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 [...]
Most people will be aware of the concept of a hack day – a number of designers and/or developers getting together for a day to build ‘cool stuff’. These sorts of days happen on a regular basis and quite a few interesting projects have come out of them.
On Friday, Charlie and I attended a hack [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Providing community information
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 [...]
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 [...]
FOWA Day 1
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, [...]
The Royal Mail is well known in the UK for being an outdated organisation that is struggling to modernise, is regularly hit by crippling strikes and always seems to be losing money (despite the fact they made a profit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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]