For a while now, I've been doing slides which don't make a lot of sense unless I'm standing up in front of them; so I'm not going to share my slideshow per se. However, I thought I'd share the key information sources I used: you'll find the facts and figures I quoted, plus - undoubtedly - some other gems I missed.

The best sources of numbers were the Ofcom Communications Market Report and the National Statistics release on Internet Access, both published last August. The Ofcom report is particularly good for numbers and charts on all aspects of media consumption. I also used a few figures from the BBC's iPlayer press pack, to illustrate the growth of high-bandwidth activity, and the use of non-traditional devices (specifically in that case, PS3s and Wiis).

Click to see it a bit larger

The most useful visual was probably this one, from Hitwise - using data originally produced for the BBC's Virtual Revolution series, it visualises the UK's top 30 web presences, and the traffic flows between them.

It's particularly useful to show just how significant Google, Facebook and Hotmail (or strictly nowadays, Windows Live Mail) are in the UK online experience - and hopefully made people think a bit more about tools which government (and indeed, party politics) often seems to ignore.

I used to do similar sessions for GCN (or as it was then, GICS) courses on a fairly regular basis; and it was great to be doing them again, forcing me to stay up-to-date on the latest statistics. The biggest single change between this one and the last one I did, back in 2006? The language I found myself using.

I was perfectly comfortable using 'industry terms' which I'd felt the need to avoid (or certainly, explain) last time: and the audience knew what I was talking about. But perhaps most striking of all, I was conscious of the fact that most of what I was saying was in the present tense, where last time it was future.

My thanks to Jon Worth for recommending me for the course; and to course leader Sue Calthorpe for going far beyond the call of duty, when I stupidly left my laptop power cable behind. I really enjoyed it all; I hope the attendees did too; and I'm dead keen to do more.

There's a new website for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills - aka BIS - this weekend; and as I reported here back in November (sniff!), they're waving farewell to WordPress as their core publishing platform. The new site is built on Sitecore, and is appearing bang on the published schedule.

Visually it's really nice: a very open feel to the design, good solid navigation and a very fashionable 'carousel' slideshow at the top of the homepage. It still doesn't feel like a large site, although it's clearly much deeper than its WordPress predecessor - and that's definitely a compliment. As you might expect, given they've got some of the most web- and social-media-savvy people in Whitehall, it's a fine piece of work.

It's going to be a bumpy ride for them though. With purdah probably only 4 weeks away, with Lord Mandelson as your minister, in the wake of the Tory technology manifesto, given controversy over the Digital Britain bill, given the possibility (likelihood?) of Machinery of Government changes in a couple of months, etc etc... well, you can imagine what headlines it might prompt. But the BIS team aren't stupid; I'm sure they'll have a comms plan ready.

On the WordPress front - yes of course, it's a pity to lose a 'trophy user'. It's been great to quote the main corporate web presence of one of Whitehall's highest-profile departments as a WordPress-based site. But remember why it was on WordPress in the first place: a small-scale, stop-gap website, thrown together within (literally) a couple of days. Precisely the kind of lightweight, tactical context where we've always said WordPress excels.

And whilst WordPress might not be right for a single department-wide site, with thousands of pages and dozens of authors, I refer you to our recent work with BIS on Science and Society, and its testing of the concept of a 'network of blogs' making up a larger site. This model is already starting to happen in a few places: I know of one Whitehall departmental site which is steadily hiving off various bits to stand-alone WordPress sites. And of course, BIS have quite a few WordPress-based sites which remain live, even after the parent site 'grows up'.

Now... chances are, on 7 May, we're going to have a few new or rejigged entities keen to get web presences up and running: certainly quickly, probably cheaply. As BIS has hopefully proven beyond all doubt, WordPress is up to the task: at least in the short term, and probably longer - ask the Wales Office, now into year 3 of operation. And for the record, it ticks a good number of the boxes on BIS team leader Neil Williams's Fantasy CMS wishlist. We're ready when you are.

If there's one commitment in the Conservatives' Technology Manifesto, billed as 'the most ambitious technology agenda ever proposed by a British political party', which makes my heart leap with joy, it's this:

We will also create a small IT development team in government – a 'government skunkworks' – that can develop low cost IT applications in-house and advise on the procurement of large projects.

