A blog about digital rhetoric that asks the burning questions about electronic bureaucracy and institutional subversion on the Internet.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
"We Were Really Bad about Telling the World about It"
When the United States boasted about being the world leader in data transparency and gifting its expertise to Great Britain, I expressed my skepticism here. The session at the Gov 2.0 Expo on "Four Perspectives on data.gov.uk" seemed designed to confirm my suspicions definitely, as speakers reminded audience members that they were often first in what they called a kind of "arms race" for which nation would have the greatest government transparency. As Dominic Campbell of wearefuturegov.com pointed out, despite leading the way in the competition to launch Gov 2.0 initiatives, "we were really bad about telling the world about it for a while." He also argued that the transparency efforts of Data.gov.uk were civil service driven rather than politically driven, as such efforts were in the U.S.
Several speakers on this panel organized by Tim Berners-Lee noted the oddity of the particular political moment in great Britain now that the "new marriage" of the Conservative and the Liberal Democratic parties had begun after years of Labor party rule. They noted that the Conservative Party had actually issued a Technology Manifesto, although "her majesty's shrinking budget" was also changing the technology scene.
Chris Thorpe of The Guardian noted that in March 9, 2006, Charles Arthur called upon the government to "free our data" long before the Obama administration took office. He also pointed to the success of the initiative Rewired State, which appeared three years later. Also worthy of note were data visualizations like the Voter Power Index and GIS projects like a map of cycling blackspots, although Thorpe explained that he had personal interest in developing a simple API for schools.
Canadian expatriate Matthew Fraser has been posting a number of interesting links about this week's election in Britain and the potential influence of Web 2.0 technologies.
On Friday, will we be declaring that it was Facebook wot won it? Or Twitter that tipped it? Though the idea seems outlandish – such sentences would have been meaningless during the 2005 election, as Facebook was still restricted then to US university students, and Twitter didn't start until March 2006 – this will very probably be looked back on as the first "social media election".
So what difference, if any, has it made? For a start, if you watched the past three Thursdays' debates on a single screen – just your TV – then you were experiencing the campaign in a past mode, even though the debates are a new format for a British audience. That's because thousands of people, and especially first-time voters, were watching them on two screens: the TV screen and their mobile phone or computer, which they used to monitor and respond on Twitter and Facebook, giving instant reactions to the candidates' appearance, words and policies.
The article acknowledges that social network sites are still not as accurate as time-tested polling methods, because they skew results toward the young, the liberal, members of politically homogeneous groups, and tech-savvy subpopulations. Nonetheless, it looks like Facebook's own election is calling it for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.
It will be interesting to see what other speakers at Gov 2.0 will be saying about the race later this month.
As Britain goes to the polls the giant search engine company Google is publicizing the Google UK School Election, which promises to promote civic values and provide lesson plans to fulfill curricular standards, all while promoting its brand with primary and secondary school students.
Although the ballot box is generally thought of as a private space for exercising one's personal political conscience, clicking on Google's "privacy policy" shows a very different ethos.
We have 5 privacy principles that describe how we approach privacy and user information across all of our products:
1. Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services. 2. Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices. 3. Make the collection of personal information transparent. 4. Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy. 5. Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.
This Privacy Center was created to provide you with easy-to-understand information about our products and policies to help you make more informed choices about which products you use, how to use them, and what information you provide to us.
Although the company promotes visits to its supposedly independent Data Liberation site, one is not likely to find that actual cookie removal tools that the EFF recommends for anonymous Google use.
From a digital rhetoric perspective, I am not quite sure about the tone of "They Gave Us The Beatles, We Gave Them Data.gov," Vivek Kundra's entry on the White House blog about new online transparency initiatives being launched by the British Government.
Although the closing paragraph makes the point that the "Federal Government does not have a monopoly on the best ideas," since all are "part of an increasingly complex network of communities, ideas, and information" in the digital age, there is a certain condescending tone that seems inappropriate, given how the UK has actually led the U.S. in a number of state-run digital initiatives for digitization, remix culture, and citizen participation.
As in the U.S., the British version at data.gov.uk has an Apps Page, where third-party sites are encouraged to use information from government databases in applications for searchable databases, mapping, mobile phones, and other kinds of mash-ups. Visitors can rate these sites, but like the "tool catalog" in the US version, relatively few bother to weigh in.
