Puffbox

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

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    New Today programme site's post-match interviews

    There’s a new look to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme’s website. Gone is the bizarre Soviet styling, to be replaced by something a bit more blue and funky. Stalinist to Cameron-esque? It would be churlish to note the coincidental synchronisation with the swing of the opinion polls at the moment.

    A couple of additions seem worth mentioning: a box for ‘REACTION FROM AROUND THE WEB’ (ie blogs) on the homepage, plus feeds from del.icio.us and Twitter accounts; and the rather odd spectacle of Sarah Montague’s video review… which resembles a footballer’s post-match interview in front of a board of sponsors’ logos, and is equally enlightening. ‘We’re mid-way through the second half, I’ve thrown it to Nick Robinson, he’s dropped in a blinding anecdote…’ You get the idea.

    Worth noting, too, that Evan Davis is back blogging again, this time under an intriguing address: /blogs/today/evandavis. Which surely leaves open the prospect of /blogs/today/johnhumphrys in due course? We can but hope.

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    BNP's shocking WordPress-powered website

    Late last year, I noted that the British National Party’s website was (by some degree) the most popular among UK political parties – and got dissed by the Telegraph for not linking to it. I wrote at the time that the site wasn’t exactly up to much, and I don’t have reason to visit it regularly. But, in the process of gathering some data on parties’ online activity, I dropped by yesterday… and got quite a shock.

    At the start of the year, the BNP relaunched its website. ‘Making the maximum use of the Internet has always been a priority for the BNP because the Party is censored and so misrepresented by the establishment media,’ said an article in their newsletter, Freedom. (Well, yeah, OK, carry on.) ‘The updated website helps fulfil this ambition with the sites new web pages matching and even bettering the traditional news and politics outlets.’ You know what? They’re not entirely exaggerating.

    The new site is based on WordPress, and is managing to turn over half a dozen stories daily: a combination of news items and columnists’ contributions, all attracting decent numbers of reader comments, with sharing buttons included. They’re using a well-established, off-the-shelf theme (The Morning After), with a bit of (less than subtle) customisation. The overall effect is very slick, very professional… and yes, their claim about ‘matching and bettering’ probably does stand up.

    There’s a wider lesson here. Blogging – by politicians, activists, journalists and amateurs – is now an established part of politics. I know of at least one major government website which is about to relaunch itself in a blog format; now here’s the first political party site to throw itself properly into that game. I dare say it won’t be the last.

    PS: The theme they’re using? Designed by an Indian chap. 🙂

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    Why Parliament doesn't like YouTube

    LibDem MP Jo Swinson raised the subject of parliamentary video clips going on YouTube, during questions to the Leader of the House last week. You can see it below.

    Helen Goodman’s response is enlightening: video material isn’t allowed to be hosted on a site where it can be searched or downloaded ‘to ensure that it is not re-edited or reused inappropriately for campaigning or satirical purposes’. In this day and age, it’s ridiculous…

    …as is proven, of course, by the very fact that I can post the above video clip courtesy of TheyWorkForYou‘s new ‘mechanical Turk‘-style manual markup initiative, and BBC Parliament’s recordings.

    It’s another MySociety project where my overwhelming feeling is disappointment: it’s sad that it has to come to this. And unfortunately, where Amazon can offer cash, MySociety can only offer warm feelings. But they seem to be making startling progress.

    By the way… the list of signatories to Jo Swinson’s early day motion is interesting, with quite a bit of Northern Irish interest, and almost nothing from WebCameron’s Tories.

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    Embed RSS feeds via Google

    RSS is my answer to everything. So simple, so straightforward, so flexible. Yet, as I’ve mentioned here before, I’m amazed how few government web sites – especially new ones – offer feeds. The number using RSS feeds to pull content in, of course, is even smaller. A few months back, I asked readers how many had websites which could import content via RSS. The results were depressingly predictable (or should that be predictably depressing?).

