Posted on April 29, 2010 by Stephendale in Public Sector
This notice from PayPal caught my eye today in relation to safe web browsers. Getting on my hobby horse again (see previous post on this topic), I wonder when the UK public sector are going to wake up to the fact that the vast majority of government staff (central and local) have no other choice but to use Internet Explorer 6. IE6 is no longer supported by Microsoft, does not benefit from the latest security software patches, is not supported by a growing number of social media websites (e.g. YouTube, Flickr), does not comply with W3C standards, and is the antithesis of a web productivity tool. I had hoped that Socitm might take up the campaign to get IE6 replaced – or to at least to support the concept of staff having an alternative to IE6 in the workplace – but they remain strangely silent on this issue, despite the fact that this could be one of the most significant staff productivity improvements available to the sector -to say nothing of the improved security.
So, sorry civil servants, you can ignore the remainder of this post since it is clearly of no relevance to you. Best just to think of ‘phishing’ as something that people do with a rod and line!
If you are not using the latest versions of internet browser, you’re putting yourself at risk. PayPal and the next-generation of web browsers, support anti-phishing technologies. These safer web browsers make it easier to spot web forgery (commonly called “phishing”) and alert or block you from entering personal information that may lead to identify theft.
Download Firefox 3, Google Chrome or Internet Explorer 8
Firefox, Google Chrome and the latest versions of Internet Explorer have built-in features that alert you when you’re on a fraudulent site. This means if you accidently click on a fraudulent email, you’ll be alerted and warned before the page opens.
Check that you’re using the latest version of Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer by clicking the browser’s ‘Help’ button and selecting ‘About’. If you’re ready for an upgrade, click on the links below to download and install.
Knowledge Hub Hotseat – Still trying to explain the concepts in less than 2 minutes!
Open data – The idea behind open data is that information held by government should be freely available to use and re-mix by the public. It’s a movement to make non-personal data:
* open so that it can be turned into useful applications
* support transparency and accountability
* make sharing data between public sector partners more efficient.
The government is committed to making much more public data openly available. On 22 March 2010, the Prime Minister announced that the government was going to: “use digital technology to open up data with the aim of providing every citizen in Britain with true ownership and accountability over the services they demand from government.”
Current and planned initiatives include:
* data.gov.uk, which is a single, easy-to-use website for access to 3,000 public data sets
* Office for National Statistics (ONS) opening up access to over two billion data items at the local neighbourhood level.
WhiteHouse.gov Releases Open Source Code | The White House – As part of our ongoing effort to develop an open platform for WhiteHouse.gov, we’re releasing some of the custom code we’ve developed. This code is available for anyone to review, use, or modify. We’re excited to see how developers across the world put our work to good use in their own applications.
The following is a transcript of the Knowledge Hub ‘Hot Seat’ on-line question and answer session that took place on 26th February 2010 on the IDeA CoP Platform.
Have you ever had problems finding information amongst all over conversations going on out in the virtual world? Yes you can do a Google search and you might be lucky and find the information relevant to you, but the fact is these days there are more and more conversations and they are increasingly disaggregated. Anybody can set up a new network; anybody can post a blog and twitter about things. What the Knowledge Hub will do is connect all of these conversations, whether they are tweets, blogs, community conversations or feeds from individual websites, into one place.
The clever bit is to be able to aggregate and theme all of this content so that users can make some sense of it. The Hub will link information (data) to conversations and conversations to personal profiles, so that users can identify the knowledge that is most relevant to them and their needs.
The Knowledge Hub will also support ‘mash-ups’ and data visualisation apps for comparing performance (e.g. efficiency metrics) against benchmark data and other statistics. We will be encouraging people who use the knowledge hub to create their own applications and make them available through things like an application store, so that anybody in the sector can use these ‘widgets’ and plug-ins with iGoogle or their iPhones or other PDA devices.
I’m happy to give you further information as part of this hotseat session and will try and answer any questions that you have.
These are my links for April 7th through April 18th:
Buzz – Stuff – Post to Buzz<br />
Help people share stuff from your website in Google Buzz
What To Look For When You Hire A Community Manager – FeverBee – The Online Community Guide – Experience aside, most community manager jobs look for the wrong skills. If community building is about bringing a group of people together and developing a community spirit amongst them – then you need to find people with skills that fit that.<br />
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There is a real skill involved in this line of work Most Facebook groups, Ning sites, forums and branded communities fail because the individuals in charge of them don’t have the skill for this line of work.
Dunbar's number – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.<br />
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Dunbar's number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained."
Linked Data are the roots for the Future Web – KnowledgeBoard – A lot of people, some of which are part of the W3C, want to see a “Web of Data” where data is linked across domains (physical (e.g. web servers), virtual/symbolic (e.g. knowledge bases or domains of knowledge/understanding)). This is where every “thing” on the web is structured in a kind of “object orientated” way, RDF happens to be a standardised way of achieving this. But this does not mean that a “Web of Data” will replace the document view that we see today, it means that the Linked Data are the roots and a human view is what the user sees
Wolfram|Alpha – Making the World's Knowledge Computable. Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. Enter your question or calculation and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and a growing collection of data to compute the answer.
Have you submitted a proposal yet? The deadline of May 3rd is approaching fast.
