Ketcheson.net

Those of us who follow developments in government blogging have paid close attention to the experiment being carried out by David Miliband, UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Mr. Miliband is probably the first, honest-to-goodness, Ministerial blogger. (Go here to read his blog)

Let’s run through the checklist:

1) Conversational? Yup.

“It has felt like a wet August in Europe, but in France, more than half the country has water restrictions, in Spain reservoir levels are at 40%, and low waters on the Rhine have forced ships to jettison cargo. …”

2) Personal, and “authentic” voice? Check.

As you may know I’m no longer Minister of Communities and Local Government - I’m now Environment Secretary - so this blog will no longer exist at its current URL and I’m afraid this means we can’t post any more comments on this site.

But I’m very much hoping this won’t be the end of my presence on the blogosphere…please keep an eye out. I hope that the blog will in future be available via http://www.davidmiliband.defra.gov.uk

Thanks to everyone who’s been reading the blog and posting comments - I’m looking forward to continuing our conversations.

3) Does it have the all the elements of a blog? Let’s see…Comments, permalinks, category and date-based archives, RSS feeds, links to third-parties…Yup, all there.

4) Does it feel like readers are connected to the author’s thoughts and opinions? Or, is it just a press release by a different name? The “about this blog” page sets the perfect tone.

The traditional means of contact for members of the public, MPs and journalists of course remain open. . If you want to raise a specific issue with my department, it’s generally best to contact the Defra Helpline in the first instance. And because this is a Government site I won’t lapse into party ranting and I can’t link to party political websites - and Defra needs to reserve the right to edit or not publish comments, for example on grounds of inappropriate language.

You’ll notice that the first 50 or so posts on this blog had no comments on them. This is because I blogged for a few months within my previous department before this went live.

I don’t know of a similar experiment - so let’s see how it goes.

5) Is it a conversation? I’ll have to reserve judgement on this one…I spent some time poking around the comments sections to see whether Mr. Miliband has responded to comments, or has picked up on comment threads in his posts. My sense is that he hasn’t, and this is one of the key elements to be worked out in official blogging. If you give people the opportunity to comment, then you’d better make sure you let them know that you are really listening.

But, I’m not going to complain too much on this last point. Overall, It is a nice piece of work. Congrats to Mr. Miliband for setting it up, and perhaps more importantly, for achieving buy-in from his Communications people (in two departments, no less) for this experiment.

Any suggestions for pieces of the checklist I’m missing? Any other examples of Ministerial bloggers floating around out there?

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I’ve been watching blogs and the blogosphere for years, and have observed that the bar for writing a good blog post just keeps rising.

It’s depressing, actually. There was a time that you could find a great link — like this article on How to beat anyone at Rock Paper Scissors – and kick back for the rest of the afternoon figuring you’d made your cool quota for the day.

Now everyone’s using some sort of aggregator, and posting something like this would just look like the Digg-poaching that it is.

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With troops stationed around the world, all set up with high-speed connections and easy access to the Net, it is not surprising that the Department of Defence has had to go further and faster than most departments in thinking through blogging policies.

Various places around the Net are reporting some new guidance that has come out around the use of “Blogs and Internet Communications.”

Army.ca forums have the whole policy, while millblog, the Torch, sets out an articulate response that makes reference to earlier policies coming out of the U.S. Armed services.

A nod to Joe (at the spiffy new ThornleyFallis website) and Brendan for picking this up quickly, and throwing in their comments as part of their continued close attention to government and social media.

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Would you be scared? Check out Viidoo.

This kind of stuff is the MP3 of the current generation of online innovation. 

I remember in the late 1990s that all of I sudden I realized it was dumb to buy CDs when everything was available online for free.

I’m now at the point where I am seriously questioning the value of my cable TV connection. 

I’ll admit it: I was very interested in Bittorrent for awhile, and I thought the networks were going to take it on the chin.

I never inhaled, though. Honest. But (what I’ve heard is that) the problem was that downloading (I’m told) and finding (according to word on the street) episodes could be a real pain, particularly for older episodes and the Long Tail of the libraries and archives.  And then (I’ve heard), there were battles with cranky networks that seemed to be seeding the torrents with bad data.

So, (this guy I know) abandoned Bittorrent.

Viidoo, Peekvid, Daily Episodes, and their ilk keep moving the yardsticks, and to my mind render Bittorrent a bit useless.  Now, I’m probably swimming against the current in this perspective. As we all know, Bittorrent is currently responsible for something like 200% of all Internet traffic  and the ISPs are claiming the world will end if we don’t throttle them.

But, I’ve learned to trust my gut.  And my gut tells me that this new generation of “youtubeish” innovation is the bigger long-term hit. 

And, while the MP3 revolution hit the studios hard.  My bet is that the most vulnerable group in this round of innovation isn’t the TV networks. They seem to be moving well to insulate themselves through deals with iTunes, Youtube, or their own websites (i.e. Comedy Central )

It’s the cable and satellite companies that will take the hit. 

I once said I’d never buy another CD.

Today, it’s clear that I’ll never buy anything more than Basic Cable.

But, that’s just my 2995 cents (a month) worth.

(This post brought to you by the left and right parentheses)

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I’ve always loved the browser start page. It is the front door, the on-ramp, the place where it all starts.