One could argue that the Brits bring more transparency to such rating systems by allowing text comments, where viewers can note system crashes and price discrepancies at sites like Mouseprice, which uses land registry information from the government to compare home prices in specific neighborhoods, an important part of establishing "comps" as well as of fostering violations of certain commandments against covetousness.
Given the four-figure price tag for registering for this week's summit on Government 2.0, there should be some pretty swanky t-shirts and other swag for conference attendees. Clearly, in budget hard times, this isn't a conference designed primarily for public servants in the government sector. Instead, it is a summit intended for software and hardware manufacturers to help them position themselves for profitable contracting with the new administration.
During the Bush administration, I attended a few high-priced conferences like these as a speaker, when the excitement was all about serious games rather than social networking and the buzzwords had to do with simulation, training, and efficiency rather than access, transparency, and reform.
It's a star line-up that includes Obama's Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, who has been praised for facilitating the use of open API technologies to make information in government databases more usable by the public and has been criticized for doing little to check the influence of Google and its subsidiary YouTube in the digital rhetoric of the White House. Federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra will also be taking the stage, who also began his government IT start close to the beltway in Virginia. Kundra is slated to discuss possible ways that privacy and security could be compromised by the open data initiatives that he champions, and Chopra will be discussing schemes for cooperation facilitated by the transfer of principles of the "digital commonwealth" to those for the "digital nation."
Former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta will also speak; Podesta served as the transition chief for the Obama administration and was the public face of the website Change.gov and the putative author of many mass e-mails received by those who visited Obama sites. Podesta will be speaking about public diplomacy online.
Speaking of public diplomacy, a notable late drop from the roster is British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who is also a blogger and YouTube personality as part of his online efforts at public diplomacy. Perhaps his office was engaged with the scandal involving the Megrahi affair and thought it was wise to stay home in the UK.
There are certainly plenty of Google executives who will be taking the podium at Government 2.0, which include ICANN Chairman of the Board Vinton Cerf, co-creator of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet, who continues to wield authority in how major networks are administered.
This O'Reilly sponsored event also contains some odd choices, such as researcher Mark Drapeau, who I've criticized in the past for his odd entomology meets militarism view of the online world.
Not everyone is a starry-eyed enthusiast, Drapeau included, however. Clay Shirky, author of an important paper on power laws and inequality online, who has also cast doubt on the utopian promise of the semantic web, given its syllogistic structures, is scheduled to speak. But it is hard to miss the corporate hype of the conference's sponsorship arrangements, in which "diamond," "platinum," "gold," and "silver" sponsors vie for attention for their magnanimity.
Good government public interest groups provide some window dressing for the occasion, but much like town hall movements in urban areas during the previous century, these groups champion the civic values of mainstream establishment America rather than the activist politics of domestic digital rights groups or international NGOs that is devoted to fundamentally rethinking the relationship between direct and representative democracy in this country.
My main problem with this summit is that Web 2.0 is supposed to take on the functions of government somehow by fiat. There seems to be no legislative vision to this conference, where all the attention is on the star power of the executive branch. I contend that Web 2.0 will offer little more than more sophisticated mechanisms for polling to foster a digital homeostasis that basically uses social computing to protect the status quo. Congressional legislation, if not a Constitutional amendment, would be required to make more substantive changes to voting, commenting, petitioning, redistricting, and deliberating.
O'Reilly appeals to communitarian impulses on the Web by calling on programmers to "lend your hands" and "lend your coding skills" to Gov 2.0 efforts. But his call do "Do It Ourselves" implicitly champions a kind of libertarianism that disengages rather than engages with existing structures of power. Although the idea of "citizen action" is opposed to "vending machine government" by O'Reilly, I might argue that little more than what he calls "shaking the vending machine" will be fostered if legislators aren't part of the narrative.
As anti-healthcare protestors disrupt "town hall" meetings, I'm viewing the spectacle through my own research lenses this summer, since I've been thinking a lot about the rhetorics of town halls and how the town hall functions as both a public space and a site of architectures of control.
The modern town hall dates from the founding of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1297. Inside the Palazzo Pubblico are fourteenth-century paintings of Ambrogio Lorensetti’s allegories of Good Government and Bad Government. The German critic Bazon Brock has argued that these paintings show how “it is precisely the many diverging opinions and interests of the citizens that fill a commune with life, provided the conflicting parties are all committed to law and justice.”
