Puffbox

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

2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005

Code For The People company e-government news politics technology Uncategorised

api award barackobama barcampukgovweb bbc bis blogging blogs bonanza borisjohnson branding broaderbenefits buddypress budget cabinetoffice careandsupport chrischant civilservice coi commentariat commons conservatives consultation coveritlive crimemapping dailymail datasharing datastandards davidcameron defra democracy dfid directgov dius downingstreet drupal engagement facebook flickr foi foreignoffice francismaude freedata gds google gordonbrown governanceofbritain govuk guardian guidofawkes health hosting innovation internetexplorer labourparty libdems liveblog lynnefeatherstone maps marthalanefox mashup microsoft MPs mysociety nhs onepolitics opensource ordnancesurvey ournhs parliament petitions politics powerofinformation pressoffice puffbox rationalisation reshuffle rss simonwheatley skunkworks skynews statistics stephenhale stephgray telegraph toldyouso tomloosemore tomwatson transparency transport treasury twitter typepad video walesoffice wordcamp wordcampuk wordpress wordupwhitehall youtube

Privacy Policy

  • Public sector's own YouTube goes live

    PublicTV, produced by Ten Alps, has activated a beta version of its website promising ‘fast and free access to

    high quality government, public sector, professional training, and business videos’. In practice, what that seems to mean is a repository for public sector organisations to host and stream video content. Yes folks, it’s YouTube for public information films. Gulp.

    The site promises free encoding, hosting and streaming for content suppliers; and will happily accept enquiries from public sector organisations wanting to commission video… which hints at their principal business model. Ten Alps themselves are principally a production company, and by reducing the cost and complexity of hosting, they’re presumably hoping to generate revenue around the content itself. Heaven knows, media budgets in government tend to be more generous, and less closely monitored, than in the commercial world.

    There’s an encouragingly broad selection of short films to choose from, even in these early days, delivered in a combination of Flash and Windows Media formats. Clearly taking a cue from YouTube, you can comment on what you see, generate playlists, and see what everyone else is watching. You can’t fault the production values; much better than one would probably expect from within government, and delivered on time too.

    There’s more than enough video material sloshing round Whitehall and its environs to keep the site ticking over. Whether there’s much demand for it is another matter.

  • The awesome power of Prototype and Scriptaculous

    For the first time in ages, I’ve got a bit of time to play with some of the new technical toys out there on the internet. And today, I finally ventured into the world of Prototype and Scriptaculous. This stuff really is blow-you-away fantastic. Interactive effects like we never would have dreamt of, back in the old days, and shockingly simple to implement if you know what you’re doing.

    I’ve used it to make an important improvement to the MP Map I produced earlier in the week. People complained that they missed the region selection buttons. Well, there’s no missing them now. ๐Ÿ™‚ They now sit in a window which hovers over the main map. If you want to move them from their starting position, just click and drag. If you don’t want the menu taking up any of your valuable monitor space, just close it up.

  • Protopage: a model for News 2.0?

    I’m really impressed by the enhancements to Protopage.com – and although I still haven’t made the big decision to make it my default homepage, I’m beginning to understand why these ‘personalised start pages’ are generating such a buzz.

    Google does it, Microsoft does it, Yahoo has done it for ages. The Paris-based Netvibes is (or certainly was) the leading upstart start-up in the field. But I find myself warming most to Londoners Protopage, and it might just be a question of the presentation. I love the way you can set a photograph as your ‘wallpaper’, just like on your PC. I love the way it handles thumbnails from Flickr feeds (etc). It’s nice to be able to configure all the colour settings, just how you want them – and lots of colour gradients… mmm, nice. Putting several RSS feeds in one box is cool too. Others – I’m thinking of Netvibes in particular – look more powerful, but feel too cold.

    Protopage seems to understand that the key word here is ‘personal’. It needs to feel friendly. If you haven’t played around with any of these services, I highly recommend Protopage. Oh, and if you’ve never seen a site which lets you ‘drag and drop’ stuff around the page, you will be blown away. Brace yourself.

    So here’s the radical thought. I don’t think this business is going to go away… too much big-player involvement, too many RSS feeds to aggregate. So maybe the big publishers, media and government, should be looking at how they can get into it too?

    There are already early moves in the US, as social media guru Steve Rubel notes. Sports channel ESPN lets you build your own page, including (by the look of it) only-use-it-here feeds, and lets you theme it according to your favourite team. There are nascent efforts at the New York Times and Wall St Journal. (You’ll have to register to test them, sadly.)

    I’ve mentioned here before that Sky News is getting a long overdue relaunch next year… and maybe it should be along these lines. 1024×768 screen resolutions give plenty of space to play with. How about a big picture-led treatment of the lead story, headlines and summaries for the ‘second tier’, a few features from the correspondents, and a couple of ‘image galleries’ showing expandable thumbnails. And then, crucially – let people manipulate it. Change the colour, change the wallpaper, add their own local weather, add their own RSS feeds. If we’re happy to accept user-generated content, why not user-generated sub-editing too?

