Puffbox

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 »

One of the biggest successes in e-government this past year, and arguably one of the most surprising, is Downing Street's use of Twitter. And thanks to a remarkable couple of weeks, the Prime Minister's Office now finds itself in the Top 100 of the most followed Twitter accounts worldwide, as ranked (fairly reliably) by Twitterholic.com. It's [...] read on »

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 »

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 ten [...] read on »

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 »

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 »

I've been meaning to sort this out for some time... read on »

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 »

Thursday's Daily Mail picks up on the imminent launch of the new Downing Street website, and chooses to focus on the 'Number10TV' video element, to be powered by Brightcove. But for once, it's a story driven more by its scepticism about new technology than its dislike of the current government. They wrongly call it 'the latest [...] read on »

Fresh from stealing the online show at the recent G8 summit, the 10 Downing Street digital comms team have given the Prime Minister's new website its first public outing, with a few sneaky screengrabs popping up on their Flickr account. It's quite a significant departure from the existing site, although if you've been following the [...] read on »