Author Archives: Jason Ryan

Mobility and agility

This post began as a review of how well government websites are doing making their content available to mobile devices. I had looked at this in February last year, and had hoped that over those 12 months we might have seen an improvement. These hopes proved, as you might guess, somewhat optimistic. This exercise did, [...]

Social media metrics

Last week, while looking at the effectiveness of microformatting government media releases, the vexed issue of metrics reared it’s head. Vexed, because it is an ongoing issue for communicators, public sector and otherwise, to collate and report communcations metrics; even more so for the newer social media tools.
The sense of dissatisfaction I felt with my [...]

Government social media release [gamma]

Just over I year ago I posted the first government social media release, using an in-development microformat, hRelease. Since then, I have issued 7 more releases using this format (you can see them all on the e-government site). During the course of that year the markup has evolved as I worked with the hRelease working [...]

Public sector wikis

Chris Wilson posted an interesting article on Slate last week, The Wisdom of the Chaperones, that uses some interesting data on Wikipedia and Digg contributors to look critically at the notion of the wisdom of the crowd.
Essentially, Wilson points out that these social sites are not built and maintained by the masses, rather they are [...]

Early adopters and the strategy gap

Reading through the latest Pew research paper, A Portrait of Early Internet Adopters, at the same time as talking with colleagues from a variety of government agencies over the previous week, I was reminded how the challenges that social media present to government are neither particularly new nor require especially innovative or radical management responses.
It [...]

Blog Open Week

This week it is your opportunity to put the social in social media
When I started this blog, there were two primary reasons that drove me to the keyboard week in and week out and, after a period of reflection, I have decided that I haven’t been at all successful in the second. And while I [...]

Trust, the Media & the public sector

Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC, last week on the BBC blog posted a speech he gave called The Trouble with Trust. At over 6,000 words it is a long post, but if you are a public sector communicator, it is well worth the read – for some very different reasons.
Thompson wants to [...]

Turkey? Or ham? Both, methinks…

Having finally arrived at the last couple of working days of what has been, without too much of an understatement, a pretty tough year I am only too happy to fulfill my obligations to those few loyal readers and send you off towards the break with a little light entertainment.
Once a decade or so, you [...]

Online reputation management

Andy Oram wrote a post on Friday that triggered some thoughts of my own about reputation management, and how public sector communicators can approach this issue. Oram attended a Yale symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace and has since been providing thorough coverage and analysis.
What I found interesting about his first post (he has posted [...]

Govt 2.0 and public value

For two days earlier this week I was at the Online Social Networking conference in Sydney, the highlight of which was a terrific presentation by Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum.
Seb’s presentation, with the rather meandering title, A brief introduction to web 2.0 for government and non-profits: a perspective from the cultural sector included a [...]