Archive for 2009

Communications in a Crisis

20 December 2009

Photo: lewishamdreamer (from Flickr) The past 36 hours haven’t been the best for those travelling with Eurostar. Five trains were stranded for hours in the Channel Tunnel without power, light, food, drink, heating or information. A further train became stuck near Ebbsfleet yesterday evening. The focus today is on the cause of the incident and […]

Open Government & Open Data

15 December 2009. 1 Comment

It has been exactly nine months since I started my job at Consumer Focus Labs. In this time, we’ve published our Recalled Products website, some data on the Digital Switchover in Wales, been contributing to a blog following our attempts to get data out of Tesco and are producing our new StayPrivate.org website. Sometimes I […]

Opening up community information

27 October 2009. 1 Comment

When you move into a new area, how do you find out about the community you are going to be living in. How do you find out about the community groups, the local services, the bus times. Some of the more technology savvy amongst us might look towards the web in the hope that the information is […]

FOWA 2009 – Day 2

15 October 2009

These are a few notes from day 2 of the Future of Web Apps conference in London. This day turned out to be much more interesting than the last, which is evidenced by the fact that I don’t actually have many notes at all. I’ve tried to fill in the gaps where required. You can see the notes […]

FOWA 2009 – Day 1

12 October 2009

Last week I attended the Future of Web Apps conference in London. For those who haven’t been before – this event is run by Carsonified (a web agency based in Bath) and covers the latest thinking around developing Internet applications. I went along to the FOWA event in Dublin earlier in the year, but this one was […]

Setting the Post Code free…

6 October 2009. 2 Comments

The Royal Mail is well known in the UK for being an outdated organisation that is struggling to modernise, is regularly hit by crippling strikes and always seems to be losing money (despite the fact they made a profit recently?!). However yesterday they took on a new tact: they appear to have decided to bring […]

A look at the new Birmingham City Council website

8 September 2009. 2 Comments

Hello? Is that Birmingham City Council? This is 2001, we’d like our website back! There has been a lot of talk on Twitter today about the launch of the new Birmingham City Council website. Without a doubt, Birmingham have successfully launched one of the most delayed and expensive websites of the last few years. After being delayed […]

How clean is your beach?

7 September 2009

This is a bit different to my usual posts – but I felt this had to be said. Tonight, I had the misfortune of watching what has to be the second worst piece of reporting I’ve ever seen from the BBC (unfortunately ,the first also came from the same programme last year).  Panorama has to be […]

Why Government needed a Twitter strategy

28 July 2009

Last week, Neil Williams from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) published his draft Government Twitter Strategy. I think its about time someone sat down and produced a document like this. Some people have responded to the document negatively (as expected), some positively, and some have completely missed the point. I wanted to […]

Things I meant to blog about

26 July 2009

I’m not quite sure where the past few weeks have gone, but quite clearly they’ve passed me by quickly. These are a few things I’ve wanted to blog about but haven’t had the time to write a decent entry. Normal service will resume shortly. Karoo disconnects file sharers Hull’s only internet provider – Karoo – […]