As civic organization has developed, the town hall has served as more than a site of potential political participation for the citizens who lived in its shadow. In the Early Modern period in England, the town hall represented the instantiation of political authority as well. According to historian Robert Titttler, the “requirements of political legitimacy and effective rule” were tied to “the structure, furnishings, use, and mystique” of the architecture of the town hall.
What is remarkable about the rhetorical function of the “town hall meeting” in the United States is that it often attempts to include urban dwellers and to represent the complexities of governance in cities, where direct democracy would seem to be impossible. Although the term suggests nostalgia for small town life, as early as 1951 LIFE photographer Thomas Mcavoy captured the drama of the packed theatre tiers of a Detroit town hall meeting where women with hats and furs joined male voters in the public airing of concerns.
A 1962 article in the New York Times describes a “valiant attempt to revive the ‘town hall meeting’ as a viable political force” when the Bronx’s Republican Borough President assembled 800 residents. The reporter described how some came “to air complaints, others to make suggestions, and a few to vent wrath.” This spectacle of democratic participation placed eighteen public servants from various city departments in a semi-circle on stage on “the receiving end” of the audience’s questions. All questions were to be answered, although those that were mailed in advance may have been given first priority.
One version of the “electronic town hall” was proposed by Amitai Etzioni in 1972. In an article in Policy Sciences, he argued that his Minerva system could be ready by 1985 to “allow masses of citizens to have discussions with each other, and which will enable them to reach group decisions without leaving their homes.” Etzioni claimed that his work would seek “to correct a loss brought about by modern mass society and heretofore considered beyond retrieve.” With the Minerva system he promised to restore “the kind of participatory democracy available to the members of small communities such as the Greek polis, New England towns, and Israeli Kibbutzim.”
In the 1992 election Ross Perot promoted the idea of an “electronic town hall.” Perot had been interested in staging one-hour public conversations to be followed by computerized voting since 1969. In response, TIME magazine dismissed the plan as “an illusion” similar to “the other trappings of direct techno-democracy.” "Mass electronic communication is really one-way communication, top-down." they insisted. According to the editors, "direct democracy is such a manipulatable sham that every two-bit Mussolini adopts it as his own. Pomp and plebiscites." They praised the "American experiment" as an "experiment in democratic indirectness" and asserted the value of "filtering institutions."
In 1935 America's Town Meeting of the Air opened its first radio broadcast with a town crier ringing a bell and calling out "Which way America -- Fascism, Socialism, Communism, or Democracy?" The show based its program on the work of the League for Political Education, which had been promoting citizen participation by sponsoring debates and other public events since the 1890s. George V. Denny introduced many of the elements of the town hall meeting of today: the use of questions from ordinary citizens, call-in participation from remote cities, and an emphasis on balance between the dominant political parties.
The "Town Hall" has now become a set of rhetorical conventions associated with contemporary campaigning, ever since Bill Clinton triumphed in a format that mimicked several elements of a popular TV genre in 1992: the afternoon women's talkshow. In a key moment during a town-hall-style debate, Clinton trounced opponent George H. W. Bush in responding to a question about how the recession might affect the candidates personally.
The classic Obama Town Hall emphasizes a kind of augmented reality, where screens call up remote citizens in front of their webcams or the character strings of text dropped into input windows usually used for personal updates. The multi-tasking president shows his ability to juggle multiple channels in a virtuouso performance of communication in which he simultaneously engages with those both here and elsewhere, occupying what Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedberg have called the "networking of public space."
But these town halls have been harder to control, especially with right-wing organizations disseminating scripts on the Internet from groups like RightPrinciples.com. A frequent refrain at these meetings that shuts down discussion is chants of "One Nation Under God," which is not affiliated with this conservative website. As sites like TownHall.com indicate, the metaphor of the town hall has become associated politically with small government and traditional values. It's interesting to see the White House describing this activity as "chatter," a term that the previous administration associated with terrorist networks and far more purposive forms of communication.
