Puffbox

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

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  • Blogger Miliband for PM?

    Some intriguing suggestions reported by the BBC today, that ‘Environment Secretary David Miliband has been urged by a senior Labour MP (specifically, Frank Field) to challenge Chancellor Gordon Brown for the party leadership.’

    I have no doubt that Miliband is playing a smart game, almost certainly with an eye on very high (if not the highest) office. He’s the one with a strong personal commitment to the ‘cutting edge’ stuff – blogs, wikis, and all that – as well as plenty of collaboration with the nation’s newsrooms. And I’m inclined to agree with Frank Field on one point, that Gordon Brown will look like the ‘old generation’ when/if he faces a (relatively) fresh-faced David Cameron at the next election. It’s too early for Miliband though… isn’t it? 😕

  • Don't buy SD cards from Argos

    Picked up the new Argos catalogue at the weekend, and I’m still shocked to see the prices Argos think they can charge for digital memory cards. For example: an unbranded 1GB SD card for £22.99, or cards branded Kodak and Fujifilm for £27.99… ‘less than half price!’ Meanwhile, over at Amazon – a 1GB Kingston Technology SD card for the truly startling price of £1.29 (plus Marketplace postage rates). Or for a direct comparison: this SanDisk Ultra II 1GB SD card. As little as £11.97 from an Amazon marketplacer, but £33.99 from Argos – and that’s even with a £16 discount already applied.

  • No such thing as e-government any more

    I’m just so behind the times… it turns out that e-government is dead. According to Helen Milner, the managing director of UK Online Centres (yes, apparently they are still going), writing in the new Development Plan for her network:

    The time has come to reposition the network, building on its strong foundations of community learning and social inclusion and developing its role to support transformational government (‘t-government’, formerly known as e-government), a major programme to modernise and transform the way government interacts with the public and delivers its services.

    So from here on in, it’s t-go….. actually, no, forget it.

  • Good sources for UK internet statistics

    Not for the first time, someone has asked me for a list of good websites for statistics on the UK internet audience and market. So, having pulled a list together, I thought I’d offer it to the wider world. If anyone knows of any sources I’ve missed or forgotten, feel free to comment.

    Internet Advertising Bureau

    The ‘trade body’ for online advertising in the UK, with lots of numbers about online audience, advertising spend, ecommerce, etc. Probably the best single resource you’ll find.

    Heather Hopkins

    Heather is the chief UK researcher at a company called Hitwise, which gathers up data from all the big UK internet service providers, and produces some of the most detailed stats anywhere. Hitwise is a paid-for service, but Heather regularly posts some very interesting stuff on her blog.

    ABC Electronic

    Publish fully audited usage data for various high-profile websites. Very heavy stuff, but often useful for the odd anecdote, as it quotes famous sites like the BBC, Guardian, Yahoo. Click on the link ‘ABCE Data’ at the top of the screen; then ‘Search ABCE Database’; and just press the ‘Search’ button. (If you don’t put anything into the form, it will spit out a complete list of everything it’s got.)

    UK Association of Online Publishers

    ‘Champions the interests of approximately 160 publishing companies.’ Most of their website is members-only, but you’ll find a few interesting (and free) items on this page of ‘research’.

    National Statistics

    Government stats agency compiles figures on internet use. Especially good to show the growth of broadband.

    Statsaholic (formerly Alexaholic)

    A great site for generating graphs of the traffic for (almost) any major website in the world. Uses the same data as www.alexa.com, but looks prettier. The Alexa numbers must be treated cautiously, as they are only a snapshot of the overall internet population, and probably not a very representative snapshot. But in my experience, the shape of the graph is usually pretty accurate.

    Nominet UK domain names

    Monthly numbers on the registration of .uk domains, going right back to August 1996. You might also be interested in Verisign’s equivalent data for .com and .net, published quarterly (ish).

    … and my perennial favourite…

    Overture Keyword Assistant

    How many people searched Yahoo (etc) for a particular keyword last month… and what phrases did they use it in? Granted, Yahoo’s a very distant second to Google, but Google doesn’t publish its numbers, and the proportions are probably the same (ish). This site has been a bit temperamental of late, but it’s still running.

  • Firefox will become a 'de facto' operating system

    Over a year ago, I wrote something about ‘the scope for Firefox, plus extensions, plus broadband, plus ‘Web 2.0‘ projects to negate the need for an operating system (per se)’. A surprisingly prescient statement, if I say so myself… since one of the key players from Mozilla, Robert O’Callahan, has now revealed something potentially monumental: ‘Firefox3 is going to deliver support for offline applications.’ And that could be the key to it all. There’s already plenty of the analysis of this, and its implications, from Richard MacManus and Rod Drury.

  • Jakob Nielsen on e-gov usability

    Jakob Nielsen has written a piece on whether ‘Government Agencies and Non-Profits Get ROI From Usability‘, which doesn’t really tell you anything you wouldn’t know already – like, er, usability is a good thing, and if you pick some figures out of the air, and total them up, you can put a number on it. But since it’s Dr Nielsen, and since your boss has probably heard of him, it’s worth a glance.

