Puffbox

I’m really having trouble forming an opinion about Tory leader David Cameron’s new videoblog – Webcameron. I mean, it definitely is for real, isn’t it? We’re sure it’s not Alastair McGowan’s latest impression?

The first few installments look like a BBC1 sitcom that’s trying to be cleverer than it really is; or the sort of thing you film when you’ve just bought your first camcorder, and you want to try it out. (Or both – remember Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones’s ‘home video’ family?) Cameron’s tone of voice is curious too – sometimes it’s ‘party conference speech’; sometimes it’s ‘Question Time’; sometimes it’s ‘dad’. At no point does it sound especially sincere or convincing (I’m sorry to say). I’ve never felt like I need to see David Cameron washing the dishes. I’m not comfortable with it, and watching the clips, neither is he. (The ‘behind the scenes’ filming from the Conference seems much more natural territory for a politician, and politics.)

But I have to admire the Tories for trying here. Something like this is just begging to be mocked or parodied. The Tory revival is currently built on excellent public relations, and little substance. (Indeed, Webcameron has to be seen as the perfect embodiment of that approach.) They must know they’re taking a risk by doing this. It can work – look at the success of Microsoft’s Channel 9. But the blogosphere is notoriously unforgiving of people seen to be trying too hard.

PS: If McGowan plays Cameron, can Tim McInnerny (Lord Percy on Blackadder, etc) play Iain Dale?

This may be old news to some, but I think I’ve found the most senior blogger in the UK public sector – and it’s the Chief Constable of North Wales Police, Richard Brunstrom. With his deputy and assistant also chipping in, they must surely come a close second and third.

Brunstrom is what you might call a ‘character’, with outspoken views on drugs and traffic – the latter earning him the nickname ‘Mad Mullah of the Traffic Taliban’ from The Sun, a title which he actually seems to enjoy. He became a druid of the Welsh National Eisteddfod earlier this summer, earning himself a fetching white bardic robe, and has been praised by the Welsh national poet for his support of the Welsh language (since he’s actually English). And as of July 2006, he’s been a blogger.

In his first posting, dated 17 July, he wrote:

Always keen to innovate and to make full use of modern communications, I have decided to become the UK’s first blogging Chief Constable, starting today. I’ve no idea whether this will work, or how long I’ll keep it going – I suspect that rather depends on you, the readers. If it hits the spot then I’ll keep it up; if not it’ll get ditched like most of my ‘good ideas’. You can’t get to me directly from my Blog – but you can let me know what you think via our website ( www.north-wales.police.uk ) by clicking on the Contact Us link . I look forward to your views; hopefully at least some of them will be repeatable, but who knows? We’re going to get into podcasting too.

To his credit, he’s still plugging away, two months later… and even more surprising, it’s a very good example of the blog as corporate communication tool. His latest post is about a recent exercise to check on lorries on the A55 to Holyhead port, and he’s quite happy to provide the ugly numbers – with 91 vehicles out of 174 stopped being too dangerous to allow them to continue. What a remarkable contrast to the typical communication from police forces (confirming only the age and gender of a person helping with enquiries), albeit for sound legal reasons.

The only curiosity is the site’s comments policy. Yes, you can submit a comment – ‘Comments will be received by the author, but will not appear on this blog.’ What, never? Seems like a really oddly disengaging approach when they’re getting the actual blog content so right. (Personally, I’d also be wary of asking for age, sex and location on the comments form too.)

A report earlier this week from the Work Foundation reckons that the problem with government IT is that we’re too ambitious.

Contrary to the stereotype, public sector managers have sometimes been too gung-ho in their attitude to risk when developing and implementing information technology projects, wasting many millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money in the process.

I don’t disagree, but it’s easy to misunderstand the core ‘evolution not revolution’ message. This isn’t an invitation to abandon all ambition.

I absolutely agree, the only way to deliver change is through steady, incremental improvements. But you need people at the top who can think in revolutionary terms. The journey of a thousand miles begins – and continues – with a single step. But you need to know where you’re headed.

