Several months ago successful entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox was “appointed the government’s first Champion for Digital Inclusion”. I can see some logic here: as the founder of LastMinute.com, Lane Fox was the poster child for internet business. She still carries that history with her and is known to the public as somebody who does the Internet well.  In terms of digital inclusion she is, if not a household name, then at least a garden shed one (to paraphrase Eddie Izzard)

I happened to take a look at her website today, and was a little surprised by what I found. It’s a slick looking site, but it seems to lack some understanding of the digital world which Lane Fox is selling to the public. I find this a little worrying. There are two issues which I’d like to pick up on: technical problems and voice.

Technical Difficulties

We need to be clear that digital inclusion doesn’t equal getting people blogging. However, I think we all understand that blogging is part of the digital inclusion agenda. Blogging might be the tool that makes the digitally excluded want to join in with digital technology. It’s also a key activity in terms of shaping debates around digital participation, and indeed in shaping any other debates we might wish active citizens to take part in. I’d expect Lane Fox to be blogging a lot, yet marthalanefox.com is something of a demi-blog. Is it a diary of Lane Fox’s public appearances, a news page, or a blog? It’s not clear.

The site employs blogging language such as “read entire blogpost”, but comments are not available which diminishes the blog post to the status of a press release. My key disappointment with the website is the lack of RSS. I’d like to keep track of the Champion for Digital Inclusion’s thoughts, but I’m not likely to remember to come back regularly hoping for more: an option to subscribe to the site would seem to me to be an obviously desirable feature for this website.

Who’s Speaking Please?

Actually there is a feed for marthalanefox.com, if you know where to look (http://www.marthalanefox.com/rss). This brings me on to the second difficulty I have with the Champion’s web presence: the feed suggests that she’s not writing the blog posts herself. The feed shows that Martha has a team – Theo Park and Tim Van Damme – that are speaking on her behalf, authoring, or at least uploading, the blog entries for her. Park is Lane Fox’s “Executive Assistant” while Van Damme appears to be her web designer.

The message? You too can be a champion of the digital world, all you need is the budget to buy a web designer’s time. And an executive assistant.

Of course we know this isn’t true. You could just swing by a social media surgery and get free advice from an expert, who will get you blogging on wordpress in half hour (with RSS and comments enabled). Feel free to pop in to the next one, Martha.