I am so floored, I want to reproduce for you in its entirety a short e-mail "conversation" I had today with someone in the management of Kansas.gov, which is the portal website for state government.

First, a little background. I am trying to get my Kansas driver's license, which I understand I have to have in order to get my Kansas title and tags, which I desperately need because my Missouri tags have expired. I have now taken some time off work twice to go to the Wichita DMV office (once, actually, before my tags had expired), and each time I was confronted with the prospect of a two-hour wait. Ridiculous — and not an option for me. So over the weekend, I went online to figure out if there are less-busy DMV offices that I can drive to in much less than two hours round-trip to get this sorted out.

I'm not sure why I didn't just Google it, but I decided to go to Kansas.gov and navigate to the information. That could have been a little easier to do (would you look for driver licensing under the menu heading "Community"?), but I did seem to find the right spot, on this page. However, when I clicked the link for "Driver's License," I got a "page not found" error.

Being a Good Web Samaritan, I decided to alert the folks at Kansas.gov to this problem. Here's the succinct e-mail I sent:

The link to "Drivers Licences" is broken on this page:
http://www.kansas.gov/community/driving/

Nick Jungman

Today, the first business day since I sent that, I got a reply. Here it is in its entirety:

Nicholas,

You have reached kansas.gov, we write software and manage the website. The links on kansas.gov are working, however the link http://www.ksrevenue.org/dmvdrlic.htm is part of the revenue website and it is not working. You will need to contact the Department of Revenue as that is their website. There phone number is 785-368-8222.

Kansas.gov
Ph.800 452 6727

Now, to be clear, the Department of Revenue does have a working page on driver licensing; it just isn't at the address Kansas.gov uses. I did check this. (Annoyingly, the page's guide to driver license stations is a series of linked PDF pages. But that's another post.)

Well, I was super annoyed by that response, so I shot back, admittedly not in the most politic manner:

This is a basically nonsensical reply. Shouldn't you fix the link on Kansas.gov? To go to a page that exists?

Thought I was doing you a favor reporting this!

Sent from my iPhone

To Kansas.gov's credit, I got a relatively polite reply back, but it was still completely nonsensical:

Nicholas,

We can fix links on kansas.gov, as we manage this website. However, when a link on our website takes you to another website that we do not control we cannot fix links on their sites. We do not manage the Department of Revenue website, so we have no access to repair their site. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you.

Kansas.gov
Ph.800 452 6727

Because it is my personal incovenience that fails to concern them. Not the inconvenience of conceivably thousands of Kansans trying to use Kansas.gov for its express purpose: to navigate to a department of state government.

Of course, I had to reply:

And that is exactly what I am suggesting you do. Fix the link. On the Kansas.gov page. Just as I said in my original email. There is a perfectly functional page on Driver Licensing at Revenue's site. You should be linking to it. Revenue doesn't need to do anything.

Sent from my iPhone

No response to that one. That was early afternoon. The link is still broken. And I used to wonder why so many of us had lost confidence in government.

Or am I the insane one here?

It's my birthday. I am old enough to be having a midlife crisis and suspect I am having one.

Which makes my birthday theme song all the more appropriate. One of oldest friends, whom I've known since the fourth grade and went to college with at the University of Oklahoma, turned me on to this song by a Swiss electronica band from the '80s called Yello. The title is "3rd of June." And I've realized this year it's a good song to have a midlife crisis to.

This is the 3rd of June, 1988
A highly unimportant day
Some airplane gliding into one of the bigger clouds over Manhattan
In a downtown far away, Mr. Toomy, our face in a crowd
The city was slow and tired
The Wall Street boys wearing their ties around their neck
Like boxers' towels after a fight
Mr. Toomy stopped his pinstripe suit outside a barber shop
Looked at his face, took off his jacket and stepped on it

Who's that, what's that, what do you mean
I'll never know where I lost my dream
Who's that, what's that, gimme your name
3rd of June, end of game

No looking to the right
No looking to the left
Lenny is a target and always on track
Lenny is a target and nobody shoots
Lenny is a target lost the route
Ruins of a child's old fantasy
Ruins of a child meant to be
Lenny is a target and nobody shoots
Lenny is a target lost the route

Who's that, what's that, what do you mean
I'll never know when I lost my dream
Who's that, what's that, gimme your name
3rd of June, end of game

Mr. Toomy stopped his pinstripe suit outside a barber shop
Looked at his face
Took off his jacket
Put it on the pavement
Stepped on it
And started preaching like a monk from another world
After some minutes, he had a little crowd
Which dissappeared when a police car passed by slowly
Like rolling gloom
And Mr. Toomy throws his voice till he was the only one in the area
At this early night of June 3rd, 1988

Who's that, what's that, what do you mean
I'll never know when I lost my dream
Who's that, what's that, gimme your name
3rd of June, end of game

I am about to give up on Foursquare.