Control of this space has moved around a lot over the years - the ISPs once tried to own it, today many companies still use it to hammer home corporate messaging to their employees, and it continues to be the scene of battles for control between the big search engine and portal plays.

Back around the time of Crash 1.0, a company called Octopus.com gave us a glimpse of where the start page was going. These guys were years ahead of the curve with their “My Octopus” tool, which let users create their own, highly personalized, start page, grabbing together content from whatever sites you wanted to bring together. They even gave you the option of scraping in personal banking data from multiple sites. OK, so it was of questionable security and copyright compliance. But, it was a sweet little tool.

Anyway, like so many other dot-com flames, Octopus burned too brightly and the only trail that it has left behind on the Web are a few cryptic pages buried deep in the Internet Archive.

Octopus.com had it right, though.

They’d tapped into one of the Big Truths on the web. People want control over their data, they want the ability to put it all together in one place, mash it up how they like, and figure out their own way to present it to themselves. What do you think the iPod is?

Today, the big players are starting to get it. There is an arms-race of personalization going on between Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to create RSS-enabled, Ajaxified, start pages with all kinds of funky widgets, nifty themes, and OPML import/export functions.

So, who am I rooting for? What is my start page?

Well, I can’t root for Octopus.com anymore. So, after making the rounds and being decidedly underwhelmed by the big guys, I’ve landed on Netvibes.

The Paris-based startup’s tools give me complete control over all my data and its presentation. I’ve got six tabs running, with close to 100 RSS feeds all wrapped up in a pretty package that I can spit out into an OPML file any time I want.

They are not the only ones, of course: Pageflakes and Webwag are in the same place, and offer similar functionality. From my point of view, though, I’ve got no complaints. I’ve locked my start page on Netvibes, and I couldn’t be happier.
One thing that the Octopus.com observations have taught me - Timing matters. They had a great idea. My Octopus offered more functionality in 2000 then we are seeing six years later. But, there was no RSS or Ajax back then to make life easy, their site was plagued by poor load times and frequent crashes as boxes would time-out trying to scrape content from reluctant third-parties. And, there was the small problem of the crashing down of the startup world around them.

As Mark Knopfler once said, “it was just that the time was wrong.”

Let’s hope this round of innovation survives (Netvibes’ recent closure of a $15 mm round of financing should keep them going for awhile), and the startups in this space are able to keep pushing the browser in new directions, and giving us greedy users exactly what we want.

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Yeah, I know. Everyone is in love with Digg.com these days.

But, as I told several people last night at the very well attended Third Monday event in Ottawa (See Shel, Joe, and Brandon (Updated: And Bob) for the skinny), I’m a huge fan of del.icio.us.

I’m a classic example of “The Del.icio.us Lesson” in action. I use it because I can, selfishly, store the results of my digital haul as I go. I can spend an hour doing surfing research, click-and-storing as I go, and them coming back later in a more organized way to find what I want.

This is neat, but it is not the biggest value.

The most value comes from using Del.icio.us/popular to find what some guys I worked with once called “The Edge of the Web.”

Everyone who there who claims that they are monitoring the web for innovations should make sure they check this site daily for new ideas, new memes, new companies, and new satire.

Where else can you find:

• Sites challenging the business model of television - Peekvid & Daily Episodes
• How to find the perfect mate
• A new social networking site with some quick buzz.
• Maps of war
• and so on…

Del.icio.us/popular is part of my daily routine and helps me to find the most interesting stuff before it hits most people’s radar.

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I’m always on the lookout for office holders who launch blogs, fascinated by how authority figures can use blogs to humanize their office. Well, how about a blogging Cardinal?

Cardinal Seán of Boston now has a blog….

I want to share with you, Catholics of Boston, my experiences as I return to Rome as a Cardinal and more importantly, I want to share with you a sense of what it is that Boston’s Archbishop does on business in Rome representing the people of the Archdiocese.”

Click here to visit his blog.

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Well, the short list of government bloggers slowly gets longer. Last night, Shel Israel told the Third Monday crowd that the Mayor of Washington has been blogging for some time.

Although the blog seems to have gone dormant, my take is that the nuts-and-bolts details of his day and the honesty of the conversation seem to me to hit on the right voice for this kind of blog.

The baseball stadium lease has been signed, the budget has been put to bed, and I’m now ready to get back to the Inbox. As advertised, I want to give you regular highlights from some of my correspondence. To do this, let me share with you how I approach this. First, I receive my mail from three different sources in two different forms, old fashioned letters and email. All of this information is received though the correspondence office and is then given a workflow number and referred to an agency for follow up. I receive a daily correspondence report of this activity.

Click here to read Mayor William’s blog.

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I’ve just been sent a link to a new site that the Governor General will  be launching. (Thanks, Barbara) 

Citizen voices will be “a place of dialogue” to which  Canadians are being invited. The site will have “forums, blogs, and  chats,” and the Governor General is inviting Canadians to “join in and  share your concerns, your ideas, your experiences and your  achievements.” 

She will also be holding an online chat on September 27th at 7:00 pm.

Interesting experiment from our Head of State. 

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I’ve never “gotten” wikis. Aside from Wikipedia, I’ve never really grokked their value. I know that all kinds of smart people say good things about them. But, I’ve never really understood it.

I’m a convert now, after having gone looking for a repository of “All Things Pr 2.0″ and finding the NewPR Wiki.

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