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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 'video'

BBC iPlayer back on Wii: a tipping point?

18 November 2009 1 , , ,

The BBC's new iPlayer 'app' for the Wii is now available for download: and it has the potential to do amazing things to UK viewing habits. Thus far, if you wanted to watch iPlayer via your Nintendo Wii (and your wireless broadband connection), there was a web-based interface, not dissimilar to iplayer/bigscreen - which was [...] read on »

Social Mobility for bloggers

13 January 2009 5 , , ,

A quick nod towards today's New Opportunities (micro)site, in support of the white paper on Social Mobility. Most of it is fairly straightforward, 'pages in a hierarchy' stuff; well done, certainly, but nothing particularly special. There are a few points definitely worthy of note, though. One is the root address: www.hmg.gov.uk - one of many [...] read on »

Web 2.0 is just so 2008

5 January 2009 5 , , , , , , ,

I've never been one for New Year's resolutions or predictions; I'll leave those to other people. Suffice to say, I'm increasingly of the opinion that web 2.0, as a phase in the web's development, is over. I'm using almost exactly the same tools now that I was this time last year. It's ages since any [...] read on »

MySociety completes crowd-sourced video markup

Congratulations (hardly for the first time, of course) to the MySociety crew: in less than two months, it looks like their community of volunteers has completed the work to timestamp the 42,019 video clips supplied to They Work For You by BBC Parliament, covering the entire 2007-8 parliamentary session. Hero status is rightly accorded to [...] read on »

Live video for Darzi's NHS Review

30 June 2008 1 , ,

This afternoon sees the effective conclusion of Lord Darzi's year-long (ish) review of the National Health Service, under the Our NHS Our Future banner. I did a quick reskin of the associated website back in May, and we've gone a few steps further to mark the big finale. Inspired by comments from Tom Steinberg back [...] read on »

Big things at Sky News

26 June 2008 2 , ,

The new Sky News website is open for public beta viewing, and there are some significant developments. The use of actual moving video in the homepage's 'top stories' carousel area is a genuine surprise, and I think it works, although there must be significant implications on the content production and technical sides. Personally, I don't [...] read on »

Cameron goes direct

The Tories' latest engagement initiative, Cameron Direct takes its 'town hall meeting' roadshow to a Plymouth primary school tonight. The event will be broadcast live, and then 'on demand', in video via the UK-based SelfCast.com. It also looks like they'll be liveblogging the event through, guess what, CoverItLive. I'm not entirely sure it's worth doing [...] read on »

Why Parliament doesn't like YouTube

9 June 2008 0 , , ,

LibDem MP Jo Swinson raised the subject of parliamentary video clips going on YouTube, during questions to the Leader of the House last week. You can see it below. Helen Goodman's response is enlightening: video material isn't allowed to be hosted on a site where it can be searched or downloaded 'to ensure that it [...] read on »

Movie critic Kermode takes video-blogs into mainstream

I've always been a big fan of Mark Kermode, movie critic, broadcaster and visiting fellow at the University of Southampton. Prior to podcasting, I would schedule my Fridays to allow me to hear his Five Live segments with Simon Mayo. And yet curiously, I'm not really a movie fan (although I sometimes think I could [...] read on »

Highfield quits BBC

14 April 2008 1 , , ,

I'm sure other people will have much better insight than I into the departure of Ashley Highfield from his £359,000/year job at the BBC. Of course, he's moving to a not-unrelated position, heading up Project Kangaroo, the video-on-demand joint-venture between the BBC, ITV and Channel Four. The success of iPlayer version 2 may or may [...] read on »

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