Puffbox

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

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  • Tory MP funds 'Me-Tube' site with Commons allowance

    Earlier in the week, I mentioned the Commons debate about MPs’ communications with their constituents – and mused on greater use of the internet for precisely that effect. So full marks to Tory MP Douglas Carswell, the member for Harwich (and Clacton).

    Carswell is behind a new site, www.clactontv.com, which promises ‘to cover stories that interest you – using video clips made by you’. If, that is, you’re among the 102,028 people living in ‘Clacton, Harwich, Frinton, Walton, Jaywick, Holland-on-Sea, Dovercourt, Thorpe, Kirby and District.’

    At first glance, you probably wouldn’t spot that the local MP was behind it; but glance at the footer, and you’ll see: ‘Douglas Carswell MP is responsible for this site, which is funded from the Incidental Expenses Provision of the House of Commons.’ The key to this is that it doesn’t mention his political allegiance, so it can be called ‘parliamentary’ in nature rather than ‘party political’… and therefore, it can be funded from his Commons allowance.

    Early days, of course, with a few bits of placeholder text here and there (tut tut). But still some very encouraging signs. You’re invited to contribute your own video clips by email or DVD; there’s an RSS feed of all new clips, complete with iTunes tagging. There’s also a related forum site, talkclacton.com.

    The site is produced by Politicos Design, using what looks like in-house JSP-based code. Like everything these days, the videos are being streamed using Flash – at a better-than-average resolution of 480×336. They’re using Politicos’ own servers, hosted by Positive Internet, rather than Youtube (etc). Personally, I’d have been inclined to use the free service, especially in the early days, and not just for reasons of cost: with a service like Youtube, there are well-established methods of including hosted videos in other pages. (You’ve probably seen me do it myself here a few times.) If you’re serious about harnessing the power of the community, why not let the community do some of the work?

    Carswell’s main personal site is located at www.douglascarswell.com – and it, too, is funded from the IEP. Again, references to his Conservative Party allegiance are thin on the ground… but the front page offers ‘national news’, driven (I think) by the RSS feed of news stories from conservatives.com. One can’t help feeling that’s pushing the definition of IEP expenditure a bit. It’s clearly been a conscious decision not to push the Conservative branding… yet half the front-page content is pure Tory propaganda.

    Carswell was one of the 23 Tories (along with leading blogger Iain Dale) behind ‘Direct Democracy: An Agenda for a New Model Party‘, published in June 2005 with a commitment to ‘making localism the core of the Conservative Party’s platform’.

  • Health and Safety Executive running WordPress

    Just noticed another ‘non-blog’ in government circles… since May this year, the Health and Safety Executive has been running a news website, www.hsenews.com, based on WordPress v2.0.2. A little disappointingly, though, its sole purpose seems to be linking back to the main HSE website, with each ‘blog posting’ barely a paragraph. (Does that constitute a ‘link farm‘?) Getting on for 100 categories, archiving by date, but as you’d probably expect, no comment function.

    It’s not dissimilar to the Typepad-based Find Out More non-blog I set up for the Department for Education and Skills about the same time (or slightly earlier 🙂 ). And with a bit of luck, I should have news of another major government department doing likewise, within a week or two. I’ve done (virtually) all the tech work… it’s just a question of them being ready to roll.

  • My transient portfolio

    I’ve spent virtually all my career working fulltime in the new media environment. Overall, that’s been brilliant. But one catch is the transient nature of your work. Look through my CV and you’ll see a list of high-profile projects and employers/clients. A quick Google check will find the right web address… but it’s almost certainly not the same website that I built, maybe a decade ago. And web.archive.org will only get you so far.

    On reflection, I should probably have kept more screengrabs. But even then, you wouldn’t get a fair picture of ‘how it was back then’. Some of the design was cutting-edge for its time, but just doesn’t stand up by today’s standards.

    So it was a real treat to discover that one particular project, from a full nine years ago, remains exactly as I left it. Whilst working for the Foreign Office, I was seconded for a couple of weeks to help the Commonwealth Secretariat as they organised their 1997 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh. I decided to run a ‘daily online newspaper’ for the event, covering the event’s formalities and informalities. There were picture galleries, with (relatively) hi-res imagery for free download; a bit of audio, although if we’d made the MiniDisc player work better, we’d have done more; and a daily global (web-based) press review.

    Looking back, I have to say, I’m pretty proud of it. All coded by hand, on a Viglen 486 laptop with a 640×480 colour screen (in the days when that was a big deal), and uploaded manually via FTP and a 14.4 dial-up line. Of course, these days, I’d just chuck it all in WordPress and have done with it. But it’s nice to think I might actually have invented the ‘conference blog’ with this?!