As the British government tries to contain the current outbreak of swine flu, they are encouraging citizens to take part in an interactive website that allows potential patients to assess their symptoms and even arrange to pick up anti-viral drugs that the automated system deems necessary. More than a mere chatbot, the official Flu Survey from the government also offers a number of interesting information graphics, which include maps of potential areas of infection and graphs of patterns of infection. Of course, with the rules of the system this easy to deduce, it wouldn't take much for unscrupulous Britons to lie on the online forms in order to get medication that wasn't needed for stockpiling purposes, but health officials apparently think the risk of an escalating pandemic is far greater.
A Vision of Britain Through Time offers several slices of the political, social, and aesthetic landscapes of particular regions of the country. Visitors to the site can chose a location and then search for census data, historical maps, or text from centuries of travel writing to get a richer image of the local area.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Reboot Britain campaign is its use of figurative language to represent a nation as a computational device. One could also "scan Britain's system," "defrag Britain's memory," and "consolidate Britain's files." I wouldn't want anyone to "limit Britain's users," however.
Although Reuters reports that "Skepticism greets 'Al Qaeda in Britain' founding" among security experts who see it as more noise than signal, there are still some alarmists in NATO who are expressing concern about an anonymous Internet posting that declares that the global terror organization now has opened a branch office in the British Isles.
Today, Australian newspapers are announcing "UK aiming to curb terrorists on the Internet," who -- along with pedophiles -- will apparently be subject to more policing and be thwarted by more takedown orders enforced by Internet service providers. Perhaps the most bizarre statement about constraining violent political sentiments in virtual communities in the article is this assertion: "Smith said she planned to consult with the internet industry in the coming weeks and told reporters it should be possible to develop filters to remove militant material from the internet like those commonly used to stop children accessing adult content."
Of course, not only has filtering proven ineffective for pornography, particularly when the hardcore content is titled with bland descriptions, and such ideological screening is burdened with negative connotations for those who might draw analogies with policies of China and other authoritarian states, but also the rhetoric of criminality about supposed subversive online activities sometimes has embarrassing results, if policy-makers turn out to have overreacted to a lone digital message.
I've long said that British institutions associated with governance do a much better job using social media and video file-sharing sites than their U.S. counterparts, where American policy makers have developed some truly terrible government blogs, websites, and online videos in 2007, which will surely merit some attention in this year's Foley awards here on Virtualpolitik.
Now even the British Royal Family has its own channel on YouTube, The Royal Channel. The site is currently featuring the Queen's Christmas Message, which opens with a much younger queen addressing the populace through the one-to-many medium of black-and-white television. It is interesting to note that embedding has been disabled by the site's manager, so the context of the video can be preserved in the creator's chosen frame.
Yesterday I had a productive trip to the British Library to interview senior librarians Aly Conteth and Neil Fitzgerald. I had come to the UK to update an article that was published years ago in Literary and Linguistic Computing for the upcoming Virtualpolitik book from MIT Press. Rather than approach the subject from the perspective of uncritical publicizing of new technology in mainstream journalism, as articles like "Behind the scenes: The British Library and digitisation" do, I tried to ask probing questions about the cryptohistory of Britain's digital library efforts that included failures and lessons learned. To their credit, my hosts were very forthright and even allowed me to observe and photograph the digitization process in action. As they point out the Internet makes a "nonsense of national copyright regimes," but in their current joint effort with Microsoft, they are aiming for an ambitious twenty-five million pages or about a hundred thousand items that will be in accord with U.K. copyright rules with the aim of fostering educational use at all levels. They were careful to distinguish themselves from Google Book Search and emphasized their commitment to open standards and more egalitarian partnership models with corporate behemoths. I was, of course, leery of the way that Microsoft is publicizing its new (and flawed) operating system Vista through the initiative, but BL librarians argued that there were many systems involved in the entire process.
We also discussed the often invisible labor policies involved in digitization efforts. As they pointed out, the conversion of "physical to digital" with the imaging machine is only a small part of a process that involves quality assurance, delivery systems, and metadata schemes to create meaningful informational resources. They speculated about best practices for creating a "more robust workflow" around the replication process that would facilitate resource discovery, the connection of electronic resources together, and the importance of benefit for targeted groups to satisfy the requirements of their funding bodies. In particular, the British Library still struggles with a mandate not to digitize using monies from "core funding" that dates back to the beginnings of digitization. The lack of national strategies or frameworks also continues to be an issue.
