Striking pictures leap from a page and grab the reader by the throat.
They demand attention, illustrate a point and reel a reader in.
So why the ruddy heck are so many blogs laid out pictureless like telephone directories?
Am I being unrealistic? Maybe. I’ve worked in the media for more than a decade and I’m used to thinking text plus pictures. Not everyone is wired that way. Fair enough.
But I’m a reader too and you know yourself something that looks rubbish has a stronger chance of getting overlooked.
Yes, through blogging you swiftly publish content. Being able to chuck stuff up is a strength.
But please, remember that a dowdy looking page may not ever get read.
They’re a good marriage of words and pictures. You’re drawn into them.
FIVE things to do to add pictures…
1. Use your own pictures. It’s surprising what good images you have. Particularly if you are David Bailey.
2. Use Creative Commons pictures Flickr.com is a brilliant resource but it’s also a community so remember to be polite. If you are looking for a shot of a farm gate search ‘Farm + gate + creative commons.’ You’ll get some interesting results. Creative commons gives you permission to use a pic so long as you observe certain conventions.
3. Free to use stock image websites. Help yourself so long as you sign in. You’ll have to pay for the best ones. Not so best are usually free.
4. Use the ‘blog this’ button on Flickr. Many pictures you can add straight to your blog by following a set of instructions but be careful. The pic comes at the same size everytime and appears in the top right hand corner. It also publishes straight away which means you could have some surprised people scratching their head at their RSS feed of an empty page with a picture floating there unless you add pre-written content pronto.
5. Don’t steal. Yes, it’s tempting just to save to desktop but it’s better not to.
If William Wordsworth was alive today he’d be using Twitter.
Not the old stick-in-the-mud he became but the young man fired by revolution.
Why? Because he celebrated the English countryside through the media of the day.
How we think of the landscape was shaped by Wordsworth. Before him, mountains were frightful places. After? Beautiful. And Willie cashed in with an 1810 Guide to the Lakes that was the iphone app of its day.
Exploring how our countryside team could use social media made me trawl through some examples.
Whoever said places work can really well on social media were bang on. That’s especially true of parks and countryside. So how is social media being used by to promote the countryside? There’s some really good ideas in patches out there but nothing fundamentally game changing that makes you sit up and write verse. That says to me that there is plenty of potential.
Photography should be at the heart of what the public sector does with countryside and parks. Why? Because a picture tells a 1,000 words. Because they can bring a splash of green into someone’s front room or phone at one click. Criminally, many sites should be promoting the countryside relegate images to a postage stamp picture.
Here are 10 interesting uses:
1. The British Countryside Flickr group has more than 4,000 members and some amazing images. It’s a place where enthusiastic amateur photographers can share pictures and ideas.
2. Peak District National Park chief executive Jim Dixon leads from the front. He blogs about his job at www.jimdixon.wordpress.com and tweets through @peakchief. It’s a good mix of retweeting interesting content and puts a human face on an organisation.
3. Foursquare, Walsall Council added a landmark in a park as a location. The Pit Head sculpture in Walsall Wood was added to encourage people to visit and check-in. You can also make good use of ‘tips’ by adding advice.
4. On Twitter, @uknationalparks represents 15 UK national parks run a traditional Twitter feed with press releases, RTs and some conversation. With 2,000 followers it’s on 145 lists.
5. But you don’t have to be in a national park to do a goods job. In Wolverhampton, @wolvesparkies have a brilliantly engagingly conversational Twitter stream. There is passion, wit and information that make most councils seem the RSS press release machine that they are.
6. National Trust have an excellent Facebookprofile. You may get the impression that members are 65 and own a Land Rover. That doesn’t come across here. They observe one of the golden rules of social media. Use the language of the platform. It’s laid back and it’ll tell you when events are planned.
Yorkshire Dales by Chantrybee
7. Even more relaxed is the quite new I Love Lake District National Park is quite brilliant. It allows RSS, it blogs and it really encourages interaction. Heck, they even encourage people to post to the wall so they can move shots into albums.
8. On YouTube, West Sussex County Council have a slick short film on tree wardens that deserves more than 45 views in five months. Or does this show how much take up there is on YouTube?
9. The rather wonderful parksandgardens.ac.uk is an ambitious online tool for images of 6,500 parks and gardens and the people who created and worked in them. @janetedavis flagged this up. It’s a project she worked on and she should be proud of it. There’s a school zone to to connect to young people too and is populated by google map addresses and photographs. Really and truly, council parks and countryside pages should look like this but mostly don’t.
10. Less a government project, or even social media Cumbria Live TV celebrate the landscape they work in utterly brilliantly. Slick and powerful broadcast quality three minute films do more than most to capture the jaw dropping awe of the fells. They self-host some brilliant films on a changing site. Check them out here.
