puffbox

HMRC website crisis

Prepare yourself for the next ‘IT incompetence’ story: HMRC’s online self-assessment website has gone down, on the day people must file their tax returns, or face a fine. Based on last year’s numbers, it’s going to affect thousands of people. The BBC’s story has a bit more. read on »

Breaking news blogs (again)

Alfred Hermida, ex BBC, now Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s school of journalism, makes an interesting suggestion: using the new WordPress Twitter-style ‘Prologue’ theme as a breaking news site, ‘with reporters adding the latest details as they come in’. I actually suggested something identical to this, back in July: ‘A ‘breaking news blog’, [...] read on »

Leading blogger is new e-gov Minister

I haven’t yet seen official confirmation, but I’m reliably informed that Tom Watson is the new minister for e-government, post-reshuffle. The Cabinet Office website only says that: ‘Following on from Gillian Merron’s departure to the Department for International Development, Tom Watson MP has been appointed as new [...] read on »

Curing Vista’s outrageous wifi problem

At the heart of my dislike for Windows Vista has been a recurring problem with wifi. The spread of free wifi, notably thanks to McDonalds has been a godsend to someone like me, living well outside London (ooh, nice double entendre there) but spending a lot of time in it. But too many times, I’ve [...] read on »

Cabinet Minister for digital inclusion?

A timely piece from the BBC’s Ashley Highfield on the ‘digital divide’. It’s timely, because as of this week, Britain has a Cabinet-level minister with responsibility for digital inclusion - Wales secretary Paul Murphy. This news appeared to come as a surprise to BBC Wales’s David Cornock when it emerged at PMQs this lunchtime. Mr [...] read on »

Another Whitehall blogger

Just picked up on another Civil Service blogger, bringing the total to… er, a slightly larger handful. The otherwise anonymous Civil Serf is female, aged 33, and Whitehall-based. I’m guessing she’s a ‘Grade 7′, if her boss is a member of the Senior Civil Service - and that would seem to be more or less [...] read on »

WordPress meets Twitter

As if I needed another reason to love WordPress, along comes their new Prologue theme which effectively gives you your own local version of Twitter. That’s not to say it’s a competitor to Twitter: the whole beauty of Twitter is that everyone is using the same platform (with occasionally unfortunate consequences). But as a team [...] read on »

Thoughts from Barcamp: just do it

The mere fact that Saturday’s BarcampUKGovWeb happened at all would have been enough in itself; but the assembled group of influential, inspirational and interesting people made for a fantastic day. At one point in the afternoon, I remember looking at the schedule and getting depressed at the countless interesting sessions I’d missed. It’s been a [...] read on »

HTML email coming to Blackberry

I’m not a huge fan of email generally; it usually means ‘work’, as Mr Briggs noted following Barcamp, and I’ve argued about previously. In my mind, spam has discredited email as a marketing mechanism. But a lot of large corporate clients still think in email terms, and it isn’t going away any time soon. So it’s [...] read on »

Breath of fresh AIR

I’m finding more and more reasons to like Adobe’s new AIR technology. They describe it as ‘a new technology that makes possible exciting new software applications that merge the desktop and the web’; in practice, it opens software development up to those who chose to specialise in more ‘creative’ fields like Flash. And of course, [...] read on »