Archive for February 2009
Gov.UK tips scales in open source's favour
The line which jumps out at me from today's new government 'Action Plan' on open source software is quite a neat encapsulation of the entire document: Where there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non-open source products, open source will be selected on the basis of its additional inherent flexibility. Fundamentally, the [...] read on »
Creative Commons: 3 MPs on blogging
A shock conclusion emerges from the Hansard Society's latest research into MPs' use of new-fangled technology: they are normal people. Well, 'kind of normal-ish', Labour's Tom Harris clarifies. We're here at Microsoft's relatively new London offices to hear from three MPs, one from each of the main parties, on what they put in, and what [...] read on »
Putting Google geo-location to the Twitter test
Google's javascript API has an exciting, and somewhat underreported little feature built in: each time a call is initiated, it attempts to establish where the browser is physically located - and reports back a town, 'region' (county) and country. I was wondering if it was accurate enough to be used to 'personalise' a website automatically: [...] read on »
Real Help Now: a national picture
For the last couple of weeks, I've been working with the Downing Street team to put together Real Help Now - a fairly modest website, for now anyway, to introduce and demonstrate the practical help available to families and businesses during the recession. Fundamentally, in this initial build, it's a news aggregation site - pulling [...] read on »
Barely a third of Tweeting is via the website
Some fascinating data published on Techcrunch reveals the usage patterns behind Twitter. Less than a third of updates (I think that's what they're measuring?), just 32% are posted via the web interface. The two leading Adobe Air-based clients, Tweetdeck and Twhirl, account for 23% between them; Twitterfeed's automated RSS postings put it fourth, ahead of [...] read on »
I want to be Brian Cox
Watching Professor Brian Cox on BBC2's Horizon the other night, two things struck me. One was the fact that physics appears to have come quite a long way since I did my GCSE (and got an A in it, for the record). The other was a reminder that being a good communicator is actually a [...] read on »
Govt seeks £120k/yr Director of Digital Engagement
Who said there were no 'senior strategic web roles' in government? The Cabinet Office has just issued a job advert, looking for someone to 'develop a strategy and implementation plan for extending digital engagement across Government', and 'act as head of profession for civil servants working on digital engagement'. It's a Senior Civil Service Pay [...] read on »
David Lammy, Twitter expert
It came as a bit of a shock this evening, when BBC1's The One Show started talking about Twitter, that reporter Gyles Brandreth's first port of call was Kingsgate House on Victoria Street, home of DIUS and minister David Lammy. With traffic up by a factor of three this year already, Twitter's certainly a hot [...] read on »
WordPress: reclaiming the web
I'm suddenly receiving a lot of email (and other online communication) from people in the public sector, and indeed outside, who want to talk WordPress. And I'm not alone: Dave Coveney, from Liverpool-based consultancy InterconnectIT tweeted yesterday: The professionalisation of #wordpress appears to have finally arrived. We no longer sell websites that happen to be [...] read on »