Puffbox

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

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  • Five years + over £1bn = slight progress

    The National Audit Office reckons government is spending £208m on websites each year, but that there’s only been ‘little improvement’ in the last five years. Nine recommendations helpfully listed in the executive summary, but mostly fairly predictable – and the good guys are probably doing them all anyway.

    It’s a good idea to ‘help departments and agencies to judge the correct level of investment in websites and transactional services’. Unless you know how much something should cost, you can’t really assess those tender responses properly. (And of course, these days, so much of it should be free anyway. Like, er, WordPress.) I’d be stunned if departments aren’t looking in depth at their usage data, but I guess some still don’t.’Ensure websites meet accessibility and usability criteria’? Well, duh.

    The suggestion of extra marketing to push the Directgov brand is a bit of a surprise, and would be controversial if taken up. But I’m most interested by the suggestion of publishing ‘revised, up-to-date standards expected of all government websites’. The existing standards were (mainly) written five years ago, and a lot has changed since then. (Intriguingly, they no longer feature on the ‘live’ Cabinet Office site, but they are available in an ‘archive’ area.)

  • Top Home Office official's blog revealed

    Sir David Normington, top civil servant at the Home Office, has a blog of sorts on his department’s intranet. He’s not the only senior official to do this: it’s a natural extension of the ‘letter to staff’ you see in every internal newsletter.

    But somebody put in an FOI request to see the contents… and the man/woman at the Home Office said yes. So here’s a first wad from last month, and a further wad published yesterday. I’m actually quite encouraged by it all: frank admissions of where the problems are, and freedom to express some personal opinion. Traits a good blog should have.

    Of course, this was probably all done on the (always mistaken) assumption that it would remain within the Home Office. If this can be retrieved each month by someone lodging an FOI request, you almost wonder if it would be more efficient to publish it in the open. Indeed, couldn’t someone just lodge a regular request each month, then copy-and-paste it into a publicly visible blog him/herself? The genie just found a way out of the bottle.

    Credit: BBC Open Secrets blog.

  • Live microblogging from the News 24 gallery

    Following rapidly from my musings about a ‘breaking news’ blog, BBC News 24 morning editor Simon Waldman (no, not that one) spent the morning posting one or two line updates through the 10am to 1pm shift. Always good to see experiments, but this was too much:

    11:41 – Just slipping out of the gallery for a moment, back soon,.

    11:46 – I’m back…

    It also seemed to be written, assuming people were watching and reading the blog live. Hardly likely, given the time of day. All in all, an interesting one-off, giving an insight into the life of a producer – but not the ‘breaking news blog’ it might have been.

  • WordPress to do 'proper' workflow

    I’ve never hidden my adoration of WordPress. I don’t come across many small-scale websites which couldn’t be done at least as well, or probably better, in WordPress. And now they’re introducing a proper workflow element, the middle market may be up for grabs too.

    Starting with WordPress 2.3… contributors will now have a new button. It acts as a counterpart to the “Publish” button that Authors (and above) get. The button says “Submit for Review.” It leverages a new post_status called “pending.” Pending posts show up as links above the Write Post screen for Editors and Administrators, along with the “nags” for your own drafts and others’ drafts.

    Do you really need any more? The only possible glitch is that the WordPress interface has always been optimised for one-person usage, and doesn’t look like a ‘proper’ CMS. In many respects, though, that’s a good thing.

  • Five News joins up with YouTube-alike

    The new partnership between Five News and website Friction.tv could be interesting. It basically takes the ‘Your News’ segment from Five’s news presentation, and adds a YouTube-style dimension.

    It’s a bit much for Friction to claim it’s ahead of YouTube, on the basis of user registration numbers at equivalent stages of development (as in this Times piece from June). YouTube was revolutionary, doing something completely original, and starting from zero. But to its credit, Friction does have decent-looking audience numbers, and a decent-looking site to boot.

    Its YouTube-with-a-purpose concept could have mileage, and the Five tie-up gives it some mainstream credibility… although in truth, I’m not sure what credibility Five News has to give. I don’t think I’ve ever consciously tuned into a Five news bulletin: why should I? If I wanted the latest from the Sky News studios, I’d switch to Sky News. Plus, I’m told the staircase and balcony which is the Five studio’s defining feature aren’t actually too stable… which is why you never see presenters going more than half-way up.

  • Four magic words: 'iPhone', 'will', 'it', and 'blend'

    I spotted this whilst catching up on my RSS feeds via my mobile, and couldn’t wait to get back to my desk to see it. Quite a startling reaction to an ‘infomercial’, really.

    [youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=qg1ckCkm8YI]

    I’ve blogged elsewhere about Blendtec’s amazing YouTube-based approach to marketing. They’ve really excelled themselves with this one. Close on 100,000 views in 14 hours, too.

