Puffbox

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

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  • Guardian's 'web first' policy… it's about time

    As if to underline the point I made yesterday about the insanity of the Telegraph’s new ‘slow news’ policy… the Guardian announces its plan to do precisely the opposite.

    The Guardian will become the first British national newspaper to offer a “web first” service that will see major news by foreign correspondents and business journalists put online before it appears in the paper. The shift in strategy marks a significant departure from the established routine of newspaper publishing where stories are held for “once-a-day” publishing.

    I can’t help feeling this is an odd area of debate, though… it illustrates just how far we haven’t come in this  new media revolution. How could they rationally justify sitting on an article for several hours (or more?) when it has been written, subbed, checked, signed off, the lot?

    We’re seeing all news channels encroaching on each other’s turf. Broadcasters are producing written stuff, print media are moving into broadcasting. It’s all just content, guys. There’s no such thing as a cycle… the world keeps turning, the news keeps happening. The only thing we should be beholden to, is the news itself.

    Still nothing on the Telegraph Upload blog, incidentally. ๐Ÿ™

  • Slow news days

    Er, is the Daily Telegraph really planning to consciously slow down the appearance of its online content? A posting on the Guardian‘s website seems to suggest so.

    The Daily Telegraph website is to put its online content up later in the day in a bid to encourage more of its online readers to buy the printed newspaper. “We hope that a new content management system will allow us to time content to go up online, at the moment our system doesn’t allow us to do that automatically,” said Telegraph Media Group new media director Annelies van den Belt. Ms van den Belt said it was planned that individual section editors would decide what time content from the paper was posted online. Later posting could increase newsprint sales, “as long as we give them added value and relevance online and in the paper.”

    I bet it won’t. This won’t give me any added incentive to buy the newspaper. In fact, it makes me more likely to go somewhere else entirely. How can you possibly have a news website which doesn’t deliver the most up-to-date content? Even if it’s only the feature material, rather than hard news stuff, you won’t get away from a perception that the Telegraph site isn’t interested in fast updates.

    I look forward to seeing what the team’s Upload blog has to say about this. You are going to say something chaps, aren’t you?

  • Treasury wants to fund local web 'portals'

    Worthy of note from Gordon Brown’s speech to yesterday’s big conference on public service reform:

    And let me emphasise just how much importance I attach, and the Treasury attach, to matching local setting of objectives in new ways that will be proposed by the coming Local Government White Paper with the flow of publicly available data, real time data on what is actually happening on the ground, real time information that enables the professionals who run public services to use their experience to best effect, transparency that empowers citizens to make informed choices about how they use public services and the standards they expect. And I think we are seeing the potential of this new approach and the new technology that makes it possible. We will be examining in America the Compsat model pioneered in New York, the Citistat model in Baltimore, applied not just to policing but across a whole range of local services.

    The same potential exists in Britain as we role out neighbourhood policing right across the country, publishing more police performance data. We are interested in how local authorities across the country can use the internet and web portals to allow people to customise the information they receive about the services they use. I have looked at Shoreditch and Tower Hamlets at the digital bridge that allows police to alert residents as events happen, and residents to alert them about abandoned cars, about graffiti, about vandalism; in Lewisham texting to report and then texting back to say if the problem has been addressed.

    Those working in government, take note. When he says ‘the importance I attach’… that’s an invitation to bid for some money. Quoting this speech in your proposal wouldn’t do any harm.

  • Microsoft kicks it

    And the winner of ‘best way to follow the World Cup when you’re stuck at your desk’ is… remarkably… Microsoft. Their desktop widget has all the scores, all the groups, the full playoff tree, and a built-in RSS reader for whatever news feed takes your fancy. Full marks, too, for switching from ‘soccer’ to ‘football’ depending on your language preference (US or UK English). Ah well, anything to keep people away from the official World Cup site, brought to you by one of their main competitors…

  • Blair's web interview

    How many people actually knew about this? 'Tony Blair took part in a special interview with the Downing Street website today to answer questions from the public. Journalists Michael White and Sarah Sands chose the questions, selected from hundreds sent in to us, and put them to the PM in the State Dining Room of Number 10. The interview was a chance for members of the public to quiz the Mr Blair on any topic, just like MPs do every Wednesday during Prime Minister's Question Time.'

    Fair play to Downing Street: they do like to try things like this… but they don't seem to stick at them for long. Anyone remember the White House-style series of weekly 'radio broadcasts'? Thought not.

  • Free Skype time!

