Puffbox

Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

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  • The Earth, Wind and Fire School of Management

    A meeting over coffee this morning started on the subject of IT consultancy, and somehow drifted into astrology. I still place myself in the camp which says ‘1 in 12 people can’t all have the same type of day’; but it made for intriguing conversation nonetheless.

    One thing which really struck me was the notion of air, fire, water and earth (in that specific order). At the top of the management chain are the air people, who waft around from topic to topic. They call it strategy, vision, whatever. Everyone else calls it something quite different. The fire people sit one level down, taking the air people’s ideas and generating heat and passion around them. But they need water people to carry those ideas out to the earth people at ground level.

    Looking back, a surprising amount of my career experience fits that formula. Most of my bosses have been ‘airheads’. 😉 And for my most successful projects, I can identify the ‘water’ person who helped my work flow down to the more earthy folks. (I can think of a few which failed due to the lack of such a person, too.)

    None of which should be taken as a value judgment, in any way. Just as the ancients believed life was made up of those four elements, maybe we need all four elements – in that specific order – to make a successful project. Just a thought.

  • RSS: 'a new content arena'

    It’s well worth casting an eye over what The Guardian’s Simon Waldman told this week’s FT Media conference about RSS.

    What currently goes under the label of RSS is going to lead to the most profound changes in the way that people engage with us and our content. It is scary. And it’s exciting. And it’s certainly too important to leave to the geeks.

    Pretty much every solution I’m putting forward in my work these days has an RSS component to it. (And occasionally, RSS is the solution.) Sometimes I feel I’m getting carried away with the idea. Then I read something like this, and realise it isn’t just me after all.

  • The Digg effect

    My piece yesterday on Ricky Gervais’s podcast gave me my first first-hand experience of being ‘dugg’. (Yes, it’s a word.) OK, so it’s probably bad form to ‘digg’ your own story… but I was fascinated to see what sort of effect it would have on traffic to my humble blog.

    The answer? It was instant, and it was big. Within seconds of submitting the story, I started seeing referrals from digg.com. Maybe I was lucky with my timing, or maybe people really have nothing to do but watch the new stories pop up. (The live Digg Spy view is fantastic, if you’ve never seen it.) A day and a bit later, and we’re well into three figures hitting that story alone. Nothing in A-list blogger terms, maybe, but pretty good in my book. I’m still seeing a few referrals, although mostly now from searches of the Digg archive.

  • What is Ricky Gervais so embarrassed about?

    The great thing about blogging is that every now and then, someone picks up on something you write, and sends you some juicy follow-up. Some very interesting information has fallen into my lap regarding the world’s number one podcast, The Ricky Gervais Show, which casts a slightly distasteful shadow over it all. All I can say is, it comes from a very well-placed source.

    From the very beginning, the project’s key word, in many senses, was ‘free’. Creative freedom for Gervais and co; free podcast downloads for the punters; and, from what I hear, free hosting.

    I have it on very good authority that Positive Internet – who said they expected 30,000 downloads per week, but eventually found themselves supporting more than eight times that figure – weren’t paid in cash to host the podcast. Instead, they got free publicity: every episode closed with a namecheck, often accompanied by a glowing personal endorsement. ‘Great guys… brilliant guys… experts in the (hosting) field, and that’s why I like them… genius input and good work…’ – not bad.

    Barter arrangements like these aren’t uncommon, especially in a small business or start-up context. But it’s easy to understand how bad feelings might arise when Ricky justifies the decision to start charging for the podcasts by saying: ‘We have got to charge a little bit for it, because it does cost money to host.’

    So, with the series heading for its final episode, someone at Audible recognises a business opportunity, and cuts a deal with them. Then, suddenly, episode 12 opens with the news that ‘we may be carrying on’. In fact, Stephen Merchant lets a bit more slip at the end: despite all Ricky’s earlier talk of ‘we’re not sure’, he says ‘there’s also a free taster’ – which seems a very specific promise, if it’s all so vague.

