Archive for February 2010
Our modest microsite for UKTI
Monday saw a gathering of 250 leading figures from the world of business at London's Saatchi Gallery; and organisers UK Trade & Investment asked Puffbox to put together a microsite for the event. With minimal advance publicity, few official post-conference outputs, and no particular involvement for the general public, we felt the best approach was [...] read on »
Cabinet Office’s open source fail
A PQ from Conservative shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office what her policy is in respect of the installation and use of (a) Internet Explorer, (b) Firefox and (c) Opera website browsers by Government departments. To which Angela Smith replies: Government policy regarding installation and [...] read on »
The great WordPress / MU merge
A subject which keeps coming up in conversation just now is the planned merger of 'normal' WordPress with WordPress MU, the 'multi user' version. There's been both excitement and concern at what it might mean: but the latest report from Jane at WP HQ should be enough to calm anyone's worst fears. It was announced [...] read on »
Flogging a dead horse. Again.
I feel obliged to note that LabourSpace, Labour's attempt to build a social network around policy discussion and campaigns, has relaunched. Again. It's less appalling - downplaying, quite dramatically, the voting up and down of campaign ideas which has failed over a two year period now to spark into any kind of life. But I'm [...] read on »
BBC sounds death-knell for left-hand nav
There's a fascinating (and lengthy) post on the BBC's internet blog, setting the scene for a forthcoming 'post-2.0' redesign of its web presence. It's a design geek's paradise - global visual languages, grid systems, typography and colour palettes. Intriguingly, they start their potted history of the BBC website with a screenshot from December 1997. My [...] read on »
Networked blogs: our latest science experiment
Over the last couple of months I've been working with Steph Gray and his BIS colleagues to build a modest little family of websites which could have far-reaching consequences. As Steph notes on his own blog, I've long been musing openly about seeing corporate websites as clusters of smaller websites: making a virtue of the [...] read on »
Building Britain's Future revisited
Spotted in Francis Maude's article on Comment Is Free yesterday (8 Feb 2010): Then came the first instance of Labour breaching the impartiality of government's communications; we discovered that "Building Britain's Future", a brand conceived and promoted by the civil service, is used extensively on the Labour party's website. From PR Week article dated 29 [...] read on »
DH reveals £2.7m Adwords spend
A parliamentary question has revealed that, in the year to the end of January 2010, the Department of Health spent £2.72 million on Google Adwords pay-per-click keyword advertising. A big number, but a fair one? With Google's Adwords advertising, you only pay on results. An advert is displayed at the top, or down the side [...] read on »
Yes you can change your Twitter ID. Don't.
A while back, Mark Pack wrote a couple of articles noting that if MPs were worried about breaking election campaign rules by running a Twitter account with the letters MP in it, they probably needn't be. The authorities tended to be 'sensibly flexible'; and besides, it was dead easy to change your Twitter account name. [...] read on »
Berners-Lee, Bin Laden and business logic
Watching BBC2's The Virtual Revolution at the weekend, I found myself drawing an unexpected and slightly uncomfortable parallel. Entitled Enemy Of The State?, this week's installment looked at social networks and political activism - touching, as you'd expect, on Twitter during the Iranian election, the great firewall of China, Islamic fundamentalism and the Estonian cyber-attack. [...] read on »