2007 Government Web Managers One-Day Workshop – Web 2.0

One of the most interesting topics in this conferences was Web 2.0. What is Web 2.0?

A broad definition is that Web 2.0 is the use of the web for collaboration: rss, podcasts, blogs, wikis, videocasts, screencasting, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

All of the above have been in existence for some time, but now corporations and governments are looking at using them to expand their web presence.

One of the speakers at the Federal Governments Web Manager’s Conference was Pierre Wielezynski from the World Bank. He spoke of how negatively the World Bank is usually portrayed online in blogs (doh!), and how the organization developed their own in-house blog to create some buzz and authoritative accounts of the good work that the World Bank strives to accomplish in the world. Its authored by twelve employees within the World Bank, who blog about their work and real world experiences making loans to developing countries.

6,000 new blogs are created every month, according to Pierre. Wow!

There was a Q & A period, during which I pointed out that Facebook had recently been used during the VT Tragedy. VT Students made a page called, I’m okay at VT, to let their parents and friends know they were okay (the phone lines were busy). Anyway, Pierre mentions my comment in his blog:

“During the Q&A session, someone made a very telling comment: she created a facebook account just to see how student were coping with the Virginia Tech massacre and this led her to browsing around, finding a page about her organization   etc.. etc….This curiosity, I said, is how social media will happen in government. “

Yet another misguided website re-do.

Last week, the company that manages my beach house, launched a new version of their website, at www.villagerealty.com

I looked at the new website and was surprised at the problems. They are easy to avoid. I’ve listed them below.

1. The website doesn’t have a liquid layout. Note the funky blank margins on the right and left of the page. Why would anyone want to waste prime screen space?

2. The domain, villagerealty.com, formerly was a url for an adult website. Therefore the url is filtered out by content filters. Here at work we use McAfee’s content filters and I can’t look at the new website at all. Why would anyone want to use a domain that many people may not be able to reach, or tells them that they are trying to access an adult site?

3. The new site has pretty Flash pictures on the home page. The pretty pictures slow the loading of the page. Why would anyone want to make their potential renters wait? They can always bail and go to another rental agency’s page – the beach house rental market in North Carolina is quite competitive.

4. The “Rentals” section of the site now has a drop down sliding menu where the user has to manipulate through over 400 homes – very carefully. Why would anyone think that this would be better than just listing the numbers on a webpage, as was done on their old website, at www.villagerealtyobx.com?

My beach house, Triple Play, is already rented for most of the summer. Good thing – because I would be really, really worried if I was counting on this new website for rentals.

Working for GSA, National Capital Region (NCR)

I work for GSA, General Service’s National Capital Region, located in Washington, DC. I work as a web content manager and editor for www.gsa.gov/ncr.

NCR hosts quite a few events, workshops and seminars – learn more about NCR events at www.gsa.gov/ncrnews. We try to help our clients learn about what we do, and how they can work with us, and what we can do for them.

GSA’s regional websites, at www.gsa.gov/regions, have to comply with a number of federal mandates and internal policies, just as any government websites are required to do.

If you have any comments about the websites listed above, I would be interested in listening.