You're looking at the archive for February 2008
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BBC internet chief promises to learn webNick Reynolds is the ‘editor’ of the BBC internet blog. I must admit, I was glad to see he’d written a post to explain what the ‘editor’ of the blog did, since it almost seems like a contradiction in terms. Nick says:
‘The man who persuades important people in BBC Future Media and Technology to write [...] Department of Health redesignThe new Department of Health site is a definite improvement; the previous incarnation looked like it had been designed primarily by the technical side (which, indeed, it had). Now it’s all colourful boxes with rounded corners and shaded colourings, and it’s all the better for it. All this without breaking links, apparently.
Well done to them [...] FCO’s brilliant Kosovo blogI can’t let today go by without mentioning the marvellous blogging effort over at the Foreign Office. Ruairi O Connell, deputy head of the British Embassy-in-waiting in Pristina, Kosovo, has put together a series of fascinating posts which give a terrific crash course in why today’s declaration of independence matters. Simple things like the protocol [...] Government in competitionTwo articles in what looks like a special edition of the The Economist this week, which sum up exactly where e-government falls down. In ‘Government offline‘, they write (rightly):
Governments have few direct rivals. Amazon.com must outdo other online booksellers to win readers’ money. Google must beat Yahoo!. Unless every inch of such companies’ websites offers [...] Cracking calendarsWhen you think about it, the progress in online calendaring (if there is such a word?) has been one of the web’s bigger disappointments. It’s not for a lack of ideas, services (Google, 30Boxes) or standards (iCal)… maybe it just isn’t sexy enough compared to Flash-ier functionality. But things are finally moving, it seems.
I’m starting [...] How many Directgov sites?You know the way all government sites are meant to be merging into Directgov... does that or doesn't that cover externally located subdomains of direct.gov.uk? I did a quick bit of Google research and uncovered the following non-authoritative list... Where’s our Directgov blog?When the Guardian’s Michael Cross interviewed Directgov chief executive Jayne Nickalls in August last year, he wrote:
In its response to the Power of Information report, the Cabinet Office proposes that Directgov embraces Web 2.0 technology by incorporating a blog in which users exchange their experiences.
Now if it’s really in the official Cabinet Office document, ‘The [...] Deezer’s music by permalinkI’ve written before about Deezer.com, the French ’so good it can’t be legal’ jukebox website. Search for a song, click on the play button and er, that’s it. The music is encoded and uploaded by users, and streamed via Flash by the site… so you can’t download (er, exactly). Sound quality can be variable, but [...] I thought it didn’t have to be taxing?OK, so it’s not on the scale of the lost CDs exactly, but… this morning I got a letter from HMRC telling me that I’ll have to fill in an annual tax return. The thing is, it’s not the first letter I’ve had from them recently on such a subject.
They initially wrote to me before [...] WordPress as a CRM tool?Another example of why I love WordPress. Somebody has built a new theme which, with the help of a few common plugins, becomes a contact manager - with search, tagging, ‘related people’, etc. But I think it can be pushed further.
Using the standard WordPress comment functionality, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t turn [...] |