Puffbox

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

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  • Bye bye Ubuntu (for now)

    I gave up. A couple of weeks back, I turned my mono-boot Vista laptop into a mono-boot Ubuntu laptop with a screwed-up Vista configuration. I tried everything I could think of, but couldn’t get Vista back… so my laptop is currently on its way to Acer’s support HQ in Plymouth, where its hard disk will be re-flashed to its original Vista factory setup. Here ends another excursion into Linux territory.

    Inevitably, my fingers have been burned, and I’m reluctant to try it all again. To be honest, I’ll probably wait until Ubuntu releases its next edition in October, and install it to a (bootable) USB memory stick. I really like the ability to boot into Ubuntu… in some situations, it’s just better than Vista, simple as that. But I can’t risk losing Vista again. I can chuck a USB stick in the laptop bag, giving me the best of both worlds, at a cost of under ยฃ20 from Amazon (for a whopping 4GB).

    Oh, and to answer the inevitable question: no, I don’t think Ubuntu is ready for the desktop. Not quite, not yet. But I certainly am not betting against them. Let’s see what October brings.

  • Free music on demand, no strings

    They reckon it’s all legit, so I don’t feel bad about pointing to French-based Deezer: free music without download. It’s a bit like the iTunes store, in fact it’s very like the iTunes store… but without any nasty payment business. A Flash-based music player, with Ajax searching so the playback isn’t interrupted.

    I guess they’re paying royalties out of advertising revenue, but I’ve been using it for a day or two now, and haven’t clicked a single advert. It doesn’t have every song you might search for (especially if you’re the wrong side of 30), and quality can be variable, but it hits more often than it misses. All bad news for legit music sellers – especially since it isn’t exactly difficult to find software to save any streaming audio to local MP3.

  • More twittering at Sky News

    Sky News is republishing Twitter updates from someone called Christine Brogan, a British backpacker in Cancun as the hurricane hits. Doing some quick research (ie Facebook), it looks like she’s just a mate of someone in the newsroom. Which makes me wonder, purely hypothetically… if a news organisation spotted someone tweeting about a news event, is it ethical (or indeed sensible?) for them to republish the stream on their own pages? Twitter says it ‘encourage(s) users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms’, and I don’t see any copyright statement on the typical Twitter page.

  • Confidentiality warning: don't give feedback to NHS website

    The new and very web-2.0 NHS website allows you to offer your opinions on the service you’ve received at your local hospital. Having had the opportunity to try it out, I’m just a little worried about its approach to patient confidentiality.

    I was recently sent up to my local hospital for an X-ray, and was quite pleased to have an excuse to try the NHS facility out. Each hospital has a page labelled ‘your thoughts’, where you’re invited to write a short note about what you liked and disliked about your experience; and to rate the hospital out of 5 for cleanliness, pain control, staff cooperation, and so on. So I did; and within a day or so, allowing for moderation, the comments were posted on the NHS site.

    But there’s quite a serious problem. I’m the only respondent for my local hospital so far. So in terms of the average ‘marks out of five’ by all respondents, my marks are shown exactly as I submitted them, making them directly and very personally attributable. You can see my name, the date I was at the hospital, and what I thought of it. It’s just as well I was nice about it.

    It isn’t such a problem with the written commentary: you can write what you want, and self-censor as you go. But you don’t get that chance with a ‘marks out of five’ system. And it doesn’t allow for the rationale behind some of my answers: I didn’t rate them highly for pain control because, at the time, I wasn’t actually in pain.

    In a situation like this where data and identity are gathered (and indeed displayed) simultaneously, normal statistical practice would say you shouldn’t publish any numerical results until a certain number of responses are in – five or ten, maybe. I’m actually quite shocked that the NHS isn’t doing this. There’s also a continuing risk, in that – with aggregated scores given (I think) as a round figure out of 40 – it will be possible throughout the early days to keep track of the scores as each new response come in, to work out pretty accurately what the last person said.

    Until they sort this out, I’ll have to strongly advise people against submitting their thoughts.

  • Sky News to recruit hundreds of election bloggers

    I had heard whispers about this, but now it’s out in the open… Sky News has b-i-g online plans for the next general election, whenever it might come. They’re currently offering a PhD scholarship at City University in ‘Citizen Media / User-Generated Content’, with a specific role in mind:

    For the first year of their PhD the appointee will work closely with Sky News on an innovative project to recruit several hundred “citizen journalists” to report on the next UK general election campaign. The project aims to allow contributors to do more than simply give their opinion; instead they will be expected to write stories, take pictures and possibly record video.

