Cutting it rather fine ahead of this afternoon’s financial statements, Sky News has posted a Flash-based ‘if I were Prime Minister‘ game, where you can move the public finances around, and see what Adam Boulton makes of your decisions. The game itself is a bit simplistic – just a bunch of sliders, really. But it’s a nice touch to see Mr Boulton doing a video piece-to-camera, outside No10, to give you your outcome. Now… what would be really clever would be if it built an aggregated ‘people’s CSR’ behind the scenes, to show us precisely where the public’s priorities lay?!
-
The New Politics
I’m sure if you read this, you probably also read David Wilcox’s blog. In case you don’t… he’s just written a very well-considered piece on ‘the new politics’, in the wake of the weekend’s on-off election shenanigans. Read it – particularly the five points of conclusion at the end.
David might also have mentioned that David Cameron expressed very similar sentiments in his conference speech: half a dozen times he used the words ‘the old politics is failing’, before pledging:
‘Let us resolve right here, that we will not pursue the old politics. No more Downing Street summits, get together a packet of measures for the 6 o’clock News, brief them out and then while everyone has reported them they never actually happen and everyone moves onto the next thing. That is not what this Party is going to do.’
Sounds remarkably like a cross-party consensus for democratic engagement? Ha ha ha.
David’s point about ‘creating trusted places within which more constructive discussion can take place’ is an interesting one. I spent a bit of time last week (for obvious reasons) thinking about how you could aggregate leading political blogs into a single easy-to-browse site… and it should be remarkably easy. It would be a start.
-
Free wifi at McDonald's
Didn’t see much mention of this last week… McDonald’s have announced plans to offer free wifi in 1,200 UK outlets by the end of the year. No sign of anything on McDonald’s or The Cloud’s sites. Very good news; I’m only just getting used to wifi working, and I’ve had trouble finding free hotspots in and around central London. The ICA is a cool place to hang out… but they don’t open until noon. Any other recommendations, anyone?
-
I want my TV On Demand
My (only just) 2-year-old daughter is currently complaining to Mummy that she wants to watch Dora The Explorer, but it isn’t on anywhere just now. You know what? She’s right. Why shouldn’t we expect to get the programme we want, when we want? Instead she’s having to put up with Fifi And The Flowertots, which I personally can’t stand. Possibly due to Jane Horrocks providing the nicey-nicey voiceover. Still haven’t forgiven her for that Mrs-Supermarket-Manager-Becomes-PM thing.
-
My two to-do lists
My work contacts fall, more or less, into three camps: public sector, media and large corporate. And at the moment, two of those are in something of a frenzy.
The media contacts are desperately throwing together election plans, where they had expected to have at least six months to work them up. Indeed, to some extent, there’s an air of resignation that if the election is called, there just won’t be time to make the best ideas happen.
The public sector contacts seem either desperate to kick jobs off, perhaps before ‘purdah’ kicks in; or they’re getting understandably hesitant, on the possibility there may be a change of government, and their grand initiative doesn’t happen at all.
I’m currently running two separate ‘to do’ lists: one for ‘if he does’, one for ‘if he doesn’t’. So I’m very keen to hear an announcement, one way or the other. But here’s the problem – if we aren’t to have a November election, there isn’t a proper ‘no’ announcement. It’s only a ‘not yet’. Life just rolls on. And all the time, in the backs of our minds, we’re all left wondering if it’ll now be a spring election instead. The uncertainty scales back, but doesn’t disappear.
Depoliticising the electoral cycle suddenly seems like a good idea. In fact, if Gordon is looking to define ‘Brownism’, maybe depoliticisation is it.
-
Dammit, Prime Minister…
I love the fact that Lord Darzi begins his interim report on the NHS with words which will immediately raise a smile among generations of Star Trek (all flavours) viewers: ‘I’m a doctor, not a politician…’ ๐
And lest it’s missed… one of Darzi’s recommendations is ‘that the NHS could benefit from greater distance from the day to day thrust of the political process.’ With that in mind, he has instructed NHS chief executive to look into an NHS Constitution. Taking the NHS out of politics – or indeed, taking politics out of the NHS? A huge step… but they did it, and quite successfully too (as all have now admitted), with the Bank of England.
