Cyberclinic: Downing Street 2.0
It's a brave, exciting new move, there's no doubt about it. Well, maybe some doubt about it. Gordon Brown has, this week, gone ahead and authorised a fundamental change which may cast a whole new light on his premiership. Yep, the Number 10 website has moved from using Microsoft's ASP server-side script engine to WordPress. In short, Downing Street has embraced the blogosphere.
It's the culmination of a long, slow birth into the world of so-called Web 2.0. On May 1st last year, Tony Blair's video confiding that "nothing prepares you for the difficulty of being Prime Minister" was Downing Street's first post on YouTube.
Then Number 10's Digital Communications team joined Flickr back in March of this year, with snaps of Nicolas Sarkozy's visit to London. And about a month ago, they signed up to the burgeoning micro-blogging platform, Twitter, with such revelations as "abandoned kestrel chick found in the No10 garden, now in the hands of the RSPB", and "The house is eerily quiet. Lots of staff are on holiday, but the gardener is here doing magnificent work".
The news slipped out about a month ago that a new site was planned, and it's already up and running – albeit in "beta". Quite why such a well-resourced department as the PM's office can't put a new website through its paces before presenting it to the outside world is anyone's guess, but for now you may find "ongoing glitches with links which our technical support team is beavering away on". Indeed, when the Blog Herald announced the launch of the website yesterday, it provoked a furious rant from a web designer mocking the low quality of the work.
"Basic accessibility errors... riddled with invalid mark-up... rolled out bereft of any meaningful testing... fails Guidelines 12.4 and 13.1 (twice)... awful customisation / implementation of WordPress." He concluded: "Sack the amateurs, hire professionals and stop wasting people's time and money."
Ouch. Of course, there are good, non-financial reasons why Number 10 didn't splash out on purpose-built containers for their video clips, photos and microblogs: YouTube, Flickr and Twitter do the job magnificently, and users of those sites might well be more likely to subcribe to the feeds of each one and take notice when they're updated. But the whole reasoning behind these platforms, and indeed the WordPress one that the new website is built on, is to encourage user feedback. It's notable that comments are switched off on all their YouTube, Flickr and WordPress posts; indeed, the only way you can currently respond to any of the site's content is to send a direct message on Twitter (remember, that's 140 characters or fewer!), or write to 10 Downing Street, or, according to the "Contact Us" page, send a fax to Gordon on 020 7925 0918. Radical.
"The best preparation for governing is listening to the British people," said the PM when he accepted the job, not realising that web technology was making it easier and easier for disgruntled voices to be heard; if Number 10 did open up all their Web 2.0 endeavours to feedback, they'd undoubtedly have to employ someone full time to monitor them.
"Wanted: Easygoing, unflappable web monkey to deal with unstoppable deluge of ranting, semi-coherent fury at Government policy. Apply by fax to 020 7925 0918."
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