For those unfamiliar with the term, 'skunkworks' was devised by aircraft maker Lockheed Martin - and is still jealously guarded by them as a trademark. It describes a small, almost secret unit within a large organisation, protected from all the internal bureaucracy, and given carte blanche to be creative. Among Lockheed Martin's 14 rules for its operation are:

• Unit manager to be answerable directly to a very senior member of the organisation.
• An 'almost vicious' restriction of the numbers of people involved.
• Minimal reporting requirements.
• Strict access controls.
• Mutual trust, with close cooperation and daily liaison, allowing correspondence to be kept to a minimum.

All very 'web 2.0'... until you learn these rules came together in the 1940s.

I detect the influence of Tom Steinberg. Eighteen months ago, at MySociety's 5th birthday celebration, Tom gave a speech in which he said:

So long as the cult of outsourcing everything computer related continues to dominate in Whitehall, and so long as experts like Matthew [Somerville] and Francis [Irving] are treated as suspicious just because they understand computers, little is going to change.

Government in the UK once led the world in its own information systems, breaking Enigma, documenting an empire’s worth of trade. And then it fired everyone who could do those things, or employed them only via horribly expensive consultancies. It is time to start bringing them back into the corridors of power.

But equally, as I argued at the time, bringing those kinds of people back into Whitehall and then dumping them inside IT departments wasn't going to help either. This skunkworks concept - where you're effectively a startup within the organisation - should offer the best of both worlds.

I've been one of numerous people - inside and outside government - who have suggested such an approach in the past. And no matter how positive a hearing the idea received, it didn't happen. Its time may well be coming.

My suggestion is that this unit needs to be created very, very quickly after the election. I remember the uncertainty and sheer chaos which followed the handover from Tories to Labour in 1997. Radical, dramatic, shocking, good things happened. For a while, you went into work each day not knowing what was coming next. It was magnificent, wonderful chaos - for a while.

There's also a specific paragraph on government websites:

The Conservative Party believes that government websites should not be treated like secure government offices or laboratories, where public access is to be controlled as tightly as possible.

We see government websites as being more like a mixture of private building and public spaces, such as squares and parks: places where people can come together to discuss issues and solve problems.

Where large amounts of people with similar concerns come together, for example filling in VAT forms or registering children for schools, we will take the opportunity to let people interact and support each other.

Again... Mr Steinberg, I presume? I'm not sure quite what that's getting at; discussion forums? opening up Sidewiki-esque comments on 'standard' pages? (That idea was first aired at the 2008 Barcamp.)

There's a commitment to 'a level playing ?eld for open source IT': welcome words, but we already have an on-paper commitment to a level playing field... or arguably, ever-so-slightly slanted in favour of open source. I haven't changed my mind since January this year, when I concluded that we need a 'specific high-profile victory for Open Source, to give it real momentum in government'. And those mythical 100 Days could be the time to deliver that.

Elsewhere there's confirmation of notions already floated: transparency of senior salaries and contract spending, a 'right to data', online publication of expenses claims at Parliament and council levels, and so on.

In some aspects, there's little to separate the rhetoric between Labour and the Tories. But whereas Labour has had the opportunity to make ambitious changes happen - and hasn't always taken them, you get the sense of energy and ambition in the Tories' promises.

There are specific actions and measurable commitments in this document: and it must be said, there's evidence of the Tories practising what they're preaching - use of WordPress and Drupal, publication of government IT policy (admittedly, someone else's) in commentable form, publication of front-bench expenses via Google Spreadsheet.

Things could be about to get very, very interesting.

Over the last few months we've been doing a few little projects with Defra: first came the UK Location (micro)site, and I mentioned there was 'at least one more' in the pipeline.

The second project emerged a few days back: a 'commentable page' platform, in the style (as Steph rightly observed) of the now-legendary Commentariat theme. In fact, I handed over my part of the work some time ago; but the Defra team have taken things a step or two further, embedding it even deeper into their 'house style'.

This kind of 'new light through old windows' work - where I build a WordPress site to match or slot into an existing design - has probably accounted for about half my (new) projects over the last six months or so. It's much quicker for me, and hence much cheaper for clients. It's usually as simple as referencing the parent site's CSS files; stripping their page templates down to empty shells; then dropping in the required WordPress functions, and building new CSS around them as necessary. It cuts my bill by about 50%, maybe more. And because you're removing most, if not all, of the subjective elements, things tend to run much more smoothly too.