    And what should government do? Simple… RSS, and lots of it. I find it staggering how few government departments are pumping out RSS, a technology which is embarrassingly simple to implement, and costs zero pounds extra to run on top of your existing CMS work.

  • New government blogs: food safety and geography

    It’s been some time coming, but details are emerging of the second phase of the Hansard Society’s Digital Dialogues programme. Included are a couple of new government blogs launched in the past fortnight: one at the Office for National Statistics, the other at the Food Standards Agency.

    As mentioned previously, I spent a couple of difficult years at National Statistics, so I’m delighted to see them dipping their toe in the ‘social media’ water, albeit on a small scale for now. The geographers were always among the most forward-thinking people in the department, and onsgeography.net is going to be an interesting example to observe, stimulating debate around a specific project. A widely accepted approach to geography is crucial in making ONS data more usable to the nation generally, and I hope they can generate good buy-in through this open initiative.

    The blog over at the Food Standards Agency is your more familiar personality-led affair, from its chief scientist Andrew Wadge. He promises ‘to let you know what I and my scientist colleagues at the Agency are up to, what the emerging issues are, and how we propose handling them’. If you’re in the business, this could become a great way to keep in touch with FSA activity.

    The two blogs share a common layout, and look to be based on a bespoke platform by Bedford-based developers Vohm, who have already worked with the Hansard Society on various projects. It’s all very familiar blogging fare, including RSS feeds, pretty URLs and tag clouds… although I’m curious as to why they haven’t used a standard platform like WordPress.

  • My latest mashup: on Westminster and web services

    MP mapI’ve been experimenting a bit more with Ajax, XML and all that good stuff… and have come up with a Google Map of all UK MPs. Each constituency is shown as a marker on the map, grouped by the usual UK government regions to make it a bit more manageable. Click on a marker, and you’ll get the usual Google popup window, telling you who the MP is, which party they’re from… and what they’ve been up to recently. Technically, it’s much the same as last week’s football news mashup. The coordinates for each marker are stored locally in XML files, and all the data is brought in dynamically via ajax (as XML or RSS) when the marker is clicked.

    The magic ingredient is the use of the web services API offered by TheyWorkForYou. If you’ve never seen the site before, it takes the official record of proceedings in the House of Commons (Hansard) and turns it from this into this. That’s clever enough in itself, but they go one step further – by offering much of the information for consumption by other websites, in the form of data feeds (including XML). What this means, in practice, is that my humble little map doesn’t know who the individual MP is… but it knows how to ask TheyWorkForYou, and how to process the response. Think of it as cross-site content management: writing once, using many times, even on different websites.

    With more than a decade of e-government experience behind me, the recurring thought in my mind is: I’ve thrown this together in a matter of a couple of days. How long would it have taken, how many levels of management would I have had to sweet-talk, and how much would it have cost, to do this inside the public sector? And deep down, I know the answer is that more likely than not, it simply couldn’t happen.

    Depressingly, I’m wondering if e-government should throw in the towel, and shift its focus from producing websites to producing web services. In other words, create databases visible to the outside world, and let others do the presentation. Lots of tailored front-ends for different audiences and different uses, all running off the same authoritative data source. I bet we would end up with a better appreciation for the data, and better application of it… which, ultimately, meets government’s objective.

  • Football news from the sky (note the small 's')

    Football grounds mashupI’ve added a new site to the findless.co.uk family, which brings a completely new perspective to English and Scottish premier league football news. Specifically, the vertical perspective. ๐Ÿ™‚

    I’ve been meaning to put together a Google Maps mashup for some time, and having worked out how to import and process RSS feeds for the health and safety and education search engines,ย  it seemed like a good idea to mash these into the mix as well. The result is a map showing pointers for every top-flight soccer stadium in England and Scotland, as close to the pitch’s centre spot as I could manage. Click on the pointer, and you get some basic club information. Plus – and this is the clever bit – the latest news for that particular club, sourced from the BBC’s RSS feeds.

    It’s all stored in a database, so theoretically it should be easy enough to pump the same information into a different mapping service. Time permitting (and it’s not likely), I might try to send the data to Microsoft’s equivalent service, as their UK satellite photos are much better.

    For anyone technically minded, the feeds are pulled in using Ajax, to minimise the load time of the page, and the impact on both servers. It’s the first time I’ve done any Ajax programming, and I’m feeling quite proud of myself. ๐Ÿ™‚

  • My latest project: findless.co.uk

    safety.findlessJust how easy is it to set up a cash-generating business in the world of web 2.0? Well, with a little time on my hands to experiment, I decided to find out. And within three working days, and for a total cash outlay of ยฃ30, we are live.

