Puffbox

IBM and Yahoo have joined forces to offer a free search engine, which will index up to half a million documents. All you have to do is supply the hardware. Three clicks to install, various tuning functions, and what looks like some nice interface design, on both the front and back ends. Did I mention it was free? Mmm, nice.

Having never been inside the House of Commons chamber despite working in government circles for over a decade, I put in a request with my local MP’s office, and managed get a ticket for the weekly showpiece: Prime Minister’s Questions.

You’re separated from the proceedings by a thick glass wall, floor to ceiling – and it ruins the sense of ‘being there’. You might as well be watching it on TV, albeit in HD. In fact, from up there, you do spend quite a lot of time watching the TV screens, since you can really only see from the despatch boxes to the Speaker’s chair. Bad luck if you’re hoping to see any Lib Dems or minority parties.

Throughout PMQs there’s a steady hubbub in the chamber, which comes across crystal-clear via the speakers embedded in the benches. But as soon as anyone mentions soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan, and particularly any fatalities, the whole place falls absolutely silent. You could hear a pin drop, not that anyone holding any pins would have dared drop them.

Blair was forced to give a lengthy and complex answer on military pay, which – frankly – was impossible to follow without a slide, whiteboard, handout or something. And suddenly I’m aware how low-tech it all is. Never mind the lack of visual aids – they confiscated any technology (phones, PDAs, iPods) on the way in. Nobody in the press gallery was even using a laptop that I could see.

But after PMQs, once it’s thinned out, the chamber took on a very different tone. John Hutton gave a statement on replacing the Child Support Agency, and Peter Hain introduced the new Northern Ireland justice bill: an unexpected bonus for an Ulster boy such as myself. And during both Ministerial appearances, MPs were quite happy to offer (apparently genuine) praise and support to those on the opposite benches.

Most of it comes across as (shock!) constructive debate! Then suddenly, pressed on whether the proposed CSA changes can’t happen faster, John Hutton turns unexpectedly vitriolic. Fingers point. Gestures get animated. It seemed to come out of the blue… but thankfully, cordial relations are soon restored.

The MPs are generally pretty disrespectful of the place. People not looking at those who are speaking to them. A surprising number doing their paperwork rather than paying attention. Feet on the furniture. One of the junior Ministers seemed to be reading Auto Trader at one point?

But it was a surprisingly positive experience overall. PMQs wasn’t as much fun as I expected; it comes across as a pantomime, an opportunity to let off steam once a week, an interruption to the otherwise civilised atmosphere. The proceedings which followed were (for the most part) adult, reasoned, calm and constructive.

Maybe politics isn’t as bad as it’s portrayed after all. PMQs makes for great TV, but it’s simply not representative of Commons business.

Last week I wrote about my ‘mashup’ of Google Maps with Hansard, and how easy it was to throw together, thanks to TheyWorkForYou.com. It’s received several positive reviews around the UK blogs, for which I’m very grateful. But for anyone visiting from TechCrunch UK… I only iced the cake which was baked by Matthew Somerville and co.

Speaking of whom… Matthew has just extended TWFY to cover proceedings in the Northern Ireland Assembly. If you aren’t familiar with Ulster politics (and why would you be?), it can be tough reading. Look out for the occasional use of Irish from SDLP and Sinn Féin members, although it’s usually limited to ‘thank you’; and, in classic tit-for-tat fashion, a bit of Ulster-Scots from the Unionist side.

Now, if you’ve never encountered Ulster-Scots, you’ll need to know that it is considered a proper language, recognised by the EU and everything – and contrary to appearances, it isn’t just a transcription of somebody doing a Rab C Nesbitt impersonation. See this extract for example… and if you can’t immediately understand it, try reading it aloud. (Helpfully, Jim Shannon follows his Ulster-Scots passage with a translation into English.)

It’s great to have Stormont back. I’ve missed stories like this on Monday: a motion opposing equality legislation for gays and lesbians (that’s right, opposing equality) fell thanks to a 39-39 tied vote… and would have passed if it hadn’t been for the vote of a dead man.

I’m only surprised that it’s taken this long for someone to come up with the idea. Media Guardian reports that the BBC is trialling a system which pushes 50 hours of TV programming – preselected by them – to a Sky+-style set-top box.