EIGHT things you CAN do aside from write bad poetry about daffodils and shepherds called Michael…
1. A Facebook fan page to celebrate a park or open space. Call it I love Barr Beacon. Yes, the Friends group can use it as a meeting place. But naming it after the place not the organisation leaves the door open to the public too.
2. Give a countryside ranger a Twitter account. Use @hotelalpha9 as an inspiration. Let them update a few times a day with what they’ve been up to. Post mobile phone pictures too.
3. Despite a dearth of amateur good examples there’s potential in short films to promote countryside. You only have to point a camera at something photogenic for people to come over all Lake Poet.
Flowers by Vilseskogen
4. Start a Flickr group to celebrate your patch of countryside. Walsall has 1,000 acres of parks and countryside with amazing views and vistas.
5. Start a blog. WordPress takes minutes to set-up and after messing around only a short time to master. Tell people what you are up to. Whack up a few images. Lovely. For no cost.
6. Make your countryside and parks pages a bit more web 2.0. Use mapping to set out a location. Use Flickr images – with permission – to showcase the place.
7. Add your parks and countryside to a geo-location site such as Foursquare. If the future of social media is location, location, location then venues, landmarks and places will score big.
8. Text. With more mobile phones in the UK than people sometimes the humble text message can be overlooked as part of the package of ways to connect with people. Most councils are also text enabled. Create info boards around a park or countryside with numbers to text to recieve info on what they can see. Change it for the seasons to make best use.
Picture credits:
Newlands Valley, Lake District, UK: Dan Slee.
Wordsworth: Creative commons courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
In Ben Stiller’s blockbuster ‘Night at the Musem’ exhibits burst to life when the public aren’t around.
Cowboys and Indians come alive and a giant dinosaur plays fetch with a bone.
Walsall museum stores aren’t quite on a par with Washington DC’s Smithsonian but one thing is the same: You’d be amazed what you can find.
Thousands of items are stored as only a fraction can be put on public display at one time.
So how would social media connect a museum stores with residents? Here’s how. In a way that is way cooler than Ben Stiller.
THE EVENT ITSELF…
One Spring Saturday, photographers of the Walsall Flickr group were given special access all areas to take pictures at Walsall Council’s museum stores.
Street signs, an ARP helmet, and typewriters were just some of the treasure trove.
So were items of the nationally important Hodson Shop collection, a huge collection of working class clothes from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Eight photographers spent more than two hours poring over hundreds of artefacts.
What resulted in an amazing explosion of pictures of often rarely seen treasures. Take a look at some of the shots here.
More than 150 images were posted on Flickr in the days after and more than a dozen positive comments were posted on the group’s discussion board.
PLANNING FOR THE EVENT…
Why bother? Why arrange this?
It’s as simple as this: what’s not to like about pictures of Walsall artefacts taken by Walsall people?
Simple as the idea was, three months of planning led to the event itself.
Much praise needs to be given to talented photographer Steph Jennings (@essitam on Twitter) and the forward-thinking Walsall museum curator Jennifer Thomson supported by collections officer Catherine Clarke. Why praise? Because both parties started from different positions and arrived at not just a workable compromise but a groundbreaking piece of work that sets new standards.
REACHING AN AGREEMENT ON COPYRIGHT CONCERNS…
At the heart of everything was copyright.
Museums traditionally are very careful to guard copyright of their artefacts.
On the flip side, photographers are very careful to guard their copyright too.
In the past, museums have allowed photographers to take shots only in highly controlled circumstances with copyright signed away.
The Walsall approach was different.
The compromise that was brokered was this: photographers retain copyright so long as they accepted that they wouldn’t be able to bring tripods to take saleable pro shots.
That was fine as the Walsall Flickr members didn’t want to sell images.
The group also agreed to limit the size of the shots they uploaded to 1MB and agreed to ask permission before they used the images.
Crucially, what made this process work was the genuine commitment to make the event work by both Steph and the museum team.
When social media works well it sees a two way discussion. Brilliant things can happen.
An unexpectedly marvellous spin off led to the setting-up of a museum Flickr group to encourage people to submit images.
AN UNEXPECTED SPIN-OFF…
This isn’t just shots of the museum but a place where, as Steph suggested, pics can now be submitted for ‘shadow’ exhibitions. Planning an exhibition on seaside holidays? That shot of Great Aunt Maude paddling at Weston-super-Mare can be submitted and used as part of a revolving powerpoint of similar images. That’s something the whole family can go and see. Excellent.
This isn’t a Walsall Council success story, for my money. This is a Walsall success story. It was the coming together of museum staff, the communications unit and most of all the enthusiasm of the borough’s thriving and talented Flickr group that made this work.
What we found can work here can easily work anywhere.
Hosting a Flickr meet: Five benefits to the museum.