-
Darzi's NHS review is exactly on time
Has Lord Darzi’s interim NHS review been ‘brought forward’ for political purposes? Hardly. All the review’s communication since its inception has said ‘October’, as Darzi tried valiantly to explain in this morning’s Today Programme interview. But he might equally have pointed out that when Alan Johnson announced the review in the Commons, on 4 July, he said:
Professor Darzi will complete an initial assessment in three months’ time to inform the comprehensive spending review.
Do the maths. 4 July plus three months is 4 October. Which is today, to the very day in fact. It’s a pity the reporters – eg Nick Robinson, Niall Paterson – haven’t looked at either Hansard or the review’s own website to discover this. But equally, I have to say, it’s a bit disappointing that the review team haven’t posted something on their website to this same effect.
-
Sky's new show 'a new era'? Hardly.
I don’t know if the new Sky.com News show is really ‘a new era in TV news‘, but they’ve done a reasonable job of making it feel a bit more internetty, without becoming cheesy. Well, no cheesier than my old pal Martin Stanford in default mode. Nice use of tab-based navigation along the top of the on-screen interface.
Quite appropriate, I suppose, that its two main interviews tonight were Alex Hilton and Tim Montgomerie… but a little disappointing that we didn’t get the two talking to each other. That would really have been a bit more ‘web two point nought’, as Tim would presumably have said. Alex seemed nervous, Tim was Mr Smooth.
And staying in Osterley… Sky’s new ‘Your Photos‘ site has gone live. Relatively modest for now, just an upload form feeding into their existing (non-ajax) photo gallery template. No submission by email or MMS, so it doesn’t really lend itself to ‘breaking news’. There’s a button for post-publication moderation, which makes me assume the images are going live more or less immediately (?). Picture galleries generate page impressions, but it’s ‘web 1.5’ at best. Still, it extends the recent run of new features on the site, as Sky finally starts to play catch-up.
-
Puffbox client moves from authoring to publishing
I’m pleased to note that the first job I did under the Puffbox banner will shortly be going live to the world. All you’ll see is a website; but, ah, if only you knew what lay beneath…
The client is a well-established editorial business, writing articles for others to publish. But they realised the web had changed the rules of their business, and they wanted to become an end-to-end online publishing operation. I helped them develop the idea of a publishing platform, integrating with their existing XML production routines, which could power multiple websites from a single content bank.
If you’ve ever worked in content management, it’s relatively easy to imagine how the various front ends could look very different, with different CSS and different HTML. The clever bit was the simplicity of the back end, allowing my client to build very different site architectures from the same content, using familiar Explorer-style techniques – creating new folders and dragging documents into them.
The first people to use the new platform will be the marketing operation of a major High Street bank. I saw the new site for the first time today, and it’s really nice – a huge improvement on what’s gone before. But the real beauty lies beneath, and will reveal itself when the second, third and fourth sites are launched. It’s taken a good few months to build the platform: but subsequent sites should only take a couple of weeks, maybe even less. It adds a whole new dimension to my client’s pitch, and gives them a significant competitive advantage.
Purist that I am, it isn’t quite the CSS Zen Garden that I initially imagined – but it was never going to be. In practice, the clients will always want certain things to be a certain way, and it’s much more sensible to hand-code custom HTML templates in such circumstances. There’s also the unavoidable issue of ‘tweaked’ versions of the centralised articles: to promote a relevant product, or remove a reference to your competitor. But full credit to the developers, the Bristol-based Nameless, who have made it all work beautifully.
-
Whatever happened to that Blair fella?
Interesting to see ex-No10 man Ben Wegg-Prosser posting video clips – well, one so far – of (or indeed, on behalf of) his former boss, Tony Blair. Actually – why isn’t Blair blogging his new role?