Too long, too dull and far too pleased with itself. Little more than an exercise in vanity publishing. Irrelevant to the vast majority of people.

The complaints are numerous but at least you come here to read my blog not to find out when it’s bin day.

What about council news?

Followers of the gospel of top tasks don’t have much time for it. People rarely visit their council’s website to read the news. They’ve got something much more specific in mind, whether it’s applying for a school place or renewing their library books. News probably doesn’t make it into the top 100 tasks on a council website let alone the top 20. Why not drop it?

While there are a few exceptions like Brent, it’s hard to deny that the average council news page is a complete snorefest.

What’s this? 400 words on a benefit fraud case that didn’t even result in a prison sentence, complete with lengthy quotations from the magistrate and the lead councillor.

Now here’s 700 words on an upgrade to the council’s IT system that won’t be noticed by a single resident.

And how about a story about the trade price of recycled paper that almost wholly comprises quotations from councillors?

This is all worthy stuff and doubtless of interest to someone but it’s nothing that the average resident can do anything about. It’s never going to be the talk of the town or even get a mention at the dinner table.

But mixed in among these anaesthetic reports are things that residents care about and might even need to know: local events, major planning projects that will cause disruption, changes to bin day.

Sadly this useful information is presented, like the rest, in a turgid press release style. Residents are asked to plough through a huge slab of words that’s hard to scan for the essential details. The text is laden with contrived quotations from people no-one knows that rarely do anything more than state the obvious. It finishes without a call to action. It’s a wonder that anyone bothers at all.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Council news matters but it needs to be given to the right people at the right time and in a way that makes sense to them.

I reject the idea that council websites should focus on premeditated customer journeys to the exclusion of everything else. While there’s often too little focus on the customer’s intended task at the moment and far too much clutter and distraction on the average council website, we don’t want to swing too far the other way. There’s room for a few tips and nuggets of info that the customer didn’t come for as long as it’s not overdone.

So how do we fix it?

Social media is an important part of the mix. People might not go to their council website to read news but they’re happy to sign up in their thousands to Facebook pages and Twitter feeds that bring the news to them. Councils that take the trouble to understand the strengths and limitations of each social site and adapt their style accordingly do best. Recycling your RSS news headlines through Twitterfeed is so 2010.

Where they need to exist at all, news pages should be written in a friendly and accessible style. Drop the passive voice. Talk directly to your readers using “we” and “you”. If you want people to do something then prompt them with a call to action, don’t just make them aware of the opportunity. Pull all the vital details clear of the body text. Dates, places and contact details should stand alone at the top of the page. Above all keep it short.

Now put links to individual news pages everywhere they’re relevant. If you’re going to automate this, make sure your CMS will remove a link when it’s no longer needed. Don’t clutter your pages with links to closed consultations and events that have finished. Don’t bother at all with stories that residents can’t do anything about like personnel changes and aren’t-we-doing-great pieces. Keep it practical — news you can use.

Got an event for children? Link to it in the schools section. Business news should be on your business pages. Green news should be on your environment pages. An event in a park should be on the page for that park, among others. Far too many councils keep news in its own section and away from all the parts of the site that people actually read.

Save the press releases for journalists. Keep them in their own section. Don’t link to individual press releases from your home page. Don’t call them “News”.

If you write in an accessible style, focus on things that matter most to residents and mix links to news pages into relevant sections of your website your news will be read and heeded. Carry on as most councils do today and you might as well scrap it entirely.

See also:

• Twelve commandments for council news

Lee Jasper got more than a few backs up today with a tasteless comment on Twitter about the Norway shooter at the supposed expense of Boris Johnson:

Boris Johnson and Breivik anyone notice the striking similarities or is just me? He could be his younger brother

Jasper then proceeded to compound the offence caused by throwing around various racist comments to the effect that all white people were responsible for what happened in Norway.

All par for the course from Jasper. Or was it?

@andywasley suggested that Jasper’s Twitter account might have been hacked and that the offensive posts were written by an imposter.

