TECHNOLOGY AND THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT

You can bet your "[agency].gov/open Web page" (refer to bottom of page 2 in the Office of Management and Budget's open government directive) that agencies are going to employ social media tools.

So somebody should write a memo to warn feds about Seppukoo, the social media app that will kind of literally kill your other social media app.

Seppuku, for those of you not obsessed with all things samurai or too lazy to hit up the Wikipedia entry, is a form of ritual suicide by disembowelment (ew). Seppukoo is a means of deactivating your Facebook profile that offers the added benefit of replacing said profile with a customizable memorial page.

Seppuku was thought to be more honorable than dying at the hands of one's enemies. Seppukoo talks about liberating the digital body, but it's actually a game, because every time someone in your Facebook network commits Seppukoo, you get points and increase your Seppukoo rank.

It's probably unlikely that Seppukoo drives anyone away from their Facebook account (at least not for more than a few days -- you can log back into Facebook to reactivate your account if you are bored of being digitally dead). But the problem remains that not many federal managers are using social media tools.

For them, I recommend spreadtweet, because I think federal managers might feel more comfortable using Twitter if the interface looked like an Excel spreadsheet.

The Web and everything related to it seems to be 2.0 these days, but Google Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik's 2.0 take on Web analytics deserves the version two status. Not only does he methodically outline a new approach to analyzing Web metrics, but he offers some advice on how to measure the success of social media tools.

So, for anyone who has ever wondered whether the hours you've logged on Twitter have made a difference at your organization, pay attention.

First, according to Kaushik, the purpose of Twitter shouldn't be to get more followers. So, measuring the success of a Twitter account in terms of number of followers wouldn't be a good measure of success. Instead, he said, you should pay attention to your message amplification -- or, in the language of Twitter, retweets.

Retweets will spread your message further than you ever could on your own. Kaushik told Nextgov, "On any given day, I have a chance of 14,000 people reading my messages, but if retweeted, I have the ability to reach 1.2 million people - that's the power of using and measuring social media."

Want to compare your retweets against other twitterers? Try retweetrank.

Want to know more? Order the book. Kaushik said he will donate all proceeds from the book to The Smile Train and The Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation.

You can have the most gorgeous Web site with the most amazing interactive functionality, but if the words on the site don't work for the site's users, you don't have a good Web site. That's why GSA's Office of Citizen Services decided to focus on plain language for World Usability Day 2009, according to Nicole Burton, a usability specialist at GSA.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Plain Language and PlainLangugage.gov, the Nov. 12 activities will include a free seminar on learning to write anything in plain language from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

Federal Web managers who can't attend the session can schedule mini phone consultations on plain language with usability experts.

Details on setting up a mini-consultation -- as well as information about the rest of the World Usability Day events and general usability resources -- can be found on Webcontent.gov's World Usability Day page.

Not convinced you need to spend any extra time on Web usability? Burton points out that successful Web operations like Amazon.com spend huge amounts of money on site usability. Additionally, Burton says, following usability practices enables government to work more efficiently and spend less taxpayer money because systems are designed properly the first time.

When ForeSee Results released its third-quarter e-government satisfaction scores this week, the big news was that public satisfaction with federal Web sites had reached a record high.

Eight federal portals/department main pages received superior satisfaction scores -- that of an 80 or above during the third quarter of 2009. And as I checked each site out, I noticed something I thought was interesting:

Not one of them featured a top agency official's face prominently on the homepage.

The prominence of photographs of officials on government Web sites is something I've felt forced to pay attention to since reading Gerry McGovern's sharp commentary on the role of government Web sites last year. McGovern likens using the face of an official prominently on a government Web site to North Korean propaganda. Like I said, sharp commentary.

He also says:

"The Department 'welcomes, launches, improves, exceeds, excels, is celebrating its anniversary, and on and on and on.' It's all about them. Giving control of a Web site to a government communicator is like giving a pub to an alcoholic."

Really sharp commentary.

But, in the case of the Peace Corps, NASA, GobiernoUSA.gov, the FBI, the National Parks Service, Cancer.gov, the CDC and NIAMS' public site, nary an official head appears (in NASA's case, at least not until the footer of the site) on the homepage. It's not all about them. They make their entry points all about the user and the information the user wants -- not about themselves or what they are doing.

With the Virginia general election only a week away, residents of the commonwealth looking for voting information might find one of Google's latest gadgets useful.

The 2009 Virginia Voting Information Project Google gadget, like most Google gadgets, can be scaled and embedded on any Web site. Virginia residents plug in their address and the Google gadget, using data provided by the Virginia Board of Elections, will give them the address and directions to their polling place, a list of candidates who will appear on their ballot, and contact information for their local election official.

The folks at the Voting Information Project, a group effort spearheaded by Google and the Pew Center on the States, praised the Virgina Board of Elections for "ensuring election information is easily distributed by lots of different channels," and rightly so.

It's not enough that the Virginia State Board of Elections has a Web site with all of the information voters will need posted on it. There's no guarantee that people will know or be inclined to seek out information there. So, they made the information portable, and now anyone who thinks they have an audience that would be interested can easily pass the data along.

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