Of course, this is not limited to the public sector but, given our obligation to make information available and to keep it available as outlined in the Policy for Government Held Information, we are in a particularly invidious position.

One of the obvious ways to address this content crush is tagging. However, I can’t help feel that this is only part of the answer to the problem or, less optimistically, at best a short term solution.

With only 600 odd items in my delicious account, I already feel a sense of dread at the cognitive overload when I look through my list of tags trying to locate a page saved a couple of months ago. Looking at Hamish’s bookmarks renders me dumb with equal parts awe and despair.

The Answer

As I suggested in 5 Principles for Govt 2.0, the answer is Search. Or, in Jon Udell’s far more elegant phrase,

we’re in the midst of a long transition from container-based to query-based storage and retrieval
Tagging and Foldering.

An important point to qualify here is that the term long transition shouldn’t be taken to imply a process that is either leisurely or painless; in government, we can rest assured it will be neither.

I should also point out that, for the government namespace, the demand side search issue has already been solved. The new search on newzealand.govt.nz is frighteningly good (if you are a content owner in this namespace, just search your domain and you will see why it is frightening — everything you have posted in now surfacable).

As an example, when I wanted to pull up the Government Held Information Policy, I searched the SSC site using the, what I thought, obvious terms: “government held information” “policy framework” and finally (I am a lazy typist) I went for the whole phrase. Result? Nothing on the first page of the three searches. An advanced search on newzealand.govt.nz, using the phrase “government held information” restricted to “ssc.govt.nz” and, bingo! straight there.

Supply Side Search

The real issue for government is not the search tool. It is preparing the content for search — making it discoverable. This is where we will have to reinvent business processes and essentially apply a new model to the creation and publication of government held information.

However, until we have XML editors installed across government, and we continue to rely on the thoroughly broken model of trying to convert Word documents to valid HTML, then we will need to pay far more attention to these supply side techniques.

So, in the meantime, we need to focus on:

• semantic markup
• seo
• folksonomies, and last but most importantly
• validate your pages.

All these techniques will address the symptoms, but to get to the heart of the issue will require a more fundamental and profound change.

Conclusion

The exponential growth in the amount of content on government websites should be viewed as an opportunity to transform the namespace by creating social and economic value. There isn’t much point talking about the long tail if it is squashed under a fat rump of poorly marked up, irrelevant and dated or superseded content…

Photo: singleframe.

Before you begin downloading, installing and customising, take a look at the principles for public sector social media, these will give you a pretty good overview of the operating framework for any social media platform in government.

The blog

I am an unabashed fan of WordPress. Why? Firstly, because it is open source. The philosophy of open source software is, I believe, a natural fit for the public sector. It also has an amazing support network, and an array of functionality that is without equal. And it is dead simple to setup and run.

You will need to install it on a server: the current version requires PHP version 4.2 or greater and MySQL version 4.0 or greater. Talk to your IT people about what you are currently running, or are paying a provider for.

Support tools

The basics

Once you have installed it you, or someone you contract, will need to theme it, ie., give it an appropriate look and feel. Even if you don’t do this yourself, you will want, from time-to-time, to tweak the way the site looks, and this is where these tools will come in handy.

If possible, run Firefox as your web browser. Not only because it renders pages accurately, but because – like WordPress – there are a range of incredibly useful tools that have been developed for it, including a few that will make working with your theme so much easier. Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar are two extensions that I would recommend you install to help you run your blog effectively and to the requisite web standards.

If all this is starting to sound like too much hard work, it’s not really. While it is not necessary to understand HTML as WordPress has a solid wysiwyg editor, if you are interested in social media then it would be a good idea to get your head around it.

As well as the basics, you will also require a little more social functionality:

• a web statistic package, like AW Stats
• an RSS feed statistics analyzer
• Plugins for subscriptions, tagging and bookmarking (I use subscribe2, simpletags and sociable, respectively)

For the monster list of WordPress plugins, see this Mashable post: WordPress God.

Images

You should think about the judicious use of images in your posts: they definitely can add to the post and will make the blog a lot more approachable and usable (particularly for those who read your posts via RSS).

You will need some sort of image editing software to resize, crop and/or tidy up your images. I use Photoshop, but apparently the GIMP is just as good (and free).

Networking tools

Of course, running a blog is not just about posting to your pre-determined schedule. It is just as much about the way you interact with other bloggers and commenters in your niche. Track other blogs that are also in your field of interest, leave comments and post in response to their posts: be part of the conversation. To do this, you will need some of these tools.

RSS

Without RSS, you are doomed. It’s that simple. You will need an RSS aggregator (either a desktop client or a web-based one like Google Reader) to track blogs and to follow comments. Yes, you could do it all through laboriously visiting each site in your Favourites, but you would be clinically insane after a couple of weeks…

Collect feeds of all the blogs that you read or monitor, search results from the various blog search tools that help you track what is being said about your agency and you can access it all from one interface. Genius.

Comment tracking

You also need a tool to keep track of the comments you leave on other blogs. Again, you don’t want to have to keep randomly returning to the post page to see if anyone has responded to one of your comments. Tools like co.mments make it easy for you to follow all your comments from one spot. Naturally, you can subscribe to a feed from your account page so this just shows up in your RSS reader as well.

