It is a fundamental responsibility of the prime minister to listen and respond to the concerns and questions of the people he serves – at least that is what it says in Premiership for Dummies.
As such, Gordon Brown’s enthusiastic adoption of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and online video to open dialogue with
But intention and execution are two very different matters, and the PM’s recent dalliances with Web 2.0 have demonstrated some of the pitfalls associated with ‘reaching out’ online.
Mistake number one: After naming the prime minister’s channel on YouTube as ‘Number10TV’,
Cue
None of this would have been too much of a problem had a Financial Times blog not mistakenly linked to www.number10tv.com in a post on the PM’s mastery of the web.
Mistake number two: When building the website www.number10.gov.uk, Brown’s Web 2.0 hub, developers used the popular open-source blogging platform WordPress. Nothing wrong with that, but they decided to use a pre-built layout, designed by programmer Anthony Baggett and released under a Creative Commons licence.
The licence made the layout available for anyone to use, as long as they credited its author. The developers behind the great leader’s website, however, decided to remove the credit that would ordinarily appear on the layout. But they did not remove the name of the author from the underlying code, meaning that simply clicking ‘view source’ on a web browser revealed their crime.
And crime it is, according to a
These two gaffes demonstrate an immutable truth of the Internet: if you are doing it online, make sure you do it well. Because on the web, nothing travels faster than news of a cock-up.
Further reading
Web 2.0 adoption faces workplace challenges
Integrating Web 2.0 technologies into the workplace is not always a smooth project
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