Maybe this is a pointer for how we can take WordPress deeper into large corporates. It isn't about replacing your entire Existing Arrangement with a young upstart like WordPress in one fell swoop. Inevitably, certain sections of your website will lend themselves better than others to WordPress's natural preference for chronological presentation, commenting, RSS feeds, tagging, and so on. And if you're smart in terms of how you code it all, how you structure your navigation, and how you pass data around (most likely using RSS feeds), the join can be made barely visible.

If you're looking for a nice example of this: look at the integration of www.parliament.uk and news.parliament.uk: the latter runs on WordPress, and delivers its content - including images, by the way - back into the parent site via RSS. (Disclosure: I had a very minor role in it.)

For those interested in the technical details: it's a WordPress MU installation (although of course, that won't matter for long); meaning the Defra team are able to generate new sites under the 'engage' subdomain with just a couple of clicks. I think they've altered the default theme I handed over, for tighter integration into the site structure; but even then, it's just a case of editing the HTML around the WordPress code, all of which will be instantly familiar as it's using their existing stylesheet.

We've got one more project with Defra in the works: hoping to get it out there within the next couple of weeks.

Hot on the heels of the BNP apparently (?) taking design cues from Obama, here's the new homepage for the Conservatives' website... and the Manchester City FC homepage, with which - you'd have to say - there is a remarkable similarity.

For the avoidance of any confusion: one is returning to prominence after a long period out of the limelight, thanks in no small part to a wealthy foreign-based backer; however, some poor results over the last few months have shaken fans' confidence of a breakthrough at the highest level - leading to tricky questions being asked of their unquestionably photogenic manager who has yet to truly win over the hardcore support.

The other is...

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 to work up a relatively modest 'one page site' idea, 'mashing up' material from numerous external sources.

For the past few months I've been falling in love with javascript library jQuery; and I wanted to make use of what I'd learned - partly to enrich the user experience above that of a fairly static page, but also to simplify its management. So there's a nice little sideways-scrolling video playlist - which uses jQuery not only for the animation effect, but also to wrap the content in the necessary HTML markup. Each set of three videos needs to be contained in an LI tag; but doing that manually would have been a nightmare, especially when it came to adding new videos midway down the list - so jQuery does it on my behalf.

When you click to play a video, it loads in the page's main panel - and generates a few extras too. We're offering YouTube's little-known short URL format for easier sharing; social buttons for Twitter, Facebook and Delicious; plus a (somewhat experimental) click-to-copy button, which triggers a rather cute colour trick when you press it. None of it rocket science, but it all helps make things a little more user-friendly, and hopefully a bit more memorable.

(If you're keen to know how any of it was done, a peek at the source code should reveal all.)

It was a little strange to find myself right back at the coalface, hand-coding HTML pages in real-time: it's been a good few years, probably dating back to my time at the Foreign Office or Sky News since I've had to do that. (Yes folks, that's right - no WordPress this time.) And inevitably, with various people producing various things in various places - all also in real time, a significant proportion of the effort went on coordination rather than pure web development.

This wasn't a website on the scale of, say, FCO's efforts for the London Summit last year. But given what we had, in terms of both time and material available, I'm definitely pleased with it. Looks pretty, thanks to designer Matt; with some cute interactions, thanks to jQuery; and relatively easy to maintain on the day. I'm particularly grateful to UKTI, who were an ideal client in many respects - telling us the end result they wanted, and allowing us to work out how best to do it.

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 use of web browsers is that all decisions must be in line with value for money requirements. In addition, the Open Source, Open Standards, Re-use strategy requires Departments to consider open source browsers such as Firefox and Opera on a level basis with proprietary browsers such as Internet Explorer.

A slightly disappointing answer on a few levels. It shouldn't necessarily be seen as an either/or thing. A Strategy which says 'we don't have any specific preference' isn't really a strategy. Oh, and without wanting to be too picky, Opera isn't actually open source.*

I've had trouble finding a copy of it online; so here's the key section of the Opera licence:

All intellectual property rights such as, but not limited to, patents, trademarks, copyrights or trade-secret rights related to the Software are exclusively the property of, and remain vested in, Opera Software ASA and/or its suppliers.