Jasper certainly never claimed that his account was hacked so we can presume that the tweets were by him. He also went on to lock the account so that people couldn’t read what he’d written.

But if we needed to, how would we judge whether Jasper’s tweets today were in character or out of it?

Step forward the naive Bayes classifier — the kind of software that protects your inbox from email spam.

The Bayes classifier is an artificial intelligence tool that can be used to sort documents into various categories. For email the categories would be spam and not-spam (a.k.a. “ham”). The not-spam ends up in your inbox and the spam gets filed somewhere else.

The Bayes classifier uses mathematical probability to make its decisions. It won’t be right all the time but they tend to have a pretty good success rate.

We can use the same technique to see whether Jasper’s tweets today were likely to be his.

I set up the Ruby classifier gem for this job.

First we define two categories: Leejasper and Notleejasper.

Then we train the classifier using documents — tweets — that we know belong in each category.

I downloaded a batch of tweets from Jasper’s account. There were 97 from today and 442 before today.

So the 97 are “unknown” tweets that need to be classified. The 442 tweets from before today are used to train the Leejasper category.

We also need to train the Notleejasper category. I downloaded 8187 tweets from various people’s accounts, political and non-political, and used those.

Running the 97 “unknown” tweets supposedly from Lee Jasper today through the classifier indicates that 87 are Leejasper and 10 are Notleejasper — a result of 89% in favour of Leejasper.

And what of the other 10? They’re mostly very bland and could have come from anyone:

Notleejasper:  Actually I agree...
Notleejasper:  He wont be getting my vote either..
Notleejasper:  I think there are certain circumstances where its entirely appropriate to do so the AC Leukaemia Trust being one of them.
Notleejasper:  My point is the historical trend that provide the context for your example.
Notleejasper:  Of course what...?
Notleejasper:  What I actually said is that they 'look alike' so get of your high horse.
Notleejasper:  a rare thing indeed...
Notleejasper:  agism in the workplace don't make me laugh. The majority don't want to work longer thats why we have mass industrial action.
Notleejasper:  and the reason for that is?
Notleejasper:  what you dont think they look alike?

Overall a fairly persuasive result. I’ll reiterate that Lee Jasper hasn’t disowned his tweets from today but if he did he’d be on pretty thin ice.

One of the biggest impediments to councils implementing RSS feeds and other forms of open data is a lack of imagination about what they and the rest of the world can do with that data. The classic use case for RSS — reading it in a feed reader such as Google Reader– doesn’t appeal very strongly to most people that don’t already use feed readers. As much as they are useful for some, feed readers are unlikely to ever be used by a majority of web users.

Lately, some councils have discovered that having an RSS feed for their news is an easy way to get onto Twitter. They just post the items from their news feed automatically with TwitterFeed. While Twitter works best as a conversational medium (they don’t call it social media for nothing) simply streaming your news to a Twitter account isn’t a bad place to start.

Another option is delivering RSS by email. Anyone using RSS can easily enable this just by linking their feeds to FeedMyInbox. If you’re using Feedburner, that’s got an email delivery option too. No programming, no list management headaches. Feed-to-email is criminally overlooked by most RSS publishers, many of whom commit huge resources to running standalone email newsletter systems.

Now I’ve created QR Code Posters, a spinoff project from Mash the State to give people another useful RSS tool.

First and foremost, QR Code Posters just makes it easy to print the contents of an RSS feed. Despite living in an increasingly wired world, paper is still massively important. We’re surrounded by it and by and large it works. A paper poster or flyer gives your information a tangible, physical presence in the world where it can be noticed and read without using any technology at all.

But as the name implies, QR Code Posters also generates QR codes for each item of an RSS feed. These can be read by mobile phone users with appropriate software. The phone will then jump straight to the webpage for that RSS item. It’s very quick and very easy. See something of interest on a poster — “blip it” — and off you go with the full page.

