A word to Stephen Fry – and the word is brevity

Stephen Fry started blogging last week. Already, in Bloglines alone, he has nearly 400 subscribers. Now I love Stephen Fry to bits… but he’s averaging 7250 words per posting. Blimey. I’m sure his new piece on the modern notion of fame is fabulous, and I’d love to read it whilst travelling tonight, but I’m not sure my battery will hold out.

Miliband's Mayo/Steinberg moment

Newsnight editor Peter Barron points to an interesting Mayo/Steinberg moment this week. On Tuesday night’s show, David Miliband was being Paxman-ed about Burma: unable to answer a specific point, he promised to clear it up by publishing the missing information on the web later on. Not on the FCO’s main site, nor indeed on his shiny new blog… but over on Newsnight’s own site.

Arguably this was a risky tactic, and were I still working there, I might even have been inclined to advise against it (although it seemed to be a spontaneous decision by the Foreign Sec, judging by the video recording). By handing over the text, you’re handing over control of it. Who knows how the BBC might present it, or what else they might put around it?

As it turned out, Newsnight did publish it… and they followed it, on the same page, with responses by their own production staff, and from the UK’s Burma Campaign…. followed by a further FCO follow-up. All shown without additional commentary. And you know what? It’s a brilliant example of adult, reasoned debate. Here are the viewpoints, all in one place – now you decide.

Foreign Office blog site is live

So much for my exclusive… The Foreign Office blogging site went live yesterday afternoon, and is already attracting a healthy level of traffic, helped no doubt by Guido Fawkes’s reference to it. I can’t help but point out the high number of right-of-centre bloggers among the early comments.
[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dVM8DDptSr0]
Also interesting to note the new FCO channel on YouTube. There’s no shortage of video material around King Charles Street, so this has been a long time coming. Of course, Miliband is no stranger to YouTube, having had his own channel previously, with the occasional on-the-hoof video posting.
I’m told YouTube will be an important component this time round. It’s the right decision, as it kills two birds with one stone. There’s no (serious) doubting that it’s genuinely ‘by the Minister’ if you can see his lips move; and generally speaking, it’s much faster than writing something. Senior government people are busy, so this is probably a more practical way for them to work – assuming they’re happy to do it in ‘one take’.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world…

… the Australian Government has published a 30-page consultation paper (PDF) on whether it should have a consultation blog (singular). Words fail me sometimes.

In their defence, it sounds like they’re trying to spec up a full-scale system for online consultation, way beyond a mere ‘blog’. They’re talking about having an official invitation to participate, in easily-embeddable video form, from the relevant Minister. Response mechanisms could include an online survey, or a full-on discussion forum (with registration not mandatory). They have given some thought to using ‘social’ tools to highlight certain active consultations, but nothing of note yet.

So once you dig beneath the surface, there’s more to it than the rather ignorant title suggests. But I’m still a bit bemused that they haven’t at least launched a basic blog as part of the exercise. There is a web page about it, but don’t expect anything more than a mailto link.

Exclusive: Miliband's blog is back, with reinforcements

There have been rumours flying around that David Miliband may be about to restart his blogging activity… in fact, I may even have generated one or two of them myself. Well, after a little detective work, I can exclusively confirm them. The Foreign Office is poised to launch a surprisingly ambitious blogging initiative, featuring not just one but as many as six blogs – from the very top to the very bottom of the organisation.

The intention, Miliband explains on the new site’s ‘about’ page, is to ‘show more of the enormous range of interesting, and challenging, work we do and why we do it.’ Miliband himself is joined by Jim Murphy, his Minister for Europe who ‘wants to hear your views on how the EU is doing, and to encourage discussion through this blog’. So whilst you’re not likely to get your referendum on the European treaty / constitution, you will at least have one outlet for your support / anger. Good luck to whoever’s moderating that one.

Then there’s Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles KCMG LVO, currently Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Afghanistan; and Lindsay Appleby, a First Secretary (ie relatively senior) in the Brussels office. Reporting from the front line, there’s Maria Pia Gazzella, from the Embassy in Chile. But most remarkable of all is Sarah Russell, who doesn’t even work for the FCO yet – she’s a Fast Streamer due to join in October 2007, so presumably we’ll be following her progress as she learns the ropes.

As I understand it, the system is running on the very same Community Server machine as Miliband’s former Defra blog – which explains (a) why the Defra blog disappeared a couple of weeks back, and (b) why the presentation templates look very familiar indeed. I’m glad to see my own blog has kept its place in the (fairly brief) blogroll in DM’s sidebar, along with a few other usual egov suspects, and a selection of political blogs (not just red ones, either). But as I write this, there’s at least one notable omission.

I haven’t heard anything about a launch date, and there’s nothing immediately obvious on the site to give any hints. It all looks ready to go, though, barring the first round of postings.

But I need to say one thing. Although I’ve got good contacts ‘on the inside’ who probably knew about this, nobody ‘broke the embargo’. Miliband told the world it was coming; I just did a bit of digging, and happened to dig in the right place. The site is wide open for all to see; and if it was meant to be kept ‘secret’, it would/should have been password-protected. Even so, I’m not going to link to it directly – but I can’t stop you doing as I did, and guessing what the address might be.

