Around the world there are millions of on-line communities that deal with issues of the day. Some with really important issues such as diabetes, alzheimers, cancer and depression.
Enormous numbers use them to exchange stories, ideas and information. They do good even if we don’t agree with all the contributions.
Government sites get increasing traffic but are often the end of an on-line trip.
Maybe the government should offer links to important sites dealing with real issues for people – even if they can’t control the content.
(Trevor scheduled this post, so does not know that it is Post #1000. Yay. It had to be him really.)
I agree. In my research area of autism there are hundreds of websites and discussion sites around the world, but many promote products and information that are expensive or even dangerous. Yet there is a lot of useful information about autism hidden in the websites of our Ministries of Health and Education. The good thing about govt sites is that they usually provide reliable evidence based information which is vital in areas like autism. If govt could promote and publicise links to evidence based or reliable consumer led autism websites it would be very useful for parents or those newly diagnosed. (It is actually slowly happening but needs resourcing)
I reckon the government sites in New Zealand are generally excellent, if a little difficult to navigate. The links are there, you just need to know how to look. When the on site “search” function isn’t returning what you are looking for, there are a few tweaks in Google that one can use. The one I most often resort to is “text site:name.of.dept.gov.nz” – usually turns up what I’m looking for and more.
Yeah online guff is good.
1000th post 
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Trevor, this is a really great post – with health issues I expect a government site to have the ‘official’ word on something and when searching I augment that with other sites – some of which come from a different perspective marketing/sales, religious, spiritual etc. Government sites should recognise this – and as long as the consumer understands the semiotics behind each of those other sites then the links should occur.
I was interested to see so many National MPs on youtube speak about how they love to help constituents – especially by providing information. To me much of it sounded like they were acting as a glorified CAB, but if that is what people are requiring of our MPs then of course the government should be doing all it can to give out information. But again, it needs to be in context.