Here are some QR Code Posters in the wild. We used Sutton Council‘s feeds for news, jobs and public consultations, then augmented those with a local planning applications feed from Planning Alerts. Stonecot Hill in south London, where this noticeboard is sited, sits on the boundary between Sutton and Merton councils. Planning Alerts lets us pull a single feed with planning applications within 800 metres of that point, from both councils. Perfect.

One very useful feature of QR Code Posters is that the posters are bookmarkable. So here’s a list of all the posters we used on this noticeboard tagged on Delicious Pinboard. The posters get generated dynamically every time they’re viewed online so the next time we visit this noticeboard we can just jump straight to these links and print them out again.

The phone used in the photos is an iPhone 3GS running QuickMark (i-nigma is a good, free alternative). Most smartphones can run suitable software. Search for a “barcode reader” or “QR code reader” for your phone.

QR Code Posters is integrated with Mash the State so if you’re viewing a page for a council that’s got feeds like this one for Barnet you can just click the BP icons to print posters.

Whether you’re a council officer or an information guerrilla, now’s the time to liberate your feeds from the web and get them out into the real world. And if your council is one of the 74% that still doesn’t provide feeds you know what to do.

1. Validate your feeds

It only takes a moment to validate a feed. Invalid feeds can cause all kinds of unexpected weirdness in feed readers and other applications. Find any errors and fix them.

2. Use autodiscovery

People that use feeds a lot love autodiscovery. It provides a consistent way of finding and subscribing to feeds from any website. Put an autodiscovery <link> tag on your home page for every feed you’ve got and a tag on every interior page that’s got its own feed, eg. a tag for the news feed on the news page.

The standard tag format for RSS autodiscovery is:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://www.anytown.gov.uk/news.rss" title="Anytown Council News" />

and for Atom autodiscovery, use:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://www.anytown.gov.uk/news.atom" title="Anytown Council News" />

3. Use standard feed icons but only as direct subscription links

Whether you’re using RSS or Atom feeds, the standard feed icons are the common “beacon” style ones from Feed Icons. Get rid of the old orange rectangular “RSS” and “XML” text icons if you have them — they’re obsolete.

But don’t use the feed icons as illustrations. They should be clickable links directly to the feeds themselves so that people can subscribe. Avoid using them to link to RSS help pages or anything else.

Think: When I see this icon, I can click on it to subscribe.

4. Put your feed icons at the top of the related content

In-page feed subscription icons should be placed as near to the top of the related content as possible. Don’t bury the icon at the bottom of a list of news headlines, or even worse, in your page footer or a sidebar. Try to reinforce in your readers’ minds that the feed is an alternative way of viewing the same content.

5. Check your feeds in an RSS reader

This will often show up odd things in your feed that a validator won’t catch — like all your item dates being the same, for example.

6. Don’t lose your subscribers when your feed moves

If your CMS will let you, publish your feeds at permanent URLs. If it won’t, you’ll lose all your subscribers when you move to a new CMS and the URLs change.

If this happens, use an HTTP 301 redirect to tell your readers’ clients that the feed URL has changed permanently. Here’s how you do it.

Alternatively, proxy your feed through FeedBurner which will give it a permanent URL (and a few other toys to play with like usage stats, too).

7. Don’t offer the same feed in more than one format

People have got better things to do than to try to decide whether they want to read a feed in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.1 or Atom 1.0 format. Choose a single format for your whole site and stick with it. In practice, all formats work in all applications anyway. It gives you less to maintain and one less thing to worry about.

8. Shorten your item links if they’re longer than 255 characters

Some RSS reader applications use 255-character long fields to store item links. Some links are longer than that and will be truncated (and therefore, broken). If your CMS serves up item URLs longer than 255 characters try to run them through a URL shortening API like TinyURL first so they’ll always work.

