Puffbox

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

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    BBC's lessons for management blogs

    The BBC’s Jem Stone adds an interesting perspective on the success (so far) of the BBC’s management / editorial blogs, in a comment on ex-BBC man Alfred Hermida‘s blog. There are very valuable lessons here for many similar ‘transparency through blogging’ initiatives, not least in government and politics:

    Weโ€™ve found that [engagement with readers’ feedback] is possible (and Iโ€™m talking about the BBC mgt internet blog here but Iโ€™d say it applies to other similar propositions) but only when weโ€™ve had two factors in place:

    a) Strong ownership (buy in from senior management even when criticism from users is a โ€œs**tstormโ€ as Ashley Highfield dubbed the initial BBC iPlayer/Mac period the other day) and

    b) Investment in community facilitation, monitoring and hosting. Monitoring feedback and having the antennae to alert issues to teams (and thus the knowledge of the tools that makes this now a lot easier) is often overlooked. Doing this well canโ€™t be done by magic.

    Hope you don’t mind, Jem – I’ve fixed the spelling. ๐Ÿ™‚

    Incidentally… this isn’t the first time recently where the most valuable insight has been in the comments, and not in the originating blog post. If you’re deciding whether or not to open your pages up to readers’ comments, don’t just think of the management overhead. Think what you might be missing out on.

  • WordPress named best free CMS

    I’m amazed that .net magazine is still going at all, never mind that it’s reached its 177th issue. The focus moved from consumer magazine to industry journal a long time ago, and it’s well put together. But the six quid cover price still came as quite a shock.

    To their credit, they made the right choice when producing an article on how to ‘choose the best free CMS’ this month. Quite rightly, they drew no distinction between ‘blog’ and ‘proper CMS’ solutions; and quite rightly, they ranked WordPress top of the list, with a five-star review – although the feature’s conclusion was ultimately ‘horses for courses’.

    In the last couple of years, the WordPress platform has surged in popularity, partly due to a mistake by Six Apart in how it licensed Movable Type. It has great community support and is frequently updated. Recently there have been some concerns about how secure it is, but the recent release of WordPress 2.5 has seen significant improvements. *****

    Whilst I remember the fuss about Movable Type’s licensing, I’d personally suggest WordPress’s popularity is more down to the fact that it’s such a great tool in its own right. If that had been such an issue, you’d have expected a resurgence for Movable Type after they went open source with v4 – but I’ve yet to notice it.

    A few years ago, I’d probably have seen this as a fantastic endorsement by a high-credibility source. But since I no longer see print as having any greater credibility than online, it barely registers a blip. Mind you, I can imagine myself using the words ‘five-star review’ in my next few pitches.

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    Re-engaging the public through violence

    Super Political BoxingI blame the Tories. They brought us ‘A Kick in the Balls‘, an attempt to make political capital from some (apparently) frank exchanges round the Cabinet table, with a Flash beat-em-up game aimed squarely at the viral market. Tekken it wasn’t. (In fact, playable it wasn’t.)

    Now, remarkably, we have Super Political Boxing for your mobile phone. It’s a reworking of a previous apolitical sports game by mobile specialists Glu, which goes for cartoon-style fun along the lines of the classic Punch Out, more than the simulation of EA Sports’s Knockout Kings / Fight Night series.

    It’s your chance to vent your anger against such world leaders as Bush, Berlusconi, Putin, a remarkably beefy Angela Merkel, and our own Mr Brown (with a guest appearance by his predecessor). It’s far from the most sophisticated mobile phone game I’ve ever played, but I’m partial to the occasional boxing game. The graphics are well done, it’s actually playable as a game, and it’s a laugh. Which, I guess, is all it was ever trying to be.

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    Here is the news

    Some very interesting numbers from Robin Goad at Hitwise, showing just how dominant (or not, he concludes) the BBC News website is in the UK news market.

    What I find most interesting is the mix of news providers in this ranking. You’ve got broadcasters, newspapers, portals and aggregators (both social and automated), with no one grouping particularly dominant over any other. The Daily Mail has gone from nowhere to being the national #2; meanwhile, the Independent’s radical redesign has yet to really pay off. And look at the Guardian: below the Telegraph, below Sky News even.

    ‘The market share of BBC News in the category has increased slightly over the last 3 years,’ Robin observes; ‘but at the same time overall visits to the News and Media category have increased at a much faster rate, and most of this increased traffic has gone to non-BBC sites.’ This, he suggests, ‘points to a healthy and competitive online market in the UK, not one dominated by one player.’

    Personally, I’m looking at a market being led by one provider whose share (based on the table above, anyway) adds up to significantly more than its 14 nearest competitors put together. How dominant do you want?