Conteth had a lot of interesting things to say about the huge Burney Collection of newspapers from 1603-1817. In late October, the library plans to offer U.S. and U.K. readers Internet access through the library portals of institutions of higher education. He pointed out that in archiving newspapers now, it is sometimes more practical to skip the intermediate step of ironing and photographing the print version and merely keep the digital file that represents the text, images, and layout made for production purposes. He also talked about the perils of outsourcing some of the labor of newspaper metadata to India, where even the best English-speaking operators may not recognize common English place names.
Fitzgerald sketched out some of the library's other partnerships. This timeline from the European Library is designed to clarify multiple projects and acronyms. They also discussed the International Dunhuang Project to bring together physically dispersed 100,000 manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artifacts from the Silk Road that can be reunited through the digital interface.
Perhaps some of the library's greatest challenges involve copyright issues, particularly for the BL's substantial sound library. Conteth and Fitzgerald described how anything with potential commercial value, including the soundtrack to an awards show, may not be considered an archivable text or historical record. Jazz oral histories or the recordings of a sound researcher in Uganda may be uncontroversial at the moment, but record companies keep rights to many tracks with their future remix value in mind.
Finally, I asked them for their thoughts on the high-tech sci-fi future of their national library. Apparently plans for a hypothetical outpost have been discussed not very seriously. In contrast, the library is already using social media with its own gadget for iGoogle and pages on Facebook that includes one for entrepreneurial and networking efforts and an online book club on the popular social networking site. Librarians sounded more dubious about having users participate more actively in generating metadata for its digital collections, although the possibility of a non-Wikipedia-type model with an authentication scheme -- perhaps modeled on their use of smartcards at present -- might lead them to reconsider, given the potential value of user-generated content to understaffed libraries. I also learned that the British Library has licensed its sound library of the calls of extinct animals as ring tones for cellular telephones. (I actually heard one of these ring tones on the train before it went under the English channel.)
While I was there I also visited Sacred, an exposition about holy texts from interrelated Judeo-Christian-Islamic faith traditions. In addition to the books in glass cases, the installation also used several computer terminals to facilitate viewer comments, access to background materials in a hypertext catalog, and interaction with the proprietary "Turning the Pages" technology.
During my stay in Britain, one of my hosts was Jolyon Welsh of Britain's Foreign Office. Readers of this blog know that much of its text has been devoted to criticisms of the digital media initiatives of government agencies that often insult the intelligence of their potential audiences. (I've even been known to give awards in the subject.) Of course, not all nations are compelled to make the public relations mistakes of the United States with digital media and the networked, file-sharing culture that consumes and produces it. This article about the "British Approach" from Public Diplomacy Watch shows that Although "nation branding" expert Simon Anholt sits on their advisory board, Welsh sketched out a much more sophisticated plan for using distributed media than I often hear about in public diplomacy efforts that may be dominated by strategies inappropriately borrowed from corporate advertising and marketing. For example, Welsh showed meBSN television, which makes video footage available both to Internet viewers and to foreign news stations who need B-roll footage to illustrate stories. While visiting the foreign office's site I was also impressed by the well-reviewed i-uk site.
Unlike hyper-patriotic content on many U.S. sites, these materials seem well-designed for integration into media markets far from home. He also had some innovative ideas about ways to bring videogame technology and real-time social media applications like Twitter to diplomatic efforts in order to foster public participation in the debate about global warming. Apparently Welsh's bosses, like many in the U.K. government, are already using YouTube as a message-delivery tool. Check out David Miliband's YouTube channel here. Although some dismiss these efforts as video propaganda, it beats the idiotic kids' pages and "Ask the Whitehouse"-type Q&As that dominate official electronic discourse from the government in the U.S.
Visiting the city of Bath, England today, the home of historical beautiful people from the Roman era to the age of Romanticism, I had an opportunity to reflect on the difference between analog and digital reconstruction. Although they did have an amusingly outdated collection of pre-Google web statistics, the Jane Austen Centre largely emphasized simulations that used dolls, film costumes, and live re-enactors to represent and make manifest the historical past.
In contrast, the Roman Baths of Bath, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, used computer models on the television monitors in almost every room to provide three-dimensional representations of the baths as they would be occupied by modestly posed and yet frequently naked computer-generated humans splashing around in the shimmeringly rendered water.
Although it seems should be associating this northern English city with the gloomy electronic music of my youth and bands like Joy Division and the Buzzcocks, instead I find myself with the cheerful repetitive refrain from the song from Hair running through my skull as I walked through the city streets under the urban canopy of CCTV cameras.