The BBC – and Sky, and the cable guys for that matter – now have well-established channels for getting TV signals into your house. The video-recording hardware is equally well-established, with Sky+ leading the way, but the others catching up rapidly. The marginal cost of hard disk space is almost negligible. The ability to scroll through a collection of ‘on demand’ TV programming, delivered locally, should allow for a very neat user experience, including – crucially – a very pretty user interface.

Two ways this could work: a ‘best of’ selection, ensuring you don’t miss the week’s TV highlights, and a ‘niche’ service for stuff which meets the public service remit, but just can’t find a slot in the mass-market schedules. Both have their merits. (Media coverage of niche interests is suddenly a big news story, with a three-day-eventer – is that a word? – winning the BBC’s Sports Personality Of The Year award.)

I did my best to sit through the first hour of France 24 – and yes, that is pronounced Fronce van cat’ – on Sky Digital (channel 515)… but I just couldn’t do it. Ten minutes of news bulletin, followed by 20 minutes of filler. And in the first hour, ‘filler’ included two runs of the same mini-documentary, two runs of a pointless global weather forecast (Africa hot, Scandinavia cold), and two (consecutive!) runs of a France 24 promo. Oh yes, and a blank screen at one point. And the Washington correspondent saying ‘pissed off’ in a live two-way. And some spelling mistakes in the on-screen graphics. You could blame it on opening night nerves… except it actually started online last night. Ooh la la.

The most striking part is that it’s principally native French-speakers talking in English, or film overdubbed in English. And whilst the French presenters have (for the most part) exceptionally good levels of English, their accents are invariably American. Ironic when the whole raison d’etre of the channel is to act as a balance to the American view of the world.

Frankly, it looks amateur – rolling news done on the cheap. And when it’s a single press of the remote control away from the uber-slick Al Jazeera English, it looks even worse: the contrast with Doha’s action-packed ‘look how cool we are’ opening hour is stark. Quel dommage, les gars.

Meanwhile online… the new France 24 website is up and running too. And there are some good signs: trilingual presentation, a good number of blogs, a clutch of RSS feeds, comment functions on every story, even a bit of Ajax. But I’m not sure about the innovative (ahem) homepage presentation: clicking on a headline brings its excerpt up in the main homepage panel, rather than taking you to a page on the story itself. And it’s not very smart to go live with a lead sports story that’s 48+ hours out of date.

For a few years now, Steve Rubel has been something of a guru in terms of public relations and the web, and his blog is required reading. He and colleagues from major PR agency Edelman have just unleashed something called StoryCrafter, which:

basically breaks down a press release into its core parts, leaving it up to you – the journalist (citizen or pro) – to decide how it should be put together. Most importantly, every press release gets feeds, tags, del.icio.us/digg buttons, trackbacks and comments.

There’s an example here. The initial comments aren’t very encouraging, but I think they’re missing the point. This isn’t about a new web tool for creating press notices. It’s about a new way – rather, a new way of presenting them. And good on them for that. In my journalism days, I spent too long deconstructing someone else’s prose, before turning it into my own. The bullet-point approach will make PR people feel less creative, but it’s what their customer ultimately wants. It’s still rough round the edges, but this feels right.

Interesting to see the comments facility; but this should be a perfect situation for trackbacks (effectively ‘other sites linking to this one’) to come into their own.

I had a play on Nintendo’s new Wii games console earlier this week, at the Science Museum’s Game On exhibition. Nintendo has prioritised gameplay over graphics in its new device… and seeing it in the context of how games have developed over 50 years, the Wii’s visuals looked really disappointing. But the fun comes from its innovative motion-sensing wireless controller. For example, you play tennis by swinging the controller in your hand, like a racquet – which makes for a very different, and very enjoyable, gaming experience.

But I love this email which Nintendo have (apparently) had to send out to new purchasers in the US. It’s basically a human nature warning, as opposed to a hardware defect. I wonder how many people have smashed their controllers by (a) dropping them; (b) tossing them against the wall; or (c) whacking them against the side of the telly?

(Most fun at the exhibition, incidentally: playing Guitar Hero on the PS2 for the first time. Basically it’s another ‘press buttons in time to the music’ game, with the added excitement of a guitar-shaped controller, and a classic rock soundtrack. But as a proper guitar player myself, I found it really difficult, as my hands wanted to form the appropriate chord shapes, rather than just pressing the coloured buttons!)