information stream, but there can be many different representations, formats, and relations of streams of information, and the way they interact. I think of Web 2.0 as putting data in more appropriate formats and relations from which it can be better utilized and interacted with.

Om Malik, a writer for Business 2.0 magazine, says in his blog:

I define Web 2.0 as a “collection of technologies - be it VoIP, Digital Media, XML, RSS, Google Maps… whatever …. that leverage the power of always on, high speed connections and treat broadband as a platform, and not just a pipe to connect.”

Wayne Hall, from NASTD, has an interesting post. He says:

State government consumers -- you and me, the citizens, the owners of the information held by state government -- could get such services from a set of information tagged and collected by aggregators like Del.icio.us, Flickr or Technorati, instead of using an "end-to-end" state government portal.

Heather Green from BusinessWeek asks the question: Information services or giants (Web portals), what's going to win the masses? Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist has a very good article about it.

New channels are opening up on the Web to better provide, disseminate and make information more useful. Governments can avail themselves of this, as some are starting to do. Some governments are formatting weekly radio addresses as podcasts on the Internet. Rhode Island frees state government information with its public XML Web service. Some state governments are putting their press releases and information in RSS feeds.

Tim O'Reilly has an article all about What is Web 2.0?.

Dave Winer (author of Really Simple Syndication, RSS 2.0) says, "Web 2.0 is really simple, it's RSS 2.0"

8:35pm | web technology - technology governance - egovernment - rss - xml - blogs - open standards - open government | no comments