7 April 2010
Unless it escaped your attention, Gordon Brown called the much anticipated UK General Election yesterday. It will take place on May 6th 2010. In line with guidelines for civil service and other public sector employees, I will be curtailing my blogging and tweeting activities until after the election. If I do post anything, it won’t […]
23 March 2010
Just over a year ago I joined CF Labs as one of the developers working on innovation and making data publically available. When I started, Consumer Focus was a pretty new organisation still getting to grips with its role and getting everything into place so it could undertake its duties properly. In the middle of […]
6 February 2010
As some of you may remember, a few months ago I waded in on the MP expenses controversy with a crowd-sourcing website for putting together a list of what they all claimed. The Guardian (and others) produced their own websites that did a similar job and generally worked better. Since then, there have been further […]
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 […]
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 […]
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The Royal Mail is well known in the UK for being an outdated organisation that is struggling to modernise, is regularly hit by crippling strikes and always seems to be losing money (despite the fact they made a profit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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 – […]
7 April 2009
What’s been going on recently? – well quite a bit really. I’m now settled into my new job at Consumer Focus Labs. We’ve spent a few weeks getting our systems set up (not as easy a task as we’d have liked), our development environment in place and courting ideas from anyone and everyone. We’re now […]