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Adventures in government, politics and open source. Mostly WordPress-related.

Simon Dickson, principal consultant at Puffbox, has been blogging about e-government, online politics, and WordPress since 2005. Some important people read it.

Archive for 'google'

NHS kills Google advertising

29 July 2010 2 ,

I noted back in February that NHS Choices had spent £2.7m in one year on pay-per-click advertising. Well, that's all changed now: a PQ answer reveals that the Adwords budget has been cut by 100%. In line with Government policy, NHS Choices no longer has any arrangement, or pays for any search engine activity. No [...] read on »

Constituency maps in under a minute

27 July 2010 10 , , ,

hwg-gmapOpening up geographic data is beginning to bear fruit. MySociety's Matthew Somerville has just unveiled MaPit, 'our database and web service that maps postcodes and points to current or past administrative area information and polygons for all the United Kingdom.' What that means in practice is, postcode lookups and boundary data are now just a [...] read on »

DH reveals £2.7m Adwords spend

9 February 2010 2 , , ,

A parliamentary question has revealed that, in the year to the end of January 2010, the Department of Health spent £2.72 million on Google Adwords pay-per-click keyword advertising. A big number, but a fair one? With Google's Adwords advertising, you only pay on results. An advert is displayed at the top, or down the side [...] read on »

Wiped off the map

2 April 2009 1 ,

I've come across a rather curious anomaly in Google's new Street View. Southampton is one of the cities covered in the initial UK rollout... or rather, most of Southampton. You'll note the bizarrely unavailable stretch of Romsey Road... and the odd interruption of Wimpson Lane. Here's a link to it in Street View, to see [...] read on »

Guardian Data Store: threat to ONS or its saviour?

10 March 2009 9 , , ,

When I first saw reports of the Guardian's new Data Store 'open platform', my heart sank. In a former life, I ran the web operation at the Office for National Statistics; I resigned in June 2004, when frustration started to turn to anger. I've still got a copy of my resignation letter, in which I [...] read on »

Putting Google geo-location to the Twitter test

24 February 2009 0 , , ,

Google's javascript API has an exciting, and somewhat underreported little feature built in: each time a call is initiated, it attempts to establish where the browser is physically located - and reports back a town, 'region' (county) and country. I was wondering if it was accurate enough to be used to 'personalise' a website automatically: [...] read on »

Two weeks with my T-Mobile G1

14 November 2008 3 , ,

The release of the first 'Googlephone' running the open source Android couldn't have come at a better time for me. My Nokia E65 had served me well, but was getting a bit temperamental. I'd already handed all my email over to Google, and was keen to do likewise with my calendar needs (bye bye Outlook!). [...] read on »

Full launch for Met crime maps

Wednesday saw the formal launch of London's crime maps, which first appeared in beta only a couple of weeks back. Don't call it '1.0' though: the source code declares it's actually 'beta 1.02'. As before, it shows areas colour-coded for the rates of 'burglary, robbery and vehicle crime', based on comparisons with 'the average'. Yes, [...] read on »

No extensions, no Chrome

3 September 2008 7 , ,

It was the usual mix of excitement and fear as I downloaded Google Chrome last night: the former to see what Google would do when it had total control of the browsing experience, the latter in case it rendered any of my designs horribly. To be honest, there wasn't much to report on either front. [...] read on »

Selling free software

2 September 2008 1 , ,

Presenting, in the blue corner, Google's announcement of its forthcoming Chrome browser - by the medium of the comic book. And in the red corner, Mr Stephen Fry's armchair chat on the subject of GNU, the movement to create a completely free operating system. Both are trying to do something quite peculiar: they want to [...] read on »

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