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    @WordPress Happy Birthday!

    Five years ago today, a new blogging platform was released to the world for the first time. WordPress was the successor to b2/cafelog, itself launched in June 2001 – and indeed, it’s amusing to review Cafelog’s readme from 2002, which describes many of the very same functions I’m using on a regular basis. WordPress launched with a redesigned admin interface made ‘as simple as possible, and no more’; and streamlined presentation templates ‘with the latest in simple, easy-to-understand standard XHTML and CSS’.

    Five years on, it’s these very same qualities which make it – in my view – such an important piece of code today.

    I can’t stress enough how much WordPress means to me. I started just over Puffbox just over a year ago, with the intention of doing mainly advisory work, and rarely getting my hands dirty. But it soon became obvious that WordPress was a platform I could work with. It took care of the ugly, complicated stuff I knew I didn’t understand, letting me get on with the top-layer stuff I knew so well. And it offered users a front-end which allowed them to do virtually everything they (really) needed, without bugging their chums in IT.

    The Puffbox proposition changed overnight. Now I’m now just preaching a gospel of open source-led, low-cost, high-speed site development, I’m able to actually deliver it myself.

    People come to Puffbox looking for two things. One: rapid development of small-scale websites, which can be managed without an IT department. Two: larger websites with ‘blog-esque’ or ‘2.0’ features as standard – community, comments, inbound and outbound feeds, etc. And invariably, WordPress is equal to the task.

    I often reflect on the line from psychologist Abraham Maslow: ‘If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail.’ Maybe there are better or neater ways to do what I do. Maybe smarter or more experienced people would do it differently. All I know is, people like what I’m delivering. It’s fast, it’s cheap and it works – often better than the million-quid solution they hate dealing with. And it’s all because of WordPress (plus a basic knowledge of PHP).

    To Matt Mullenweg and the gang: thank you.

    PS: I’ve finally got round to signing up for the forthcoming UK Wordcamp to be held in Birmingham in mid-July. I’ll probably offer to lead a session on what I do, including details of one h-u-g-e project currently in the works.

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    Liveblogging alternatives

    With Twitter continuing to struggle with the basics, web-based liveblogging continues to march ahead, with news of several new apps out there. But whether they will rival the current (clear) leader, CoverItLive, remains to be seen.

    ScribbleLive is interesting from the very start: yes, you have to log in… but using existing logins from services like Facebook, Windows Live / Hotmail or (apparently) OpenID. Makes a huge amount of sense for a tiny startup to outsource one of the major annoyances to these big players: top marks already.

    But whereas CoverItLive feels like a hosted broadcast event, ScribbleLive feels more like a conventional blog with instant commenting enabled (and yes, I mean ‘instant’). There’s no sense of ownership; it looks like everyone can edit/delete anyone’s entries. You can upload images into the comment stream, and even reference YouTube clips (with URLs automatically converted to embedded video… nice). You can email comments and pictures in, which is cool. he catch? – it all takes place on ScribbleLive’s site, with no easy ’embedding’ options as yet.

    Writing in the comments on TechCrunch, co-founder Michael Monte describes it in terms of chat amongst friends. ‘You go to a concert or a conference, and you want to invite your colleges to contribute to the event or the last episode of Lost is on and you and your friends what to discuss as the plot unfolds.’ And whilst that’s fair enough, it doesn’t (currently) amount to much more than Instant Messaging on the web.

    Backnoise has even fewer strings attached. There’s no sign-in whatsoever: you just need to know the name of the ‘chat’, and you’re there. All updates are posted anonymously, with input windows refreshing on a timer: no Ajax here yet. There’s a basic ’embed’ option, using IFRAMEs. But most remarkably, there’s a ‘wipe it and start afresh’ button (labelled ‘buzzkill’) available to every user?! One for the anarchists, I’d say.

    And yes, inevitably, there’s talk of a WordPress-based solution. Currently in development, wpliveblog promises a ‘similar feature set to ScribbleLive’: and on reflection, it’s easy to see how that might work. WordPress has several levels of user rights, allowing one person (or several) to be designated as the lead blogger and/or comment moderator, with a few selected ‘guest panellists’ given lower-level rights to bypass moderation. I guess you’d use a similar technique to a plugin like Official Comments to apply a different presentational (CSS) style to ‘hosts’ comments’ and ‘contributions from the floor’. The normal WordPress admin interface might be slick enough to manage it already.

    If I was liveblogging something in the near future, I see no reason not to use CoverItLive. But the competition is heating up, and there’s unquestionable appeal in a WordPress plugin. I’m looking forward to seeing it in action.

