Puffbox

David Cameron has taken the Conservatives' promises on availability of public data a few steps further, in principle at least, in a speech at Imperial College on taking 'broken politics' into the 'post-bureaucratic age'. 'In Britain today, there are over 100,000 public bodies producing a huge amount of information,' he said; 'Most of this information is [...] read on »

Five years ago - to the very minute, as it happens! - I was working on a proposal to put to someone at the Cabinet Office. I was still working at ONS, and was trying to think of a clever way to handle our job adverts. We were obliged to post details of all vacancies [...] read on »

Some fascinating data published on Techcrunch reveals the usage patterns behind Twitter. Less than a third of updates (I think that's what they're measuring?), just 32% are posted via the web interface. The two leading Adobe Air-based clients, Tweetdeck and Twhirl, account for 23% between them; Twitterfeed's automated RSS postings put it fourth, ahead of [...] read on »

Chances are, you missed last month's publication of the Cabinet Office's white paper on the 2011 Census. 'Modern times demand modern approaches,' declares Sir Michael Scholar, chair of the UK Statistics Authority: you'll be able to complete your census form online, and 'all standard outputs will be publicly accessible online, and free of charge, from [...] read on »

A few days ago, I bought an iPod Touch; and I can finally understand the fuss. I didn't really want it; I'm not short of portable media players, and my Android phone gave me a perfectly good touchscreen to play with. But I'm very excited about mobile-optimised web interfaces at the moment, and felt I [...] read on »

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 »

I'm not sure I need to waste my time explaining why you need to go to TheyWorkForYou and sign up to MySociety's campaign to Free Our Bills - or rather, to have Parliamentary data marked up in mashup-friendly XML. Just compare 'proper' Hansard to TheyWorkForYou, and imagine the same process being done on all Parliamentary [...] read on »

One particularly difficult phase of my career was my time with National Statistics, in the aftermath of the 2001 Census. I tried, and ultimately failed, to persuade the organisation to recognise the tremendous asset they held in Census data, and to make wide public access a priority. I'm proud of some of the (relatively modest) [...] read on »

'Following a successful closed launch', apparently involving no fewer than 12 developers, Ordnance Survey has opened the doors to OpenSpace. It describes itself as 'a JavaScript® Application Programming Interface (API) that uses 'slippy map' technology, letting you dynamically pan the map by grabbing and sliding the image in any direction you like.' Just like Google [...] read on »