US launches ‘MySpace for spies’

“Spies and teenagers normally have little in common but that is about to change as America’s intelligence agencies prepare to launch “A-Space”, an internal communications tool modelled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.

The Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the entire intelligence community in December. The move is the latest part of an ongoing effort to transform the analytical business following the failure to detect the 9/11 terrorist attacks or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

Incredible! Kudos to the CIA for realizing the powerful potential of social media networks. Now if only the Canadian government could learn from our neighbours down south and follow suite to reduce the bureaucracy and lack of communication within and amongst departments. What are we doing instead? Banning Facebook. Go figure.

Read the full article here:FT.com / World – US launches ‘MySpace for spies’

Government of Canada finally adopts RSS feeds by Audience!

I remember going to the www.canada.gc.ca website a few months ago and browsing through the RSS feed links only to find that 90% of them were not active. To my surprise, I decided to give them another try today, and low and behold, they were working! What’s more the Canadian public can now obtain Government of Canada (GOC) RSS news updates by audience, department or province!

All this is great, only there is one problem. Why is nobody promoting this feature? Why is the RSS page link buried in the lower right hand corner of the landing page in small print? In my opinion there should be a direct call to action in a prevalent location. Most people don’t know what RSS means, therefore if that term is to be used, there should at least be a “what is RSS?” link right beside it. Even just two visually pleasing buttons, “Subscribe to our news feeds!” and “What is a news feed?” by its side would do the trick.

All in all though, kudos to the Canada.gc.ca web strategy team for logically organizing the feeds as a first step.

Great Explanation of social technologies and their usage

This is a great little social technology summary image from Forrester Research that I use in many of my web strategies. Let me know if you know of any similar summaries that are more up-to-date.