You shall not modify, translate, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the Software or any part thereof or otherwise attempt to derive source code, create or use derivative works therefrom. You agree not to modify the Software in any manner or form or to use modified versions of the Software including, without limitation, for the purpose of obtaining unauthorized access to the Services or disabling features of the Software or Services.

See that bit about 'You shall not attempt to derive source code'? Well, that's basically the complete opposite of Open Source. We're going to have real trouble making this debate happen if we can't even get the basics right.

* Although, in an unexpected moment of charity, I'm wondering whether it's actually a punctuation failure. Perhaps they meant 'open source browsers such as Firefox, and [non-open source browsers like] Opera'? No, I doubt it too.

It was announced at WordCamp San Francisco last year that WordPress and WordPress MU would be merging codebases. This has now happened in 3.0-alpha, and we’re working on smashing bugs and tidying up a few screens. If you’re currently using a single install of WordPress, when you upgrade to 3.0 you won’t see any of the extra screens associated with running a network of sites. If you’re currently running MU, when you upgrade you’ll notice a few labels changing, but upgrading should be as painless as usual. If you’re going to set up a new WordPress installation, you’ll be asked as part of the setup if you want one site or multiple sites, so that’s pretty simple. If you want to turn your single install into one that supports multiple sites, we’ll have a tool for you to use to do that, too. So if you’ve been worried about the merge, have a cup of chamomile tea and relax; it will all be fine.

It's quite a relief to see how they're planning to manage this: most existing users of 'normal' WP won't even see the new functionality, but if they want to make use of it, there'll be a way to do so. Any impact will be seen by the existing MU user base, but as it's a more complex product by definition, they should be better able to cope with any changes. That seems like the perfect solution all round.

The feature I'm personally most excited about? Never more having to refer to 'ordinary' WordPress, 'standard' WordPress, 'WordPress solo', 'non-MU'...

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 genuinely amazed it's still there at all.

Instead, the core content is now a pretty straightforward set of commentable pages, nothing you haven't seen on a million blogs. Except that those million blogs handle it better. You don't see the comment form until you press the 'Leave a comment' button... and then, you're immediately presented with boxes for first name, surname, and email address. That's right: no actual comment box.

Presentationally, it's curious. It managed to spell the surname of its lead sponsor, Ed Miliband wrong at the very top of its homepage - corrected shortly after I tweeted about it, but even so. Its HTML page title and 'hero' graphic can't even be consistent in the capitalisation of A Future Fair/fair for All/all. (Then again, the HTML page titles are universally awful: SEO clearly not a priority.)

(Update: there's an interstitial page at www.labour.org.uk which introduces yet another different capitalisation: 'A future fair for all'.)

Oh, and the site logo introduces a whole different slogan - 'Be the change'. What's the point of launching a campaign slogan if you're not going to use it yourself?

LabourSpace has flopped. Several times now. Surely the best thing they could have done at this point was quietly ditch it - and put the effort into a 'manifesto blog', or a concentrated push on Facebook. Instead they drag the dead horse out for another public flogging.

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 own memories go further back, to the days when the BBC's URL was bbcnc.org.uk - and one particular landmark in page design. White with a dark blue left-hand column; some kind of HTML table magic. Groundbreaking in its own small way.

Pretty soon, all websites looked like that - many, no doubt, deliberately doing so because if it was good enough for the BBC, it was good enough for them. So it's a pretty big deal when they now announce that they're 'moving away from left hand navigation to consistently placed, horizontal navigation across the site.'

I haven't designed many sites lately which used any kind of conventional left-hand nav; but I have built a few sites which integrated into existing 'look and feel' which did still have left-hand nav - and it felt very strange. Blogs and the 'tab' metaphor have effectively killed it off.

Another interesting trend from the Beeb's work-in-progress is the overlaying of big headline text on imagery. For an organisation which produces so much imagery, it's a fairly obvious thing to do: and it may 'raise the bar' for other sites with pretensions to similar scale. Pages without pictures are going to look pretty dull in comparison.

And it looks like we're going to see a conscious effort to underline the real-time aspects: I note the various mockups marked 'ADDED 3 MINS [ago]'. Again, if you're running a large website and you aren't demonstrably keeping your core content similarly up-to-date, you're going to look bad - and risk losing trust.

If you want to know what your website will look like in a year or two, have a peek. Do I like it? Yes, yes I do.