What is particularly interesting about this post, from a public sector communicators perspective, is the comments that it attracted. As we move to deploy social media tools in the .govt.nz namespace, we are likely to see the same range of reaction that is displayed in microcosm on this blog post.

There are (as of today) only 28 comments on the post and I recommend that you read them all. They provide a fascinating insight into the convergence of social media and a (much-loved) public sector web environment – hence a good indication of some of what is in store for the first agencies to use these tools or channels.

Obviously, they veer from the enthusiatic:

If find these a boon, if only because I have the one set of bookmarked articles on both home and work computers and in the case of del.icio.us on my mobile phone too.
Ged

…to the outraged:

I think this is awful! At what other time has the BBC put other sites logos anywhere on their site aside from when they feature in the story? Is this a groundbreaker? They mention the New York Times and Washington Post having the same system – er, well they are commercial sites carrying paid for advertisements. The joy of the BBC is the lack of this, and I believe thats what we are paying for through the license fee.

Stop polluting our site and get them off!
Richard Turnbull

Through the gamut of, at times, emotive reactions, there are a couple of comments that really stand out as warnings for public sector organizations (aside from the above execration about advertisements). The comment about Newsvine, in particular, is a salutary one:

We at Newsvine were very disappointed to see that a button for the site was not included. Newsvine is a very high-traffic site and, if I’m not mistaken, it sends a lot of visitors to the BBC site.
Alice

Alice has a good point. Public sector organisations have to be very careful about the companies that they (are being seen to) endorse by including them on their pages. In this case, it is simply not practical to include them all, but there are tools that allow the user to choose which bookmarking service they would like to use. The final comment points to a good example.

Where decisions do need to be made about which services to include on the page, then these should be informed by pre-existing relationships. If Newsvine is sending a lot of traffic to the BBC, then in the spirit of participation, the BBC should reciprocate: that is the point of social media.

In other words, the criteria for inclusion should be similarly based on a social media-grounded assessment. How do they fit with your shared audience? It should be a complementary relationship:

My only concern is the choice of bookmarks presented – if you visit Reddit, it’s seems primarily concerned with off-beat political news. And Digg is more concerned with niche tech stories, in my opinion.

It therefore gives the impression that the BBC selected a few social book marking sites on the basis of these sites being popular, rather than because they actually have any real connection with BBC news coverage.
Brian Turner

Conclusion

Public sector communicators should not really be surprised by the range and intensity of the reactions here. It is the environment we work in. What I found interesting about these comments is two things.

One, the extremes are balanced by some very thoughtful and helpful suggestions (this could just reflect the sort of people who read the Beeb’s editorial blogs), in any event, that is extremely encouraging.

Two, there is a lesson about how you deploy social media. It is not a case of just using the technology; you need to understand how the whole (eco)system works and that, particularly in the public sector, is not an easy task.

How did they fare? Poorly.

When I opened MSN the first thing I saw was a warning:

Additional plugins are required to display all media on this page. Install missing plugins now…

That is a great start: do I want to install something else onto my machine just to view your content? I don’t think so. As a consequence, a significant part of my screen was blank, so I can’t really give you an accurate assessment of the content that they are providing for their visitors — at least those that have the requisite plugins installed.

Both MSN and Yahoo!Xtra weigh in at a hefty page size: 364KB and 354KB, respectively. That means that for Kiwis accessing these pages using dialup, they are in for a wait of around 90 seconds for the pages to load. A minute and a half to load: make it my homepage? Sure, what else am I going to do with my time?

This is particularly ironic given Yahoo is partnering Telecom on this venture. As we have recently seen, New Zealander’s access to broadband is not a given.

Following my look at mobile access to government sites, I decided to put these portals to the same test. Surely the big corporates are far more aware of this stuff than the public sector and will be much better positioned to deliver content over the phone (especially when you consider how much Telecom have to gain)? In a word, no.

