The Internet is forcing its way into the mother of parliaments with both sides in the UK proposing to require parliamentary debates on epetitions which gain more than a certain number of signatures.

Tory Leader David Cameron is promising that any epetition that gains one million signatures will allow members of the public to introduce a bill on which MPs are required to vote.

Any epetition that gains 100,000 signatures will be eligible to be formally debated in the House of Commons.

Labour's promise is to introduce a trial where selected epetitions will be debated in the Common's second chamber.

We've just completed work on an epetition system for a major local government authority in Queensland, and it will be interesting to see how the epetition system is used, although there is no hint that it will be used in the UK way. (But we'd be happy to hear from other legislatures with more radical ideas).

Our first system was built some years ago for Councillor Jane Prentice who had the innovative idea of allowing for signatures in favour and against the petition. She used her system as an effective tool to run local plebiscites on planning issues, amongst other things.

This petition system was then used to build a system for use by councils around Queensland.

Using a petition to gauge public opinion or force legislation onto the notice paper is a challenge to traditional theories of liberal democratic practice of checks and balances. While democracy is to be encouraged, "tyranny of the majority"  is regarded as a real risk.

However, one million signatures in the UK is the equivalent of around 333,000 in Australia and would be a huge hurdle to jump. True, the online advocacy group GetUp boasts 343,206 members, but they've never got close to having that number participate in any one of their own campaigns.

Accountability and transparency means that most government agencies are fastidious (at least in theory) at recording as much as they can of interactions between them and the public. Ideally you will have detailed and accurate records which are readily available to the client citizen. So social networking sites pose a particular challenge.

We're big fans of open government at Internet Thinking, but I don't think we'd advise any of our clients to go as far as they have in open.alabama.gov.

When it's slow and a newspaper is looking for a story, nothing is easier than to beat-up on a government for how much it spent on the latest overseas trips or renovating ministers' offices.

Yet when you go to open.alabama.gov they lay those facts and figures out for you, and more. Looks to be asking for trouble from my point of view as a public relations professional. But perhaps not. Perhaps when the figures are publicly available, no-one cares. Sometimes the best place to hide is right out in the open - where everyone can see and no-one thinks to look.

Although if this last theory is true, then openness in government could actually bring less scrutiny rather than more.

Probably the most substantial transparency on this site is overall state spending. The State Check Book "contains a searchable database of unaudited expenditures by category, payee and agency. The searchable database allows searching and drill down capability. You can view the results online, or download the data as a report or Excel spreadsheet. The searchable database is updated nightly Tuesday through Saturday."

You can also track budget against actuals. Will this stop the government practice of re-announcing projects next budget that you didn't get around to spending the budgeted money on last year?

This site is what the Internet is meant to be all about. It also shows why it drains the blood from the face of media advisors.

HT Government Technology

Australia ranks fourth in the world for business Internet service after USA, Japan and Singapore, but before Hong Kong, England, Canada and Korea according to a survey by serviced office providers Servcorp.

A long time ago, in a far off inner city suburb, I used to run a boutique (read small) advertising agency. We were constantly advising our clients on how to measure and analyse the responsiveness of their direct marketing efforts - as all good agencies should. Absolute, irrefutable return on investment was and still is the holy grail but actually achieving that is harder than you may think. DM, as in Digital Marketing, (not old media Direct Marketing), can and does automatically provide instant, reliable, and useful information which makes this calculation and many others much easier. It's a pity "push" marketing is not cool anymore - now it's all about opt in "pull" marketing and boy don't those stats look good compared to the old days (last year). Not that I'm complaining - our clients here at Internet Thinking are some of those benefiting from the measurabilty of their online marketing, as are we.

Being a Twitter newbie I am still going from "what is the big fuss" to "I would rather die than not have Twitter" (which is apparently my eventual fate ever since setting up my account). So it was fascinating yesterday to see that as the Liberal Party went into meltdown, Twitter was ahead of even the online news services presumably because the same journos that send news back to the online service were tweeting it as well. Being that Twitter is virtually live I guess it bypasses the upload stage at the online media outlet.Thanks to the likes of @leighsales for making us feel like we were there, because I think news is so much more exciting the closer to real time you get. So is this the future of news broadcasting? Virtual real time reporting from multiple sources (that you have chosen) and opinion aplenty to go with it.

Not much later in the day and as the Liberal Party continued to crash and burn, Twitter was again ahead of the pack - this time the ARIAS. I am writing this from Queensland where the sun arrives one hour late every morning during summer, and so I had to shut down Tweedeck during the show as I was finding out who won the "best unintelligible emotional outpour" award way ahead of the TV broadcast - I know thats mostly a function of the daylight saving but even my Brisbane based "tweeps" (see I'm picking it up) were slightly ahead of my TV (how do they do that??) And to top it off Daniel Merriweather read his acceptance speech notes from his mobile phone...

One of the paranoid, or perhaps not so paranoid, conspiracy theories doing the rounds is that the US Republicans manipulated election results through the use of Diebold voting machines.

I say "not so paranoid" because while I don't accuse Diebold of committing any fraud, one of the problems with such voting machines is that they lack adequate auditing procedures.

If your job was relating your clients to the public you'd think that you'd be all over the newest uses of the Internet. Some of my recent experience suggests not. Like every other industry, Public Relations professionals are resistant, or even oblivious to, the way the Internet radically alters how you can and should spread your message. This article isn't about those PR professionals.

Good as it is, there is one thing that Google can't do - find material that isn't on the Internet yet. Which is why sites like On Line Opinion do well. Publishers are in the business of guessing what readers might be after, sourcing a writer to provide the content and making it available. Search engines can access that material, but only after the publisher has done its work.

So you think you know what Spam is? Maybe you do but I was also sure I had a good understanding of the Spam Act of 2003 until recently. Have a look at the ACMA site (who administer the Act) and see what you make of these little goodies:

I am currently trying to sell an investment property and was given a copy of the Gil Davis book "Sell for More" which aims to teach you how to sell your residential property for a higher price.

It's official. Google does not use keywords for search, although she reserves her right to change her mind. Writing on the Google Webmaster Central Blog Matt Cutts writes:

At least for Google's web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking.

Read more... Add new comment

Really effective web design incorporates usability research. That is research that tests how users react to your site in a real environment. Seven years ago we offered this research as a service, but at that stage no-one was convinced enough of the need to do it - unless they had huge budgets.

"To tweet or not to tweet?" is a question we're constantly being asked by clients. There's no definitive answer, although those who say it is just a fad are mistaken. How different organisations use it and how they integrate it into their websites will be highly specific to what your aims are and how many resources you have.