Puffbox

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…’ 🙂

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Well, I guess it was inevitable: the Tories have played the ‘chicken’ card. If Gordon doesn’t call the election now, and there are enough good reasons why he shouldn’t, he will be portrayed as a coward. Potentially damned if he does, definitely damned if he doesn’t… Charlie Beckett hit the nail on the head this morning: ‘It is one of those occasions where those who attempt to spin the media are spun.’

Incidentally… I’m seeing plenty of mentions of Cameron giving his speech ‘off the cuff’, and an implicit contrast with Brown’s scripted speech last week. Clearly the Tories have decided – rightly – that they have a better story to tell when it comes to sincerity. And they can – rightly – point to Webcameron, which has been running for months as evidence. Uncut, un-spun, me-to-you stuff. Scoble as opposed to Stalin, perhaps. 😉

Am I the only one to feel there’s something inherently wrong with outsourcing the moderation of blog comments or forum posts? Yes it’s difficult from a resource planning perspective, but can you really get a genuine feel for the readers’ responses from an external agent’s written report after the event?

Granted, it can be a pain to filter out the spam and abuse; it’s a mechanical job requiring only rare use of intelligent human discretion. But the other part, the ‘ding!’ when you receive an insightful comment on something you’ve just thrown out there, is one of the more motivating moments in managing a blog. It seems odd to delegate that away to someone else… especially when personal passion, from writer to reader and back, is inherent to the very notion of social media.

What other blogs will be joining Westmonster in Lloyd Shepherd’s MessyMedia stable? A job advert posted on Gumtree last week talks about:

• Celebrity and popular culture
• Media (film, TV and publishing)
• The City
• Food, restaurants and bars
• Cars and bikes
• Consumer issues – buying, selling, complaining
• Politics (to work alongside our existing editor)

I didn’t ever consider this to be a political blog… but then I saw the complete list of 1200-odd UK political blogs as compiled by Iain Dale‘s readers, and it turns out I’m on it. So it’s time for a little bit of politics.

Gordon Brown is playing a very dangerous game. Even if you accept – and few do – that the timing of his surprise day-trip to Basra (complete with home-for-Christmas announcement) was merely part of ‘the normal process of government’, it was always going to be seen by a cynical electorate as a cynical party-political ploy. There is no truth, there is only perception.

It’s not as if he doesn’t have a track record for sleight-of-hand: you only have to think back to his final budget, and a headline-grabbing cut in basic-rate income tax distracting attention from the phasing-out of the 10p tax band. We seem to have accepted that it’s acceptable for nasty things to be omitted from the Budget speech, and buried in the accompanying flood of press releases.

I’m afraid this just isn’t what I expected when he talked of ‘a new type of politics‘. I can’t believe it was pure coincidence: today was either naive or cynical, one of the two. If the intention was to present him as the global statesman in Basra, whilst the Tories were left bleating in Blackpool about party politics, I believe it was one huge miscalculation.

No matter how good Brown’s poll ratings, he is a politician. And politicians don’t have enough credibility to get away with a stunt like that. With big leadership problems in both the blue and yellow camps, Gordon’s biggest enemy at any general election may turn out to be sheer apathy. Or to put it another way, the electorate itself. A proper engagement strategy needs to be in the works.

PS: I know for a fact that the Labour Party machinery is preparing itself for the possibility of an election being called imminently. Brown may not yet have made the decision, but he has certainly ordered the team to be ready for the possibility/probability that he will make the decision.

I can only assume that CampaignTV is trying to be the left-wing response to 18 Doughty Street. It presents itself as ‘the first free to view, independently-owned Labour-supporting internet TV channel’, whilst at the same time recognising its limitations:

CAMPAIGNTV meets the urgent need for a progressive challenge to the dominance of right-leaning political content on the internet. It’s the place to find films making a case for the Labour Party, for trade unions and for other progressive campaigns. We start as a small organisation, with a low-cost site hosting a quality tv player and a selection of quality films. We want to grow and offer more and more programming as the site develops.

There’s a lot wrong from a technical perspective. They declare quite unashamedly: ‘For optimal viewing of CampaignTV, we recommend using Internet Explorers 6 & 7. (Firefox 2.0 is NOT recommended). You should also use Windows Media Player 9 or 10. (Windows Media Player 11 is NOT recommended).’ Based on my own experience at least, ‘not recommended’ actually means ‘not going to work’.

Finally, you reach the content: and it’s a curious mix. They’ve clearly got good connections, given the one-to-one interviews with senior Labour figures including the PM, and footage from official events. Most of it, sadly, is standard corporate-video fare: smiling faces, snappy soundbites, muzak.

Will it engage me as a voter? No. Much as we’ve done with online ad banners, when we stuff like this, clearly over-edited and over-produced, we automatically disengage. People only create material like this when they’re trying to preach at you. And nobody wants to be preached at. Think of it as the difference between a blog and a brochure, but in video form. It’s why Webcameron was working, and why David Miliband is taking the Foreign Office down the same road.