Web 2.0 applications in government websites: prevalence, use and correlations with perceived website quality

This paper investigates the extent to which Web 2.0 applications are prevalent in government websites, the ways in which Web 2.0 applications been used in government websites, as well as whether the presence of Web 2.0 applications correlate with the perceived quality of government websites. Divided equally between developing and advanced economies, a total of 200 government websites were analyzed using content analysis, and multiple regression analysis. The order of prevalence of seven Web 2.0 applications to be as follows: RSS, multimedia sharing services, blogs, forums, social tagging services, social networking services and wikis. Websites in advanced countries adopt Web 2.0 applications more commonly than those in developing countries. The presence of Web 2.0 applications was found to have a correlation with the overall website quality, and in particular, service quality. This paper only covers government websites in English. Emerging genres of Web 2.0 applications such as mashups and virtual worlds have not been included. Also, data were drawn completely from the public domain. Decision makers and e-government web developers may benchmark their own efforts in deploying Web 2.0 applications against this study. The numerous exemplars cited here serve as a springboard to generate more ideas on how Web 2.0 applications could be used and harnessed to improve the overall quality of government websites. This paper represents the effort to dovetail two strands of research interests, namely, Web 2.0 and website quality. It also extends current works by investigating the suite of Web 2.0 applications found in government websites globally.