I mentioned in my last post that Iain Dale’s guide to political blogging will almost certainly point you to a blog or two which you didn’t know about before. I’m thinking specifically of the blog by the UK’s minister for e-government, Pat McFadden.

Before you rush over there, be prepared for a disappointment. It started in July 2006, a few weeks after McFadden took on the e-gov brief. There have been six postings since, on a weekly(ish) basis with long gaps. It looks like an extension to the site’s barebones CGI-driven CMS, rather than any recognisable blogging tool. There’s no comment function, no permalinks, no RSS.

The content is purely constituency-centric, and even then, it reads more like the ‘MP’s Diary’ column you typically see in the local paper. In fact, one wonders how seriously he is taking his e-government duties: his biography makes no reference to the portfolio.

The rather one-way spat between Guido Fawkes and David Miliband continues, this time in the pages of Iain Dale‘s new Guide to Political Blogging in the UK (PDF). Published just in time for conference season, Dale’s 32-page guide lists the top 100 Labour, Tory and LibDem blogs, plus the top 100 ‘non-aligned’ blogs. It also features contributions from some of the UK A-List.

Miliband – writing, let’s remember, from the office of a Cabinet Minister – describes how blogging lets him ‘break out of the usual parameters of politics’. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, to be honest… but it’s useful to keep handy for quoting purposes:

Through the Internet we can reach more people directly and faster than ever before. We (need) refreshing ways to find out what people think of the department and what we are trying to achieve. I can open up a conversation with people from around the world who are interested in my work. We share ideas and learn from each other. … Politics and government are changing in a fundamental way. We have to become more transparent and open. I believe that the internet, and interactive tools like blogs, are ways of achieving this.

Fawkes, sadly, uses his dedicated page to bash Miliband’s efforts. Only to be expected, I suppose, if you’ve ever read his blog… and arguably, it perfectly demonstrates the fundamental Fawkes negativity.

The blogger who breaks all the rules is David Miliband, the blogging minister. Last month he blogged on only five days. He doesn’t connect with readers, he writes in the aloof jargon rich language of a true policy wonk. His blog is about as politically honest as Pravda in the days of Stalin. His blog is more about bridging the gap with people who agree with him. Worst of all, he hands down his wisdom in a self congratulatory tone. He is a master class in how not to blog.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Miliband deserves significant respect for trying to do this from a Ministerial office. Believe me, I’ve worked more than a decade in central government communication. Miliband has worked wonders to get the blog up there in the first place; for most ministries, any kind of two-way dialogue is a genuine culture shock.

Iain Dale, incidentally, deserves a lot of credit for this work. I’m not sure what value the ‘top 100’ lists actually constitute: being realistic, once you get past the upper echelons, you’re into very small fry. But look down the listings, and you’re bound to spot somebody on your personal radar who you didn’t know was a blogger.

I’m glad to see the government getting bullish about data sharing. We can’t hope to deliver serious efficiency gains or joined-up thinking if we can’t join up the information we already have.

I’m bemused by the examples quoted by both sides of the argument, though. Joined-up information helping prevent people becoming homeless? I wonder if that stems purely from Pat McFadden’s joined-up remit for social exclusion and e-government. And from the Tory side… a threatened tax on scenic views? Which Budget was that in?

Here’s why the world needs information sharing. I was waiting in an office reception this morning, as the receptionist called a steady stream of clients and correspondents to tell them her company had moved premises. A year ago.

Yes yes, Big Brother and all that. But in a nation covered in CCTV, where TV retailers grass on you to the licensing people (and have done so for years), do you really think we have any privacy left as it is?

It’s time to trade the illusion of privacy for some tangible benefits.

If blogs really mattered in UK politics – yet – one would have hoped to see something on Tom Watson‘s blog about his news-leading resignation from the junior ministerial ranks. Tom is acclaimed as the first UK politician to publish his own blog, back in March 2003, and won a New Statesman award in 2004, with the citation noting that he had ‘set an example for other MPs interested in connecting directly with the electorate’.

