Puffbox

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

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  • Video-led marketing and the demand for honesty

    I’ve mentioned before that I’m a big fan of video interviews (preferably one-take, impromptu point-and-shoot affairs) as a marketing tool. Now I see 37signals, one of the heroes of web 2.0, are getting in on the act.

    Why did we decide to do these videos? Benefits over features. Tours and screenshots do a great job of explaining what Basecamp does but we wanted to do a better job of showing how it makes people’s lives better. Video turned out to be a great way to do that. There’s nothing like seeing real people talking about how easy Basecamp is to use and how valuable it is to their businesses. These people talk about how they love Basecamp and we’re proud of that.

    I’m a bit surprised to see them opt for professional production, though. It makes things look too slick, too well-prepared, too post-produced. In a world sick of spin, you inevitably wonder if they’re just showing the positive bits. Real-time, raw, unedited video requires either great acting talent, or honesty. And honesty is in high demand these days.

  • BBC political editors blog frenzy

    You’d be forgiven for missing it… but the BBC’s political editors in Scotland and Northern Ireland are now blogging. Mark Devenport is being particularly enthusiastic, averaging two or three items per day. In Wales, political editor Betsan Powys is continuing to post to her Election blog… presumably because it still hasn’t finished yet.

  • Anyone going to the RSA on Friday?

    I am going to be attending Friday’s conference at the RSA about society, internet and government after all. If any loyal readers are also going to be there, do say ‘hi’. There’s still time to register; it’s free, and it runs from 1pm to 5pm.

  • Photosharing meets crimefighting

    Worthy of note: the website, launched on Monday, for people to upload holiday snaps taken at the Ocean Club holiday resort, Praia da Luz which might yield clues as to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

    They want anything in the two weeks before she went missing with ‘people in them who you don’t know as opposed to scenery shots or pictures of just your own family’. It’s a fairly basic file upload facility; pictures will be imported into the Childbase computer which (according to Sky’s Martin Brunt) will ‘scan the photos and recognise anyone who appears a number of times. It can also compare images with known sex offenders, both British and Portuguese.’

    What has happened to that family is truly horrible – and gets worse as each day goes by. But I still have a very uncomfortable feeling about certain elements of the coverage.

  • I don't get Facebook (yet)

    I only joined Facebook a few days ago, and only then because I felt it was something I had to know about. So far, I’m disappointed. It doesn’t seem to be great at anything. The photo-sharing element is mediocre. The ‘notes’ feature falls well short of any serious blogging application. The calendar element is OK, I suppose. RSS support is patchy. Maybe it only shows its true worth when you throw your entire life at it, and force all your friends and family to do likewise. Seems to go against the grain of other 2.0 apps, which allow – and sometimes encourage – you to consume the data outside. Or perhaps I just need more mates. (Charlie Brooker’s take on Facebook is worth a read, incidentally.)

  • iPods for civil servants: a great idea

    I actually think it’s a very good thing for the Home Office to be giving out 20 video iPods for work purposes (as reported in The Times). It’s a perfectly valid method to distribute ‘e-learning’, via bitesize chunks of video content. I bet it’s more efficient than gathering senior staff into a conference suite somewhere, several times a year – and realistically, £9,000 is a blip in the overall budget.

    Would critics prefer that staff brought their own iPods in from home, and charged them up with work-based content via the office network (and GSI)? Ask the IT managers if they’d be happy with the implications of doing so. In a lot of places, it’s a gross misconduct offence.

  • DFID's £1m website gets 3,000 visitors per month

    While we’re on the subject of blogs and DFID… if it’s true that DFID is funding a Research for Development portal that’s costing £360,000 a year to run, and getting only 3,100 visitors in the average month (as disclosed to Hansard a couple of weeks back), that’s pretty shocking. Surely there’s more to it than it seems…? (spotted on DizzyThinks)

    Theresa May tabled a wad of PQs lately asking departments for details of the websites they run, and the costs incurred: I think this search picks most of the answers up, but don’t expect many great insights. In quite a few cases, departments have used the ‘disproportionate cost’ excuse.

  • Telegraph site out of action

    Glad to see it wasn’t just me who couldn’t access the Telegraph’s website yesterday (and still can’t this morning). The Guardian says it was a distributed denial of service attack. The blogs and my.telegraph sites are on a different server, and were not affected…so it’s a bit of a shame that nothing’s been posted by the Telegraph guys themselves, to say what’s happening. (Unless I’ve missed it.)

  • Miliband on the 'Facebook generation'

    I picked the right day to – finally! – sign up for Facebook: yesterday saw another very new media-literate speech by David Miliband, and another venture into YouTube. (Personally I wouldn’t have let him stand to do this; it does affect your tone of voice, and I think it’s to his detriment here.)

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw83heBf3mk]

    The speech itself, at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, was a return to his pet theme of ‘how the spirit of the age requires a new type of politics, and how the new tools of the age can help deliver economic and social change.’ In truth, if you read the New Statesman piece, most of this will be familiar. But it’s still actually a little exciting to see a Cabinet minister – and potentially a future Prime Minister – talking about Web 2.0, Facebook, Linux and the like. (Er, we’ll overlook the spelling of ‘wikipaedia’ in the transcript.)

    Miliband clearly sees this as his Big Idea. The speech touches on education, transport, environment, community… a month or two back, this would have been interpreted as his bid for Labour’s leadership. Since that moment has passed, and the job now unlikely to become vacant for a few years at least, we’re left with the conclusion that he actually believes it.

    I’m fascinated to see where Miliband ends up post-reshuffle. I hear he has won a lot of friends at Defra, and they would be sorry to lose him. But if environmental issues are to be an electoral battleground next time round, as seems likely, don’t be surprised if he stays where he is.

  • Ssh! Secret new Directgov blog

    Behold the power of referral logs! I’m not sure I’m supposed to know about the new Directgov ‘internal’ blog which was started last week by e-government veteran Paul Cronk. But since he linked to me, and since someone clicked on it, I now know about it. (Since it’s explicitly internal, I won’t link to it… unless Paul gives me the OK to do so?)

    Its aim is to ‘communicate actions, changes and information around the content of Directgov’ – and of course, a blog is a great way to do so; good on them for trying this. My thanks to Paul for linking to me… but I think it’s a bit harsh to say the various external e-gov-centric blogs are ‘not comfortable reading… critical of Directgov’. On the rare occasion I am critical of it, I hope it’s constructive criticism. We all need a better Directgov; and I’m sure we’re all equally impatient about getting it.