Puffbox – Page 27 – Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

9 Feb 2010

politics

buildingbritainsfuture, civilservice, labourparty

Building Britain's Future revisited

Spotted in Francis Maude’s article on Comment Is Free yesterday (8 Feb 2010):

Then came the first instance of Labour breaching the impartiality of government’s communications; we discovered that “Building Britain’s Future”, a brand conceived and promoted by the civil service, is used extensively on the Labour party’s website.

From PR Week article dated 29 October 2009:

Whitehall comms experts have denied any revolt. Permanent secretary for government communications Matt Tee insisted Building Britain’s Future was a government brand, and said he would ensure it was not used by the Labour Party… ‘I am clear that Building Britain’s Future is a government brand – if we reached a position when someone else used it, I’d have to consider the risk that citizens could be confused about where the messages are coming from.’

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) director of comms Russell Grossman said: ‘All civil servants are keen to ensure the line isn’t crossed into political sloganeering. This slogan doesn’t cross that line at all – The Labour Party hasn’t used this.’

And finally, on Puffbox.com in July 2009:

Earlier this week, I saw this… the front page of the Labour Party website. And there it is, right up front – ‘Building Britain’s Future’ in large letters, the same logo in the corner.

Sorry Mr Maude. Sorry PR Week. Sorry Mr Grossman. Sorry Mr Tee.

It’s still there, by the way.
9 Feb 2010

e-government

advertising, adwords, google, health

DH reveals £2.7m Adwords spend

A parliamentary question has revealed that, in the year to the end of January 2010, the Department of Health spent £2.72 million on Google Adwords pay-per-click keyword advertising. A big number, but a fair one?

With Google’s Adwords advertising, you only pay on results. An advert is displayed at the top, or down the side of a set of Google search results for a given keyword or phrase; or, optionally, on third-party web pages where Google’s matching technology decides your keyword is relevant. Plus, Google’s technology allows for geo-targeting, so in the case of DH, they can specify ‘UK only’. (Of course, DH is only responsible for England, but that’s for another day.) So in theory at least – we know that people were looking for something health-related; they saw an advert from DH/the NHS; they decided it was of interest; they clicked on it, and were taken to a DH website. Job done.

A couple of factors to bear in mind. There has been a trend towards campaign calls-to-action based on search terms: ‘search online for X’ – and in the free-for-all of Google search ranking, the only way to truly guarantee visibility at the top of the page is to pay Google for the privilege. If it works as a call-to-action, and you have to pay for it, then so be it. And it’s a competitive business – where government finds itself going head-to-head against pharmaceutical companies. Top ranking can cost a lot of money.

DH is rightly cautious about disclosing too much data, citing competitive confidentiality. Similarly, Google doesn’t tell you as much as you might like about ‘what keyword X will cost you’. But their Traffic Estimator provides some clues.

If we look at ‘chlamydia’ for example: Google’s tool suggests that a bid of 30-43p per click will buy you a position in the top 3 adverts for the term, leading to 62-86 clicks per day. That’s something like £27.50 per day, or £10,000 a year. Now of course, Google’s screen layout means there’s a significant premium to being the no1 ‘sponsored link’ – and you might well consider it worth bidding high to guarantee top spot, particularly in the case of chlamydia, where the NHS site is the no2 ‘natural’ result.

For the term ‘stop smoking’, Google’s tool suggests a bid of £1.66 to £2.50 per click, to secure a top 3 slot resulting in 49-68 clicks per day. So for a similar volume of traffic, that’d be well over £100 per day – and an annual cost in the region of £42,500. Why so much more expensive? – because the NHS is in direct competition with bids from anti-smoking drugs, devices and consultants. One wonders what premium they’re paying to guarantee no1 position there – but the Google tool suggests a maximum bid-per-click of over £6, taking us well into six figure annual budgets.

Time and again, when you search for something health-related on Google, there’s an NHS sponsored link at the top of the page. They, or rather we, are paying good money for this. You’ve got to assume someone’s looking at the numbers, and deciding it’s worthwhile. Just because it’s a big number, doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t cost-effective. It may surprise some people for me to say this – but some things on the web are worth paying for.
8 Feb 2010

politics, technology

markpack, nadinedorries, twitter

Yes you can change your Twitter ID. Don't.

A while back, Mark Pack wrote a couple of articles noting that if MPs were worried about breaking election campaign rules by running a Twitter account with the letters MP in it, they probably needn’t be. The authorities tended to be ‘sensibly flexible’; and besides, it was dead easy to change your Twitter account name. In the piece which appeared on LibDem Voice, I commented:

But is there a risk that someone grabs your temporarily vacated username? I can’t see anything in the Twitter documentation to suggest there’s a ‘grace period’ between one person giving up a username, and someone else claiming it… as is often the case, say, with domain names.

