Now, I'm speaking for nobody but myself here - but what the Guardian piece doesn't fairly reflect is that it was not a crowdsourcing exercise, nor even a consultation.

It was the definitive statement of the outcome of negotiations between the two parties currently forming the country's coalition government. It was not 'give us some ideas for what you think we might have agreed.' The comment box provided an opportunity for people to voice opinions or ask questions, and government promised it would listen.

There was no commitment to take the responses back for a second round of coalition negotiations. To do so would have been quite ridiculous. So I'd argue that it's entirely reasonable for the departmental responses to take the position of 'well, we've heard what you say, but...'.

We are committed to the use of open standards and recognise that open source software offers government the opportunity of lower procurement prices, increased interoperability and easier integration. The use of open standards can also provide freedom from vendor lock in. In September 2010, we will publish Guidance for Procurers. This guidance will ensure that new IT procurements conducted by Government, evaluate both open source and proprietary software solutions, and select the option offering best value for money.

Nothing much to get excited about, to be honest. I suppose it's nice to see an acknowledgement of 'the opportunity' of achieving benefits. But it's a little disappointing that it should close with a flat statement about evaluating both proprietary and open-source on 'best value for money' grounds alone - which leaves us right back where we started. I note there's no reference the Maude statement, back in June, about departmental websites using open source 'whenever possible'.

In line with Government policy, NHS Choices no longer has any arrangement, or pays for any search engine activity. No commitments have been made with Google or any other search provider for 'pay per click' online marketing since the moratorium on marketing spend was put in place on 24 May 2010. NHS Choices used paid search activity to ensure that it reaches the widest possible audience, and that users can easily find clinically assured health information and access the services they need from Government.

(And sure enough, other top spenders like the Act On CO2 campaign have also scrapped their Adwords activity.)

In my February piece, I looked at two specific search terms - 'stop smoking' and 'chlamydia'. The NHS site is still the top natural result for 'stop smoking'... although it comes beneath sponsored links to specific pharma products. The picture for chlamydia isn't so great: the NHS site comes well down the first page of Google results - beneath the American CDC, interestingly. Time to ramp up the SEO activity.

The note confirms that 'Directgov funding will be reduced by a third over the Spending Review period', from £28.4m in 2010/11, 'together with the funding for the digital teams based in the Cabinet Office.'

But alongside the nuts-and-bolts details of who pays for the laptops, there's an interesting perspective on what Directgov's actual role is:

Directgov‟s ongoing role is to enable government to:

• Reduce the deficit
• Encourage individual and social responsibility, through provision and sharing of information and services in an open and transparent way
• Enhance the role of social enterprises, charities and co-operatives in public services

I've been working with well known LibDem blogger Mark Pack, whose day job is with PR company Mandate, to migrate the website of the Cancer Campaigning Group over to WordPress. It's a fairly modest little site, and I was under orders to keep the design broadly as-was. But it's got one specific feature I'm very excited about.

Nearly four years ago, I wrote about the increasing adoption of the iCal standard for calendar sharing. With Outlook 2007 set to embrace the format, I foresaw a rush of websites publishing event data in iCal feeds, allowing you to subscribe with a single click, and then see someone else's dates alongside your own.

The, ahem, optimistic assessment would be that I was well ahead of the curve. Four years on, you'll struggle to find many (mainstream) sites offering such feeds - although I've noticed a slight increase of late. The BBC, for example, had a feed of World Cup fixtures; the Arsenal site has a similar service for its new fixture lists, including the Reserves, Youth and Ladies teams. Why? Maybe it's the growing prevalence of smartphones by Apple and Google, both of whom were quick to adopt the format.

And then suddenly, the opportunity presented itself to build an iCal-enabled site of my own. The Cancer Campaigning Group's previous site had an 'events' section, although it wasn't anything special. WordPress 3.0, released just over a month ago, includes the ability to create 'custom post types'; and I only recently discovered its little-documented 'add_feed' function, introduced as far back as early 2007. A little jQuery on the front- and back-ends, and we had all the ingredients we'd need.

So I've written some code to create a custom post type called 'Event', and added it into the WP back-end interface. You enter event details just as you would enter a post or page, with a title, body text and optional excerpt. There's a special 'event type' categorisation; and a pop-up date picker for simplicity and consistency.