Bookmarking

I have posted before about the importance of social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us for public affairs and these tools are equally as important when you begin to blog. Not just for syndicating links to your blog, but for tracking how your posts are being bookmarked by others. Open an account and start bookmarking your posts, this allows you to discover more about your readers and their content preferences.

SEO

Public sector communicators often overlook the importance of search engine optimisation, probably because in the .govt.nz namespace we are already pulling quite hefty page ranks. There are, however, some techniques that you may want to consider to ensure that your posts are well indexed and easily discoverable. There are also some pitfalls you may want to avoid.

Conclusion

This should get you started. I am sure there is stuff that I have missed — feel free to add your suggestions in the comments. What this should give you is a (hopefully not too daunting) feel for exactly what is involved in running a public sector blog. As I have said before, the easiest way to tackle this is incrementally; launch it as an internal tool, iron out all the bugs and then you will be ready to take it to the world.

Photo: eshm

The first thing that occurred to me as I began writing the post was that there isn’t much point trying to optimize your pages for search engine spiders unless they are also optimized for all the other User agents, ie., web browsers, handheld devices, screen readers, content aggregators and syndicators etc. In short, SEO is a subset of a wider field of optimization, and an understanding of web standards, particularly HTML, should precede that conversation.

This got me thinking about the level of understanding of HTML among public relations/affairs professionals. After all, it is our job to advise our employers or clients on how to best communicate using the various channels that use the Internet, so surely we should have at least a basic understanding of these media?

Maybe not. Two things happened this week that left me thinking that perhaps this is a naive or overly simplistic view…

First, I was in an agency presentation where a web development company were pitching to redevelop one of our websites. At one point, they showed us a slide where all the acronyms on the page were highlighted (this being a government site, they reasoned, you would want people to be able to understand the acronyms: fair point). However, when I asked how they intended to do this, they said with some javascript. I asked why they wouldn’t just use the acronym element? And, honestly, they just stared blankly at me. They had no idea what I was talking about.

Here is a hint. If you are presenting yourself as a subject matter expert, at least cover the basics.

Then a couple of days later, I saw that another social media release had been put out, and judging by the case study, it was a success. Which is great. However, if you view the source of the release, you will see that the quality of the HTML is, well, quite poor. Invalid, no doctype, full of deprecated markup and meaningless classes.

Why does this matter? The release looks fine in most browsers and none of the other bloggers of media seem to be complaining about the quality (or lack thereof) of the HTML.

It matters because if you are a practitioner of public affairs/relations and you are working in the online space, how can you claim to be a professional if you don’t understand the basic language of the medium? Would you employ a builder that couldn’t read the architect’s drawings?

It matters because valid, semantic markup is accessible to both people and machines. It is optimised for search engines, for browsers and for people, irrespective of how they choose to access or repurpose that information. That is presumably what the author of the case study was aiming for when he said:

So we opted to make the announcement as an SMR, optimizing it’s format for maximum success.
Geoff Livingstone

I don’t want to be overly critical, because I think that it is terrific that people are experimenting with the social media release. Indeed, compared to some of the earlier SMRs that I have looked at, this one is a marked improvement. What I do find amazing is that so much of what communicators are trying to achieve on the Internet is done without consideration of the standards that support this medium.

So, if we are going to have a microformatted social media release, hRelease, then we can start by issuing releases that are valid (x)HTML. Validation is not an end in itself, but it is a pretty good indicator of a disciplined approach, and if we want to be considered professionals, isn’t that something we should all aim for?

Conclusion

If you are going to specialize in online communications or public relations (in the public or private sectors), then you owe it to yourself, you agency and your clients to – as a minimum – be familiar with the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 specifications. The HTML 4.01 spec was published eight years ago: have you read it? Do you think you should?

At the time the company launched their services were confined to asking companies to take down the offensive material but, it seems they have (in true Web 2.0 fashion) expanded their service offerings.

In order to protect you from your earlier indiscretions, RD are now in the business of

hiding unwanted Web comments with a barrage of positive, Google-friendly content, either created by the company or dredged up from elsewhere on the Web and optimized to appear at the top of search-engine results.
Forbes Magazine

Um, isn’t this just spamdexing?

So, you are foolish enough to publish something indiscreet or, according to Ars Technica, you are one of the 40% of bloggers that published damaging information about your organization on your blog, and then you panic and think, ‘what do I do?’ You call these spammers and they game the search engines to fill their pages with bogus content to bury your indiscretions. It’s like Gresham’s Law.

This service, called MyEdge, is described as “labour intensive” and fees start at US$10,000. So, it doesn’t really look like an option for us public service bloggers who have, as Che Tibby describes it, a hot-heated morning with too much coffee.

It does, however, raise a couple of interesting questions about the practice of online reputation management. The dubious ethics of MyEdge aside, all of us (or certainly our organizations) are constantly building our online profiles. Every page published, article, photo or video posted is indexed and stored – possibly forever. What are we doing about that? Che and Colin McKay have some pretty good suggestions for public servants, but what about the way public sector communicators curate their agencies’ reputations?

How many of our agencies actually practice even a rudimentary form of search engine optimisation? Or have a social media strategy that actively manages online content to effectively curate that reputation?

I don’t have any easy answers, but it seems to me that public sector communicators cannot afford to assume that this space is solely the province of private sector marketers and is of no consequence to them or their organizations.

Photo: PartsnPieces