Funny I should ask. Last week, colourful Conservative MP Nadine Dorries changed her Twitter name to ‘Nadine4MP’, apparently following Tom Harris’s lead. But somebody swiftly jumped in, and bagged the newly vacated NadineDorriesMP identity. Tim Ireland at Bloggerheads.com insists it wasn’t him, and has done some further digging into who it might have been. The account is currently reporting ‘that page doesn’t exist’. Accusations and conspiracy theories are flying.

Yes, if you leave your main MP-labelled account dormant for a few weeks and switch to a new non-MP-labelled account, you’ll lose a good few followers. But to be honest, if they don’t follow you to your new location, they weren’t following you very closely, were they?

Instead, where are we? No1 result from a Google search for ‘nadine dorries twitter’, and in the top 10 for plain ‘nadine dorries’, is the vacated, possibly hijacked, currently defunct @NadineDorriesMP account page. And this on the evening when said Ms Dorries is getting primetime terrestrial TV exposure for an hour.

You have been warned. Again. 🙂

that page doesn’t exist
8 Feb 2010

technology

Berners-Lee, Bin Laden and business logic

Watching BBC2’s The Virtual Revolution at the weekend, I found myself drawing an unexpected and slightly uncomfortable parallel.

Entitled Enemy Of The State?, this week’s installment looked at social networks and political activism – touching, as you’d expect, on Twitter during the Iranian election, the great firewall of China, Islamic fundamentalism and the Estonian cyber-attack. All implications of the decentralised network, it gently argued:

Al Qaeda, like the internet, has no centre. It’s a dispersed group of loosely associated people.

Those few seconds of prime-time Saturday evening telly seemed to be laying down a challenge. If you asked people name the biggest influences on modern life over the last decade, the internet and Al Qaeda would be right up there. Both hugely successful, despite the lack of formalised structure. So why am I getting hung up on the supposed need to build a bigger company, and become a ‘proper’ business?

There are, of course, entrepreneurial opportunities in this field, for those motivated, resourced and skilled enough to exploit them: to build large corporate structures, and extract money from fellow large corporates. As I’ve blogged here previously, I know I probably should be looking at these. But the truth is, I don’t feel a compelling need to do so.

I’m left wondering whether the lesson of the decade of Bin Laden and Berners-Lee is that loose affiliation isn’t just as good as formalised corporate structure; but is actually better. Anyone?
5 Feb 2010

e-government, politics

Payment on results

WeAreSocial’s Robin Grant tagged me (and various others) on Twitter, asking for opinions on Conservative proposals from Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne:

A Conservative government will require all public bodies that want to launch marketing campaigns to state precisely what behaviour change the advertising is designed to bring about, and an element of the advertising agency fee will be made contingent on achieving the desired outcome.

Like Robin post author Simon Collister, I can see good and bad in this. I’m inclined to agree with anything which makes government think much harder about its communications spending: the whole reason I started down the open source technology route with Puffbox was because I felt we were spending too much money, and receiving too little in return. I’m all for bad projects being held to account, and good projects to be held aloft as exemplars.

But it’s going to be incredibly difficult to make such a rule make sense. Too many factors involved, too much hard cash at stake.

If marketing operated in a vacuum, with no external factors – and, by the way, no client involvement / interference – then maybe you could compare the situation before with the situation after, and say that any difference was solely down to the quality of the campaign. But of course it doesn’t. And even if it did, you’d be assuming absolute trust in the measurement of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ – which would, in many cases, be government statistics. You can imagine the worries around conflicts of interest, potential and perceived. And where potentially large sums of money are at stake, lawyers gather.

And what would happen if the target were exceeded, perhaps considerably? No reward? All stick, no carrot?

Robin wonders if any such rules would be applied to websites and other social media. I’d draw a distinction between scenarios where you are doing the communicating on behalf of the client, and where you’re enabling the client to communicate themselves. Virtually everything Puffbox does is the latter: more’s the pity, sometimes. So the only metrics my output can be judged on are the deliverables: did we do what we said we’d do, in the agreed time and for a reasonable budget. And on those, I’ve got no worries whatsoever.

Bottom line: I doubt this would change much for me, and others in similar situations. We’re only as good as our last job, as they say; and it would only bring the threat one step closer. Same threat though. And that’s fine.
5 Feb 2010

politics, technology

captcha, conservatives

Captcha yourself on

There’s always a risk attached to using automated text-generating services. For example, this ‘captcha’ I was presented with by the Conservatives’ Blue Blog website:

Not one to raise on the first trip to Camp David, perhaps.
4 Feb 2010

e-government

commentariat, mod, wordpress

Defence green paper on WordPress

Delighted to note the Ministry of Defence’s decision to publish its new green paper in commentable form, using a restyled version of Steph‘s Commentariat theme for WordPress.

The MoD have been doing some excellent, if a little underpublicised, work with blogging tools – Defence News and a blog from Afghanistan, both running on a Typepad account; and Blogger-based initiatives from Basra and Helmand; not to mention efforts around YouTube, Facebook and so on. But I think this is their first WordPress-based work.

