Andrea DiMaio

I have seen multiple press articles (for instance look at this one) over the last few days about how rapidly usa.gov is changing to incorporate some web 2.0 characteristics.

There are different kinds of feeds that one can register to (health and consumer news, updates on the federal blog). There are social bookmarks. There is access to plenty of blogs. There is a word cloud. There are widgets to access federal information on a variety of areas, such as crime, public safety, environment, on your own portal.

All this confirms the willingness to change and supports earlier statements about openness. Do not be mistaken though, there is nothing really new or revolutionary. Several US States have implemented the same functionalities long time ago. Two things strike me so far:

1. Government 2.0 functionalities (except for RSS feeds) are confined to a box on the lower-right hand side of the home page. On my laptop. I had to scroll the page to even see that. I would expect them to be center front, there is no reason to be shy.
2. There is a video section, while I was expecting videos to go straight to a US government channel on YouTube and pictures to go to Flickr (as they do for some States already)

Usa.gov is on the right course. It just takes a few more (and bolder) steps, and the willingness to let parts of the old site go: in the web 2.0 world, less is more.

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Category: web 2.0 in government     Tags: portal

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