Once upon a time clip art was once cutting edge.
No, really. It was.
Back in 1997, the first Walsall Council website sported a dancing light bulb.
No, really. It did.
There’s also a notice telling people that the website was under construction (it’s slide number two on the presentation embedded in this post.) If you’re on a mobile device the embed may not be showing. If that’s the case the link is here.
We need to evolve, learn and innovate. Nothing demonstrates that better than the late 90s webpage frozen in time showing Billy the Bulb and one giant leap for a council website. Time has moved on and we need to too.
At the Socitm Learning from Better Connected event at Manchester there was plenty of examples of innovation.
Not least the forward-thinking webteam who ripped up the rule book and re-designed the liverpool.gov.uk website based on what people want rather than what officers think people want.
Here’s my preasentation that I’ve posted to Slideshare.
Included on it are:
Some stats on internet use.
Some stats on the mobile web.
A quick map of the Walsall media landscape 2011 and 2005.
A quick case study on engaging with the community through Flickr.
A quick case study on two hyperlocal sites: WV11.co.uk and Pelsall Common People.
How a countryside ranger can tweet from the sharp end.
Some stats on Walsall 24 which saw us live tweet for 24 hours in real time.
All good stuff for 2011, but you can bet your bottom dollar in 13 years time when we’ll All have robot butlers it’ll seem a bit tame and dancing lightbulbesque.
Quite right, too.
This is great stuff, of course.
But I want to hear more of these robot butlers. Personally I’m still outraged that I have to use a keyboard to enter data rather than just saying “Computer” in a commanding voice like on Star Trek.
Keep up the good work.