     

    The appointee’s role would be to work closely with Sky News to recruit suitable contributors, mentor them and guide them in creating the right sort of content, and manage their contributions. … For approximately 4 days a week the appointee will be based within the Sky News website operation, and will also work with the Sky News Election campaign team.

    In other words – Sky’s killer idea for general election coverage is to hand it over to the bloggers. It makes a lot of sense to me: politics works on blogs, and the public is disillusioned with conventional political coverage. Sky has wisely spotted an opportunity to become the home of political blogging in the UK… and should look for ways to develop the kind of community interaction that can keep it interesting. (I won’t say any more for now…)

    Applications to be in by 31 August, but be warned: the ยฃ13k salary is not guaranteed after the first year. Er, I guess the lucky winner had better hope Gordon isn’t planning an early election. ๐Ÿ™‚

  • Are you watching, COI?

    Hello, 70 Whitehall! The FT reports that COI’s media monitoring unit is considering how to extend its coverage to the blogosphere. Hardly a surprise, but I suppose it’s another endorsement of the importance of the new channels, particularly in politics. According to MMU director Clarence Mitchell: ‘There’s a whole level of debate taking place online which simply didnโ€™t exist before and departments feel they need to be fully engaged in that.’ When he says ‘several were taken increasingly seriously within government’, one wonders which. Apart from the obvious couple.

    Incidentally, having been (I thought) quite nice about Iain Dale yesterday, I have to say his summary of the FT piece is pretty slanted, and not exactly accurate.

    The Financial Times reports that the government is about to set up a ‘blog monitoring unit’ (I kid you not).

    No, Iain, you do kid us. It’s not a new unit being set up, it’s an existing unit thinking about expanding its remit. And besides, as you proudly point out on regular occasions, political stories frequently break online, then find their way into the mainstream media – so it’s probably doing exactly the same job, just a day earlier. And anyway, what’s the alternative – ignore the blogosphere? How often do I read posts complaining that the government isn’t listening to ordinary people outside the Westminster Village? Sheesh, you just can’t win.

  • Next Cabinet Minister to start blogging is…

    An inside source tips me off to the existence of a server at blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk, and a work-in-progress site which seems to be laying the ground for Ed Miliband to start blogging. As my source points out, it must be a family thing. Only a string of test postings for the moment, and no obvious activity since 2 July. It’s being built on a platform called BlogEngine.NET which I haven’t previously come across: looks like it does everything you’d expect, with the added bonus of not requiring an underlying database.

    Quick update: the work-in-progress site is no longer visible. Not sure why – there wasn’t really anything contentious on it. (Although if it were me, I wouldn’t have made it visible until it was ready anyway.) Thankfully, traces remain in Google’s cache…

  • Mouse squeaks, lion roars back

    There’s something faintly surreal at the lengths Helen Boaden goes to, to rebut Iain Dale’s claims that the BBC was biased in its reporting of the weekend’s Tory red tape review. If you wanted evidence of how ‘proper’ media is taking bloggers seriously, here it is.

  • Calling all ministerial bloggers?

    It just occurred to me that since the reshuffle, we no longer have any officially blogging ministers in Whitehall. Miliband hasn’t restarted his efforts since taking over at the Foreign Office… and both DWP efforts have been mothballed, following moves for the relevant ministers. Unless you know better…?

    Actually, if you hang on a couple of weeks, there will be a ministerially-led blog appearing in the vicinity of Whitehall. But don’t tell anyone I told you.

  • Reporting via Twitter is *so* yesterday

    Sadly Sky News reporter Derek Tedder’s experiment in Twitter-driven journalism seems to have been short-lived: there’s been nothing from him since mid-yesterday afternoon. Press Gazette’s Martin Stabe has plenty of additional detail, including a few quotes which Sky EP Julian March probably should have polished up before handing over. I certainly don’t remember ever using the phrase ‘tits and arse’ in the weekly traffic reports I pioneered during my Osterley days.

    Actually… we don’t seem to have an updated Sky web video bulletin since last week. Full marks for experimentation chaps, but it’s starting to smack of attention deficit disorder.