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I am co-presenting the first presentation on Wednesday at the Ark Group's Advancing Intranet Management in the Public Sector conference in Sydney.
My colleague and I will be discussing how our agency's intranet was used to support staff through the recent major reform of the Australian Child Support Scheme and the cultural shifts through the Building a Better CSA program.
If you're attending the conference, please come and say hello at some point.
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Look for me at the Sydney conference, Advancing Intranet Management in the Public Sector | Tweet |
Monday, October 06, 2008
Storytelling as a blogging style | Tweet |
There are many different approaches to writing a blog post.
The Lost Art of Blogging provides an example of one of the more effective in The Homeric way of blogging : storytelling.
Humans respond strongly to stories and there is no reason why this technique should be less useful in official communications than in personal ones.
After all, the most effective business cases tell a story, as do many excellent advertisements.
Selecting a blogging style | Tweet |
This is a useful presentation on different styles of blogging and how frequently they should be used.
I am unsure how the author determined the appropriate frequency of different types of blog posts, however it does provide some ideas of approaches to content.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Australian history on show - on Flickr | Tweet |
Thank goodness that another Australian institute has taken the step to start placing a pictorial history of Australia up in Flickr.
As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald in the article, Australian history gets Flickr treatment, the State Library of NSW has begun loading its photo collection into the online image library.
It can require a great deal of hard work and organisation to get archives into a viable state to place online (as the Powerhouse museum has already done so well).
The benefit is that a priceless visual history of Australia becomes visible to all Australians, rather than requiring people to travel to the photos to see them (such an antiquated notion!).
Eventually it may be possible to aggregate all the individual collections into a national view of Australia's past in a way never before achievable. Then through user-based tagging, comments and search, different pathways through the images can be used to tell different stories, bringing the past back to live via the people who lived through it.
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Stop focusing on the fold | Tweet |
Research since 1997 has indicated that the 'fold' in webpages (the bottom of the first visible screen of a webpage) is no longer a hard barrier for people.
However the myth of the fold still persists in many web designs.
Boxes and arrows has hosted an excellent article by Milissa Tarquini, Blasting the Myth of the Fold.
In the article Milissa provides a clear call to web designers to move beyond the fold-based design of the past and recognise that, provided the site's purpose is clear in the first visible screen, placing important content below the fold does not make it unfindable for web users.
She compares the clickthrough rates of items of a number of AOL pages, finding that in many cases links below the fold receive as many, and sometimes more, clicks than items at the top of the page that are supposedly more visible.
One of the interesting findings reported is that due to different browser resolutions and rendering engines, there is little consistency in where the fold occurs in web pages anyway. The most common fold line is experienced by only 10% of web users as variations in PC screens and browsers means that the fold appears differently to different site visitors.
Milissa's advice is to instead provide visual cues and compelling content to encourage users to scroll through your page, thereby no longer forcing designers to cram in all the important content into the first screen that appears.
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