puffbox

New Comment Is Free adds ‘blog of comments’

A big day for the Guardian today, as the new community-enabled Comment Is Free makes its debut. Site editor Georgina Henry describes the various mechanical and presentational changes, but one in particular catches my eye. Each user of the site now has a personal profile page… featuring an ‘instant archive’ of all the comments they’ve added [...] read on »

BBC’s lessons for management blogs

The BBC’s Jem Stone adds an interesting perspective on the success (so far) of the BBC’s management / editorial blogs, in a comment on ex-BBC man Alfred Hermida’s blog. There are very valuable lessons here for many similar ‘transparency through blogging’ initiatives, not least in government and politics: We’ve found that [engagement with readers' feedback] is [...] read on »

Movie critic Kermode takes video-blogs into mainstream

I’ve always been a big fan of Mark Kermode, movie critic, broadcaster and visiting fellow at the University of Southampton. Prior to podcasting, I would schedule my Fridays to allow me to hear his Five Live segments with Simon Mayo. And yet curiously, I’m not really a movie fan (although I sometimes think I could [...] read on »

Full-text feeds on BBC blogs

It’s great to see the long-awaited improvement to the BBC’s blog infrastructure coming fully on-stream. I’m hearing reports of long, long hours being worked this week; and the inevitable post-launch debugging work continues. The Beeb’s Jem Stone describes the full horror, and scores extra points for an obscure Guns N Roses reference. But I’ve spotted one [...] read on »

On tour with the PM

I hinted that there might be more online initiatives coming out of 10 Downing Street; and true enough, next out the world-famous door is a bit of on-the-spot blogging from Gordon Brown’s trip to the United States later this week. For the first time on a foreign visit, a member of the No10 web team is [...] read on »

How to live-blog a summit

I think we got away with it. The remit for the week had been pretty straightforward: design, install, build, populate, edit and operate a website for the Progressive Governance Summit of 20-ish world leaders. So yeah, I’ve been busy. It became an exercise in ‘web 2.0′ - open source tools, free online services, RSS feeds, and [...] read on »

‘Gov 2.0′ in US presidential campaigning

I’m grateful to Jeff Jarvis for a detailed post on ‘government 2.0′ (although it isn’t a term he used, nor should he have). He points to two recent proposals from the Democrat candidates for the US presidency. I hadn’t heard Hillary Clinton’s suggestion, back in January, that government should actually be required to blog: I want to [...] read on »

No10 man’s blog raised at PMQs

With civil servants’ blogging habits such a hot topic, I can’t avoid mentioning the reference casually dropped into PMQs by David Cameron this afternoon. There is a new strategist, a man called David Muir. Yes, I have done a bit of research—he is the chief strategist and on the internet he has listed his favourite book. [...] read on »

The hunt for Civil Serf continues

It looks like I wasn’t the only e-gov person to get an email this afternoon from the Daily Mail, asking if I knew who Civil Serf was. No, I don’t. And given the treatment which the Mail handed out to DFID’s Owen Barder, I wouldn’t be inclined to tell them, even if I did. But [...] read on »

Nine Lords a-blogging

Very interesting to see the horrendously-branded Lords Of The Blog, a new group blog co-written by nine peers, each promising a couple of items per week. Prime mover Lord (Clive) Soley writes in his introductory post: MP’s and Peers need to find new ways of engaging with the public. A blog is not the complete answer [...] read on »