puffbox

DIUS living up to its name

I’m genuinely delighted to see the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills allowing itself some room to innovate. As DIUS social media manager Steph Gray explains, they’ve just published an interactive version of their white paper on innovation (published a few months back), using - wahey! - WordPress. Or more specifically, CommentPress: the theme which [...] read on »

Hazel Blears, Twitter-holic

At 11:30 this morning, Hazel Blears burst onto the Twitter scene. Six hours later, and we’re already up to her tenth tweet on the microblogging service. I feel as if my entire afternoon has been punctuated by the latest update on what Hazel is doing. Or indeed, not doing. I’m all for departments experimenting with Twitter… [...] read on »

Commons motion to free postcodes

I’ve just come across an Early Day Motion at the House of Commons, dated 1 July 2008, by Labour’s Khalid Mahmood: That this House believes that the Register of Postcodes is a national public asset and should be freely available. Short and sweet. And attracting healthy numbers of (mostly Labour) MPs willing to add their names in [...] read on »

Political engagement with June Sarpong

I never ‘got’ June Sarpong MBE as a TV presenter - she always seemed (at least) half-asleep to me. Her elevation to the status of Question Time panellist wasn’t met with universal acclaim. But to her immense credit, she does seem genuinely passionate about bringing young people, specifically young women, into politics - as the [...] read on »

‘Linking here’ lists with Google feed API

Time for some tech talk. A few weeks back, I wrote about Google’s new AJAX Feed API. Having played with it last week on behalf of a client, and having liked what I saw, I decided to implement it myself. If you’re reading this on the puffbox.com website itself, you might see a list in the [...] read on »

Another Downing St travel-blog

Gordon Brown’s off to Japan for at the weekend, to hang out with the other G8 heads of government. So it’s time to crank out another Puffbox production for 10 Downing Street: the now-familiar mash-up of a travel-blog, Twitter stream and Flickr photo set. As with previous trips to the US and Brussels, it’s based primarily [...] read on »

Here are your winners

It took a couple of days, but the list of winners from this week’s New Statesman awards has finally emerged. As predicted, MySociety didn’t go home empty-handed, with recognition for their FOI site, What Do They Know? And it’s good to see Patient Opinion getting recognition in the Community Activism category - their approach to [...] read on »

DWP’s ‘what’s new’ policy

It’s coming to something when the editorial policy of a single page on a government department’s website is the subject of a parliamentary question. Naturally, the Tories’ shadow secretary of state for Work & Pensions has a particularly keen interest in new additions to the DWP site’s What’s New page. The top of said page says [...] read on »

Mash! Mash! Mash!

The latest move from Tom Watson’s Power Of Information Taskforce, effectively a big BBC Backstage-style government mashup competition, is a master stroke. The Power of Information Taskforce want to hear your ideas on how to reuse, represent, mashup or combine the information the government holds to make it useful. … We will take the best ideas [...] read on »

Lammy’s lessons from Obama

Labour MP David Lammy’s speech to the Fabian Society on Monday wasn’t the first to say ‘we need to learn lessons from the Obama campaign’, and it won’t be the last. But it’s a well-constructued speech, and well worth a read. He notes the eventual success of two ‘outsider’ candidates, prepared to take risks - on [...] read on »