    Any UK users of Skype… if you log into your account page at Skype.com today (or very early tomorrow), you can claim ten free minutes' outbound calling! Not a Skype user yet? Well, here's your cue.

  • Yahoo cracked calendar sync years ago

    Arguably the 'web 2.0' application I'm most looking forward to is a decent online calendar… with synchronisation. Don't get me wrong, I love what Google have done, and 30boxes is very promising too. But until one of them cracks the Outlook problem, letting me sync my local calendar with their web one, it's little more than a theoretical exercise. I can't have a calendar that can't sync.

    So I was a bit startled to discover that, actually, Yahoo cracked it years ago. It took some substantial detective work, but I came across a reference to a product called Intellisync – and eventually found details of it on Yahoo's site. And yes, it does what it promises.

    Intellisync for Yahoo! synchronizes schedule information from your other personal information managers with Yahoo! Calendar, contact information with Yahoo! Address Book, tasks with Yahoo! To-Do List, and notes with Yahoo! Notepad. Please note that you can also use your Yahoo! Address Book and Calendar with Yahoo! Mail, a free web-based mail service, for a complete and free personal information management solution on the Web.

    And it works. I've successfully put a new appointment into my PDA – a T-Mobile MDA Pro, running Windows Mobile 5; synchronised it with my desktop copy of Outlook 2002; and then synchronised that up to Yahoo's website.

    Am I ready to switch over to Yahoo? Er, not quite. I still don't quite know what to make of Yahoo. They seemed to buy up all the right innovators, like Flickr and del.icio.us, but I haven't seen any benefits to me yet (despite being a more-than-occasional user of both). And whilst I hear great things about their new mail interface, I can't seem to convert my old-school Yahoo account over to it.

    (Update: I found the workaround. The new interface is much prettier… but man, is the advertising intrusive! And as far as I can tell, it's still the same old calendar, despite the hot-stuff new mail app. Disappointing.)

    So I'm sticking with Google for now. Gmail still delights and amazes me. Google's calendar works beautifully, up to a point. I'm gradually being won over by Picasa, their photo management app. And they're (hopefully?) close to letting me bring my own domain to my Gmail account – as opposed to a rather primitive masking arrangement like now. Plus, it's still my search engine of first instinct. They just keep getting it right.

  • Left, right, left, right…

    Yes – it’s absolutely true. The US government has just launched a new design for its ‘front door to usability information from across government’, usability.gov. And there it is, in the right hand margin: Navigation: Left is Best. You can’t make it up.

  • Freemind, the rest follows

    Just a quick word to recommend the amazing Freemind program, available free from Sourceforge. I’ve never been a great one for ‘mind mapping’… but I needed a program to help me draw an organisational chart / sitemap, and it was perfect. It’s a bit rough round the edges, as many open source programs are. But boy, does it deliver. Just don’t get put off by the over-evangelical tones of its website.

  • 7/7 report positive on web

    Initial coverage of today’s report on last July’s London bombings is pretty negative. Inevitably, I suppose… there’s no news in the things that went right, only the things that went wrong. So it’s worth highlighting the compliments paid to two particular organisations:

    Transport for London recorded 600,000 visitors compared to the usual number of around 100,000. Transport for London sent out more than 600,000 e-mails on 7 July between 3 pm and 5 pm to people registered on its e-mail alerting system, and more than 50 per cent of these were opened within an hour. The Metropolitan Police Service updated its website 27 times during the day, and received 1.5 million ‘hits’.

    We would like to record the remarkable achievement by both Transport for London and the Metropolitan Police Service in maintaining their systems despite the peaks in the numbers of visitors to their websites.

    There’s interesting talk of something called ‘CasWeb’ in the Met’s Casualty Bureau:

    When it became operational, there were 42,000 attempted calls to the Casualty Bureau in the first hour. Each call lasted between seven and twelve minutes. We understand that, to handle the volume of calls that were received, 2,500 call-takers would be required. It is obviously not possible to put in place a Casualty Bureau of that size within hours of the onset of an incident. There will always be capacity issues. However, we have been given reassurances that the new โ€˜Caswebโ€™ technology being introduced by the MPS will significantly increase the capacity of any future Casualty Bureau to answer large volumes of calls.

    Does this sound like a searchable database of who’s definitely OK, and who isn’t? Great idea if it is. With so many people working in offices, a website (assuming it’s well enough publicised) would be a great way to reduce the strain on call centres and phone networks. I’m not sure what the site would tell you if you searched for someone confirmed as ‘dead’, though.