9. Write a sensible feed title

The bit in your feed’s <title> element is what gets displayed as your feed’s title in RSS readers and other applications. Usually this should be your organisation’s name and a short indication of the content, eg:

• Anytown Council News
• Anytown Council – what’s on
• Anytown Council Job Vacancies

Far, far too many feeds just have either the “Anytown Council” or the “news” bit, forcing users to rename those subscriptions in their readers if they’re going to make any sense at all.

Here are some bad examples from the Mash the State database:

• Council Website Updates (but which council?)
• Events (for who?)
• Jobs Vacancies (sic)
• Latest Online Consultations
• Travel Information
• www.anytown.gov.uk::Latest News (get rid of all that clutter)

10. Create an easy subscribe-by-email service

Many councils provide email alert services to keep their residents up to date. This is a lot of hassle, having to deal with bounces, unsubscribes and maintaining the whole mechanism. If you’ve got RSS feeds it only takes a moment to let people subscribe to them by email using third-party services like FeedMyInbox.

You can create a direct subscription link like this:

http://www.feedmyinbox.com/?feed=http://www.anytown.gov.uk/news.rss

This is how we do the black subscribe-by-email links on Mash the State’s council pages. You get a whole email service for nothing without having to pay a penny or do any more work at all. Just like with RSS in general.

Got any more good tips? Leave a comment and I’ll work them into the article here.

Enjoy.

UPDATE 27 Feb 2010: The Boris Backchat blog mentioned in this post has served its demonstration purpose and has now been deleted.

A few people have raised the objection that what Mash the State is currently doing with council RSS feeds is really just helping councils to deliver their PR (or as those critics often like put it, “propaganda”).

In one sense, they’re right. A council’s press releases or “news” are just their own side of the story. You’d have to be pretty naive to think otherwise.

But getting any kind of information out into the open where it can be scrutinised, compared, cross-referenced and easily discussed is always an advantage. Here’s how to build a discussion blog around your local council’s news. Of course, if they don’t have an RSS feed this isn’t possible, which is why Mash the State exists in the first place.

Time required: Around 15 minutes.

Skills required: Just basic web use stuff. No programming or HTML. Anyone online should be able to do this.

Here’s one I made earlier: Boris Backchat. Got something to say to the London mayor? Just leave a comment.

Apologies to those outside London — I had to choose something!

Here’s how I did it:

1. I registered a new blog on WordPress.com. This is free and only took a moment.

2. I found the URL (web address) of Boris’s RSS feed. Visit your local council or other government website and hover your mouse over the RSS feed link or icon. Right-click and choose “Copy shortcut” (Internet Explorer) or “Copy link location” (Firefox) or whatever your browser gives you in the right-click menu.

In this particular case it was easier to grab the feed URL from the Greater London Authority Mash the State page.

3. I signed up at xFruits which has a whole set of free tools to do things with RSS feeds. This is free.

4. I used the “RSS to my blog” tool on xFruits which automatically copies the contents of an RSS feed into a blog, making a new blog post for each item in the feed.

First I typed a title for the new blog site and a few tags.

Then I pasted in the feed URL that I’d copied in step 2.

To configure this I also needed the URL of my new blog’s “API endpoint”. This is the address which other programs can use to push data into your blog.

The API endpoint URL for this blog is:

http://borisbackchat.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php

The format is the same for all blogs on WordPress.com:

http://yourblogname.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php

I also had to type in my WordPress username and password, and as I’ve got several blogs on WordPress, had to choose the right one to send the RSS feed to from the drop-down menu.

5. And that’s pretty much it. I went into the WordPress settings and set the time zone correctly and edited the site description. Now we’re ready to go.

To close the loop, if you want to keep up with the latest posts on Boris Backchat you can subscribe to both the new posts (articles) and comments in your RSS reader.

xFruits will work with most popular blog systems including Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type and WordPress hosted on your own server.

Welcome to open government. :)

Thanks to Jon Bounds on Twitter for tipping me off about xFruits. It’s a great set of tools. Jon has just set up a similar site for Birmingham City Council.

… and as I always like to say about these things, it’s taken longer to write about it than to do it!