In the years after Alexander Graham Bell successfully transmitted the sentence "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you"
using a liquid transmitter and an electromagnetic receiver on March 10, 1876, enterprising reporters and editors most likely ran breathless stories about how government was using the new fangled telephones -- sparking debates about whether this was a cause for great celebration or concern. The slower the news day, the higher the likelihood.
Fast forward 132 years and the story has not changed that much. Government is still discovering the Internet and it is still drawing praise and criticism in its attempts. Portals are (largely) yesterday's news but ink is still being spilled to chronicle public sector experimentation with social networking sites, blogs and wikis. Around here, such things are our main beat and we are forever forwarding links to interesting finds and examples of how the popular press covers them like this one in the Washington Post on text messaging in local government (forwarded by our Editor-in-Chief).
It is an unenviable task to follow or advance a big city daily newspaper's coverage of anything but here we can add something the original story lacked -- context. Our ongoing review of the results of the Digital States suggests that there is a critical mass around the use of Web 2.0 technologies.
In summary form, even as work continues to finish what states started in their transition to online service delivery, there has been widescale experimentation and significant adoption of collaborative Web 2.0 technologies among public agencies. Listservs, the long established Web 1.0 tool used by more than two-thirds of states (60%) of states, have been joined by wikis in a quarter (26%) for sharing information of common interest and concern. RSS Feeds - alternatively known as Really Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary, or Rich Site Summary - are common (90%) for broadcasting information to interested users, and almost three-quarters of states (72%) are using podcasts somewhere within the executive branch. Just less than half of states are using Text Messaging (49%), mashups (46%) and blogs (44%).
The numbers suggest that some public agencies in some jurisdictions are finding ways to act more like the citizens they serve, using technologies that their publics use in their everyday lives.
Fast forward 132 years and the story has not changed that much. Government is still discovering the Internet and it is still drawing praise and criticism in its attempts. Portals are (largely) yesterday's news but ink is still being spilled to chronicle public sector experimentation with social networking sites, blogs and wikis. Around here, such things are our main beat and we are forever forwarding links to interesting finds and examples of how the popular press covers them like this one in the Washington Post on text messaging in local government (forwarded by our Editor-in-Chief).
It is an unenviable task to follow or advance a big city daily newspaper's coverage of anything but here we can add something the original story lacked -- context. Our ongoing review of the results of the Digital States suggests that there is a critical mass around the use of Web 2.0 technologies.
In summary form, even as work continues to finish what states started in their transition to online service delivery, there has been widescale experimentation and significant adoption of collaborative Web 2.0 technologies among public agencies. Listservs, the long established Web 1.0 tool used by more than two-thirds of states (60%) of states, have been joined by wikis in a quarter (26%) for sharing information of common interest and concern. RSS Feeds - alternatively known as Really Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary, or Rich Site Summary - are common (90%) for broadcasting information to interested users, and almost three-quarters of states (72%) are using podcasts somewhere within the executive branch. Just less than half of states are using Text Messaging (49%), mashups (46%) and blogs (44%).
The numbers suggest that some public agencies in some jurisdictions are finding ways to act more like the citizens they serve, using technologies that their publics use in their everyday lives.
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