1. Connecting with non-traditional audience.
2. Showcasing exhibits and helping to find an online audience for heritage.
3. Art. Great pictures are just that. Art. What better way to showcase your artefacts?
4. A set of marketing pictures. At Flickr members’ suggestion the group were happy for their images to be used by the musem. Many amateurs are keen to get an audience for their work in return for a link to their Flickr page and a pic credit.
5. Pictures to link to via a Twitter stream.
Attending the Flickr meet: Four benefits to the photographer.
1. Rare behind-the-scenes access.
2. Being able to retain copyright of images.
3. A unique photographic challenge.
4. A chance – if you are happy to – to showcase your work through council marketing.
Thanks to: Jennifer Thomson and Catherine Clarke from Walsall museum. Steph Jennings and the members of the Walsall Flickr group who attended the session.
As brilliant ideas go the ‘unconference’ is as good as tea and a slice of cake on a summers day.
Get like-minded people in one place and then decide what you are going to talk about on the day. You’d be amazed at the hot house ideas that emerge.
Believe it or not the first event described by such a term was the XML Developers Conference of 1998 in Montreal in Canada.
How does an unconference – or Barcamp – work? Basically, four or five rooms are used with different subjects being discussed in each in hour long slots. Feel like saying something? Just chip in. It’s as simple as that.
They work brilliantly in and around government where there is a willingness to share ideas without being hampered by private sector hang up about competition and bottom lines.
They work well in the hyperlocal community too – Talk About Local have run excellent events – and they’ve even gravitated into the travel industry.
Some of the most exciting thinking I’ve come across has been at unconferences. It’s not exaggeration to say Localgovcamp Birmingham in 2009 utterly revolutionised the way I think and approach my job.
Elsewhere, UKgovcamp in January saw around 120 people with five rooms and eight slots. That’s 32,000 possible combinations. In other words, a lot of knowledge and conversations. Coming back from one such event in London as the train was passing through the Oxfordshire countryside one clear thought struck me.
Isn’t it about time we made the brilliance of the unconference fit into the day job?
Invariably, those who go are innovators. This is great. In local government, there is a need for these key events every few months if for nothing else than the sanity of those who blaze a trail sometimes with little support. But how do you get the message through to the 9 to 5-ers and policy makers who would also really benefit?
It’s an idea I’ve kicked around idly with a few people. Myself and Si Whitehouse mulled this over at the London Localgovcamp. I like the phrase ‘Locallocalgovcamp’ he came up with. It has the spirit of localgovcamp but it’s a lite version.
What it may be is this: A space where ideas could be kicked around in the informal, unconference style.
But crucially, there maybe an item or a hook pre-advertised that may encourage slightly less adept to come along. Besides, it’s easier to convince your boss to let you go to an event if you know you’ll get something out of it. The pitch of ‘Cheerio boss, I’m off now to drink coffee with geeks and I may just learn something’ is not as compelling as ‘Cheerio, boss, I’m going to this event to learn x and if y and z too.’
The idea of the local meet-up itself is not especially something new.
London digital people in government do something called ‘Tea Camp’. A 4-6pm slot in a department store cafe. Tea. Cake. Conversation. All seems dashed civilised idea. Besides, there’s a critical mass all working in a small area.
Perhaps it’s time for a regional version of this. The West Midlands where I live and work sees an inspiringly vibrant digital community. There is also seven councils within a 30 mile radius.
So what would an as-part-of-the-day-job West Midlands bostin social event look like?
Two hours? Two rooms? Two sessions? Or is that too short?
Once upon a time there was something more powerful than Twitter, MySpace and Facebook combined.
It was a platform that brought people together and allowed a you a chance to paint on a blank canvas with music.
This, ladies and gentleman was the mixtape.
This was a cassette filled with tracks you’d selected. It wasn’t just art. It was an art.
For over 25s the mixtape was the status update of the day. They could be a love letter, a sign of friendship or the grandstanding of musical knowledge. All recorded across two sides of a C90 cassette with 45 minutes on each side (or if you were a real oddball, a C60).
From the 1970s to the mid-1990s the cassette was a standard medium for music. With my bedroom too small for all but a ghetto blaster cassettes were the way I listened to music. I wasn’t alone. As a teenager, music was massively important. It help shape who I was. Through it all, mixtapes were how I circulated my thoughts.
Brian Eno used to make mixtapes for his mates. He’d record slow classical music movements back-to-back. They were a prototype to the ambient music he pioneered.
“Composers hadn’t caught up,” he recalled on BBC Radio Four’s Frontrow .
“People didn’t buy records and sit at home between two speakers listening to an LP.
“They bought music and they were cooking or washing up with music in the background.
“New technology means new music. Always.”
In 1990, more than 400 million cassettes were sold in the US. Many for home taping and unlike the slogan no, it didn’t kill music. But what did die was the cassette as a popular platform. By 2007 barely 200,000 cassettes were sold in the US. Those figures are likely to be reflected in the UK.