Then to call the calendar into a page, you use a WordPress shortcode - [calendar]. You can also specify the range (past or future), and the view (simple text list or javascript-enabled grid), plus the 'type' (if you're using them). This actually gives you remarkable flexibility, only some of which is obvious on the Cancer Campaigning Group site.

And of course - there's the iCal feed. If you take the feed URL into your calendar app of choice, you should be able to subscribe to it. And then, as the site admin adds new events, these will simply appear alongside your own personal appointments.

It hasn't been easy: and to be honest, I'm not entirely confident that we've captured and resolved all possible issues. The biggest problem has actually been with Google Calendar: Google caches the feeds for an indeterminate period, and there's no apparent way to force a refresh. So if there's an issue with your code, you may not realise for several hours; and it may take a further few hours for your fix to feed through. I'm also fairly sure that the code, as it currently stands, won't scale too well.

So for now, I'm watching the Cancer Campaigning Group site to see what happens. If it goes OK, I've got a couple of much higher-profile clients waiting in the wings.

(Quick update: actually, not for all the United Kingdom as it turns out - the following method doesn't work for N Ireland. See Matthew's comment below.)

Here's a quick example, as much for my own future reference as anyone else's. Let's say you wanted to generate a map of a given MP's constituency - say Lynne Featherstone in Hornsey & Wood Green:

• You need to find the appropriate reference number for the constituency: either by browsing the list of all constituencies, or searching for places whose names begin with Hornsey. Note - these will produce nasty-looking data files, rather than pretty HTML lists. Hunt through the code, and you'll find:
  "65883": {"codes": {"unit_id": "25044"}, "name": "Hornsey and Wood Green", "country": "E", "type_name": "UK Parliament constituency", "parent_area": null, "generation_high": 13, "generation_low": 13, "country_name": "England", "type": "WMC", "id": 65883}
• The 'id' is the number you need - in this case, 65883. The MySociety API now lets you call the geometry of that area, in - among others - Google Earth's KML format, using the following URL. (Don't worry about the '4326' here: it's a reference to the coordinate system being used, and won't change in this context.)

  http://mapit.mysociety.org/area/4326/65883.kml

• Conveniently, Google Maps lets you enter a KML file's URL as a search query, and it will draw it on a map. Even more conveniently, if you add 'output=embed' as a search parameter, it strips away everything but the map itself. So here's an embedded map of Lynne's constituency, pulled into an <iframe>. Look at the source code, to see how easy it is.

Boundary data generated by MaPit.mysociety.org which contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2010; Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2010 (Code-Point Open); National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2010 (NSPD Open).

And thankfully, it bears a close resemblance to this map on Lynne's own website, which took me considerably longer to churn out.

The Cabinet Office press release says it will 'sit in the Government Communications team headed by Matt Tee', with oversight from Francis Maude and Danny Alexander; but will also have celebrity input:

Today’s move puts new energy behind the drive to get more people and public services online. Martha Lane Fox, UK Digital Champion, will drive a transformation and redirection of Directgov as part of her role advising government on how efficiencies can best be realised through the online delivery of public services.

That's quite a curiously worded sentence when you look at it. In terms of traffic at least, Directgov is doing well - so you could argue that a 'transformation and redirection' of Directgov would be breaking what has so far been a winning formula. But then comes the key word - 'efficiencies'. I think we know what that means.

And so, Directgov continues to be shuffled around government every two years. But maybe now, with Matt Tee's Cabinet Office government communications unit holding responsibility for all the key strands of activity, it'll get the kind of clear, authoritative leadership it's perhaps been lacking.

Let's all meet up again here in 2012, and see how it went.

It was immediately noticeable that the attendees were much more serious than in previous years. Year one, in Birmingham was amateur - in the positive sense of the word. There were signs of things getting more serious in Cardiff last year. This time, it was noticeable how many more people had come to talk about code - although having said that, we still had a good number of curious newbies.

It's always tricky to attempt a summary of a multi-track event like this: you don't know what was said in the sessions you didn't attend. But from what I saw, a few topics stood out: custom post types, BuddyPress, and cash.

There's no doubt that the community is excited by the potential opened up by Custom Post Types - which aren't actually new in WordPress 3.0, but have now reached a point where they're properly usable. (Well, almost - I'm using them for a forthcoming project, and have already spotted a few weaknesses.) People were starting to demo some examples, and it's clear there's plenty of fun to be had with them.

BuddyPress was causing similar excitement last year, but there's definitely a bit more perspective being applied now. Although I like what I've seen of it, I haven't yet done anything with it myself: I've just found it a bit overwhelming. I picked up a few hints that others have had similar experiences.