  • DIUS: a rare opportunity for e-gov innovation

    I hear that the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills is actively recruiting for at least one senior communications role. If ever there was a website in e-government which really ought to push the boundaries, this is it. I mean, the word ‘innovation’ features in the title, for goodness sake. And if any sector is likely to be receptive to a ‘web 2.0’-style approach, it’s surely the universities.

    I note it’s the UK Intellectual Property Office – until recently, the Patent Office – which is running the current DIUS website. I’m not sure what it’s running on, but glancing at the source code, it looks like the same platform as ipo.gov.uk. I’m not sure that meets the ‘innovation’ element of the brief: looking around the IPO site, it’s rather rudimentary, and despite having a What’s New page, there isn’t even an RSS feed.

  • Iain Dale's reluctant readership

    One of my interesting chats today was with someone whose identity I won’t divulge just yet. He made a very valid point: when it comes to political blogging, there’s a gaping hole in the UK blogosphere. Ask anyone with any interest in politics which blogs they read, and you’ll hear the same answers: Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale. Me included.

    I’m actually enjoying Guido’s stuff at the moment. I detect a slightly different tone of late: still stirring of course, but not so cynically. Maybe the criticism of late last year, and early this, hit home. It has always been essential reading, purely for the extent of its influence, but I no longer object to the fact that I feel I have to read it.

    But I continue to read Iain Dale’s blog because I feel it’s important that I should, not because I agree with him on much (if anything). That isn’t meant to be a criticism of the guy: in many respects, I admire what he’s doing – but I don’t just consider myself to belong to the same camp. (I’m still keeping an open mind on Cameron, though, but that’s not the point.)

    He’s currently conducting a readership survey, to find out more about what his readership wants – but underlying the questions is an assumption of sympathy with his pro-Tory, pro-Cameron stance. None of the multiple choice options allow for the ‘outsider’ readership. For example, he asks if you agree or disagree with the statement that ‘Iain is a disruptive influence on the Conservative Party and he should be more loyal’. I agree with the first part, and probably disagree with the second – although I wouldn’t feel it’s my place, as a non-Tory, to comment.

    Where is the anti-Iain Dale – a well-produced blog by someone who clearly ‘gets it’, and has an ear to the ground in SW1, but from a centre-left perspective? And if he/she existed, I wonder would I continue to read Iain’s stuff?

  • News doesn't roll, it lurches

    Eighteen months ago I wrote the following: ‘News doesn’t roll; it lurches. But that’s for another time.’ And then I never quite got round to explaining what I meant.

    I only remembered it thanks to a comment from Charlie Beckett, director of Polis on my piece about ‘breaking news blogs’. Charlie wrote, with some justification:

    Journalism should ALWAYS be shy about getting things wrong. That doesn”t mean that you can’t be like a 24 hour news channel and not be wrong for long, but I think the way you throw around ideas like ‘vague’ is precisely what will discredit online news. Call it something adjacent to news, by all means, but ’stuffy’ old facts are exactly what the public needs during a breaking story like 7/7.

    I don’t disagree at all. When I said ‘don’t be shy about getting it wrong’, that wasn’t an endorsement of shoddy, unsubstantiated speculation. By ‘vague’, I meant you shouldn’t wait until all the elements were in before publishing. On reflection, I probably should have phrased it all better. But the idea was ‘hot’, and I wanted to get it down and out quickly. Which, in a roundabout way, proves the point I was trying to make… I think.

    I think a breaking news blog could, and probably even should, be like a rolling news channel. But I think it’s actually better suited to the objective – because fundamentally, news doesn’t roll. When we talk about a rolling news channel, it’s the channel which rolls, not the news.

    Let’s take the example of Sky News. At the top of each hour, the cycle begins again. There’s a constant pressure to make the top story fresh. It’s a familiar mantra: ‘what’s the new top line?’, when all too often, there isn’t one. And sometimes, it’s embarrassingly obvious that they’re trying to make a new story out of old knowledge.

    But developments don’t emerge gradually, they explode – and the story lurches from one development to the next.

    A blog (or blog-style presentation) could actually play this ‘developing story’ role more naturally than a 24-7 TV channel – because it’s not only ‘news on demand’, it’s also ‘news on supply’. If there’s nothing new to say, you aren’t really under any pressure to say it. (Particularly in an RSS context, where new items are either read or unread.)

  • I love this business

    Today reminds me precisely why I went down the consultancy route. A few informal chats with some influential people, none of it strictly pitching for business – but inspirational nonetheless. A reminder that there are good people out there, with good ideas, and a willingness to run them by each other. Even just a chat over coffee left me buzzing with thoughts I hadn’t had before. It’s a great feeling.