Puffbox

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

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  • Telegraph going big on TV

    So I guess we know what big things Shane at the Telegraph was talking about (presumably?). The Guardian reveals that there are to be ‘seven new (online) TV programmes, including … a weekly political talkshow featuring Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe.’ And as the Telegraph’s Guy Ruddle isn’t shy about declaring, ‘It is political TV with bias.’ So… Doughty Street with brand names, then?

    I must admit, I’d missed the fact that ‘As part of a resource reallocation, Telegraph.co.uk stopped its daily news podcast and its Telegraph PM pdf download at the end of the last year.’ But I’m not entirely surprised.

    I’m increasingly of the opinion that podcasts will find it hard to bag a slot in most people’s daily lives (except perhaps for Tube commuters). But TV-via-broadband is definitely a goer. As mentioned here before, I’ve now got a Wii in the living room – and its main use has been as a big-screen web browser. Sitting down for a bit of YouTubing is becoming a regular event, and feels entirely natural.

  • Public servants and politics

    Interesting to see ‘previously a-politicial’ NHS blogger Dr Crippen laying his political cards on the table, and joining the new multi-author blog CentreRight.com, a subsection of ConservativeHome. (Thanks Iain.)

    Looking closely at the ‘about us’ text, CentreRight.com declares itself to be ‘a hub for the British conservative movement’ – note the small ‘c’. And I guess by some people’s standards, Labour are a centre-right party these days. But as an offshoot of ConHome, there’s no doubting where its political affiliations lie. Playing devil’s advocate for a moment… OK, so now we know Dr Crippen’s political ‘agenda’. It’s hardly a shock. But does it make him more or less trustworthy as a ‘front-line blogger’?

    It probably shouldn’t. If you care about your work, if you care enough to blog, why shouldn’t you become more closely involved with those who may/will eventually run the NHS? (In that sense, it’s actually admirable: someone prepared to put his money where his mouth is.) But whilst his writing may not change, people’s reading of it may well do. Sad but true.

  • Fancy directing Directgov?

    Hmm, interesting. Directgov is looking for three non-executive directors. Who’s up for it?

  • Act On CO2 a success: Hitwise

    Fascinating data from Hitwise’s Robin Goad on the apparent success of the recent Act On CO2 campaign. Not only has it pushed up the number of search queries (and one assumes, traffic to the site); but it’s a very pleasant surprise to see two of the top 5 destinations for searches on ‘CO2’ are government sites. A third is Wikipedia, which is almost a given these days. The other two are US-based.

    Update: caught the TV advert earlier today… and I see they’ve reverted back to the ‘search for Act On CO2‘ tagline, as opposed to quoting the Directgov URL. Well, I guess that would explain why searches for that particular phrase are up – I doubt many search terms have a TV campaign dedicated to them. Plus, I guess it means they were happy that the ‘no URL’ approach worked last time.

    (Oh – and I was going to embed the advert in question for your viewing pleasure, but can’t find it anywhere on YouTube. This despite the fact there is an Act On CO2 user registered. No activity there post-Miliband, by the look of it. Are we far enough into this revolution to be shocked when you can’t find something on YouTube?)

  • UK schools told not to upgrade to Vista

    Becta, the technology-in-education agency chaired by former e-Envoy Andrew Pinder, put out a report earlier this week telling schools and colleges that the time was still not right to upgrade to either Windows Vista or Office 2007. If you’re extending an existing network, their recommendation is to stick with XP; I can sympathise. It took my Vista laptop nearly half an hour to shut down last night.

    If you’re using Office 2007, they say, you should continue saving stuff in the old .doc / .xls / .ppt formats. Plus – ‘pupils, teachers and parents should also be made aware of the wide range of free-to-use products currently available and on how to use and access them.’ Hear hear.

  • Whatever happened to Schoolsweb?

    Schoolsweb was/is going to be one of the biggest web projects in e-government, bringing together a number of education-centric websites into a single 50,000-page service, with personalisation and email alerting and all that. But as the Guardian noted a year ago today, it was in ‘a bit of a tangle’.

    ‘The ยฃ12m Schoolsweb is to be one of the first “eChannels” to be run on a government-wide web infrastructure… Schoolsweb was due to be launched at the end of 2005. However, the project team was told at the end of (2006) that “poor delivery quality of the first release of this infrastructure has led to significant delays, preventing work from starting on content migration”. The latest go-live date is September.’

