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Number 10′s site highlights what is social, and what is not

by on 14 August, 2008 in Digital revolution, New Media, Strategy, Web/Tech, Weblogs

My comments yesterday about the new Number 10 site provoked some interesting responses.

A few agreed with my general theme – that it really wasn’t up to snuff – while some thought I was too harsh, and should be giving Number 10 far greater credit for even engaging with new web technologies in this way, because few governments – if any – do.

On Perfect Path, social media guru Lloyd Davis points out that a major part of the work on the new site has been to install “better plumbing” – WordPress. Simon Dickson, who’s behind the site, agrees in comments this was an early milestone.

All of which is fine – WordPress is a very fine CMS, and now much more than just a blogging platform. The geek in me says it’s reasonably cool Number 10 is using it. But platforms are, of course, immaterial to users – they only see the output – and it still leaves the question of the site’s purpose. 

Part of the problem is that those of us working in the digital world view social media as a Very Good Thing. If you were around for web 1.0 you know it has brought the kind of interlinking of people and ideas we were dreaming of back in the day.

We see the values of Web 2.0 – of information sharing, collaboration and creativity – a unambiguously good and important, so it is hard to be critical of any site that claims to support those values, especially when it emerges from the highest echelons of government, even if the only evidence of that support is using the same tools as we do.

The drawback of this approach, though, is that not everything is a social media problem. Not everything needs to be bashed by the bloggy hammer. Being better at blogs than other governments is a doubly pointless measure of success; we can’t, after all, choose to be ruled by, say, Sweden, if it has a more enlightened approach to comment moderation.

So we need to ask if putting photographs on Flickr, videos on YouTube, and adopting a blog format for press releases really achieves anything, whether or not the comments are switched on.

What is this site’s purpose? Lest I be accused of being entirely negative (it’s been said) let’s look a something this site could be doing.

The government is not shy of complaining that its message is distorted by portions of the media. So one thing this site could do is allow access to briefings on what decision has been taken, or which position adopted, and why. That’s beyond a press release, or a press conference transcript, or speech text.

How exactly that explanation is delivered – through text, graphics, data or video – is up for debate, and is also where the space for innovation is (see MySociety). But what you’re trying to do is explain is the PM’s tactics for stopping knife crime, improving public health, reforming the NHS or dealing with Russia. I’d be fascinated to see more of Brown’s briefing material around these things (while accepting some, especially around foreign affairs, might be classified for good reason). After all, I’ve helped pay for it. I suspect many others would be too – not least Britain’s small but (finally) growing band of political bloggers.

This is the obvious social media angle here, also alluded to by Lloyd in his comments. It is not about building a social site at Number10.gov.uk. It’s about something much, much harder – something that runs counter to the DNA (even the interests) of all governments – being more transparent.

Maybe that’s the trouble here. As Ben Hammersley said in comments on the last post, “What bothers me is the mismatch between what they have to play with, viz a distinctly non-interactive, non-webby PM, and the choices they made.” Maybe this site really is just a roughly-executed Web 2.0 veneer for a very 1.0 PM, and without addressing that fundamental problem it can’t do things properly.

But as things stand, it’s neither starting a conversation, nor facilitating one.

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Number 10′s new site misses the 2.0 mark

by on 13 August, 2008 in Digital revolution, New Media, Web/Tech, Weblogs

Poor old Gordon Brown. Not only is he struggling with the traditional Prime Ministerial work of managing a sticky economy and anticipating major armed conflicts, all while on holiday, but he’s got the new world to deal with – all this web wonkery that’s sprung up since that Spring day in 1997 when he entered government. There was no time in opposition to prepare for Twitter, that’s for sure.

One has to fear his lack of web time is tripping him up. Building a new website for the PM is, undoubtedly, a tricky brief, but a more savvy Downing Street would surely not have allowed the new Number 10 website to go public without a lot more work. Yes, it’s labelled “beta”, but that’s not an excuse. It’s been around for days now, but it’s trying too hard, too obviously attempting to get hip to the social media jive.

Before we even start on the difficult social stuff, there are the basics to consider. For a start someone should, surely, have checked some domains before using the phrase “Number10tv” as the name for the WebCameron-esque video section of the new site. One assumes they didn’t check, because on www.Number10.tv the far-right BNP has its video channel (I’m not providing a link for obvious Googlejuice reasons). Over on www.Number10tv.com another opportunist has stepped in to post a “satirical” version of the official site (“Watch PM Brown as he dithers over the most pressing issues of the day!”).