    (Once you’ve punched in your credit card number, of course, we get a little more candid. ‘I’ll tell you what’s new about (the new series): this time you have to pay for it,’ he cackles at the start of the second ‘season’ opener.)

    I don’t think anyone could justifiably condemn him for moving from ‘free’ to ‘fee’. It’s nothing to be ashamed of: I mean, we all have to put food on the table. If your 12-week freebie commitment expires, and you reckon you can make a bit of cash by doing a few more, good on you. But please Ricky, why not just be straight about it?

    Otherwise, you can understand why people might take matters into their own hands, and post dodgy copies for download on their own sites and blogs. It took me precisely one web search to find a cracked version: even more helpfully, someone had tagged it ‘piracy’.

    UPDATE: Just for completeness… I’ve been able to confirm that Ricky initially brought the idea to Guardian Unlimited, who paid him ‘minimal artist rates and a part of the production costs’ to do the series of 12. Channel 4 did pay Ricky, not the Guardian, for its advertising slots.

  • Why we need Direct.gov.uk

    If you’re allergic to the colour orange, look away now. There’s going to be a big marketing push this month for Directgov, and a new strapline to sell the concept: ‘public services all in one place’. The press material concentrates on one aspect above all others: the convenience of a single site. I quote…

    Independent research published today has shows that people would welcome a website that gives them access to public services all in one place and that they no longer surf widely over the whole net but prefer to use so called ‘Supersites’ – a handful of trusted, reliable websites – to manage their lives.

    Something in that press release quote doesn’t ring quite true – otherwise (to quote Seth Godin at Google) we’d all be using Yahoo Auctions rather than eBay. But I don’t think that’s quite what it’s trying to say. I agree that we need Directgov because people look at ‘The Government’ as a single entity. They don’t see departmental boundaries; and why should they? They need one place for all government dealings.

    Of course, this is what we had initially, when CCTA launched www.open.gov.uk. But that platform just wasn’t ready for the internet revolution, and that’s why so many of us deserted it. (I was at the Foreign Office at the time; and a promise of a one-week turnaround for uploading documents wasn’t really what we had in mind.)

    Directgov has been widely criticised, internally and externally. Considering the cost, I’ve heard some surprisingly bad things about its underlying ‘Dot P’ CMS, which is set to be replaced in the near future. But the criticism levelled by something like Directionlessgov.com, whilst valid in an absolute sense, misses the key contribution being made by Directgov.

    More than anything else, we need Directgov because it’s a clean slate. It isn’t beholden to a stagnant Whitehall department’s systems, structures and legacy. The editorial teams are principally answerable to the principle of Directgov, instead of to a Ministerial department. This lets them produce material which concentrates on end-user needs, not process or hierarchy. Yes of course, we all know that’s how it should always be anyway. But when you’re a small web team inside a huge bureaucracy, your views don’t always get heard. No matter how right they are.

  • links for 2006-03-03

  • Newsvine goes public

    For those wondering when we’ll get a community-edited site for general news… today might be it. Newsvine bills itself as a ‘collective… a place where anyone can read, write and influence the news.’ In practice, that means tagging like del.icio.us, editorial-by-voting like Digg, users’ columns like a blogging platform… and a steady supply of ‘professional’ content to keep it all ticking over. And as of today, it’s open to the public.

    I was lucky enough to get in on the closed beta launch earlier in the year. I was excited by what I saw, but not entirely won over. Looking again though, I’m a little more impressed, and a little more convinced. Their UK homepage is still a bit too US-driven and AP-dominated for my liking, but it’s good to see the user participation starting to happen.

    A brief look at the company blog, or the CEO’s own musings, and it’s clear these guys know what they’re trying to do. They could succeed… although I’m beginning to feel a US-hosted service won’t be able to crack the UK market.

    So who’s going to bring this to the UK? I can only think of a handful of candidates, with access to the base content, and the open-mindedness to let users run their own show. I’m looking to Simon Waldman at the Guardian; or Lloyd Shepherd, now returning to Yahoo. You could make a case for Sky or MSN doing something, but I just don’t see it.

