Nick Mudge’s Technology and Government Weblog

I have a new blog I am using. Check it out: www.nickmudge.info

1:07am | open government | Comments Off

Tod Newcombe, the editor of Public CIO magazine, has been writing some good stuff on his new Public CIO blog.

3:04pm | blogs - open government | no comments

Scott McNealy has stepped down. Jonathan Schwartz, President, and blogger, is now CEO.

Update: Tim Bray says bloggers are taking over the world.

3:18pm | open government | no comments

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

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

Comments from Christopher Fowler's blog:

Eric: If anyone actually read the Patriot act? The first line states, “Suspected” …has anyone even interested in this act ever been a suspected terrorist? Probably not..hence the act will never apply to you, personally, when they actaully root out terror, and the likes due to the act, all the people who opposed this act will be thanking it? Just my thoughts.

Christopher: If you inherently trust the government (I’m not judging that position) then there is nothing wrong with the Patriot Act, nor would there be any reason not to support domestic spying. If you feel that only those who are truely suspect are the only ones who will be monitored then I can understand your point of view.

If you feel that past actions by the government (i.e. McCarthyism, Watergate, etc) is proof that high level officials need oversight and can not be inherently trusted then you will see the Patriot Act and perceived violations by this administration as something to worry about regardless of ones likelihood of being a terrorist.

10:26am | open government | no comments

I'm working on a blog piece about the California Best of the Web. I have rather a lot to say, which is good, so it will be fairly long I think. I think I'll be done with it in a couple days.

2:20pm | open government | no comments

Jim Willis from the GOCC blog says, "Government agencies, with their directories full of rotting, static HTML docs, are ripe to skip right to the front of the class in the move to Web 2.0." Hell yea!

9:25am | web technology - xml - open government | no comments

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

In my opinion Govtech.net had one of its best months ever in September in terms of a lot of good content.

Here are the articles and news I found notable:

GT Mag Stories:

GT Online Features:

Digital Communities Website

News:

10:33pm | web technology - government resources - govtech web site - technology governance - egovernment - xml - identity - SOA - enterprise architecture - wireless - best practices - open source - open standards - open government - security - workforce | no comments

This month's cover story of Government Technology magazine is about workforce issues in state government IT. It is a really interesting article all the way around.

One of the things that interested me was the talk about the content on government websites in relation to younger generations. From a section of the article entitled The Right Medium:

Oregon's Scott Smith thought Oregon.gov, the state's new portal, would pass the critique of even the toughest audience -- his 16-year-old son. Smith is director of operations of Oregon's Information Resources Management Division (IRMD), and is also manager of the state's E-Government Program.

One night at home, he said, he showed the portal to his son and got a little surprise.

"I took him to the Oregon.gov portal and navigated through a lot of the different layers and different agencies," Smith recalled. "I told him we have 95,000 pages of information out there, and he just wasn't impressed. I was dumbfounded, and told him, 'This is a big deal. This is a lot of information. We've never had this before.'

"His comment was, 'Yeah, but you can't connect to it,'" Smith said.

12:59pm | govtech web site - egovernment - enterprise architecture - best practices - open government - workforce | no comments