Puffbox

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 »

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. All [...] read on »

WeAreSocial's Robin Grant tagged me (and various others) on Twitter, asking for opinions on Conservative proposals from Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne: A Conservative government will require all public bodies that want to launch marketing campaigns to state precisely what behaviour change the advertising is designed to bring about, and an element of the advertising agency [...] read on »

There's always a risk attached to using automated text-generating services. For example, this 'captcha' I was presented with by the Conservatives' Blue Blog website: Not one to raise on the first trip to Camp David, perhaps. read on »

Delighted to note the Ministry of Defence's decision to publish its new green paper in commentable form, using a restyled version of Steph's Commentariat theme for WordPress. The MoD have been doing some excellent, if a little underpublicised, work with blogging tools - Defence News and a blog from Afghanistan, both running on a Typepad account; [...] read on »

Now this is how open source is meant to work. In January 2007, the French defence ministry's Direction Générale de l'Armement began work (in association with BT) on a project called Milimail, to enhance Firefox's open-source cousin, the Thunderbird email client for military purposes. It's now known as Trustedbird - and lists among its additional features: Deletion [...] read on »

I've happily signed the e-petition on the Downing Street website calling on the Prime Minister to 'encourage government departments to upgrade away from Internet Explorer 6.' I've written on this subject before; and I know the huge headache it would be to alter in-house applications built for IE6 alone (although that's another story altogether). I note the [...] read on »

There's a bit of a spat at the moment over Conservative (mis)use of crime stats to suggest a doubling or trebling of violent crime. The BBC's Mark Easton has an excellent summary of the situation, which ultimately boils down to a change in how the numbers were put together: Before 2002 the decision as to whether [...] read on »

The trinity is complete: with the release of an officially-sponsored Android app, following in the footsteps of previous iPhone and BlackBerry releases, there's now a WordPress client for the three biggest-hitting smartphone platforms. (Sorry Nokia.) It's development like this which, in my mind, lifts WordPress above other similar platforms - and any bespoke CMS build. You've [...] read on »

A bit out of the blue, this morning saw a revision of the UK government's open source policy. And whilst it still doesn't quite endorse the notion that open source solutions are fundamentally better solutions, it does ratchet up the expectations. Last year's revision to the 2005 policy statement introduced a subtle - but, I thought, [...] read on »