    UPDATE: I think Mike Arrington is getting just a little carried away when he says it’s perfect.

  • links for 2006-03-02

  • Ignorant voters want more than score-draw politics

    A piece in the BBC’s Magazine today reflects on a report into voter apathy. The Joseph Rowntree-backed Power Inquiry has delivered a ‘devastating critique of the state of formal democracy in Britain’ (its words) – claiming, if I might paraphrase, that politics doesn’t care about people, rather than people not caring about politics.

    Political parties and elections have been a growing turn-off for years. The cause is not apathy. The problem is that we don’t feel we have real influence over the decisions made in our name. The need for a solution is urgent. And that solution is radical.

    In fact, the solution seems to be (after a quick scan of the report) a fairly predictable mix: an elected House of Lords, decentralisation of powers, more transparency in politics, replacement of the first-past-the-post voting system. Nothing to stop you dead in your tracks. But the BBC picks up on one particular point:

    We may be living in the Information Age, but when it comes to putting a simple cross in a box many potential voters are complaining about being kept in the information Dark Ages… The claim that voters lack information stands out for being so stubbornly at odds with current trends.

    No party worth its salt these days would launch a national campaign without a website as back up. And then there are third-party sources, the BBC being just one of them. In fact, a totally contrary suggestion could be that instead of a lack of political information, voters may be drowning in too much of the stuff.

    I think the BBC is missing the distinction. Yes, we have plenty of material – but not what I would call genuine ‘information’. All I want is the truth, just gimme some truth, as John Lennon sang in 1971. Cold, hard, honest, impartial facts. OK, maybe there’s no such thing as absolute across-the-board truth. But let me speak as a voter. Give me the facts, and I’ll decide where I think the truth lies. And vote accordingly.

    Is it any wonder that we get turned off by politics when one side says one thing, the opposition says the opposite, and every argument ends up in a score-draw? Don’t you wish, just once, that a TV debate would finish with the words ‘well, that settles that then’, as opposed to ‘we’ll have to leave it there.’

  • Origami: has Microsoft blown its big chance?

    If anyone was expecting a big announcement regarding Microsoft’s already mythical ‘Origami Project‘ today, you’re going to be bitterly disappointed. Another spooky chillout Flash video, lots of vague statements about ‘I am everywhere you are.’ And: ‘come back next week’.

    After the rather underwhelming Apple announcement earlier in the week, I really thought this was the Microsoft marketing machine finally getting it. Were we really going to see Redmond out-cool Cupertino? For a while there, it looked like it. Origami is getting lots of nice buzz around it; then suddenly Apple trips up. What an opportunity. And I think they’ve blown it.

    The aim of the campaign has – of course – been to build buzz. Well, maybe I’m just reading the right blogs and news sources (even the BBC), but I think the buzz is cranked up to the max. If it were me, I’d have tried to redraw the plans overnight, in the light of Apple’s apparent slip. Get the product out there ASAP. Or at least, say something tangible. I have a nasty feeling that, by next week, we’ll all be sick of the waiting. You can only buzz for so long.

    Once again, you’re left wondering how Microsoft can excel on the blogging side (Scoble, Channel 9, MSDN), and misjudge its conventional marketing every time. Dinosaurs, for example. Product naming, for another… I mean, come on, Windows Live Local? The ‘Microsoft redesigns the iPod box‘ video is funny, until you learn (according to Joe Wilcox) that it was produced by someone inside Microsoft. I agree with Joe that self-parody is a good thing, but only up to a point. If everyone recognises there’s a problem here, and nobody is fixing it, that’s not good.

    UPDATE: actually, I think it’s actually worse. If you look at the source code of the page at www.origamiproject.com, you see an HTML comment: Origami Project: the Mobile PC running Windows XP. The tone of the report on, for example, the Register hints at disappointment – ‘oh, it’s only a new XP device.’ It’s hard to imagine Microsoft putting substantial effort into adding major new functionality to an operating system it’s about to retire. This could be one big disappointment: and then all this hype generation will seem less than clever.