puffbox

Video on Flickr: what impact on YouTube?

At long last, Flickr does video. And true to form, they just get it absolutely spot-on. The ‘90 second limit’ thing initially feels restrictive, but it’s a perfect fit for their ‘photo sharing’ ethos. What impact on YouTube?, I wonder. Personally, Flickr feels like a more natural place for me to share my occasional personal videos; and [...] read on »

Anyone see Gordon Brown’s live webcast?

Did anyone log on to the live Labour Party webcast last night? Or indeed, did anyone know about it? The party claims 3000 questions were sent in by text (or via the web, I believe?), to be put to the PM by comedienne Arabella Weir during the 30-minute Q&A session. The Labourhome website appears only [...] read on »

No10 beats Obama

It doesn’t actually mean anything, but well done to Downing Street for topping 1,000 followers on Twitter. The Twitterholic website collates a popularity contest, which suggests there’s still a l-o-n-g way to go to top Barack Obama in terms of followers - but they’ve already issued more updates in a fortnight than he’s put out [...] read on »

PoliticsHome: overwhelming and soulless

‘Staying on top of modern politics has become a full time job,’ declares the long-awaited PoliticsHome on its About page. ‘Things move too fast: it is too much for any single person to track.’ Unfortunately, the same can be said about the site itself: load up the homepage, and a torrent of headlines hits you [...] read on »

How to live-blog a summit

I think we got away with it. The remit for the week had been pretty straightforward: design, install, build, populate, edit and operate a website for the Progressive Governance Summit of 20-ish world leaders. So yeah, I’ve been busy. It became an exercise in ‘web 2.0′ - open source tools, free online services, RSS feeds, and [...] read on »

Summit microsite ready (phew)

It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride, as you may have picked up from stories on other blogs, but we’ve finally got the Progressive Governance summit microsite ready for the start of proceedings tomorrow morning. The discussion papers are up, the comment facility is switched on, the live streams are configured and ready. And [...] read on »

Maybe if I was a Londoner

I’m actually a big fan of ‘fill in this questionnaire and we’ll tell you who to vote for’ websites. Granted, it’s all a bit unscientific: it’s close to impossible to boil the key policy issues down to a series of multiple choice answers (never mind agree/disagree), then assess how each candidate’s policy correlates to the [...] read on »

Govt report backs ‘free’ data

I wasn’t especially nice about the interim progress report on Power of Information Review, in that I didn’t see much specific progress being reported. So it came as a bit of a shock to discover, courtesy of the Open Rights Group, that there’s actually something really significant in it. The interim report announced that: HM Treasury and [...] read on »

Innovation, innovation, innovation

Over at the Telegraph, Mick Fealty rightly reflects on the ‘fascinating confluence of ideas cascading into the body politic at the moment’, with both right and left suddenly making an issue of innovation, open source, and all that good stuff. The latest contribution was David Cameron’s speech at NESTA this morning: Indeed, the odd thing about [...] read on »

No10’s new microsite by Puffbox

Fresh from its success with Twitter, 10 Downing Street is preparing for a weekend of social media experimentation, in association with Puffbox. This Saturday, Gordon Brown is hosting a gathering of around 20 left-leaning world leaders under the banner of Progressive Governance, to discuss globalisation, climate change, development and international institutional reform. (It got a brief [...] read on »