While you’re waiting for the official announcement, have a peek at the FCO’s Flickr account which has just sparked into life again.

First Messy Media blog: 'Westmonster'

I’m proud to be Bloglines subscriber #1 to Westmonster, the new political blog out of Lloyd Shepherd’s Messy Media stable. Initial reactions are favourable: relevant content, tightly edited, and with that increasingly familiar ‘chatty’ style. But they’ve gone heavy on the site’s design, lots of Flash and javascript… and whilst it looks great, it’s infuriatingly sluggish to scroll on my (not quite top-spec but perfectly respectable) desktop PC.

With the Sky News political blog adopting a similar approach, this is getting to be quite a busy niche… Incidentally, have you seen the new banner image atop adamboulton.typepad.com? All a bit ‘crouch, touch, hold, engage!’ for me…

Sky's political blog goes Guido

There really is a ton of stuff happening at Sky News just now – clearly the benefits of putting some big names on the TV side into the online operation are beginning to come through. I think it’s absolutely the right thing to switch the focus of Adam Boulton’s blog to rapid-fire ‘rumours, whispers and gossip’. More Guido than Robinson, I guess. Then there’s the forthcoming ‘your photos’ site, which I got a sneak preview of, earlier this week – nothing too extravagant, but by the time you factor in moderation etc, it’s more difficult than it sounds. Not to mention preparations for the general election, whenever it might eventually come. (I hear there’s a feeling among some senior staff that October is a definite maybe.)

Government website = blog platform?

I got some bad news yesterday. Last week, I took an urgent call from a colleague working in central government; a new (but quite large) public sector organisation (which I won’t name) was in desperate need of a new CMS-driven website, but its long-term solution was still months away. Was there anything I could suggest? And could they have it by the end of September? Red rag to a bull… 🙂

Within a couple of days, we had put together a proposal to build the whole thing in WordPress MU (multi user). In many respects it’s the logical extension of much of my recent work and thinking. ‘Press releases’ is just a blog. ‘FOI disclosure log’ is just a blog. Want to keep stakeholders informed of activity on your project, or in your department? That’ll be a blog, plus a few static ‘pages’ forming a pseudo-primary nav. And so it goes on. Plus of course, all the inherent goodness of a blogging system – built-in search,sidebar widgets, subject tagging, RSS, comments if you’re feeling brave. The price? Only just into five figures.

It was genius. Design, development and deployment measured in (literally) days, rather than months. And if you’re prepared to apply the ‘near enough is good enough’ rule, everyone gets what they’re most eager for.

It got rejected, ostensibly because it was too ‘out there’. I’m reminded of President Kennedy’s inspiring words about the 1960s space programme:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

How many organisations do you know which are happy with the big, ugly content management system they spent hundreds of thousands (or indeed, millions) on? Not many, I’ll bet. Yet we keep doing and re-doing it. Meanwhile, millions of bloggers prove how much you can do with an open-source tool, a few community-derived plugins, and a genuine desire to communicate.

So I’m afraid, despite Jeremy’s upbeat comments about Thursday’s government heads of e-communication meeting, I’m feeling a bit depressed this morning. To be in with a chance of meeting the deadline, I had to start before getting the go-ahead – so that’s a few days’ hard work largely wasted. I know I’m going to look at whatever they end up with, and know it could have been so much more. I’m worried that it’s easier to sell a £100,000 product than it is to sell an identical – or indeed, a better – £10,000 product. I fear we might be in an Emperor’s New Clothes scenario.

If anyone out there is feeling brave, please get in touch while the idea’s still fresh.

The world's best search engine on your website

There’s now a ‘business edition‘ of Google’s Custom Search service, which lets you effectively ‘build your own Google’, featuring only the sites you want to be searched. It’s got all the functionality of the world’s favourite search engine, because it is the world’s favourite search engine.

The business edition takes away the adverts; and the results come in as XML, so you can dress them up however you want. Of course it costs money, but for $100/year for a 500-page site, rising to $2250 for a 300,000-page site, you’d be extremely hard pressed to buy, install, maintain and manage an in-house search engine.

Talking to a business contact today, the question came up of launching a search engine aimed at a particular content niche. The free version of Google Custom Search isn’t really an option; but you know what? – this might well be.

Digg-TV? Sky News plans new web-led show

More new web-influenced programming to come in a couple of weeks on Sky News: look out for Sky.com News (geddit?) at 7.30pm on Tuesdays to Fridays, with half an hour of ‘the most clicked stories on the Sky News website, and further analysis of one of the most popular stories, as well as opening up online discussions to studio debate. There will also be a rundown of the best popular online video and news from around the world as caught by Sky News viewers.’

Inevitably, the host will be the channel’s resident geek, Martin Stanford. He’s been into this territory before, of course: a relaunch at the same time last year introduced, and then rightly abandoned, various attempts at phone-in and webcam-in interaction. Then last month, they trialled a web-only video bulletin; with little follow-up, I assumed they’d gone cold on the Digg-TV idea. So I’m not yet sure it’s fair to call it ‘a radical step’ (as quoted on Media Guardian). But there are intriguing aspects: for one, the show will carry on through the TV advert breaks, if you’re watching on the web.