    Well, September 2007 came and went; and the page at www.schoolsweb.gov.uk is still the placeholder which first appeared in 2006. Heroically though, I note that Fluent Interaction, the agency who designed (and to a large extent, specified) the Schoolsweb site are listing the (still unpublished) work in their company portfolio. Their caveat – ‘challenging build phase pending the full launch of the website shortly’ – is most diplomatic, although still in the present tense.

  • Why aren't you using open source?

    Earlier this morning, a contact asked me to provide a list of reasons why I think a Whitehall department should adopt an open-source tool like WordPress. Then at lunchtime, James Higgs (ex Interesource) reflects on the headache caused by ownership of code in the event of company collapse:

    For the benefit of people negotiating with people to write you software and provide hosting, I strongly advise you to establish an escrow agreement whereby a copy of the latest source code and data is regularly deposited with a trusted third party in case the company goes bust.

    True enough; that’s certainly one approach. But as James points out, ‘open-sourcing’ the Interesource code in the first place would have avoided this: ‘not just because we could potentially harness the power of the community, but also because it would protect our existing clients and make us more attractive to new ones.’

    It’s funny. Not so long ago, the question was ‘why should I be using open source?’ Increasingly, I’m left wondering why anyone would use anything other than open source.

    James has some interesting thoughts on WordPress itself, incidentally. My own feeling (which won’t come as any surprise) is that I’ve been able to make WordPress do pretty much everything I’ve ever asked of it… everything from blogs to ‘proper CMS’. I absolutely agree with the principle of ‘do the simplest thing that could possibly work’: and increasingly, that’s WordPress, especially if you’re lucky enough to be starting from scratch.

  • Eight years later…

    I’m currently ploughing through some old content on behalf of a Whitehall client, dutifully migrating all the ‘public record’ stuff ahead of an imminent site relaunch (of which more next week). I just came across a press release from April 2000, which promised:

    A groundbreaking Government portal to be launched in July – the first of its kind. This will provide a single electronic point of entry to central and local Government which will be able to access all services. It will be capable of personalisation – with citizens able to match the home page to their own interests. It will also use push technology, so it can send reminders about changes in services or important dates. A future example could be, receiving a personal e-mail when your TV licence or car tax needs renewing.

    Er, whatever happened? (Two years earlier, I’d produced the groundbreaking Foreign Office website which included homepage personalisation and push technology, so yes – it was possible.)

  • Demise of Interesource

    Commendable transparency from Shane at the Telegraph, regarding the collapse of their technology partner Interesource. I must admit, I’d completely missed news of their demise (as apparently had Shane… and Wikipedia, still referring to them in the present tense.) They seemed to be carving out a decent niche in the news/politics field, with the Telegraph work and the Conservatives’ Stand Up Speak Up site. I also know they were talking seriously to one other Major Media Brand (but that the figures they were quoting were rather, er, high).

    There isn’t much detail about how it all went wrong: no hint from the archived content on the Interesource staff blogs, and the little detail offered by those suddenly jobless doesn’t sound pretty. Meanwhile, the Telegraph guys are working on something with ex-Interesourcer James Higgs’s new operation.

    I guess this all explains why the Mirror is now using Movable Type for its Kevin Maguire blog, having used Interesource’s irPublish platform until recently – by my reckoning, until the week before Christmas. The Maguire header still contains an entry for blogs.mirror.co.uk – which gives Page Not Found. But we’ve still got doggysnaps, I suppose.

  • Recruitment advertising won't die

    Interesting to note the Scottish media’s concern at the prospect of a launch of a jobs portal by the Scottish Executive Government ‘which poses a threat to the advertising businesses of every newspaper in the country’. Of course, we’ve had a centralised jobs portal in the form of the Civil Service Recruitment Gateway for several years, and I’m pretty sure the Guardian is still going. And despite the rosy picture painted by the official best practice guide, now in its second edition, I find it slightly galling to see CSRG advising people to ‘take advantage of developing technologies’. A few years ago now, I tried (and failed) to persuade them to adopt RSS. A single central publishing solution, with the ability to syndicate vacancies back to source departments’ corporate sites in a standardised XML format, would have been a killer app. I thought I had them sold on it several years ago; it never happened. (Thanks to Martin for the tip.)