Oh dear.

On the site Number 10′s consultants did build, things are better, but still not good. For a kick-off, the design’s at sea – the search box is crashing into the navigation on at least one browser, lines roam everywhere, a colour palette is unevenly applied and there’s a bit of a typographical disaster going on all over. 

Trendy features are present and correct, but meaningless. Sure, the press releases are in reverse chronological order, and have a little calendar on them, just like blogs. The headlines are serifed, just like A List Apart. Share buttons – the usual Delicious, Digg, Facebook – hang around hopefully, in the unlikely event anyone’s going to want to breathlessly tell their friends about a press release from Downing Street. But it all means nothing if the content and the intent aren’t there. Dig deeper, and it’s hard not to see all this as slightly cynical use of web 2.0 lipstick to tart up a banal 1.0 reality.

Which brings us to the content. There’s nothing, inherently, wrong with this stuff, but it remains traditional broadcast, one to many. There are the releases, snaps of Gordon meeting Barack, video of Gordon making a speech, lots of anodyne historical stuff that I suspect (I’m no historian) Wikipedia does better, and certainly in more depth. No, there are no links out to that, as far as I could see. But – oh God – there is the Twitter channel. I daresay it was inevitable.

But conversation – real conversation – between users is off-limits. I’m told they’re using WordPress to power the site. WordPress is the blog platform that powers this, and tens of thousands of other, blogs. So they’re actually turning comments off to achieve all this. Meanwhile they rely on YouTube and Flickr to display some still photographs and video (although “Number 10 TV” – the official version – uses the Brightcove platform), but comments are turned off on those third party sites as well.

I know they’ll worry the Daily Mail will do its dinger the moment a user says something nasty or obscene. There’s probably no budget for moderation. So why bother?

The idea, one assumes, is that enthusiastic subjects will find this stuff because it’s in their social media world, not the Number 10 silo, and that they’ll then want to favourite and share it all, motivated by the sheer delight of finding footage of Gordon Brown addressing the Knesset. I’ll let you decide if that’s likely, although I note the video of that speech has done just under 600 views on YouTube since it was posted a week ago. I’m not sure if that’s bad or, actually, remarkable. Maybe there’s a lot of clicking around Downing Street itself.

Either way, the whole is just a bit off. It’s like hearing a script from Yes, Prime Minister recited by someone who doesn’t speak English. The words, the gags, are there, but there’s no understanding of what this really means, and what it should change. They’ve turned a trick, yes, but one that’s not nearly good enough. Having read the story of Hillary Clinton’s campaign disaster on TheAtlantic.com today, and the extraordinary strategising that went on there (and she still lost) I wonder: would any credible political campaign in the US accept this site?

Authenticity is the key here. Blogs, when they first appeared a decade ago, brought with them an expectation of a conversational tone, of genuine interactivity, of someone being at the other end of the line. It’s clear that Gordon’s not – of course he’s not – he’s running the country. That reality makes it hard to achieve what this site pretends it does. Using these tactics, of pretending this has been touched by the Web 2.0 magic, reduces this site to tokenism, another wobbly piece of scenery on the stage Gordon Brown is trying to claim control of. It really doesn’t help.

Comments { 8 }

When blogs die

by on 2 August, 2008 in Digital revolution, London

Damn. A favourite blog – London Connections – has suddenly decided to give up the ghost.

It was a site that fed a minor obsession of mine – and, I’m sure, thousands of other Londoners . It told us what, on earth, was going on with all the changes to London’s public transport. Although I didn’t always understand some of the technical diagrams of track layouts, and sometimes it wasn’t even relevant to my routes, I loved the detail and the greater understanding of the complexities of transport planning it gave me. (I know, I know. I am a geek).

The links to public documents about railways works were, in themselves, a valuable civic service that no news organisation provided. It was a site that, far away from all the balls spoken about citizen journalism, proved the huge value of narrow, niche publishing on the web. Just look at the number of comments on the final post to see what value it brought. It was all produced by a blogger who was, I think, anonymous.

But now it’s dead – a risk, I guess, with something powered by passion, not profit. I hope that perhaps the author will take a break, and choose to return, but there’s an air of finality about the final post.

Damn, again.

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