Posts By Paul Canning

Postscript two: Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

Following the almost universally badly received launch of the new Birmingham City Council website local developer Mark Steadman posted a challenge on his blog: Why don’t those who are busy complaining and building independent fixes to problems that only concern people who know or care what hashtags are*, get together and build an alternative CouncilRead… Read more »

Introducing ‘lifestream’: UK MP’s website breaks new ground

LibDem MP Lynne Featherstone is the party’s lead on web stuff and so she should be – she’s had a blog since 2003 and has fed it practically everyday since. Lynne even credits her election victory to her strong online presence and use of it as an organising tool. When she came to updating herRead… Read more »

Google UK offers free webinar to council webbies on ‘conversions’

As part of Google UK’s increasing local engagement it is running the first in a series of Webinar‘s next week. This one is about ‘conversions’, getting users through a process on your website and sucessfully out the other end. This process may start from them clicking on an ad or being directed from the homepageRead… Read more »

Postscript: Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

The fallout from the relaunch of Birmingham City council’s website (#bccwebsite) has continued, not just online but in the local press as well thanks to the strong interest of Birmingham Post Editor Marc Reeves. It’s not a coincidence that the Post has a ‘web 2.0’ site and in its reporting about #bccwebsite has even includedRead… Read more »

Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

The night before last – and in the night – Birmingham City Council without much fanfare switched over to its rejigged website. Within moments the twittersphere was alight. It was crashing, it had obvious faults and it looked terrible. Over the next 36 hours reviewer after reviewer found fault after fault. This would not beRead… Read more »

How to write a good tweet

Image via Wikipedia My guru Jakob Nielsen has published on research Nielsen Norman Group has just completed on Tweet usability. To my knowledge, no one else has done this sort of research although many of the recommendations have been picked up elsewhere and some are plain common sense (not that that often stops people ignoringRead… Read more »

Fear the Google, don’t fear the Google

I came back from a break to the missed news that Google has settled out of court in its clash with US Publishers over its Google Books project. Looking over last Friday’s news coverage in the UK what immediately struck me as someone who has an interest in the story was the repetition that GoogleRead… Read more »

Local government ‘needs Digital Stream Managers’

Peter Barton, who heads up UK council Lincolnshire’s web team, is one of the most experienced local government (LG) webbies around and also a great thinker. We have chimed very often on his usual hang-out, the UK’s Public Sector Forums Bulletin Board. A new post of his hits all my sweet spots by describing theRead… Read more »

Follow UK public sector bloggers in one place

Just completed a mass update to the Public Sector Bloggers website and feed which was initiated by Dave Briggs and tidied up by Steph Gray. I used those signed up to @PubSecBloggers as well as my egov links in my blog‘s right column, which now needs an overhaul as a lot of sites/blogs are effectivelyRead… Read more »

RSS vs Twitter in UK local government: a serious imbalance?

Image via Wikipedia eGovernment Register reports today on ‘social media’ use in local councils (LAs), noting that work by Liz Azyan published on her blog at LGEOResearch.com shows it at: Number % of LAs Facebook 48 11% Twitter 128 30% YouTube 63 15% RSS 122 28% Web dev blogs/feeds 6 1% Now I would argueRead… Read more »