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 [...]
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 [...]
The Royal Mail is well known in the UK for being an outdated organisation that is struggling to modernise, is regularly hit by crippling strikes and always seems to be losing money (despite the fact they made a profit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 [...]
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 [...]
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 – has [...]
Yesterday, Richard Pope and I launched WhatTheyClaimed.com, a site aimed at digitising and collating all of the data from MPs expenses.
The website is based upon a system I built a few weeks ago to monitor our own expenses at Consumer Focus Labs . The site was designed to match the processes at Consumer Focus, [...]
In case you somehow missed the media frenzy, the final version of the Digital Britain report was published yesterday. After reading some of the media reports, I decided to read as much of the detail of the report as I could to see what was actually proposed.
Firstly I need to make a few disclaimers. [...]
I’m sorry to say that today I’m slightly embarrassed for the UK. Not only are we being badly affected by the recession, have a crumbling ruling party in Government and have a Parliament full of people milking the system for all its worth, but we’ve just sent two members of the racist British National [...]