more like a shot of chocolate Ex-Lax.
Oh grock ... how I hate that site!
There is nothing appealing about it.
- It has a harsh monochromatic palette.
- It's too much a link and B2B directory
- It really doesn't tell me anything about New York state on that front page.
I have been thinking long and hard about Eliot Spitzer's battle cries of reform for Albany. I take it to heart that he means serious business. The problem is, there is no visible measure of how this change is happening.
Spitzer and Bloomberg are kind of cut from the same political rug when it comes to how they are not implementing technology as an agent of practical government change. Because, honestly, we should not ask what is government. and why it is not working. We need to ask who is government and why aren't they effective.
Government is not Bloomberg. It's not Spitzer. Government is the thousands of people working for the people and by the people's money. If Spitzer nor Bloomberg will lead with their actions, then how can we expect the people who are the nuts and bolts of government to follow into change?
I understand that change does not happen overnight but if Spitzer's mandate is to bring change to Albany, then he needs to show how change is happening right now. Hence my disappointment over seemingly little details like the New York State government website or, even worse, Eliot Spitzer's own.
Last year Eliot Spitzer gave a "I am Web 2.0, hear me roar" stump speech at the Personal Democracy Forum [1] conference. In it he talked about how he looked forwards to using the principles of the Cluetrain Manifesto [2] in order to bring change to New York. Nany Scola reports [3] :
Some of the main points: he wants to expand rural and urban broadband access, build a communications networks for first responders, tear down barriers to municipal wireless, expand the Universal Service Fund (the extra fee on our phone bills to make sure every house, school, and hospital in America can get a phone dial tone) to cover broadband, direct the New York State's Office of Technology should map out all its broadband infrastructure assets, and start figuring out how it can leverage telephone poles and mailboxes (though those are federal, Spitzer admitted) to extend high-speed access.
He hit all the right points, but he left me a bit cold at the end with the roteness with which he hit 'em. His closing line -- "The problem is not a lack of resources, the problem is a lack of imagination and a lack of leadership" -- helped, but not all that much.
You know what is unfortunate about my quoting Nancy's report? That the Spitzer team didn't blink twice over committing one of the big cluetrain no-nos : They tore down and scrubbed Spitzer's old site.
Yup.
The speech was part of Eliot Spitzer's old website but, just as many politicians who look at the web as a form of ephemera, the site was taken down completely and with it everything is gone. So the historic record of Spitzer's speeches, press releases, photographs, audio clips is gone -- as if history started with his governorship.
With no online historic records of Eliot Spitzer's previous political life we have no way of assessing his current performance. No records, no transparency, no accountability.
Do you catch my drift now?
It's those little details that matter because they strike consciously or subconsciously a chord. By not having visible markers of actions-based change, we are going to continue seeing and hearing the same old results as just rhetoric with a dose of posturing and a stale heaping of rhetoric-based spam.
So, one of the first places Spitzer needs to lead is online.
Big time.
Not sometime in the future but now.
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