Looks to be sitting in ultra-cheap hosting space provided by Hampshire-based Justhost.com – £2.95 a month for unlimited disk space and bandwidth; although I think the server itself is in California.

Depending on your definitions, I think that’s now a majority of central government departments – or certainly very close to it, anyway – who have run public-facing WordPress-based websites.
3 Feb 2010

e-government, technology

france, opensource, thunderbird

French military's open-source collaboration
Now this is how open source is meant to work.

In January 2007, the French defence ministry’s Direction Générale de l’Armement began work (in association with BT) on a project called Milimail, to enhance Firefox’s open-source cousin, the Thunderbird email client for military purposes. It’s now known as Trustedbird – and lists among its additional features:
- Deletion receipts (MDN);
- Delivery receipts (DSN);
- Encryption/Signing with triple wrapping;
- RFC 2634 Security Labels and Signed Receipts;
- Address autocompletion with several LDAP directories;
- CRL download from LDAP directories;
- Manage Out of Office settings on a Sieve server
…only some of which I even begin to understand. But apparently, the key enhancement is the fact that you can ‘know for sure when messages have been read, which is critical in a command-and-control organization’ – according to Mozilla executive David Ascher, quoted by Reuters. And that’s good enough for it to hook into NATO systems.

What’s more, code from the French project found its way into Thunderbird’s v3 public release last December – making the product better for everybody.

The recently revised UK government policy on open source seemed to focus solely on the procurement angle. But as Trustedbird demonstrates, there’s potential for the benefits of open source to go much, much wider.

And if a particular open source product doesn’t quite meet your exacting specification, that shouldn’t mean you simply dismiss it. Ask not what open source can do for you, you might say; ask what you can do for open source.
3 Feb 2010

e-government, technology

downingstreet, internetexplorer, petitions

No10 e-petition on abandoning IE6

I’ve happily signed the e-petition on the Downing Street website calling on the Prime Minister to ‘encourage government departments to upgrade away from Internet Explorer 6.’

I’ve written on this subject before; and I know the huge headache it would be to alter in-house applications built for IE6 alone (although that’s another story altogether).

I note the petitioner’s failure to mention the government-backed Get Safe Online initiative, which explicitly recommends upgrading. So when he says ‘(The French and German) governments have let their populations know that an upgrade will keep them safer online. We should follow them.’ – I know he’s wrong. And I’m not sure I buy his suggestion that ‘When the UK government does this, most of Europe will follow. That will create some pressure on the US to do so too.’

But that’s all beside the point. If we can use this petition as some kind of leverage, I’m prepared to overlook its deficiencies. And with nearly 5,000 signatures in a couple of days, and front-page coverage from the BBC, we have a platform on which to build.

The latest browser market share numbers show that finally, IE6 has been deposed as the world’s #1 browser. And in the last few days, Google has announced that its Apps will be phasing out IE6 support, becoming the latest big name to say enough is enough.

It’s time to put IE6 out of our misery. Sign the petition.
3 Feb 2010

e-government, politics

datagovuk, freedata

Don't go comparing

There’s a bit of a spat at the moment over Conservative (mis)use of crime stats to suggest a doubling or trebling of violent crime. The BBC’s Mark Easton has an excellent summary of the situation, which ultimately boils down to a change in how the numbers were put together:

Before 2002 the decision as to whether an incident was a violent crime had been taken by police. After 2002, officers were obliged to record all incidents as violent crimes if the alleged victim said that is what it was. The aim was to stop police fiddling the figures and to get a better picture of violence. The obvious consequence was to send the raw numbers shooting up.

Statisticians therefore warn that ‘figures before and after that date are not directly comparable’ – however, that doesn’t seem to have stopped either the Tories or, to some extent at least, the Labour government making precisely such comparisons.

Not that that’s any kind of justification, as Tory spokesman Chris Grayling attempted on the Today programme this morning:

I know there’s been a change; I also know that the Home Office has continued to use the same comparators. … As an opposition party, we don’t make the statistics. We can only use what the Home Office publishes.

My point isn’t the party politics of the situation: it’s the reminder of the pitfalls of playing with data. The launch of data.gov.uk is rightly being hailed as a triumph: but it hands highly explosive material to eager amateurs. Some won’t notice the caveats; some won’t understand them; some may actively choose to ignore them. And some will say, ‘what does it matter, we’re all at it.’

If statistics are kept to a small clique of experts, then it’s fine to tinker with the calculations – safe in the knowledge that all the users are expert enough to understand and factor in the changes. But stats aren’t kept to the cliques any more, if ever they really were – and data.gov.uk takes this to a whole new level.

The decision to offer the data was absolutely right in my view: in time, it should be an antidote to this. But it will come under fire at some point: and we need to have a defence ready.

that page doesn’t exist