• It wasn't in the top search results for a few randomly-selected Budget-related search terms.
• It doesn't have a 'link canonical' tag in its code header.
• It has a pretty curious set of 'meta keywords' - including 'piercings', 'tattoos' and 'polish armed forces'. (Update: apparently not random at all - see comment below.)
• The page templates aren't especially well structured for SEO purposes.
• It has inconsistent names on various external sites like Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

None of which, in my mind, constitute a 'technical mess'. So it's interesting to see, this morning, that the headline has been watered down, to mock the keyword selection.

Some of the criticisms are valid. The site could do a few simple things to improve its SEO standing, probably taking barely a few minutes. And yes, I have trouble remembering which specific configuration of 'downing' and 'st(reet)' it uses to make up its various usernames. But some of the accusations are way over the top, and some don't stand up at all.

The 'meta keywords' criticism, for example. In the old days, search engines respected the keywords you entered in your page header as a guide to the page's substance. But then people, possibly working in the field of 'audience development', began abusing them. So what does Google, with 90% of the UK search market, think about meta keywords?

Let's ask Google's Matt Cutts, shall we?

His answer: they don't use it. 'Basically not at all... Even in the least little bit.' Not worth spending much time on then, I'd say.

And then there's the failure to rank highly for certain budget-related search terms. But would you want or expect Number10 to be a high-ranking result, when it has very little material on the subject - and isn't the 'lead site' on the subject, from either a policy (HM Treasury) or a citizen-facing (Directgov) perspective?

If you search Google right now for 'budget', you'll get both HMT and DG in the top few results. That's the appropriate outcome.

I'm not saying there aren't improvements I'd want to make to the Number10 site. As regular readers may know, I contributed some advice in the early days of their migration to WordPress - but I didn't have any hands-on involvement in the build itself. If I had, for the record, certain things would have been done differently.

PS: Thankfully, someone at the Telegraph saw sense, and dropped the 'technical mess' line. Otherwise I'd be forced to point out that their article page scores 88 HTML validation errors in the W3C checker, compared to the Number10 homepage's zero.

I finally gave in, and upgraded the company's iPod Touch for the purposes of testing the brand new iPhone app from 10 Downing Street. And then, as I spent an hour randomly resetting and restoring, I promptly remembered why I hadn't upgraded for so long. Anyway...

On a technical level, the Number10 app is actually quite modest - just a pretty front end on its website's RSS feeds, and the feeds from its YouTube, Flickr and Twitter accounts. But it's really very pretty - and that kind of thing matters in the world of the iPhone. It feels like a perfect blend of native iPhone interface and the parent website's house style.

It follows, coincidentally I'm sure, in the wake of recently-launched apps by both Labour and the Conservatives - and I'd say it's the best of the three. The Tories' somewhat dazzling effort may have more glitz, but the Number10 app feels better in terms of information delivery: and I like its one-click sharing button to send details to your Twitter and Facebook chums. (It's quite surprising that neither the Labour nor Tory apps have sharing buttons.)

Not entirely sure who it's aimed at, or what specific purpose it serves, other than providing an iPhone-optimised interface on those various web presences: but the same criticism can be levelled at many such 'corporate' iPhone apps.

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 petitioner's failure to mention the government-backed Get Safe Online initiative, which explicitly recommends upgrading. So when he says '(The French and German) governments have let their populations know that an upgrade will keep them safer online. We should follow them.' - I know he's wrong. And I'm not sure I buy his suggestion that 'When the UK government does this, most of Europe will follow. That will create some pressure on the US to do so too.'

But that's all beside the point. If we can use this petition as some kind of leverage, I'm prepared to overlook its deficiencies. And with nearly 5,000 signatures in a couple of days, and front-page coverage from the BBC, we have a platform on which to build.

The latest browser market share numbers show that finally, IE6 has been deposed as the world's #1 browser. And in the last few days, Google has announced that its Apps will be phasing out IE6 support, becoming the latest big name to say enough is enough.

It's time to put IE6 out of our misery. Sign the petition.

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 the top political blogs. But the website has always been a bit, well, ugly (or indeed, well ugly) - like it was trying too hard.

The new look is a big improvement, primarily because it accepts the reality that it's really just another multi-author blog. You get a straightforward two-column layout: content plus comments on one side, a site-wide sidebar on the other, with header navigation based (I guess) on tags. It isn't spectacular in design terms, but it doesn't need to be. (Mind you, I'm not sure about including everyone's 'gravatar' on every page: that's going to slow things way down, for everyone.) It's still powered by the same mysterious Tangent Labs platform as other Labour output; I'm wondering why.

