Puffbox

I've been a fan of Graham Linehan since he was a writer on Irish music (etc) magazine Hot Press. On Wednesday, he stuck a message up on Twitter reacting angrily against 'rightwing wackjobs in the US lying about the NHS'. He starts using the hashtag #welovethenhs and asks celebrity chums to help spread the word. [...] read on »

I'm not going to say much here about the Power Of Information Taskforce report: the best place to do that is on the site itself. But I will pick up one point which stopped me in my tracks. The report notes that: Successful leading high tech businesses will spend at least 10% of their budget on [...] read on »

PR Week is reporting that Matt Tee, currently chief executive of NHS Direct, has been appointed the new Permanent Secretary of Government Communications; a formal decision is apparently due later today. It's an intriguing appointment: Tee's background is very different to that of his predecessor, Howell James. He came into government (proper) from a business development [...] read on »

I spoke last Friday at ScotWeb2, organised by (now former) civil servant Alex Stobart to talk about Scotland and web 2.0, open source, engagement, all that good stuff - with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on public sector activity. There isn't yet (so I'm told) much of a critical mass for this stuff north [...] read on »

When you think of 'official' blogging platforms inside government, the obvious example is the Foreign Office blogs site - headed of course by David Miliband, but featuring some truly remarkable contributions from various global 'hotspots' (Beijing, Kosovo, Zimbabwe). But it's not the only one out there, and it'll soon be joined by others. One which rarely [...] read on »

I see today that Capita has been named as the preferred bidder for the £60m+ contract to run the NHS Choices website for the next 3 years - ahead of the incumbent, the Dr Foster Intelligence public-private partnership, as well as IBM, Serco and TATA. According to Capita's own press release: Capita will be responsible for the [...] read on »

Today sees the launch of version 2 of the website I designed and built for Lord Darzi's national review of the NHS. V1 was built in double-quick time during the summer, and for reasons of cost and speed, used the Typepad blogging platform. Over the last month or so, Typepad's limitations have become more and [...] read on »