Show Us A Better Way winner.

A while back blog commenter mittfh (how will we say that on the radio?) pointed out how few views many council information videos get on YouTube. This one for example has only 20 views at the time of posting this link.

It shows how hard it is for government to communicate public information on-line. Perhaps the tech-savvy members of the public could show government, local and national, a better way?

In fact that's the idea behind the government's innovative Show US a Better Way Competition which asked the public to suggest news ways of communicating public information. The winner has just been announced. It's a proposal for a site called Can I Recycle It - which will help you find recycling services near you.

All the ideas for new government information services to be developed as a result of the competition have come from the public and there are some interesting proposals: a site that will help you find a local public toilet, a site to help you find cycle-paths and a website that will help you locate nearby post-boxes. My personal favourites among the unsuccessful entries were SeeCCTV and something called Baby Blob..don't ask why.

PS. If you emailed in about Tom Watson inadvertently saying "tetrabyte" in the interview on PM, it is of course terabyte.. Given the state of the art I wonder if you could fit a terabyte in a Tetrapak carton? Probably...

UPDATE: Met up with Dan Jellinek yesterday. He'd just finished chairing the e-democracy 08 conference which discussed the way government engages with the web. We discussed mittfh's comment, crime maps and some other iPM'ish issues. Interesting stuff.

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