SO, WHAT ARE THE MIXTAPE RULES?
When making mixtapes I’d arrived at a series of golden rules. Always start with two fast paced corkers one after the other. Make the third slower. Surprise with a build between fast and slow. Be unexpected. And never, ever let the tape run out before the track finished. Ever.
In High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s story of a music obsessive the mixtape is a way repressed men could communicate. He impressed his girlfriend with a mixtape.
In the late 1990s powered with red wine I compiled a cassette for a girl. With Stereolab, The Stone Roses, The La’s and The Beatles it was a combination of care and bravado. Just enough sensitivity with a layer of cool disregard just in case.
The girl who I made that tape for 12-years ago, dear reader, is now my wife. The tape? Somewhere in the loft.
MIXTAPE NIGHT SCHOOL? VIA TWITTER?
A rather marvellous conversation on Twitter sparked the idea of Mixtape night classes. Like woodwork or macrame these skills could be kept alive at Stafford College. What would those sessions look like? Check @janetedavis’ quite excellent Mixtape night school syllabus. There is input there from @sarahlay and @jvictor7 too.
Philip John’s excellent blog on how Spotify risks failure by not tapping into the social side of compiling play lists is here.
Jim Anning’s Twitpic of his mixtape. I could have had a borrow of that back in the day. The shot is here.
A mixtape USB stick. The dream present for geek music lovers over 25. Amazing. Thanks to @cahrlottetwitts it’s here.
You can rely on Flickr for having a mixtape group. They’re here.
Steph has written a fantastic post about the mix CD that her chap James game to her in the mid-1990s. It shows brilliantly the stories behind the homemade selections. Read it here.
Epic visionary Sarah Lay has written a great piece on what the mixtape means to her. It’s a great read and it’s here.
Jamie Summerfield blogged about how a mixtape helped provide the answer after his father died. You can read it here.
This is genius. An idea by Andrew Dubber for a mixtape making service was picked up by a Canadian web developer who created this wonderful, amazing, brilliant thing here.
“Given enough coffee,” someone famous once wrote “I could rule the world.”
Bet they weren’t drinking Mellow Birds, though.
There’s something brilliant about a good cup, convivial company and the caffinated exchange of ideas.
It’s no surprise that Social Media Cafes have sprung up across the globe as the rise of social networking spreads. There are more than 20 in the UK inspired either consciously or unconsciously by London’s Tuttle Club and Lloyd Davis. They are listed here.
Aside from the general social media coffee drinking government (local and national) in London provide the quite marvellously titled Tea Camp.
Birmingham has an inspirational Social Media Cafe, but then again Brum is a hugely inspirational digital place with a vibrant grassroots community. I like the way it’s monthly cafe describes itself as: “a place for people interested in social media to gather, get acquainted, chat, plot, scheme, and share.”
But what makes a good one? It’s not always enough just to do it Field of Dreams-style ‘build it and they will come.’
Of the 20 who came to the first meeting in Costa Coffee, Wolverhampton organised by David Stuart three remain regulars including David, yet far more interesting people have come along to take their place.
We’ve met in six venues in three towns sometimes daytime, some times not.
Here are some thoughts which are by no means a definitive list ….
You can’t please everyone all the time.
Twitter people seem more receptive to Social Media Cafes.
There’s people who can’t come to events in the daytime. Ditto evening.
Big cities with creative sectors can support a ‘turn up and chat’ Social Media Cafe. Small towns have less chance.
Smaller communities respond better to events with some networking and speakers.
People with jobs who need something to show for disappearing out of the office for two hours respond to speakers.
A Facebook and a Twitter presence are a must.
Don’t rely on old media for publicity. The BCSMC were told by one reporter that they wouldn’t publicise the event since: “this was a competing medium.”
Online polls to decide venues don’t work. Ask David Stuart.
It’s better to have a leading figure who is not anti-social – particularly when meetings are arranged around online polls (only joking, David).
Somewhere close to train or bus links helps.
An arts centre or a place where creative people hang out is a good place to hold a cafe.
If you’re looking to cover a region or a county a big, big section of people just won’t travel. The prospect of some Stourbridge types travelling to Walsall, for example, is on a par with Mars exploration.
Get somewhere that sells good coffee. It’s more important than wifi.
The law of 4th XI cricket applies to this the same as other voluntary organisations. A few people do a lot. If 40 people say they’ll come, 10 will.
Okay. Cards on the table. For the last 12 months I’ve been coming across geeks who have been banging on about data with a religious zeal.
You can see them wherever digital people meet-up with their Atari t-shirts and their Mash theState badges.
Internet creator Tim Berners-Lee a while back got an entire conference to chant ‘free the data!’ over and over.
Why?
What the flip is data? Why the flip should I be bothered? I’m just a local government press officer.
It was Tom Watson MP who I first heard talk about data in the summer of 2009 at the Black Country Social Media Cafe.