  • Can the Civil Service engage with the citizen?

    From Saturday’s Guardian (with thanks to David Wilcox for spotting it):

    The government is planning to link up with the power of consumer and civic movements on the net by offering funding, permitting civil servants to post information on sites, and releasing information currently locked up in Whitehall. Ministers believe web movements are rapidly transforming the power relationship between government and society. A two-month review inside the Cabinet Office, including ministers, communicaitons (sic) officials, and outside experts such as Tom Steinberg from mysociety, is to be established next week, for the government to consider how to respond. They are discussing whether it is sensible for government to pull back from setting up its own sites if they are going to compete with existing innovative ones. They are instead thinking of providing funding for grassroots sites dedicated to information sharing.

    Lovely thought, and with people like Tom involved, there should be the odd sane contribution at least. But bear in mind the radical shift in approach that this would represent. Not only encouraging two-way interaction, but going a step further by putting someone else in charge of it. Good luck, Tom!

    Personally I have only mild reservations about the notion. It isn’t much different from private companies engaging in public forums… a case of balancing honesty and transparency, with a need to stay reasonably ‘on message’.

    But ministers aren’t the problem here; the civil service is the problem. Ministers know they need to understand what’s happening in the real world, because the clock is always ticking until the next general election, with the inherent risk they might get kicked out. The civil service has no such concerns, with the only ticking clock being the one that counts down to his/her retirement. And senior civil servants simply don’t want to do anything which might put that at risk.

  • Economics man Evan Davis joins BBC blogosphere

    Delighted to see BBC economics editor Evan Davis entering the world of blogging. I’ve long admired his unique down-to-earth approach to what can be an infuriating subject, and he’s already bringing a similar tone to his blog activity. You won’t find Anatole Kaletsky writing something like this:

    Does the world really need a new economics blog? Well: no but yeah but yeah but no, as Vicky Pollard would undoubtedly write if she had a blog of her own. For one thing, Evanomics is not quite a blog. I’m not intending to make entries every day, or to update you with my views on every twist and turn in the financial pages. But Evanomics is designed to have some blog-like characteristics. A place where you’ll find a variety of material, frequently updated, and with plenty of opportunity to comment or contribute.

    In fact, Evan was the subject of some conversation last night, as my wife and I polished off a bottle of Stormhoek rosé, whilst watching the first episode of the new series of Dragon’s Den. The previous series had become far too predictable, with only the final candidate in each episode getting a deal. (We used to base our guesses purely on ‘how long is left in the show?’)

    But even more annoying, Evan was probably the worst exponent of the growing ‘tell them what they’ve just seen’ phenomenon which is gradually doing my head in. You see it a lot on ITV and Channel4: coming out of an ad-break, they’ll remind you (in some detail) what happened barely three minutes earlier, as if we’d forgotten. But Dragon’s Den was always worse. Barely a second after seeing a man make a pitch for £100k to expand his widgets business, Evan’s voiceover would tell you that he was asking for £100k to… etc etc.

    To our considerable relief, both problems seem to have been largely cured. Still some repetition, although nowhere near as bad as before. And, without wanting to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it… somebody in the early part of the show strikes a deal. That really only left us discussing how skinny Evan was looking.

    (Thanks to Simon Collister for the tipoff.)

  • Groundhog day for the Stormhoekers

    Me, Cath, Hugh and Namibian expat Rob from our rendezvous in Newbury yesterday. Not Reading, as Cath notes. Their national tour actually began on Groundhog Day (2 February), and I guess it’s starting to affect them…

    stormhoekroadshow.jpg

    Anyway, I think I know what the ‘Secret Evil Plan‘ is… and yes, it’s going to be memorable for one or two people at least.

    Quick update on the wine itself: the entire bottle disappeared in a single sitting, which is unusual for us these days. We were awoken a few times during the night by Screaming Baby, and my head was a little foggier than I had expected. No undue aftereffects by morning, though. I think that’s a positive review..?

  • Tony Blair promises Stephen Fry: I will get IT-literate

    Tony Blair’s plans post-Downing Street… chat-show host? I hadn’t picked up on the number of podcasts he has been recording with various celebs lately, from Chris Evans to Seb Coe, and now Stephen Fry. Of course, Stephen Fry is always going to be great to listen to. But he isn’t shy about asking some tricky questions – ‘do you mind knowing that so many people don’t like you’? (I’m not sure that one was cleared in advance?)

    They touch on some interesting territory – the way new communication channels and challenges mean having to ‘conduct politics in a different way’, but disappointingly, it doesn’t really go anywhere. Instead, we end up on the old familiar territory of ‘oh, I’m rubbish with computers’. But at least we get a pledge: ‘It is something that when I leave I am going to have to devote a lot of time to.’ About time too, Prime Minister.

    I have no idea what these podcasts are meant to achieve, other than some vague sense of improving engagement with the ordinary voters, by involving ‘that bloke off the telly’. I doubt it’s working particularly well. But it’s an entertaining listen (or read) nonetheless.