LG/WWW

For the past week I've been following the London 2012 Olympic Torch Relay around the country through the text, pictures and video posted on Twitter by local authorities, the Police and other agencies. This page displays a timeline of live content and you can use it to follow the Relay as it progresses. Initially I did this to prepare for when the Relay reaches Berkshire, as then the live page will display content from local organisations and residents, or Torch Tweeters as we're calling them; you can read more about this here . It has however given me an invaluable insight into how social media is being used to cover this event. Over the next few weeks I'll post my observations and my first is on hashtags. Despite being a national event (international if you include Dublin) I couldn't find any attempt to join everything up on Twitter. Some counties have sensibly used a common hashtag, #GlosTorchRelay for instance was used to tie together all the tweets from t...

Twitter. It’s for keeping in touch with friends, say some, it’s for sharing ideas say others, it’s for promoting your organisation and getting your message out to the world, say more. This is not what Twitter is; this is what you can do with Twitter. Twitter at a basic level is an online database of information that can be read and written to by much of the world’s population who own a computer or other device capable of connecting to the Internet. It’s not until you look at it like this that you can realise its full potential. What’s more the nice people at Twitter provide an API to make it easy to query and extract the data. You can select tweets by user, list, hashtag, phrases or words in the tweet and more. If this all sounds a bit nerdy that’s because it is, so here’s a practical example of what can be achieved . This page here displays Tweets from everyone who’s in this list and have used the hashtag #geotagtest. It displays the four most recent images attached toTweets that ...

If like me you're a fan of Dan Slee's blog you've no doubt read his excellent article on creating lots of little Facebook pages . As usual he's spot on, and in this piece I'll look at going one further and putting every page of interest on your website, on Facebook. By adding Open Graph tags (code containing meta-data about the page) in the Head each of your pages you can tell Facebook (and other sites that can read Open Graph tags) a lot more about what each page is. I blogged about defining your website pages a objects so I won't bore you again with this. Add a Like button to every page too, and when a user clicks on it, they create a new page in Facebook. I realise this is a bit techy but if your site uses a content management system, this is easy for a web designer or developer to do. Doesn't this create a huge overhead in having to administer potentially thousands of Facebook pages? The simple answer is no. A page is only created when som...

Last year we launched a pilot page for local news . As well as showing the news we publish it takes content from Twitter and display the latest tweet from a selection of over 25 organisations local to West Berkshire. We chose our initial group based on local, primarily not-for-profit organisations that tweet and you can see the full criteria here . The pilot was to test whether the page worked technically, whether it updated all the time, every time and whether what it displayed looked as it should. The page passed these tests with flying colours  but it also produced some unexpected but positive results.  For example towards the end of the week the page often becomes a what's on at local art venues and Saturday afternoons the page often displays live local football and rugby scores and if there's a fixture, racing results. These are both things we didn’t expect to happen but are a great ways to promote local cultural and sporting activities. So where do we go fro...

It’s fair to say that most Local Authority websites are a collection of text based articles, in fact that’s a reasonably good description of most websites. Sure, many will have a forum or two, perhaps an events calendar, in fact all Local Authority websites will have at least a small amount of more complex functionality, but on the whole they’re based around pages of text. Recently I’ve started to look at website content in a different way, not just as text but as a collection of objects. To illustrate what I mean by this, let’s take an example of a page about a library . A conventional page would be an article with textual information about the library. It would probably contain things like the address of the library, contact details, perhaps a map, perhaps events at the library and so on. An object however would be a digital representation of that library. The object would contain metadata about what type of object the library is, the latitude and longitude of whe...

Not so long ago most websites were generally created to do one just thing, to publish the same information to the same people at the same time. Improvements in line speed, browser functionality and Internet availability mean that these days websites are generally used for two more tasks, service delivery and user engagement. One website isn’t enough for many medium to large organisations, some having multiple web presences each aimed at different audiences. Recently I’ve been looking at how this could be reflected in what local authorities offer online and have come to the conclusion there are two distinct groups who might access a council website, customers and citizens. With this in mind I looked at how a site could be created for each type of user, in effect splitting an existing site into two. The initial concept of the sites should be simple. The customer wants easy access to services or service information and to be able carry out what they came to the site for ...

Much has been made of BCCDIY in the past couple of years or so, some heralding it as a new dawn in local authority service delivery. It's the website that does for free what the official Birmingham City Council (BCC) does, if reports are to believed for an amazing £3.3m, or at least did. As of last week however the expensive offering does have one thing over the free facility, it's still up and running. Those such as Conrad Quilty-Harper in the Telegraph who even as late as this August were singing the praises BCCDIY might now have reconsider their point of view. Perhaps this is a premature post-mortem and someone just forgot to renew the domain but at the very least if the official BCC website was off-line for a fortnight I'm betting quite a few people might have complained and if not I’m very sure that someone might have at least noticed. A Google search at time of writing reveals that perhaps no one has noticed that BCCDIY has gone AWOL. In truth BCDIY ...