en.europa-eu-audience

Apple Beating Kindle for E-books in UK

 

Amazon says Kindle book sales are rocketing, now outstripping its paperback sales by 15 percent. But who are the people buying electronic books? Is the Kindle really moving the needle on e-book sales overall? And if so, how much?

More on http://gigaom.com/2011/02/18/apple-beating-kindle-for-e-books-%E2%80%94-in-uk-at-least/

Working Group on Technological Options for Capturing and Reporting Parliamentary Proceedings

Source: http://www.ictparliament.org/node/2599

Following the Workshop on Technological Options for Recording Plenary and Committee Sessions in Parliament, which was organized by the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament, in collaboration with the European Parliament in July 2010, in Brussels, a Working Group has been established to develop guidelines for reporting parliamentary proceedings.

The report of the Workshop is available here: Report of the Workshop on Technological Options for Capturing and Reporting Parliamentary Proceedings, July 2010, European Parliament.

Addressed to parliamentary decision-makers, IT staff, audio-visual staff and reporters, the guidelines will include discussions of the policy as well as the technical options for all the stages of reporting parliamentary proceedings, from capture to publication, with the aim to facilitate the availability of information regarding the work of parliament to a wide audience in a timely manner.

The group has been working under the moderation of Jeff Griffith, Senior Adviser at the Global Centre. Your suggestions and recommendations are welcome.

 

iPad Usability

Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad.html

Summary:
iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.

eGov, communication and metrics

Sources :

http://greatemancipator.com/2011/02/15/measuring-and-capturing-value-of-government-communication/

Measuring and Capturing Value of Government Communication

http://www.slideshare.net/govloop/measuring-and-capturing-value-of-government-communication a video

Event: http://www.govdelivery.com/

 

See an Espresso Book Machine in Action

Source: http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2011/02/11/see-an-espresso-book-machine-in-action/

NPR’s Science Friday posted this video yesterday. You’re looking at an Espresso Book Machine that is owned by the NYC based bookseller McNally Jackson ...

 

Read also "tear down this PDF" at http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/02/07/tear-down-this-pdf/

The delusion of e-democracy

 Source : http://greatemancipator.com/2011/01/26/the-delusion-of-e-democracy/

An addition to that recent string of papers on public engagement should be one by Ismael Pena-Lopez of the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. Ismael has been blogging for some years and on his site ICTOLOGY he presents for public consumption a variety of works including a recent one entitled ‘Goverati: E-aristocrats or the delusion of e-democracy‘…

 

Twitter and Social Networking in the 2010 Midterm Elections

Source: Pew Research Center Publications

by Aaron Smith, Senior Research Specialist, Pew Internet & American Life Project
January 27, 2011

Overview

Some 21% of online adults used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace in the months leading up to the November 2010 elections to connect with a campaign or the election itself, and 2% of online adults did so using Twitter. That works out to a total of 22% of adult internet users who engaged with the political campaign on Twitter or social networking sites in at least one of the following ways:

• 11% of online adults discovered on a social networking site who their friends voted for in the November elections.
• 9% of online adults received candidate or campaign information on social networking sites or Twitter.
• 8% of online adults posted political content on Twitter or a social networking site.
• 7% of online adults friended a candidate or political group on a social networking site or followed them on Twitter.
• 7% of online adults started or joined a political group on a social networking site.
• 1% of online adults used Twitter to follow the election results as they were happening.

...

Read more on

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1871/internet-politics-facebook-twitter-2010-midterm-elections-campaign

Guidelines: Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials

The Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials represents shared best practices followed by agencies participating in the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI).  This document draws substantially on the National Archives and Records Administration’s Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Records for Electronic Access: Creation of Production Master Files – Raster Images (June 2004), but has been revised and updated in several areas to reflect the current recommendations of the working group and to reflect changes that have occurred in the digitization field during the last five years.

See http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/digitize-technical.html

Current Document

Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials  (PDF, 5.43 MB)

 

ow to Revamp a Digital Agenda (or an E-Government Strategy)

Source: by Andrea Di Maio  |  February 4, 2011  |  2 Comments

http://blogs.gartner.com/andrea_dimaio/2011/02/04/how-to-implement-a-digital-agenda-or-an-e-government-strategy/

"For one of those coincidences that make like interesting, over the last week I have been discussing e-government strategies (or digital agendas or information society plans) in three different contexts. First of all discussing with colleagues at a meeting in Brussels. Second, commenting on the recently launched call for an Italian digital agenda. And third, helping an account executive who is in contact with one of our clients about the revision of their country’s strategy. If I go a little be further back, to May 2010, I had meetings in various countries in the Gulf area, and the topic was again how to develop or rebalance e-government strategies.

Almost all these conversations have some common elements:

• There has been a triggering event, raising the visibility of the topic among politicians. In some cases the event is the publication of one of those worldwide rankings (from the UN, the European Commission, Accenture, or Brookings) that I have been bashing on for many years.
• Prominent people in the economy and society (economists, journalists, popular bloggers, and the likes) believe that greater investment in technology will re-ignite the national economy, and that technology is a powerful weapon to modernize a bureaucracy that hinders progress and innovation.
• ICT vendors and consultants look for greater public sector spending at a moment in time when clients in other industry sectors spend more cautiously on technology.

Whatever the trigger, it is certainly important to take a deep breath and make a serious reflection about how technology can help."

Read more at the source: 

http://blogs.gartner.com/andrea_dimaio/2011/02/04/how-to-implement-a-digital-agenda-or-an-e-government-strategy/

Ten reasons why blogs are more useful than email newsletters

Sometimes it surprises me how much some organisations like using email newsletters over other tools like blogs.

They spend weeks or even months crafting news items, bundle them together into a single email and then send them out to a subscriber list - sometimes without even using a system to measure the response rate or manage the bounces, making it impossible to prove a return on their investment.

I've long been a fan of blogs over email newsletters, here's some of the reasons why:  ...

Read more on http://egovau.blogspot.com/2011/02/ten-reasons-why-blogs-are-more-useful.html

04-02-2011 eGOV AU