Neither had skip links, and both served up big irrelevant images. Yahoo! acknowledged this was a problem by including a message that told me:

Please upgrade to a more recent browser: Internet Explorer 7, FireFox 2 or Safari 1.2

My message back to them: Please upgrade to a more user-centric approach to web development.

I will, however, acknowledge that at least Yahoo! offers RSS feeds from their portal, which increases the utility of the site, sort of.

Conclusions

Looking at both sites really made me ask myself one question: why would you bother? If you want a portal, customise your Google homepage and build your own (you can even set it up to work on your phone).

These two offerings are for people who don’t understand the web, have incredibly low expectations about what sites should be delivering and have no physical or technological handicaps. Anyone else taken either for a spin and come up as disappointed?

Smart move. Why would you want to cater for your audience when it is the advertisers that are clearly your cherished relationship?

The reason that I bring this up again is a post on Read/WriteWeb that looks at the adoption of Web 2.0 by MSM.

What is clear from the article is, more than anything else, the fact that for the organizations that they looked at (and it is by no means a representative sample), all of them offered RSS feeds. In fact, that was the only point of solid convergence. 12 out of 12 offered RSS feeds, and even those sites that weren’t offering any of the more recent social media services at least offered feeds.

The Bivings Report reaches the inevitable conclusion:

RSS has definitely gone mainstream. For just about any new website, having an RSS feed has become a basic type of feature.

I couldn’t agree more. RSS is no longer an ‘nice to have’ or a tech gimmick on a site — it is a basic constituent of a modern, well-designed and usable website.

The social media services, however, are still maturing. The Herald implemented these features in their rebuild. On most pages there is a bar like the one at the head of this post inviting you to submit the article to social media like del.icio.us and Digg. Scoop recently put Scoop It into alpha, suggesting that the appetite for social media in NZ is enjoying the sort of upswing that we are seeing across the globe; but it is not quite primetime yet.

So, I have two questions for you:

1. Do you use the buttons on the Herald site?
2. Why don’t Fairfax get it?

Realistically, I only expect answers to the first, because I think that there isn’t an answer to the second…

What does it mean for us?

RSS has matured and is now a big part of the game. Once IE7 becomes the ubiquitous browser – and that is probably only months, not years, away – then we are going to see feed stats on all our sites go through the roof.

As communicators, we need to be well ahead of this curve. If you can’t get a reader on your desktop, subscribe to an online one NOW. If you still don’t grasp the whole RSS thing, follow the links on the resources page and get started. You won’t look back.

Well, the obvious point to make is that they both look remarkably similar. Both have gone for CSS based layouts (which, in terms of a web standards based approach, is commendable) that use the same background and three column spread. It is not surprising that the Stuff site looks like its Australian stablemates, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age, but the NZ Herald’s similarity is odd. I put it down not to industrial espionage – which would make a terrific story, but to a (more prosaic) failure of imagination…

Technical detail

Both sites homepages are on the hefty side, Stuff weighing in at 219KB and NZH a bloated 381KB. The Herald page load, at least this morning, is a shocker. You could finish your breakfast and the hard copy of the paper before this thing loaded…

Neither homepage validates, but the Stuff website fails really badly. Why would you build a site using CSS and then still include <font> tags? It is just shoddy web development. Period. Both sites are missing some <alt> tags but, given newspaper sites reliance on posting images, it comes as no shock.

Overall

The improvements to the Stuff website are both the most welcome –only because the old site was such a disgrace– and the most disappointing. Sure, not everyone cares about the quality of the markup (except those people using assistive technologies), but you would think the developers would have taken a little more professional pride in their work. What they really screwed up, however, was missing the opportunity to implement RSS feeds for the site. The Herald site offers an array of feeds and, for that reason alone is – from a user perspective, a far superior site.

Fairfax don’t offer RSS feeds on their Australian sites, so I guess it is part of their business strategy to force their readers to the site to ingest the advertising there. Smart move. Why would you want to cater for your audience when it is the advertisers that are clearly your cherished relationship? Fairfax execs have obviously yet to be won over by the whole Web 2.0 thing.

So, what do you think about the new sites?