Gradually, after scores of conversations, blog reading and thinking it’s started to makesome sense.
What has emerged to me is a picture of the potential for nothing short of a revolution. In life and by extension in local government.
What is data?
It’s information. It may be bicycle accidents. It may be crime figures. It may be the location of street lights or a leisure centre.
Pretty boring, yes?
On it’s own probably. But it starts to get really, really interesting when that information gets presented in an easily digestible way. Like on a map, say.
It gets even more interesting when several streams of information are put on the same map. It can make the world we live in look a different place.
Yes, but that’s the whole point. It’s information – or data – that’s buried away which is fabulously interesting if you were a cyclist. You could find out where the accident blackspots were and avoid them. Or maybe campaign for something to be done about them.
The open street map is one such editable map with scores of snippets of data.
In the West Midlands, the MappaMercia project have kicked some ideas around. The gritting map of Birmingham is one example of turning data into something interactive. It plots gritting routes around the city which are treated in icy weather.
Start to make sense?
Here is a Q and A. It’s an idiot’s guide to data written by an eejit after talking and listening. It’s not a definitive. But it’s one take on what data will mean for local government.
What is data?
Data is information. Simple as that. Broadly speaking, this can be on a whole range of subjects. It could be weather data, news data, scientific data or government data. Even what time the 404A bus route runs from Cradley Heath to Walsall can be classed as data.
What about personal data?
All that stuff isn’t really of interest to enthusiasts who want to build maps and mess about with things. However, every time you use your Tesco Clubcard that data gets stored by Tesco. The supermarket giant then use that to build a picture of what lines are doing well and also a snapshot of your shopping habits.
Isn’t data available anyway?
If you are Sherlock Holmes and you look hard enough there’s a stack that could be found. But that’s just it. In the 21st century we expect more than just that information is stored in filing cabinets that may or may not be open to the public twice a year. In 430 different locations (one for every local council).
But isn’t data about bus routes and bus arrival times like, really, really boring?
To you maybe. But if you catch the 404A from Cradley Heath you’d want to know when the buses left and – here’s the nub – how reliable they were.
What is a ‘mash-up’?
This is where information has been taken and presented in a different format. On a fun level, the United Cakedom mash-up plots where cake reviews were carried out. There’s also a picture and a link to the blog that carried them.
Yes, but what does this mean for local government?
It means more transparency.
It means that people can see what is going on. It can also means that better informed decisions can be made by decision makers. That has to be good.
What would the average council officer think of making data freely available?
Frankly, they may be terrified.
Why?
If you are working at a particular coalface you may think that the information you are collecting is actually yours.
It can be sat on an officer’s hard drive and jealously guarded.
The officer may be worried at how this information plays out amongst residents. It could lead to criticism and awkward questions being asked. That’s democracy.
Why should local government officers not worry?
Frankly, many of the decisions about releasing data are being made at a very senior level in Government. More than 3,000 data sets – that’s packets of useful information – have been made available by the British Government via data.gov.uk.
Are there any amusing examples of data worry?
The Localgovcamp event in London recently heard of an example of how the Royal Mail stepped in to ask a council to stop mapping Victorian postboxes as the information ‘could be of use to terrorists’.
There was also the worry that a grit bin map could be used by grit thieves at a time of short supply.
What’s all this fuss about data.gov.uk?
This is a website for masses of data to be made available.
What sort of information can be found there?
It’s a range of public information from birth rates to accident statistics to death rates.
Isn’t data.gov.uk difficult to understand to the lay person?
Yes and no. It’s all in one place which makes a start. But the real beauty is when web developers get their hands on it and make easy to use applications like the iphone ASBOmeter that tells you where and how often anti-social behaviour orders are handed out by courts.
What about council websites? What does this mean for them?
Previously, there was effectively one door to knock on for council information. The council website. That’s changing.
As data becomes freely available anyone tech-savvy can build a website and display council data. Remember, as taxpayers it is effectively theirs.
Remember the bicycle accident site? People would be more inclined to go there rather than turn detective. See? See how it starts to work?
Do council websites do nothing then?
No, not at all. It means that as the bar has been raised to present information council web people will have to learn new skills. Interactive mapping is a must. Simply posting a pdf that won’t show up in a google search just isn’t good enough.
Is this political?
Different political parties are starting to construct policies around it. It’s not for me to comment on the rights and wrongs of those parties.
Undoubtedly, in local politics the trends and anomolies thrown up by open data will enter into the political arena.
So, this is all about big government then isn’t it?
Not really. There’s a stack of data collected by government both local and national.
There’s also a lot more which individuals create, either consciously or unconsciously. It happens every time you use the web, for example. Google checks where you are clicking so it can rank pages accordingly. When you follow someone on Twitter data is collected. Add a picture to Flickr and more gets created.