Here’s why you should submit a proposal:
Show case your work with 700 delegates from over 40 countries and be seen as a pioneer and leader in what you do
If you have been part of a successful (or unsuccessful) project with innovative best practices, lessons learned, hints and tips, then we want to hear from you
Benefit from the extensive marketing campaign and promotional exposure/recognition you will receive from being part of one of the largest conferences serving the information industry.
You and your organisation will be listed in the printed brochure (sent to 22,000) and on the website (emails to 24,000).
Join a roster of industry authoritiesand use this opportunity to raise your profile. Previous keynote speakers to the programme include:
* Charlene Li, Co-Author of ‘Groundswell’
* Dame Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science, University of Southampton
* Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Deputy Head Research, University of Southampton
* Blaise Cronin, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
* Clay Shirky, Author of ‘Here Comes Everybody’
* Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
* Dr David Weinberger, Co-author of ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’
* Dr Jakob Nielsen, described as ‘The king of usability’
* Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive, The British Library
Selected speakers receive a FREE place to the 3 day conferenceand co-located exhibition, worth over £900
For information on conference themes, making your submission and review criteria please click on the links below
Posted on April 11, 2010 by Stephendale in Google, RSS
I’m not sure if anyone else has shared my frustration at having come across a really useful or interesting website and then discovered there is no RSS facility to subscribe to subsequent updates. Clearly the author/owner of the website believes that their readers will bookmark the site and keep popping back to see if there are any changes. Not very realistic when there are several billion websites out there.
There’s also the perennial issue of the (mainly public sector) websites that fail to support RSS, with an antiquated content management system (CMS) often cited as the problem. Mash the state clearly had some good intentions in embarrassing local councils into providing an RSS feed on their website, but with only 32% of councils with this facility at the last count – well short of their target of getting all council websites to support RSS – they may well have given up on this crusade (indeed the website hasn’t been updated since 2009)
Anyway, there is a solution (sort of) which I had completely forgotten about until recently when I was reconfiguring some feeds in my Google Reader. This lets you create a web feed for websites that do not have an RSS facility. It’s a bit coarse in that you can only monitor changes to a whole webpage (rather than – say – just monitoring news updates), but better than nothing.
To make a custom Google Reader feed, all you need to do is cut and paste the URL (the web address) of the page you want to monitor into the box you get when you click on the ‘Add a subscription’ button at the top left of the Google Reader page.
I’ve shown below the screen shots for the feed I’ve juts created for my local council Uttlesford – not, I might add because I think they’ve got anything interesting to say, but you never know, they might read this and respond by providing a real RSS feed on their website. I can live in hope!
If anyone is not aware of if an RSS feed is available, look out for this commonly used icon:
These are my links for March 31st through April 5th:
http://crenk.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/web-3.0.png – Im sure a lot of you out there have heard the term Web 2.0, but today I wanted to explain Web 3.0. Web 3.0 is a very interesting term that talks about the semantic web. The below image better explains the differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.
Measuring Social Media with Web Analytics, Part 1 – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – Social media is increasingly becoming a measurable medium. However, many companies have yet to develop a social media measurement strategy, or they're struggling to get theirs properly implemented. This doesn't need to be the case, but unfortunately many companies aren't aware of the options that are available to monitor, measure, and track social media
Gov 2.0: OpenGov APIs: Interfacing with Open Government – At Transparency Camp in DC last weekend, Socrata – a firm that hosts open data sets for governments – open sourced their API for accessing and querying public data. The Socrata Open Data API (or SODA) is a specification for running queries against public data sets. Currently, Socrata hosts data sets for the City of Seattle and others – code samples for working with the SODA spec can be found on Github.
On 23 December 2009, the Government published a consultation paper on policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey. The purpose of this consultation was to seek views about how to best implement proposals made by the Prime Minister on 17 November 2009, to make certain Ordnance Survey datasets available for free with no restrictions on re-use. This was part of the PM’s vision for the role of public data and information in the delivery of Smarter Government that would empower citizens with better public services and a thriving private sector market based on the data that government produces.
A response to the Government consultation on making Ordance Survey (mapping) datasets available for use and re-use is available on the CLG website.
Key points from the consultation are:
A package of datasets will be made freely available to the public and will be released under the product name OS OpenData™.
The datasets that are released as part of OS OpenData will continue to be maintained by Ordnance Survey to a high and consistent standard. To ensure the product set remains relevant and continues to fulfil its objectives, it is envisaged that this product set will be reviewed periodically by an expert panel appointed by government and reporting to CLG Ministers.
The OS OpenData will include
• OS Street View®
• 1:50 000 Gazetteer
• 1:250 000 Scale Colour Raster
• OS LocatorTM
• Boundary-LineTM
• Code-Point® Open
• Meridian™ 2
• Strategi®
• MiniScale®
• OS VectorMap™ District (available 1 May 2010)
• Land-Form PANORAMA®
The OS VectorMap™ District dataset is a new product and is available in both raster and vector formats. It is designed to be a flexible and customisable product specifically designed for use on the web. It will enable developers to select, customise and modify maps to their specific requirements.
OS OpenData products will be available from 1 April 2010 in hard media and as an on-line service at www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendata
In addition OS OpenData will include an on-line viewing service of a selection of the OS OpenData topographic products.
This initiative continues the trend in making public data public (over 30000 datasets now available through the http://www.data.gov.uk portal) and will no doubt spawn the development of a whole new raft of innovative mashups, widgets and apps by social innovators. Exciting times!