It's been fun, Naveen and Co., but you've got a lot more work to do. And you need to do it quickly. The last thing you want is power users (which I have been for months now) to give up and quit. It's almost too late for me.

If you're familiar with Foursquare, skip to the next paragraph. If you're not familiar, I'll explain Foursquare briefly. It works best if you have a smart phone with GPS. You download the Foursquare app to your phone and set up an account. Then, whenever you visit a place (a "venue" in Foursquarese), you launch the app and "check in." The Foursquare user with the most check-ins at any given venue is honored as the "mayor" of that venue. Whenever your check-ins achieve a certain predetermined pattern -- for example, you check into 10 different places -- you earn a "badge" that publicly commemorates your achievement.

Foursquare is a lot of fun at first, particularly if you're in a social group with several Foursquare players. In my case, I work in the journalism school at the University of Missouri, where faculty and students feel a professional duty to try hot new social media trends. So it was quite an achievement for me to steal away the mayorship of Lee Hills Hall, my building, from a colleague who has been playing Foursquare much longer than I have. I'm also the mayor of the Middle Eastern restaurant down the street, a hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop downtown, the downtown post office, the hotel in Chicago where I stayed for five days ... 11 places in all. When I managed to become the mayor of 10 places simultaneously, I earned the "Super Mayor" badge. Very exciting. I actively pursued the "Barista" badge by checking into as many Starbucks locations as possible. One day I was surprised by earning the "Overshare" badge because I'd checked into 10 places within 12 hours.

Those surprises are long over. I've had 12 badges for a while now. I'm studying the other potential badges, to see what I could possibly earn next, and there's really very little. It seems I have most of the standard-issue, realistically attainable badges. If I'd gone to South-by-Southwest, I could have earned any of 16 different event-specific badges. I didn't go. Not that many ordinary people do.

In short, I've played Foursquare intensely for about three months. And then it got boring. Where's the business model in that?

This column by Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review has generated a little buzz. Very basically, he suggests that today's journalism students need search-engine optimization skills more than they need to understand AP style.

I think it's unwise to get overly focused on SEO.

We tend to talk about it as this magical new skill we all must master, but in essence, it's either about highly technical things like meta tags and sitemaps, which we should leave to our developers, or it's about the common sense of writing good headlines. Which, in my opinion, has always been vastly more important (and more difficult) than teaching AP style. True, headlines work differently on the Web than in print, but this again is mostly common sense; I think I'm going to stop cloaking it in mystery by calling it SEO.

If you delve a bit into what Google itself has to say about SEO, you sort of have to come to this conclusion. Google does not explain how its indexing algorithms work, so those who claim they know are lying or guessing (or breaking their Google confidentiality agreement). Google does make clear that the algorithms are constantly changing — i.e. you can't learn them — and that the point is simply to make them good at finding the best content. Much of what passes for "SEO" are lame attempts to game this system. Really, we should just heed Google's advice: to be indexed well, create the best content.

One reaction I saw a lot of from my last post, about AP's plans to stop abbreviating state names, was something along the lines of "I hate this; why is AP doing this to me?"

Editors of America, the AP does not own news style! I find myself reminding students of this over and over again. AP style is a style. It is not always the appropriate style. Your organization can (and should!) define its own style. I can talk at length about the flaws in AP style. Other editors have. Why suffer it? 

Just read this item in the April 8 edition of APME Update, an e-mail newsletter (nothing to link to online yet):

AP CHANGING STYLE ON STATE ABBREVIATIONS

The Associated Press is changing its style on state abbreviations and Canadian cities to create a consistent and universal style for international and domestic use. Starting May 15, the proper style will be to spell out the names of U.S. states in all stories and datelines where a city is followed by a state name. SACRAMENTO, Calif., for example, will become SACRAMENTO, California. We also will drop the practice of including names of Canadian provinces in datelines. We will instead use Canada. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, for example, will become VANCOUVER, Canada.

Not only does this create a more consistent style for AP around the globe, but I expect some SEO benefits, since everyone searches either for full state names or uses the U.S. Postal Service abbreviations (which Google understands and translates).

The 2010 stylebook is due in a few weeks. I wonder what other changes are coming.

UPDATE at 8:31 p.m.: @gerrrib points me to this discussion about the change at SportsJournalists.com. It seems AP has been sending advisories about it for a week now. I don't know about your newsroom, but no one in mine sees these advisories in the age of APExchange. And isn't it weird that this is basically unGooglable?