The other was the news that Sarah Brown, the PM's wife had passed uber-geek Stephen Fry in terms of Twitter followers. As I write this, Mr Fry has 773,000 followers, Mrs Brown has 791,000.

With no great fanfare in the conventional media, Mrs B has built quite a profile around her Million Mums campaign against 'the needless deaths of women in pregnancy and childbirth around the world', and other similarly lefty causes. It's pretty clear she's writing her own tweets personally, and gets actively involved in terms of replying, re-tweeting and hashtagging. It's working, and she is often (rightly) used as a best practice example for public figures.

She also did a bit of blogging from last week's G20 summit in Pittsburgh, again at wordpress.com - although I'm told there has been talk about bringing it properly 'in house'; and has been contributing to the influential Huffington Post for some time.

Her activity is rarely Labour-branded per se... but of course it's exactly a year since she sensationally appeared on-stage at the Labour conference to introduce her husband. (It's quite amusing to look back at the BBC's live text commentary from the day: 'It's almost time for the pre-speech video. Sarah Brown is in the hall. At the lectern. What's going on? It looks like she is about to address the Labour conference.') Now articles are being written, describing her as 'arguably the most admired and powerful woman in Britain... She might even be the last hope for Labour.'

Don't underestimate the role her new media activity has played in this.

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 - what do we do with them all?

For anyone needing background, here's an easy link to all the posts I've written on the subject. To anyone I met WordCamp who's reading this: check out the URL construction. Did you know you could do that??

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 an email account'? Of course, that part's dead easy. But what do you do when that account receives hundreds or thousands of messages daily?

I've spoken to the Downing Street team about this in the past; the problems with the old 'just an inbox' system went beyond sheer volumes. And unfortunately, the classic corporate response - ignore the lot of them (and yes, it does happen) - isn't an option when there's the considerable risk of missing something tremendously sensitive: an email, let's say, from a soldier's widow.

It's based on a web-to-email form rather than a plain email address: no shame in that, it's what Obama does. However, unlike most (including Obama, by the way), it's done over https, giving an extra layer of security for those messages whilst in transit.

Before you get to that form, though, you're shown a list of subjects you might be emailing about: and if one of these is relevant, it directs you to somewhere more suitable. Isn't this obstructive? Yes, of course it is. But it stops you before you waste your time typing a message which won't get the reply you want. That's got to be a good thing overall.

Once over that hurdle, the email form is perhaps surprisingly short: all it asks, in terms of personal information, is a name, postcode and email address. Enough for you to get a reply (if they choose to send one), and enough for them to see if any subjects are particularly hot in certain areas. The message is limited to 1000 characters: too tight for Dizzy, but at least there's a live character count on the screen.

Before your message is properly submitted, you get an automated email asking you to verify your address. Again, perfectly normal online behaviour, with benefits to both sides: it filters out the anonymous rants, and double-checks the recipient's address in the event of No10 wanting to reply.

Then, behind the scenes, I hear there are a few tools to help them cope better with the volumes: the ability to group emails by common subjects, workflow management, and so on.

A lot of the commentary, it must be said, has been purely a hook on which to hang wider criticism: 'a beleaguered prime minister retreating to his bunker,' to quote Francis Maude. It didn't take any account of whether the former function was actually working. For anyone.

The new system - built outside WordPress, incidentally - provides added security, greater efficiency and reliability, But most importantly, it provides a much better likelihood of your email actually getting a decent response. Which is the whole point of having such a service in the first place.

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 - presented first on the Number10 website - didn't just pop up on the 10 O'Clock News; it was the basis of the lead package.

It's another curious piece to camera by the PM. When he talks straight into the camera, he actually comes across as quite sincere. But then he ruins it with that unnatural smile, which isn't convincing anyone. He actually looks like he's going to burst out laughing when he mentions Harriet Harman. (Insert your own punchline in the comments, please.) Clearly I've missed the inherent humour in the words 'detailed written statement'.

Prime Minister - please, stop putting it on. Remind me, who was it who uttered these words six months ago? 'So I'm not going to try to be something I'm not. And if people say I'm too serious, quite honestly there's a lot to be serious about - I'm serious about doing a serious job for all the people of this country.' Exactly. No more forced grins, eh.

