We can talk about Web 2.0 till the cows come home, but it makes a lot more sense if you actually use it. Here are a few suggestions for government agencies to try out.

It's difficult for government agencies to endorse something or otherwise without trying it for themselves. But trying things out can mean overcoming difficulties, especially in terms of communications protocols. These suggestions represent low-cost (in all senses of the term) ways of exploring Web 2 applications.

1. Set up a blog for internal use only. This is fairly straightforward to achieve, and it can be used to discuss issues or concerns that employees may have.If that sounds a little TOO open-ended, a blog can be set up for a particular project.

All the usual caveats must apply regarding confidentiality and so on, but the advantage of a blog would be that management would, hopefully, have a better idea of what opinion is like on the ground.

Obviously, a culture of no-blame should prevail, and people should be allowed to post anonymously if they want to.

2. Set up a wiki or a similar application for internal planning and policy-making. What usually happens is that 15 different versions of a document start getting circulated, unless there is a very good system of version control in place. A well-set up wiki will include version control in its functionality anyway, and allows people to contribute their thoughts more spontaneously and, of course, from anywhere they have an internet connection.

If preferred, a wiki like this could be set up for small, self-contained projects, to enable team members to contribute their ideas without any of it affecting the rest of the organisation.

3. Set up an external blog. This means, set up a blog to which Joe Public can contribute. It's a potentially very good way of getting customer feedback.

4. Set up RSS feeds. In the UK, government websites are very active, with content changing daily most of the time. Many allow you to subscribe to an email alert system, but they really ought to provide an RSS option too. In fact, there needs to be at least two feeds I think: one for general news and the other for publications. But there would also be room for more specialist ones too, in order to allow people to easily keep up-to-date with specific projects.

5. Experiment with social bookmarking and tagging. One way would be to encourage internal teams working on a particular project to devote some research time for exploring the issue in sites like http://del.icio.us/

6. Create a weekly -- ok, monthly -- podcast. What's new? What's coming over the horizon? Millions of podcast listeners can't be wrong: this is a great way for teachers and other educationalists to keep up-to-date without foregoing their sleep!

7. Change the rules. A lot of organisations have rules against surfing the web in "company" time. But this no longer makes much sense in an age in which so much is done via the web. Such rules should be changed in order to remain relevant

What do you think? Please leave a comment.