    If it’s something you’d like to add to your site, Google might well have a solution. They’ve made available a ‘feed API’, based on simple Javascript, to pull headlines together from any RSS feeds (yes, plural) you specify, and turn them into HTML for inclusion in your pages. You can have a conventional one-line ticker, or a vertical presentation: in an aggregated list, or divided by source. Adding a live view of the latest headlines from any given (RSS-enabled) site just became as easy as copy-and-paste… assuming your CMS is OK about you entering Javascript.

    Of course Google’s far from the first to do this… but I’ve never seen a similar service with the same big-name, long-term backing. The code looks relatively simple to hack if you need to, and you should be able to dress it up in the host site’s font/colours using basic CSS. Plus, the Google ‘widgets’ are really neat, with hover effects and animations built in. It’s far from ‘industrial strength’, but it might well be enough for smaller projects.

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    CoverItLive adds branding options

    Hosted live-blogging service CoverItLive, by far the best way to liveblog, always came with a catch. You could set it up, and drop it into your website, in minutes… but it was very obviously a rather crude embedding of ‘someone else’s service’. Their logo, their font, not yours. But not any more.

    Effective today, there’s an option on the CoverItLive admin interface for ‘My Viewer Window’, allowing you to create your own presentation style by uploading your own logos, resizing the window to fit your design, and selecting one of the web’s ‘usual suspects’ fonts. The images must be a specific pixel size, which isn’t actually a bad thing in my book… and must be GIF, JPG, PNG or (intriguingly!) Flash. There’s still a small ‘powered by CoverItLive’ message in the corner, but hey – give them a break!

    The ‘main image’ is effectively a ‘splash screen’, for when the liveblogging isn’t ‘on’ – so you probably don’t need to worry too much about it, frankly. (Maybe do a cute ‘please wait’ message or something?) The ‘secondary image’ appears at the bottom of the iframe, and sits on top of a grey strip with a background image applied. To make it look most natural, I’d suggest you use a transparent 24-bit PNG: that should sit beautifully and seamlessly on top.

    I’m talking to a couple of clients who are excited by the possibilities of live-blogging. I wholeheartedly recommended CoverItLive as the solution, but with a (single) caveat about the lack of visual integration with the client site. That problem has gone away overnight. The CoverItLive guys are doing everything you could ask of them, and they entirely deserve their top spot in this emerging field.

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    New Comment Is Free adds 'blog of comments'

    A big day for the Guardian today, as the new community-enabled Comment Is Free makes its debut. Site editor Georgina Henry describes the various mechanical and presentational changes, but one in particular catches my eye.

    Each user of the site now has a personal profile page… featuring an ‘instant archive’ of all the comments they’ve added to Cif articles. It’s the realisation of the ‘blog of comments’ concept I described a year ago, prior to the launch of the Telegraph’s own blogging platform:

    Every time I add a comment to a Telegraph news story (for example), it would get aggregated on a ‘personal profile’ page… in other words, a de facto ‘news blog’. You automatically see the headline (and first paragraph?) of the story I commented on, followed by what I thought. It lets me write what is effectively a news-driven blog, but does a lot of the copy-and-paste work for me.

    The presentation of these profile pages is pretty dreadful. It’s little more than a few lines of metadata, followed by something resembling search results. No customisation options, no uploaded ‘buddy icons’, no RSS feed per user*, no in-profile navigation (other than pagination), no sort options.

    So there’s a very long way to go before these profiles become recognised as ‘blogs’. But make no mistake, that’s what they are. It’s blogging without the overhead, and it ties the blogger ever closer to the Guardian brand and site (whose primary navigation Cif now shares).

    * In fact, the new Cif’s lack of RSS overall is a real shame. Cif’s biggest problem is that there’s just too much of it. A single RSS feed, covering all topics, isn’t much help. I really hope these are a feature of the topic-based ‘subsites’ Georgina refers to. They’re getting RSS and subject filtering so right elsewhere on the Guardian site… but Cif needs it more than any other section.

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    BBC's new /topics pages

    See, this is what you can do when you’ve got lots of information, all properly tagged and structured. The BBC’s new /topics pages are entirely automated, and pull together content from across their online offerings – iPlayer, the News site, weather, /programmes – into a nicely presented ‘everything we know about X’ page. A modest 66 topics to start with, by my calculation, but the promise of many more. Try these examples: NHS, Gordon Brown, Liechtenstein. (And check out the pretty addressing, too.)