Can we go off as local government officers and build Google maps? And what about Ordnance Survey?
Err, no. No blog about the public sector and maps is complete without a line about Ordnance Survey. This is the state-owned organisation that licenses people, companies and state owned bodies, such as councils, for the right to use maps.
Right now, there is a row going on between OS and Google which means that local government people can’t use Google maps. This may change in the near future.
Not heard enough? What does world wide web creator and brains behind data.gov.uk Tim Berners-Lee say about it?
There is a brilliant TED talk on data which should be required viewing. You can view it here.
During it (at about 4 minutes 30 seconds) he shows a clip of Hans Rosling using data visualisation to shatter a commonly held myth about poverty. People in non-western countries die early with big families. Right? Wrong. Not any more they don’t. He used birth and death data to create an animated chart to bring alive his argument.
1. Remember that data collected by local government doesn’t belong to local government. Or the officer that collected it. It belongs to residents.
2. Realise it’s going to happen anyway. It’s not your decision. Open data is often Government level.
3. Start using data to feed back into the decision making process. Maybe there is a site out there that can be used?
4. Raise the bar when presenting information on council websites. Think maps. Think RSS feed too.
5. Realise that data no matter how boring to you is madly interesting to somebody somewhere.
6. Look for data that can be made public. A map with layers to show who your councillor is, where the leisure centre is and where the library is is a start. Add past election results too.
Start to make sense now?
Creative commons credits
Data – Patrick Hoesly, Bike – Kicki, Seventies computer – AJ Mexico, Caramel – Matthew Murray, Handheld – Zach Klein, Tim Berners-Lee – Farm4Static.
This was drawn-up after the ‘What makes an ace local government website?’ session at #ukgc10 by Liz Azyan from Camden Council and also the #ukgc10 WordPress session. Some extra thoughts were inserted after…
You’re in a rush. You’re going swimming. You’ve three minutes to find out when the nearest leisure centre closes… and you’re face with a council website.
This could be a pleasant experience and for many it is. But if you’re unlucky you’ll be faced with a sprawling brick wall behemoth of a website written in a funny language riddled with jargon.
Oh, Lord. It’s not gritting information, for example. It’s a winter service plan.
Your opinion of your council suddenly plummets and you hurl abuse at the screen.
But ladies and gentlemen, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Liz Azyan’s session at the UK Government Bar Camp ’10 at Google was a thought provoking session with some cracking points.
Cards on the table at this stage. I don’t work in a web team. I work with them and more to the point I’m a council taxpayer who uses one.
Here are some points that emerged from the session — sprinkled with some that struck me afterwards.
What do people want?
They want to find the information they are after. Simple.
What do they often find?
A website written in council speak with difficult to find pages presented poorly. In short a frustrating experience.
Tech frustration by CCB Images / Flickr
So, why bother with a council website?
It’s an argument that – surprisingly – seems still to exist in some quarters. Isn’t it just a big waste of money? Actually, no. Quite the reverse. After getting attacked for wasting money by TPA Lincolnshire Council responded with a cool, calm and brilliantly argued piecethat argued that the cost of web was staggeringly lower than employing people to help face-to-face or over the telephone. It’s worth taking a look at.
What’s the average cost of contact via a council website?
For contact, read an occasion a member of the public needs to contact the council.
Face to face £7.81
Telephone £4.00
Online £0.17
Which does make you think. Vast resources get put – rightly – into a help desk or a one stop information shop. Often, web is seen as a poor relation.
There is also a theory that telephone numbers should be hard to find. If you have cost savings in mind pushing people towards the £4 option may not make good sense.
Do Local Government websites pay enough attention to design and appearance?
The hell they do. Some of them look utterly dreadful. There’s an organisation called SOCITM who seek to raise standards in government. Every year they survey Local Government sites on a checklist. Accessibility is key. So is usability. But nothing seems to get assessed on design.
One point that Devon’s Carl Haggerty made very strongly – which I totally agree with – is the need for this to change. Design and look IS important. If the website looks poor people won’t even get as far as starting a search.
As someone who has worked on newspapers and has put together magazines the look of something is fundamental. Look across the news stands. From the unscientific straw poll in the session colour seemed to be important.
Why should we bother to make websites better?
We need to improve because people’s expectations are higher.
We need to improve because at a time of tighter budgets web is a cost effective solution.
We also need to improve because while once council websites had a virtual monopoly on local information those days are changing.
As barriers are lowered – by things like WordPress and by the surge in hyperlocal blogs – others can do the job themselves. The case of the tech-savvy Birmingham residents who knocked up their own council website – bcc.diy.co.uk should send wake-up calls throughout local government. If you don’t do it, they are basically saying, someone else will.
As more and more data gets released web developers will find their own uses for it. Leisure centres? There’s an app for that. The days of the council website being a monopoly are ending. Smart people are just starting to wake up to that.
