Puffbox

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 »

A couple of (broadly) Labour-related online developments of note late last week. One was the relaunch of LabourList, just in time for conference. Alex Smith has done great things editorially since taking control of the website in the wake of Drapergate, and entirely deserved the recognition of a high ranking in Iain Dale's annual poll of [...] read on »

It doesn't matter how they got there, and it doesn't matter if a significant proportion are spammy. The @downingstreet Twitter account hit one million followers on Sunday afternoon - making it surely the biggest e-government hit in a couple of years at least. At zero setup cost. And zero marketing spend. The question is - still [...] read on »

Rejoice, bloggers! Downing Street has started the rollout of its (apparently?) much-missed function to send an email to the Prime Minister. There's been plenty of commentary on the function's disappearance last summer, from Tim Ireland to Francis Maude, much of it coming from the slightly naive position of 'how hard can it be to set up [...] read on »

It isn't every evening that a video clip from a government website features prominently on the main evening news. Except this week. Last night, it was the Treasury's YouTube clip of Alastair Darling preparing for tomorrow's Budget: nothing too spectacular, nice visual wallpaper for the story. Tonight, the PM's announcement of changes to MPs' expenses - [...] read on »

So Damian McBride appears to have been taken down by the blogger he was considering trying to emulate. It's being reported that McBride's emails were sent from his official Downing Street email account. If so, that's a naive error to have made: partly because it leaves him open to (valid) accusations of misusing public resources, and [...] read on »

By getting involved early and enthusiastically in the whole Twitter thing, has DowningStreet earned itself $250,000 of free digital engagement? Well-known internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis (number of followers: 63,000) has offered Twitter a cool quarter of a million bucks - as I believe our American friends would describe it - to secure himself a two-year [...] read on »

Nice to see Downing Street getting into the spirit of Red Nose Day... Well done to those responsible, I know who you are. I've never quite decided whether or not it's appropriate for government sites to do things like putting up 'Christmas decorations'; I think I'm OK with it, as long as it's professionally [...] read on »

For the last couple of weeks, I've been working with the Downing Street team to put together Real Help Now -  a fairly modest website, for now anyway, to introduce and demonstrate the practical help available to families and businesses during the recession. Fundamentally, in this initial build, it's a news aggregation site - pulling together [...] read on »

Entirely predictably, the Downing Street Twitter channel broke new ground at some time on Friday night, registering its 100,000th follower. To put this extraordinary growth in some perspective: one month ago, they had just 12,000. And just one week ago, they had 50,000. In relative terms, for now at least, they're now comfortably settled into [...] read on »