Research e-Labs

New Zealand government agencies have recently published important dates in iCalendar format. This enables you to subscribe to the calendar using your preferred organiser or calendar program (e.g. Outlook). How easy is that?

Exciting news! This site has been included in in the Implementation List for the W3C’s WCAG 2.0 Implementation Report, achieving Level AA conformance.

This site has been designed to achieve accessibility standards. However due to a combination of unrefined standards and misreporting by testing tools, it has previously been difficult to make a clear-cut assessment of compliance with existing standards.

Many years of work by the W3C has led to the development of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 which is now in the Release Candidate process.

We have submitted this site as an example Candidate Recommendation Implementation and have performed our own self-assessment here.

Visit http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/

Find/search for the idea:
“search - add title tag, make it WCAG 2 compliant / accessibility”

Rate it! (a 5 of course!)

The State Services Commission has published an updated Government feed standard based on Atom. Currently in draft for consultation until 13th August 2008, this will replace the 2003 e-GIF RDF specification for New Zealand Government feeds.

I gave a presentation Feeds for Thought in June for the Government Web Community covering trends around feeds, microformats and the web slice. The presentation has been updated and is relevant as collateral to the draft 2008 NZ Government Feed Standard.

The hCard microformat is an open format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places with machine-readable semantic HTML. We have published a tool (beta) for generating hCard code for a typical New Zealand address and testing the mapping of that address with Google maps.

There is increasing recognition of the economic impact of Open Source Software (OSS), offering productivity gains for local industries and generating export revenue by servicing offshore markets.

The Australian Open Source Industry Community Report 2008 says “…conservative projection of earnings suggests that the Open Source industry generates $500 million in revenue each year, with over 50% of that being directly related to Open Source”

A revealing video from The Office of Privacy Commissioner of Canada highlights privacy issues on social networks.