Celebrating the eighth birthday of eGovAU

Earlier this week I started getting LinkedIn messages of congratulations for my work anniversary (thanks to everyone who sent them).

When I checked, it was for my work on this blog, which is now eight years old.

That's decent for a blog lifespan, where the majority are abandoned within the first year.

Thank you to everyone who has read, contributed to, commented on, republished or shared my posts -  while most of the words in my blog are mine, its success is due to the thousands of people who have encouraged, critiqued and prompted me to keep writing on topics that, at times, are difficult to raise in other places and in other ways.

eGovernment and Government 2.0 are a journey, not a destination - as buzzwords including Digital Transformation, Social Government, Innovation demonstrate (a good caution on the use of buzzwords is here).

The end goal, always, is to serve citizens in the most effective ways, using the least quantity of resources possible (not simply money) in the process.

The Government 2.0 journey (whatever buzzword you prefer) is far from over.

Reflecting on technology from a human lifespan perspective, we're barely into the early adulthood of the public internet, barely into teens for social media, just started school for open data and just out of diapers for the cloud.

And those are just a few of the technology-driven innovations that are changing and evolving our societies, environments, governments and world.

We're yet to see the large-scale impact of technologies including 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and many others that have already been developed, let alone all the tech still behind closed doors or on the drawing board.

In the immortal words of Randy Bachman, "You ain't seen nothing yet"!


Here's a few statistics from the eGovAU blog to celebrate its anniversary...

Published posts: 1,581 (including this one!)
Draft posts: 60 (I like to keep a backlog, but some are half-finished and may never be published)

Pageviews all time: 1,693,550
This excludes syndication (automated republishing of my blog in other sites) and selective republishing in commercial and non-commercial publications. I estimate total pageviews is likely to be about 4x this figure from the other data I have (so around 7m views).

Pageview share by country (all time)

USA	43.7%
Australia	13.9%
France	8.3%
Germany	3.7%
United Kingdom	3.0%
Russia	2.1%
Poland	1.4%
Ukraine	1.0%
Canada	0.7%
China	0.4%
Other	21.9%

Pageviews by browser (all time)

Firefox	33%
Internet Explorer	27%
Chrome	23%
Safari	5%
Opera	5%
Other	3%

Top posts by pageviews (all time)

1. Australian government Twitter accounts 
2. What are Australian Government agencies using social media to achieve?
3. It's nice to see government agencies share with each other
4. GovHack 2013 - my top ten picks
5. What the Facebook ruling from the Advertising Standards Board (that comments are ads) means for agencies
6. Building a business case to move from IE6 to a modern web browser
7. Are organisations failing in their use of social media and apps as customer service channels?
8. Has Gov 2.0 in Australia got too boring too fast?
9. Register now for BarCamp Canberra
10. Sharing and comparing political party policies - developing an XML schema for party policies
11. What impact will cyborgs have on government?

 Thanks for reading, and stick around - there's lots more to come!