Puffbox

In February, The Times named the blog written by Philip Barclay and Grace Mutandwa, staff at the British Embasy in Zimbabwe, to be  one of the UK's best. And rightly so. Some of the stuff they've written has been the most moving I've ever read on a blog. But while Grace is a local, Philip [...] read on »

It's almost ten years since I left the Foreign Office, but it's always nice to be back. This time, I'm a guest at a roundtable seminar featuring some of their - actually, to be fair, some of the country's - leading bloggers. The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones chairs proceedings. I'm struck by the different takes on what [...] read on »

We rolled out a fairly modest enhancement to the DFID Bloggers website this week: probably unnoticed by most users, but one I'm quite proud of. At its heart, the DFID site is a group blog; but we do a few things to present it as a network of individual blogs by individual bloggers. Then the [...] read on »

Credit where it's due. By popular demand - and contrary to the implication of Jem Stone's piece, I can't claim to have started it  - the BBC has switched from sending (very short) summaries in the RSS feeds from its various blogs, to sending the full text of the blog postings in question. 'Sorry that [...] read on »

A few months back, I built and launched onepolitics: an automated website which pulled together the latest blog postings from the 'proper' political commentators. It wasn't ever meant to be a mass-audience website: I built it for myself, but if anyone else wanted to use it, they were welcome. As I wrote at the time: I’m [...] read on »

'Staying on top of modern politics has become a full time job,' declares the long-awaited PoliticsHome on its About page. 'Things move too fast: it is too much for any single person to track.' Unfortunately, the same can be said about the site itself: load up the homepage, and a torrent of headlines hits you [...] read on »

The mere fact that Saturday's BarcampUKGovWeb happened at all would have been enough in itself; but the assembled group of influential, inspirational and interesting people made for a fantastic day. At one point in the afternoon, I remember looking at the schedule and getting depressed at the countless interesting sessions I'd missed. It's been a [...] read on »