    Over on the BBC Internet Blog, Matthew McDonnell explains how it uses ‘a variety of search techniques to create feeds of the latest BBC content’. I’m guessing a lot of it is down to a subject taxonomy, or free-text search for certain keywords. However it works, its beauty is encapsulated by this section:

    Because the overhead involved in maintaining these pages is so low, we can cover many more subjects than we could using traditionally edited pages which had to be manually updated by a human being. As the feeds used in /topics are automatic, we can be confident that all the pages are bang up-to-date.

    In many respects, this is the ‘holy grail’ of every taxonomy project. Well done to the BBC for actually making it happen; although it’s likely to encourage others to attempt to follow suit. And most will fail. (Yes they will.) And for the future?

    We want to include high quality content from outside the BBC to enhance our pages. We’ll be working on providing feeds of news and blogs from sources other than the BBC. Yes, feeds [for you to build into your own website] will be available soon.

    It’s genuinely brilliant: can we call it a hybrid of Wikipedia and Wikinews, with the added benefit of trusted editorial oversight? Just please, don’t try it at home.

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    On the political parties' sites…

    I’ve been looking at the various political party websites today, planning a possible enhancement to my onepolitics website. A few nuggets you might be interested in…

    • Plaid Cymru are on Twitter. Only a token effort, and only 9 mates. But it’s a start. (And its bilingual.) To their credit, they’ve also got presences on YouTube, Facebook and Flickr (details here).
    • The SNP don’t seem to have a YouTube presence. Seems odd, when they were among the first to get into it. (Anyone know of it?)
    • One thing the SNP do have, and it makes me a little uncomfortable, is a News Aggregator on their main party site. Why uncomfortable? Because it’s effectively just republishing an RSS feed from www.scotland.gov.uk (using Drupal’s built-in aggregation tool, by the look of it). Yet another blurring of the line between government and politics… and very awkward, where independence is an important characteristic (eg National Statistics stuff).
    • and most worrying of all… if you look for the site of Ian Paisley Peter Robinson’s DUP, and you happen to be running Google’s Desktop search app, you get presented with this.

    Visiting this site may harm your computer!

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    The best we can do?

    Nominations have closed for this, the tenth year of the New Statesman new media awards. So the winners of the five trophies are (theoretically) listed somewhere on this page. You might find a few gems you didn’t previously know about, but overall, I instinctively find the list a bit depressing.

    Most nominees have only received a single nomination, in many cases by themselves, judging by the frequent use of the words ‘I’ and ‘we’. Most are pretty straightforward uses of off-the-shelf technology, by ‘one man band’ operations. And from a technical and/or creative perspective, most frankly aren’t great.

    Maybe there’s a lesson in that. It’s now trivially easy to set up a passable website. Quality still takes time and skill, but you can get to the start line in next to no time, and with minimal up-front investment. From there, it’s really a question of the passion and commitment of the site ‘owner’, and its readership / community.

    But I dare say it’ll be the bigger fish who will win. Expect at least one for MySociety. And I’d like to see recognition for the London Mayor ‘votematch‘ site, one of the few sites recently to really make me think. (The result it gave still haunts me.)

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    Meet the mainstream

    Just to draw your attention to the latest website traffic numbers published by Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale. Now I’ve no desire to stir up previous arguments about statistical validity, certainly not here. But I do note Guido ‘s observation that his blog is now more popular than ITN, and Iain Dale attracts more traffic than the Guardian’s Politics site (excluding Comment Is Free, which may or may not be valid).

    Guido uses this to lay down a challenge – ‘who is the mass media now?’ – whilst Iain observes that there’s ‘an increasing overlap, whereby bloggers are now writing for and appearing on the MSM with increased regularity and mainstream journalists are now blogging’. Fair points on both fronts.

    Meanwhile, look at the numbers (in February) for the official party websites. Tories top, BNP a close second, Labour a distant third. All well behind the site for a man we can’t even vote for over here, though.