    A month or two back, Google unveiled a new feature which allows you to ‘create your own search engine’. Basically, you specify all the sites you do or don’t want to be included in searches, and Google does all the other boring stuff, like hosting, ranking, indexing, and all that. If you’re an expert in your field, and you know ‘all the good websites’, you can create a search function with all the benefits of Google’s expertise, all the benefits of your experience, and none of the bad stuff. It’s effectively bringing the editorial function to the chaotic anarchy of search, and the implications are truly huge.

    education.findlessYou’re welcome, then, to www.findless.co.uk – a new editorialised search engine network. Why ‘findless’? Well, aside from hopefully being memorable, it sums up our philosophy that ‘less is more’ when it comes to search results. We’ve all seen the heatmaps: startling numbers of people instinctively click on the first search result in the list. All the more important, then, to strip out all the sites whose SEO may be great, but whose content may be lacking. Most people we’ve asked immediately think it’s an odd choice of name… but pretty soon, they get it.

    We’re starting with two areas, chosen because we (my wife and I) have worked in the fields in question, and know the good sites without having to think too hard. One is health and safety, the other is education. Coincidentally, in both cases, the quality information is spread very widely, and you may not instinctively know where to look.

    The homepage template features a great big search box, with a great big font – all very 2.0. Beneath, we’re running the headlines from selected websites in the field, driven largely by the sites which bother to offer RSS feeds. The effect, hopefully, is close to a pre-emptively personalised Google homepage. We’ve also stuck an Amazon affiliate box on there, just to see what happens. Type in your keyword, press ‘submit’, and Google basically takes it from there. The basic layout template is ours, but as a trained eye will instantly spot, we soon hand over control to Google, its results and its adverts.

    The feedback loop is covered by (guess what) WordPress. If people want to suggest a site for inclusion on our whitelist (which we list in full), they can leave a blog comment, and we’ll have a look. But we’re maintaining absolute editorial control. If we like a site suggested by a reader, we’ll include it. If we don’t like it, we won’t. Yes of course it’s subjective, but that’s kind of the whole point.

    How so cheap? We’re using hosting provided by Danish company one.com, whose basic package comes to a trifling ยฃ0.90 per month (ex VAT), for 1000MB of disk space and no (formal) bandwidth limit. Even including a ยฃ9 setup fee, and domain name registration, it still totals barely ยฃ30 for a year’s service. All accounts include a MySQL database, and are ASP/PHP-enabled. Powering the feedback loop / blog area, naturally, is the open-source WordPress and having done it a few times now, installation was a breeze. The Google function is free, paid for by their cut of the pay-per-click advertising revenue. I’m using a free PHP script to pull in the RSS feeds, and cache them. Google Analytics is keeping track of usage.

    I’m not expecting this to fund my retirement; in fact, if it covers its costs, I’ll be delighted. But it’s been fun to go from zero to revenue-generating business in a matter of a few days, and a useful learning experience. I’m more convinced than ever that tools like PHP and WordPress are the future of small and even mid-sized websites for individuals and businesses. The cost of raw materials is, increasingly, negligible if not zero… but the need for experienced experts is paramount.

    I’d love to hear what people think of it (unless you want to complain about the formatting problem in IE6… I know all about it already, thanks!). Please leave a comment, either here or on the findless blog.

  • I'm a free agent

    Just a quick note to say that, subject to final confirmation, my current main engagement with the Department for Education and Skills has come to an end. So the good news, dear reader, is that I’m available for hire. If you have a web strategy problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find me… etc etc.

    I’ll say more about my time with Education after a period of quiet reflection. But keep your eyes peeled for the one piece of work I’m most proud of, or certainly it was when I left it – going live in the next few weeks. ๐Ÿ˜‰

  • Prรชt ร  regarder

    A first sight of the new French government-backed news channel, France 24, as posted on YouTube. (You did just say ‘vingt quatre’ rather than ‘twenty four’, didn’t you?) Judging by this promo, they didn’t spend much of their budget on things like verbs or punctuation. Launch date TBC.

    [youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=-RcoSH3o_Mg]

  • TV reviews for the social generation

    I completely agree with Peter Preston’s thoughts in Sunday’s Observer about the demise of the TV critic. The mass audience moments are gone… I mean, can you remember the last time you had a conversation about ‘did you see X on telly last night?’ But the core need – to ‘connect and share experiences’ remains. You just have to look harder to find the right community to share with.

    I’m absolutely convinced there’s a market out there for a brilliant TV community website. The UK needs a site with reliable previews of stuff you want to watch, before it’s broadcast – or at least, pointing to a further ‘viewing opportunity’ (ie repeat) later in the week. There’s just too much out there, in too many places, and you need people to ‘mark your card’ ahead of time. These previews would be followed up by the community’s comments. It’s a site I would use every single day, but nobody has built it yet. So I might. ๐Ÿ™‚