Of course, my first stop was Manchester Cathedral, where sadistic and gory murders were virtually staged for the videogame Resistance: Fall of Manwithout the church's permission. As a site of political conscience, where the term "Welfare State" was coined and a sermon against the slave trade launched a petition drive that garnered signatures from a fifth of the city, and which was rebuilt after bomb attacks from Nazi planes and the IRA, church elders are now very protective of the images of the church, which they treat as intellectual/sacred property. Signs read "No photo-imaging devices or recording equipment may be used in the Cathedral without the express and written permission of the Sub-Dean." Actually, the cathedral is remarkably modest in size compared to its larger ecclesiastical cousins on the Continent. It is dwarfed by a nearby sight-seeing ferris wheel and nestled among historical English taverns.
At the end of the evening we had a tour of the Manchester Museum, where our guide pointed out how Victorian scientists arranged displays of stuffed animals to suit patriarchal and Eurocentric agendas. It was also interesting to hear about how interactive touch-screen displays that had ceased to function were replaced with tried-and-true techniques for interactivity like large paper and cups of crayons.
Update: Regarding the Manchester Cathedral controversy, Gamasutra has a great piece by pal Ian Bogost, "Persuasive Games: The Reverence of Resistance," which actually looks at the rhetoric of sacred spatiality that the game presents.
Speaking of Great Britain, I feel that I should say something about the digital media that the country is creating in honor of the upcoming 2012 Olympics, which will be hosted in the British Isles. The website for London 2012 is making rhetorical appeals to many forms of participatory culture, despite the fact that much of the action will be structured by the norms governing passive consumption of spectator sports.
Many design blogs have been dishing the visually chaotic faux-graffiti logo for the games. In fact, over 50,000 people have already signed an online petition to have the logo changed. (I don't know whether the success of the London logo petition should be encouraging or discouraging to organizers of human rights' petitions with more gravitas, such as those dramatized in a recent ad campaign by Amnesty International.)
There is some interesting coverage of the controversy at BAGnewsNotes and spurgeonblog. BAGnews argues that is important to see the image in the context of an overall web design strategy, while spurgeon points out that the invitation to "remix" the logo using "starter templates" and the inspiration of "some examples" merits attention. It may not be as appealing as the materials at Creative Commons, but it may encourage Britons to manipulate elements of what Lawrence Lessig has called "remix culture" well in advance of the lighting of the torch.
With news that the British government had decided to raise their threat level to "critical" or imminent attack status in the face of terrorist plots for urban mayhem in London and Glasgow, I thought that a visit the Britain's government websites to see how much they were using this risk communication strategy in the brand identity of their overall website design would be in order. Actually, there were no signs of any color coded icons in gov.uk pages. However, even in the security anxious United States, government websites have often stopped sporting the threat level. For example, the White House, which once carried the threat assessment prominently on its home page in 2003, no longer has the color bar on its opening screen.
I saw some other notable web design features in my tour of government agencies. Of particular interest was the fact that social media strategies were showcased on the site for the Prime Minister, who has already launched a YouTube channel to document his public appearances. It would be interesting to see what YouTube political critic James Kotecki makes of the British approach. I suspect he would say that it lacks a direct address to the viewer, which is an important YouTube rhetorical convention.
There is also a virtual tour that takes visitors "behind the most famous front door in the world" for 360-degree views of rooms and perusal of seemingly magical objects that are highlighted, as they might be in room exploration games or interactive narratives. Unfortunately these objects aren't truly clickable, and their information is stored in a separate index from the one that engages visitors in the spatial environment of the virtual Number 10 Downing Street. You can also be led on an online video tour through the building by historian Simon Schama.
As you can see from the purple and orange samples that I have presented here, another remarkable feature of the British government's sites was their lack of explicitly patriotic colors from the national flag or other icons of national authority. Also noteworthy was the bilingualism with Welsh content of the main government portal page, Direct.gov, which is the equivalent of First.gov in the U.S.
Finally, no tour of the virtual state in Britain would be complete without a visit to one newsworthy recent addition, the page for the British Secret Intelligence Service, known to James Bond aficionados as MI6. The Security Service or MI5 is, of course, the main portal of information about the current terrorist threat.