Beneath the surface of several sessions was the sometimes tricky issue of cash. Growing numbers of people, myself included of course, are making their livings on top of WordPress - via a combination of custom programming, design and support. I've never been one to buy 'premium themes', but it seems like the big players in that field are making serious money. And although nobody dared to tackle it head-on, there were many nods towards an argument which kicked off last week in WordPress World about premium themes and licensing terms. (Mark Jaquith's post sums it all up beautifully.)

And then came The Controversy. The final wrap-up session descended into chaos, leading to a lot of people saying things they hopefully now regret - at least in terms of how they said it.

It boils down to this. A few people around the UK have, apparently, been keen to hold WordCamps of their own; but have felt unable to, due to the existence of a nationally-branded WordCamp UK. To some, this statement came across as an accusation that the UK-level event was deliberately preventing the growth of smaller groups. They saw it as an attempt to force an unsuitable US-style city-based model on the UK. The language got very emotional very quickly. It was genuinely horrific to watch.

Here's the conclusion I've reached. If - and I stress, 'if' - the UK can support more than one WordCamp now, then I'd be very happy for that to happen. In which case, it may no longer be appropriate to have a UK-branded event. But the most important thing is that we have at least one such event in this country in the next 12 months - whatever it gets called.

Back in May, I wrote a piece about consistent government branding. Given the benefits in terms of cost savings and strengthened identity, I suggested: 'it's an idea whose time has come, and will not come again for some time.' A couple of months later - after several web projects, a print item or two, and now even public events - it looks like we've got one.

I've already told the story of how I put together the Programme for Government website in under 24 hours. In the early evening before publication the next morning, I received a PDF of the proposed print output - and could really only mimic it. There wasn't going to be time to get approval for anything else. A 2:1 wireframe, white 'page' hovering on a very light grey background, extra large Times Roman text in the top left, green highlight colour, Gill Sans body font (where available). Nothing too clever on either the technical or aesthetic fronts.

We then had the initial Spending Challenge site, which looked almost identical, not surprising given that it used my original CSS code... followed by the two discussion apps based on Delib's platform, both coded from scratch but again using the same defining elements - 2:1 wireframe, white page on grey, big Times New Roman logotype, Gill Sans where available.

(It was particularly amusing to see the Delib guys sticking with the page shadow effect. Well past midnight, amid last-minute doubts about the design lacking a certain something, I added this using CSS3's box-shadow. It took a few seconds to add to the CSS; it looked OK, and my creative juices had run dry - I wasn't going to come up with anything better. Lo and behold, it's one of the style's defining characteristics! - although to Delib's credit, they went back and did it 'properly' as a repeating background graphic.)

And now I note the same style has even been translated into event scenery: witnessed first at the Cabinet away-day in the North, then again last Friday in Cornwall.

The outside observer would have to conclude that this is HMG's new across-the-board House Style... or certainly, the makings of one. There's a lot to like about it, not least its easy online application; there's something inherently 'British' about Gill Sans, and the colour combination blends sobriety and dynamism quite well. But some refinement is still required: I don't think we've found quite the right green, for example.

I am determined to reduce the number of Government websites and so the creation of any new sites will be exceptional and only permitted where its objective cannot be met in any other way. The reduction in the number of websites is part of the overall control on communications spending, which the Efficiency Board is overseeing.

You'll note the complete lack of any specific criteria being mentioned. That's OK, it's hardly the first time. But on the very same page of Hansard, we go on to learn there are some specific criteria as to whether or not a web project even requires the Board's oversight.

Tom also asked about the cost of the Your Freedom website, built by Delib. Francis Maude responds that the site cost a very reasonable £3,200 (inc VAT) to build, and has a (very precisely) estimated annual cost of £19,853.98 including VAT. But the last line of the response is the most interesting:

The creation of the Your Freedom website did not come before the Efficiency Board as the estimated cost was below the £20,000 threshold for approval.

Ah, there is a specific criterion after all! There's certainly been no mention of it in, for example, the Cabinet Office press release announcing the new procedure, which only stated that:

No new websites will be permitted except for those that pass through a stringent exceptions process for special cases, and are cleared by the Efficiency board

So at first glance, it looks like you'll get away with it if you keep the price below £20k. Your Freedom, which comes in just £146.02 below that threshold, appears to be setting a handy precedent.