PS Is it pedantic of me to point out that Nick Robinson's oh-very-clever line about 'a U-turn on YouTube' isn't strictly accurate? The Number10 video player is powered by Brightcove, and the clip isn't among those uploaded to Downing Street's YouTube account. There, I'm glad I got that off my chest.

PPS Jemima Kiss at the Guardian has a nice roundup of views from 'the web community' (ie the usual suspects), reaching a similar conclusion. But please, before anyone else declares it the Worst Video Ever, let's remember the Countdown one.

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 partly because it exposes him to the risk of exposure via FOI. Guido republished an email he had sent to McBride requesting 'copies of all emails referring to either myself or my publication, “the Guido Fawkes Blog”... under the provisions of the Data Protection Act (1998).' (Mind you, Derek Draper told Sky News tonight that his private email had been 'hacked into'.)

It would have been an ugly and unpleasant story if he'd been a Labour Party employee discussing such tactics; or even if McBride had sent the emails in his own time, from his own email account. But it wouldn't have been quite so explosive. And let's face it, it probably wouldn't have come to light. (Frankly, I assume such conversations happen all the time inside most political parties.)

So let's clear up the technicalities. Someone created a new blog at wordpress.com, under the ID 'aredrag' at 4:24pm GMT on Tuesday 4 November - a free service with a minimally intrusive registration form. On the same day, before or after, someone using the pseudonym Ollie Cromwell registered the domain name 'theredrag.co.uk' - a tenner for two years through easily.co.uk. They then paid wordpress.com the $15/year fee to run a wordpress.com-hosted site under a different domain name. The site itself consists of a standard Kubrick template, with only the default 'Hello world!' post visible. It has a (very rough) custom header graphic, but beyond that, it's as 'out of the box' as it could be. To me, it suggests someone who knows what they're doing online; and in the right hands, it could have taken only a few minutes. It doesn't necessarily imply a coordinated, organised, resourced smear campaign.

At its heart, this is a story about the thin line between politics and government - a subject often mused upon in these pages. Now of course, it's not a new riddle. But it's the fact that any individual, with no great financing or technical skill, can become a journalist and publisher in minutes that adds a new dimension. It allows McBride and/or Draper to contemplate setting up such a scurrilous website in the first place. And equally, it has brought mavericks like Guido Fawkes into the mix: independent, and with nothing to lose.

Numerous times, we've tried to draw lines separating party politics and public duties - MPs' communications allowances, civil servants in quite obviously politically-focussed positions, Ministers blogging their political views, whatever. In this culture of constant communication, I'm wondering if that's still possible.

• Does the Prime Minister have to be the 'leader' of his/her party? On reflection, Blair and Prescott did a fairly good double-act, with one being the head of government, the other being the party chief.
• And does the PM's spokesman actually have to be a civil servant? Should we accept that Downing Street is a special case, exempt from the same neutrality requirement of front-line, service-delivery Whitehall departments? We can't play out our West Wing fantasies with politically neutral civil servants.

There's a long way to go on this one. A very long way.

There's breathless excitement in a piece on TechCrunch:

[Calacanis] wants to lock in the price now because he thinks it is a great marketing opportunity. It is not unusual for people on the suggested list to gain 10,000 new followers every day. That comes to 3.6 million a year, and even if half unsubscribe, that is still a direct channel to more than a million potential customers. Those are customers who feel a connection with you because of the personal nature of Twitter messages.

There's additional detail in John Naughton's piece from yesterday's Observer:

"I was only half-bluffing with this move," he wrote in his weekly newsletter. "I was 90% sure Twitter wouldn't take the money and I wouldn't have to pony up .... However, if they did call my bluff ... I would have gotten what I wanted: two to 10 million Twitter followers and the ability to drive one to two million visits to Mahalo a month from Twitter."

This is a serious entrepreneur, a guy who has made serious money from the internet, reckoning that $120,000 for one year, or $250,000 to cover himself for the likely price rise in year two, was good value to buy something which 10 Downing Street already owns. One wonders, then, whether Francis Maude might want to reconsider his comments about No10's experimentation with 'the latest digital gimmicks'?

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 done. Opinions, anyone?

And while we're on the subject of Comic Relief... full marks for opportunism go to DFID blogger Emily Poskett: her post about meeting the various celebs climbing Kilimanjiro has made for record traffic levels on the site. The page in question is coming very high up the Google search rankings for several obvious queries. Is there anything wrong with using a popular culture hook for a story about government aid activity? - no, not in my book.