Archive for 'downingstreet'
Real Help Now: a national picture
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 [...] read on »
David Lammy, Twitter expert
It came as a bit of a shock this evening, when BBC1's The One Show started talking about Twitter, that reporter Gyles Brandreth's first port of call was Kingsgate House on Victoria Street, home of DIUS and minister David Lammy. With traffic up by a factor of three this year already, Twitter's certainly a hot [...] read on »
Independent launches blogging platform
The Independent's new blogging platform, Independent Minds, launched yesterday in a partnership with the now Russian-owned Livejournal. But unlike the Telegraph's MyTelegraph site, it puts the journalists' blogs on the same platform as the readers'. It's a dramatic improvement (as you'd expect) on the very clunky, and frankly half-hearted blogging efforts they were doing on [...] read on »
FT's bloggy new look
Is it just me, or is the new Financial Times website design, being rolled out progressively this week, heavily influenced by blogs - and remarkably reminiscent of the Downing Street site? Whilst other sites seem keen to cram ever more into their homepages, the new FT homepage makes the site feel really quite small. Just [...] read on »
Gordon Brown on your Wii
One of the more inspiring developments at the BBC recently has been the extension of iPlayer away from the desktop PC. Back in April, they launched iPlayer on the Wii - but it wasn't the breakthrough moment it might have been. Leaving aside the fact it didn't stream especially smoothly on my machine, the interface [...] read on »
Lords Committee talks Directgov, YouTube
I'm not sure we learned a lot from this morning's Lords Communications Committee session with Michael Ellam (the Prime Minister's official spokesman) and Sir Gus O'Donnell (head of the home civil service), part of the continuing review of government communications, and reforms proposed in 2004's Phillis Review. It wasn't an intense grilling, and as you'd [...] read on »
WordPress T-shirt in Downing St
I've been meaning to sort this out for some time... read on »
New Number10 site goes live
Today sees the long-awaited launch of the new Number10 website, based on WordPress and built by New Media Maze with occasional interventions by yours truly. The reaction so far has been positive, although as the team have admitted to Twitter contacts, there are numerous rough edges still to be smoothed out. (Some more serious than [...] read on »