If there was ever a time he needed a direct-to-public mass communication channel to put forward his opinion in detail, surely this would be it? But at the time of writing… nothing since 28 August. Shame.

If you’re involved in UK government web work, you’re probably more familiar than the average UK resident with the Welsh language. The official guidelines state:

For services provided to the public in Wales, and with due regard to the Welsh Language Act, the Welsh and English languages must be treated on a basis of equality.

… although generally, people take an encouragingly pragmatic and relaxed view. Which is just as well.

The Welsh language has 28 letters – or possibly 29, depending on your stance on the letter ‘J’. (Er, what about Jones?) These include: ch, dd, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh and th. Yes, I know each of those is two letters, but they only count as one. Technically, this is known as a digraph.

And here’s the best bit. In a Welsh dictionary, words beginning with ‘ch’ don’t come between ‘cg’ and ‘ci’ (if there are any). Oh no. They would come after ‘cz’ (if there was a ‘z’, which there isn’t), since ‘ch’ is considered to be the letter between ‘c’ and ‘d’. Unless, that is, it really does mean the two letters as two distinct letters, rather than one. So for example, in the placename ‘Bangor’, the ‘n’ and ‘g’ are two letters, and not the digraph ‘ng’.

So what? Well, if you’re trying to write the specification for a bilingual English / Welsh database with presentation in alphabetical order, and you want to do it properly, you’re going to have to write one very clever sorting routine. 🙂

In case the reason for my research is of any use to anyone else: 2002’s UK government web guidelines say to use ‘Character set Latin 1’ (ie ISO-8859-1) for Welsh, even though this doesn’t contain the required w-circumflex and y-circumflex characters… but this may have been because the all-encompassing UTF-8 was only properly adopted as an internet standard in late 2003. The BBC, National Assembly for Wales and Welsh nationalist political party Plaid (formerly Plaid Cymru) all currently use ISO-8859-1.

UTF-8 is the choice of the Welsh Language Board – which seems like the strongest possible endorsement. It is also used by Welsh language TV channel S4C, plus the Welsh versions of Google and Wicipedia (not a typo). The missing characters also appear in ISO-8859-14, also known as ‘Latin 8’, but this is rarely used if ever.

Somebody called ‘Bob’ left a comment on my post last night about the vandalism on Defra’s wiki, and it’s a brilliant point which deserves more prominence. Over to Bob:

Guido’s gang seem to forget that being a wiki, the content they helpfully amended had probably been written by non-Defra people who wanted to contribute to a debate.

By trying to attack Miliband and/or Defra, all they’ve achieved is an attack on the people who want to influence Government policy on the environment.

Effectively, they’ve tried to censor a forum for the discussion of a subject that affects us all. I don’t think they’ll have an impact on Defra’s approach to the wiki, but you can be sure that there will be some people who’ll’ve seen the wiki and been deterred by Guido’s fan’s comments. Not exactly a success for democracy, is it?

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Otherwise I would have.

Inevitably of course, this found its way into the proper media: this morning’s Times tries to turn it into a ‘humiliation for Cabinet minister’ story. I hardly think Miliband was ‘forced to creep back into his cyberhole’… it was a wiki, it has rollback functionality, this is the whole point.

Oh, and incidentally, a quick note to Jonathan Richards: this didn’t happen ‘a few hours after the site went live’… unless by ‘a few’ you mean ‘almost four hundred’. The wiki was launched three weeks ago.

There were also pieces on AP and AFP, making it a global story. Brilliant.

I suppose it was too good to last. This morning Guido Fawkes reports on Defra’s wiki experiment (two weeks behind the times…) – and his acolytes decide to wreck the place. All very amusing, I’m sure. Have your Friday frolic, guys, then maybe we can continue trying to achieve something constructive.

This was always going to happen. I spoke to the guys at Defra as it was being launched, and they knew the risk they were taking on. But it’s exactly why wikis have a rollback function. If anybody dares turn this into a ‘government website gets hacked’ story… grr.