Yes, but it’s all about the home page, isn’t it?
The figures can vary widely. Around 15 per cent of people came onto the site through the home page from one council. That’s not much more than one in ten. A piddling figure. Especially when you take account the time and effort that goes into it. But in another council researched after the session was around 90 per cent.
Brent Council's opt in less busy webpage.
The moral of the story to local government webbies is to research your web stats before changes are made.
Can you make your homepage less busy?
Yes. Brent council offers the option of the traditional busy page and a more simple one. That quite appeals to me.
So how do people navigate around your site if they do do that?
There’s your website search box. Which often isn’t that great. Even if it’s a google one, apparently. From the experience of several councils much time and effoft is wasted bu users here.
There’s your A-Z of services too.
There’s also the postcode search which to me seems rather attractive and far more relevant. If I lived in Baswich in Stafford, wouldn’t it be better to tell me what was on offer for me there?
There’s also the novel idea of a pictorial map. You point at it. You hover over the bits you want and you click through there. Directgov have a rather attractive planning map that does that.
Widgets. Redbridge Council have use this. It’s a similar theory to the igoogle approach where you compose the page that you want from the information that you want. The idea is great but feedback suggests that only small numbers of people have embraced this
The message from Liz’s session was that as far as search is concerned you need to pick one way and stick to it. Sites that try and do absolutely everything in the way of search look cluttered, busy and turn people off.
How about open source (and what the hell does that mean?)
At the WordPress #ukgc10 session the idea of WordPress as a web content managament system was talked about. There is much going for it. It’s open source. Which for non-geeks means that you don’t have to pay someone a lorry load of cash to buy it and maintain it. It’s free. You can download it from www.wordpress.com and web developers who know what they are doing can build you widgets so you can customise things to suit your ends.
The downloadable version of WordPress is from WordPress.org while WordPress.com is where you get your hosted versions.
There are plenty of examples of Government using open source. The 10 Downing Street web site relies on it in parts for it’s press operation. So do almost half UK government departments in one shape or another. It’s great if you need an emergency website knocked up at short notice.
However, the feedback was that there was a 500-page limit on WordPress. That’s probably more than enough for some sites but bigger projects may be hampered by that limitation.
But how about the Birmingham City Council experience? (insert clap of thunder here.)
There has been plenty written about the Birmingham experience. But if you haven’t come across it it’s a tale to strike fear into local government web managers up and down the land.
In short, Birmingham City Council appointed consultants to build their website. The final bill was more than many expected and wasn’t as good as people were expecting. It led to Press criticism.
The Birmingham bloggers build a DIY site when they were less than impressed with the council version.
There is a thriving community of bloggers and the digitally-connected in Birmingham. They decided to build their own DIY council site by taking the data that was publicly available and constructin their own website.
Based on open source and while it may look rough at the edges, it is a site born of social media and built by community-spirited people eager to do their own thing. That it cooked a snook at authority to boot was for some a bonus.
They came up with something based on a postcode search and using stunning Flickr imagery of their home city.
It’s legacy will be more than a website. It’s legacy is a warning shot that internet users have a powerful voice and if you don’t provide them with something they’luse and be impressed by, they may well build their own. As a warning shot to council it’s there to be heeded.
So, how about asking people what they think of your site?
I’m impressed with the Camden Council Facebook group set up to see what people thought of their site. An impressive use of social media. Bold, imaginative and connecting directly to the online community. Magnificent. And a template to follow.
In a nutshell: So what would NINE really good things to do be?
1 Use pictures better. Pictures tell a 1,000 words and are a brilliant way of showcasing your organisation. Not just the arty commissioned ones. The Flickr ones too.
2 Choose a way for people to navigate about the site. And stick to it.
3 Don’t make your site busy. It looks awful. Simplicity works.
4 Don’t get too hung up on the homepage. Remember that few people can get onto your site that way.
5 Speak to the people in the calls centre. What subjects come up most often? Shouldn’t that play some role in what appears on the homepage? And be well designed and put together?
6 In an A-Z of services think Yellow Pages. Put links in several places. For example, people could be looking at household waste in several places. Waste, rubbish or even trash
7 And finally, wouldn’t it be good if SOCITM took more account of design and look? That way we may all have better websites.
8 Use social media to see what people think. Use Twitter and Facebook. If social media is about a two way conversation then what better way of connecting with web-savvy citizens?
9 Don’t rule out open source. It’s free. And one day someone with vision will come up with something that government can use.
Input for the #ukgc10 ‘What makes an ace website?’session included points from Dan Harris, Ally Hook, Liz Azyan, Sarah Lay, Martin Black, Stephen Cross and Andrew Beeken.
Flickr pics used with creative commons licence laptop (Jason Santa Maria) and frustration (CCB Images).
Do me a favour, would you? Stop. Just for a second and relax.I don’t want you to finish this blog more tense than you started.