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    Subliminal consultation

    Consultation is something government puts huge amounts of effort into, without (often? ever?) getting it right. The latest major attempt, to encourage discussion around the Draft Legislative Programme, takes you to a five-question web form with questions so vague and high-level, couched in parliamentary language, that I wouldn’t know where to start. Will we improve on last year’s embarrassing 71 responses, many of which had ‘little, if any, relevance’? I’m not convinced.

    So full marks (unexpectedly?!) to DCSF for trying something quite different. Playspace is intended to canvas the opinions of younger children about playgrounds. It presents itself as a kind of Sim City affair, letting you drag play equipment into an empty space to create your own playground. But the clever bit is that you’re actually spending ‘credits’ to choose the equipment, and you earn extra credits by answering questions.

    It’s consultation for the attention-deficit generation: a handful of questions, with the reward of play after. A dozen multi-choice questions, and you’re done. Meanwhile, behind the scenes – I assume – it’s capturing the answers to the questions, as well as an indication of what types of equipment kids actually prefer.

    It’s not without its problems. Like, for example, spelling DCSF wrong; and failing to link to its privacy statement, which is pretty essential for what must be a data-capture process behind the scenes. (Thankfully these glitches have now been fixed after I raised them… although I’m not convinced the site’s generic privacy statement goes quite as far as I’d like for this application.) But it shows a willingness to explore more effective means of sounding out public opinion… and I bet it results in a much richer collection of real data then any ‘normal’ consultation process.

    It’s good to see an e-comms good news story coming out of DCSF’s e-efforts. You don’t have to dig too deeply into their website to find crushing legacy problems dating back a decade. And that’s before we even mention Schoolsweb.

  • Brown comfortable on camera?

    Just a quick return to the subject of yesterday’s speech by Gordon Brown to the Google Zeitgeist conference. Having failed to watch the Windows Media stream on the No10 site, I was glad to see the speech posted on the event’s YouTube area. And it’s remarkable for one reason: look how relaxed Gordon Brown seems, for a man supposedly at political rock-bottom. Granted, we could do without the ‘watching tennis’ head movements, but be fair to him – he’s only got one working eye. (Hat-tip: Dizzy.)

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    Sky News covers threesome live

    There’s no stopping CoverItLive, the specialised live-blogging app. It’s becoming a regular feature on some of the leading political blogs… and now the Sky News website has arrived at the CIL party, carrying a live three-way interview (you can’t really call it a ‘chat’) with the leading candidates in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election this morning.

    They’ve used it as a pseudo-chat application, which (as I’ve said before) isn’t its optimal use case. It’s a live blogging tool, intended for one individual to post rapid-fire comments, with occasional contributions from readers. Yes, you can use the same functions to deliver a moderated chat function, but that’s really not the point. To be honest, reading back through the chat transcript, it’s really quite hard to follow without the strong leadership of an active moderator/host.

    Still, it’s quite interesting to see the very different approaches to the live chat medium. Lengthy contributions from an eager LibDem candidate, occasionally too eager on the copy-and-paste a few times; mind you, host Martin Stanford did the same a few times. Snappy – almost too snappy? – answers from Labour’s Dunwoody Jr. And (it must be said) very rare contributions from the Tory, who appears to have arrived late.

    PS: I’m just sorry they didn’t invite the Monster Raving Loony candidate, The Flying Brick (?) to participate. My favourite from the list of policies on his website: ‘I will introduce piranha to the river Weaver, this will make fishing a spectator sport. Tourism would be increased tenfold and jobs increased in the Leighton Hospital. I propose a new, world leading, ward opened specialising in fish bites.’

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    PM hails Google's model of globalisation

    Gordon Brown’s big speech at Google’s Zeitgeist conference this morning saw the unveiling of a new initiative involving the MetOffice, British Antarctic Survey and Google Earth to visualise the (potential) effects of climate change worldwide. It’s quite nice, but ultimately you’ll load it up and go ‘hmmph’.

    More interesting perhaps was his citing of the lessons learned from the growth of Google’s industry for ‘how we build not simply a successful global economy but a global society’ – openness, non-protectionism, flexibility, inclusion.

    He paints an optimistic vision of the future, based on a campaign in favour of globalisation. We get a few familiar tales of empowerment through technology, including yet another reference to crime mapping. And references to overturning protectionist monopolies will have gone down well with the Googlers in the audience, no doubt. ๐Ÿ™‚

    It’s interesting to compare Brown’s words with David Cameron’s remarks to the very same conference, two years ago. Both reflect on the positive side to globalisation, but whilst Cameron’s focus is more domestic, Brown is talking (again) about the global economics of it all. ‘Zeitgeist’ is certainly the word.