  • Give every MP a blog, save taxpayers £millions

    Talk today in the Commons about MPs’ communication to their constituents. The BBC reports: ‘MPs could get an extra £10,000 a year to help them keep in touch with constituents in a planned shake-up of the commons allowances system. Commons leader Jack Straw said a change to the expenses policy was needed as MPs now received 300 letters a week.’

    The article goes on to quote Straw: ‘We do have to keep up with the times. There is a demand, not for a report with glossy photographs of a sitting MP but actually describing in some detail what I have been doing.’ Hang on… cheap one-to-many communication? describing your constituency work in detail? Did somebody say ‘blog’?

    As I was discussing with a fellow pro the other day… the tools are now available at negligible cost. Give every MP a WordPress-based blog (cost: free), based on the recently released WordPress MU v1.0, on some external hosting space (cost: maybe as little as £150 per year). Get someone who knows what they’re doing to set it up. Lots of RSS and email alerting. And plenty of change from your 10-grand-a-head.

  • Microsoft reveals search term data

    Not sure how much to trust it, given the lengthy disclaimer (‘anecdotal’, ‘proof of concept’, etc)… but it’s good to see Microsoft offering hard numbers on the keywords used in searches. Not quite as great as the equivalent from Yahoo, which gives precise numbers for each keyword – and for each combination using that keyword. Still my favourite data source out there. Still no sign of Google sharing its numbers.

    If you do any serious writing for the web, especially in a commercial role, you should be checking these two sites. Use the same words in your headlines and page titles as people use in their searches. This is how to buy your way up the Google rankings.

  • You're not special

    I’m getting increasingly annoyed by the current IBM advertising campaign: ‘what makes you special?’ Here’s the one thing I’ve learned building countless websites for large organisations – you are not special.

    IBM special campaign

    More or less everything you want out of your new website, or your new CMS, is more or less what more or less everyone else wants. Accept that, use what comes ‘off the shelf’, and you’ll be up and running in no time. But if you insist on being different, and customising the off-the-shelf solution to the nth degree, you’ll spend unjustifiable amounts of time and money, for which you’ll almost certainly never see a decent return.

  • Sky News to slash Irish operations

    Sky News is cutting its Irish operations to the bone, from a total of 25 staff in Belfast and Dublin, to – er – five. The two Sky News Ireland bulletins, which were getting pretty dismal ratings, will cease at the end of November. Speaking as a Belfast native myself, I suppose this is the flipside of the ‘peace dividend’. A stable Northern Ireland just isn’t news any more.

    Oh – and I note that the New Statesman is also reversing its digital ambitions. Not only is it dropping the paid-for subscription model from 17 November, but it’s introducing additional free web-only content.

  • Yes I have checked the plugs are plugged in

    We need some kind of secret password to share among the world’s technically literate. I’ve just spent 40 minutes trying to arrange an exchange on a faulty piece of hardware… of which 30 minutes were your basic ‘have you checked the plugs are all in tightly?’. Yes mate, I have.

    I’m not ringing you up for a friendly chat; I’m only ringing you up because I have to. So when I said – in the first sentence after you answered the phone – that I needed to arrange an exchange, that was because I needed to arrange an exchange. A conclusion you eventually shared with me after 35 minutes, on an 0870 number too. (So not only is it wasted time for me, it’s profit for you, at my expense. Thanks.)

  • Youtube as a news release channel

    Very interesting to see this video posted on Youtube: it’s a one-minute statement from SNP leader Alex Salmond delivering a Halloween warning that ‘the ghost of Iraq is going to haunt Tony Blair’. Of course, Salmond isn’t the first politician we’ve seen on Youtube… but this is the first instance I’ve seen of (effectively) a ‘video news release’.

    [youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=5vAdK7eYLBo]

    It’s very much a ‘today’ video. It’ll be old news by tea time, in all likelihood. But the easy access to cheap technology – clip mic, camcorder, editing software, hosting provider – makes this sort of thing possible and practical. Another example of ‘guerilla media’ tactics from the Celtic parties, and one to be (broadly) welcomed.

  • Free again: Ricky Gervais

    Interesting to note that Ricky Gervais is back doing free podcasts via the Guardian website, promising three specials for Halloween, Thanksgiving (?) and Christmas, according to MediaGuardian. I just hope we get a bit more from Stephen Merchant this time round… for me, he was the star of Extras. Even the simplest reference to ‘Barry off Eastenders’ made me laugh every time.

    And while we’re on the podcast theme… I notice there are new(ish) series by Jarvis Cocker (oh, so that’s what he’s up to these days) and Danny Kelly (sadly sans Baker) available through iTunes. I’m downloading them now, so I can’t vouch for their quality. Don’t blame me if they’re rubbish.