Three things dawned on me today as a blizzard of amazing links poured through my Twitter stream.
One. My brain was capsizing. And I was starting to get tense.
Two. There are only 24 hours in a day and you only have one pair of hands. You can’t know it all.
Three. The answer became clear. Do one thing at a time. Bit like my Grandad did growing things on an allotment.
The scale and velocity of social media is exciting, inspiring and frightening.
“One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload,” said Marshall McLuhan.
“There’s always more than you can cope with.”
He died in 1980. And all he had to deal with were three TV channels that finished at midnight and Pong. Lucky man.
I quitelike this one, too. “Getting information from the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.” Mitchell Kapor said that.
Information overload? Here’s me. I’m following 500 people on Twitter. I try to keep up. I do. Really.
Oh, and Right now I’d like to know more of geotagging, Foursquare, smartphones, Flip, Google maps, podcasting and Facebook.
I know it can’t all be done.
This is exactly why people who call themselves ‘social media experts’ are not. Because you simply can’t be.
So what? Here’s my answer. Be good at something rather than a dabbler in everything.
It’s okay not know everything. Why? Because you can’t. And besides, nobody likes a know-all.
Do one project at a time. One month at a time. Make it a good one. Understand it. Then maybe move on.
I forget where I heard that, but it’s a brilliant, brilliant piece of advice.
Philip John is good at WordPress because he has spent time on it.
Bristol Editor is good at blogging about journalism for the same reason.
And Liz Azyan with LGEO Research and Dave Briggs knows local government because she has knows her onions.
Sarah Lay got good at Google maps because she spent a bit of time on it. And listened to how Stuart Harrison did it.
Specialise. Relax. Have a little corner allotment plot of the digital universe and take time to grow something good there.
As my Grandad once said, do potatoes first. Watch them grow. Get good at them. THEN try something a bit trickier. Like carrots. Then try artichokes. Before you know it you’ve got a thriving corner of produce. You can try to be Sainsbury’s. You’ll fail. It’ll be more fun being an allotment market gardener with this stuff.
“Citizen journalists,” the sneer goes, “Whatever next? Citizen surgeons?”
It’s a glib, throwaway, catch-all comment designed to dismiss social media sites which spread news without the aid of shorthand, a spiralbound notepad and an NUJ card.
The argument goes that like a surgeon’s scalpel only someone trained can handle news properly.
But with the quiet opening up of the BBC College of Journalism website another brick in the ever shaky argument comes toppling down.
The website http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/ has been run internally for the corporation for three years. It is a treasure trove of skills refined from more than 60 years of award winning peerless journalism.
To survive a 21st century journalist must blog, podcast, film, edit and interview and write.
In the era of multi-skilling the press officer will also do well to take a look at the array of skills the site offers coaching in. There is plenty there for them.
But where the BBC training site’s hidden strength really lies is in the trasure trove of skills it offers to the hyperlocal blogger.
Recently, there has been a fierce debate in the UK digital community about defamation and media law. The Talk About Local project to encourage hyperlocals has started to debate it. Bloggers such as The Lichfield Blog’s Philip John have come up with some hyperlocal friendly resources.
But what the BBC site offers is a more extensive, professional insight into what will and won’t get you into trouble.
I’m tempted to call the opening up of the BBC training site as their greatest contribution to digital since the BBC Acorn computer pushed home computing out of the science fiction pages into the spare room in 1981.
This website starts to put quality journalism within the grasp of anyone who can operate both a WordPress site and the BBC’s training pages.
For a qualified journalist looking to embrace change this is a welcome resource.
To the press officer it is a reference point. But also another signal that the 21st century landscape is changing.
To a blogger it should be bookmarked and memorised.
SEVEN TOP TIPS FROM THE BBC THAT COULD PROVE USEFUL IN SOCIAL MEDIA….
1. A guide to defamation These tips will be especially useful to bloggers. But also with the ever changing media landscape handy for press officers and journalists a long time out of NCTJ college.
2. Contempt of court You don’t have to be in the dock to get on the wrong side of a court of law. The rights and restrictions that govern news – and yes, blogs – are complex and can be devastating if you get it wrong.
3. Using submitted content A great insight into how the BBC uses it. For hyperlocals where photography may rely heavily on submitted pics this could be of use.
4. Original journalism There are news rooms across the country drained of experience and talent that could benefit from this. High standards are never a bad thing.
5. Bloggers and the law A contribution from Birmingham City University leacturer Paul Bradshaw – @paulbradshaw on Twitter. Nice to know the BBC are listening to someone like Paul who has a foot in the blogosphere as well as journalism.
6. Making short news films With YouTube in the driving seat high production values are not needed. But a few tips that could transfer into making something watchable can’t be a bad idea.
7. Filming interviews A few minutes with a Flip video and you’ll know it’s a tricky business balancing the questioning with the filming.
