Blogging

(Some of) My favourite bloggers

Here, partly as a thank you to those listed for being so thoroughly excellent, but also as a way of pointing readers to great sources of content, are some of my favourite bloggers.

Dan Slee

Dan is a phenomenon. He seems to literally give away everything he knows on his blog. He’s a great one for lists, which is always a great framework for a post. Ten ideas for innovating in cold weather? 42 (count ’em!) ideas gleaned from a conference? 16 lessons for councils using Flickr? Dan has it covered. The best kind of blogger – he innovates, and then tells the world how it went, and what he’ll do differently next time.

Visit Dan’s blog, or follow him on Twitter.

Catherine Howe

Catherine writes with considerable knowledge and verve about democracy, localism and the internet. Part Phd research notebook and part public service, her blog provides neat summaries and ruminations on what she has been reading lately, along with perceptive coverage of events – she attends these things so we don’t have to.

Visit Catherine’s blog, or follow her on Twitter.

Steph Gray

There are some bloggers who don’t post as often as you like, but that’s only because when you see they have written something new, it makes you smile. Steph is one of those. He’s not just full of insight and practical ideas, but he’s a great writer too, with a neat turn of phrase and a ready wit. Steph’s also willing to hand out praise to those that deserve it, as his recent series of digital heroes shows.

Visit Steph’s blog, or follow him on Twitter.

Ingrid Koehler

It’s easy for those outside of government to take the risk of putting one’s head above the parapet, but much harder for those working inside the machine. Ingrid’s relentless blogging has paved the way for others to follow in her footsteps – the Policy and Performance blog highlights good stuff happening elsewhere, promotes good work happening throughout local government and shares the considerable knowledge that resides in Ingrid’s head.

Visit Ingrid’s blog, or follow her on Twitter.

Public Strategist

It’s fair to say that Public Strategist sees things that I would never see, and explains other things in ways I never could. Clarity of writing when discussing hugely complicated topics of public service delivery is guaranteed. A must read.

Visit Public Srategist, or follow him on Twitter.

Kate Bennet

A relatively new addition to my list of favourite bloggers, Kate works as a technology-focused civil servant, who most recently has been focused on innovation and her blog has been full of great stuff on how to innovate in government. It will be interesting to see where her career takes her next, and therefore what her blogging will be about. Am sure the engaging writing and diverse style of posts will continue, though!

Visit Kate’s blog, or follow her on Twitter.

Michael Coté

Michael Coté, or just Coté as everyone seems to refer to him, is a tech-blogging machine. Huge lists of interesting links, regular audio and video podcasts and interviews and in-depth coverage of the tech issues of the day all regularly feature at People over Process. Whilst he doesn’t cover specific government topics, a lot of the things he does discuss – like big data, social enterprisey technology, and open source – are very relevant. You won’t understand everything he posts, but that’s your fault, not his.

Visit Coté’s blog, or follow him on Twitter.

Mary McKenna

How sycophantic is it to choose my boss for this list? Probably very, but there’s a recession on, so, you know. Anyway, I’m lucky that my boss is such a great blogger so I don’t feel too much of a suckup to include her here. Mary’s blog is mostly about people, and sometimes about cats. It’s about the people she meets on her travels, many of whom are genuinely interesting – or at least, that’s how she portrays them. What I like best about Mary’s posts is that I always know I’m going to learn something from them.

Visit Mary’s blog, or follow her on Twitter.

Carl Haggerty

Can’t not mention Carl in this post. His is a great practitioner blog – he writes about what he does, and what he thinks about what he does. Often Carl throws out ideas without ensuring they are 100% polished, often resulting in fresh ideas popping into your own head as you’re reading his stuff. Great coverage of topics too, including internal social collaborative tech, local authority web strategy, big enterprise IT and local community stuff.

Visit Carl’s blog, or follow him on Twitter.

There are loads of others, of course, and I’ll do another post like this soon. Thanks to all those mentioned, though – you’re doing great, important work.

Sharing and flexibility

Nice post from BIS’ Neil Williams on deciding up on a commenting system for the department’s website.

Go read the whole thing, but he summarises:

So what have we learned?

  • People blogging about what they are up to is dead handy. Stephen and Jimmy writing their posts, me reading them, has saved you thousands of pounds. Direct cause and effect.
  • Having the flexibility to embed stuff is awesome. Insist on it next time you buy a CMS. Hats off to the guys at Eduserv for really coming through for us on this one. We couldn’t put pages together like this and this and this without it.
  • The growing availability of embeddable stuff is way cool. I’m excited about what else we might be able to achieve without dev work – like page ratings using Bazaarvoice and forums using Talki.
  • We all need to think differently now. Few things we might want our website to do are going to be unique to us. Gov webbies, and suppliers of government web services, need to adapt and thoroughly check out 3rd party plugins before embarking on any kind of jiggery-bespokery. Why pay for our own learning curve when others have already been through it?

My take (which pretty much repeats what Neil has said:

  1. People sharing stuff via blogs is good and has measurable impact.
  2. In whatever you do, being flexible and open means you can make the most of developments in technology, or whatever.

Way to blog

There are a number of great options available now to start your own blog, for free, with just a few clicks of a mouse button. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses and here I run through five of the best ones.

WordPress is my personal blog tool of choice – I’ve been using it since 2005 and I’ve grown to love it. The free, hosted version at WordPress.com is great – easy to use with a whole host of features.

Pros

  • Easy to get started
  • Huge user community
  • Very active development

Cons

  • Feature-rich, or feature-bloated? For newbies there is a lot to learn
  • Doesn’t do email posting as well as some of the competition
  • Limited in terms of rich media embedding
  • Theme customisation costs money and is limited

Blogger is pretty much the granddaddy of blogging platforms – it recently celebrated its tenth birthday. Interestingly, it was originally developed by Pyra Labs before Google bought it. People at Pyra later went on to develop Twitter.

Blogger was left on the shelf by Google for a long time, but just recently seems to be sparking back into life, which is good to see.

Pros

  • The online help provided is excellent for newbies
  • Extremely customisable
  • You can embed pretty much any code in  your posts

Cons

  • Beige colour scheme for the editor looks hideous
  • No static pages I stand corrected in the comments – Blogger does do static pages these days

TypePad launched in 2003 so has been around for quite a while, and is a mature and stable product. Like WordPress.com, it is based on an open source platform, Moveable Type. For a long time it was often the case that enthusiasts used Blogger and professionals used TypePad, but since WordPress came along that’s no longer really the case.

TypePad does cost money, though comes with a

Pros

  • Sophisticated and easy to use editor
  • Plenty of customisation possible

Cons

  • It costs money, unless you go for the stripped down Micro version

Posterous is the newest service mentioned here, and it is making quite a splash for two main reasons: the ease of getting started with it (by simply sending in an email, you publish your first post) and the neat ways it integrates with other services.

Pros

  • Very easy to get started
  • Extremely well integrated into other social media services
  • Email posting is excellent

Cons

  • Not many options for customising the look and feel
  • Very much built with posting by email in mind – web editor not the best

Tumblr is a blogging system which focuses on making it easy to share content you find on the internet, adding your own comments as you go.

Pros

  • Super easy to post to, with a simple editor and templates to use depending on what media you are posting
  • Some nice themes and designs to choose from, which you can customise

Cons

  • Lightweight in terms of features – adding things like comments, tag clouds etc takes some hacking
  • Obviously set up as a scrap-booking style of blogging, not really suited to longer written pieces

Which blogging service do you recommend?

The DavePress survey

Hello everyone, welcome back after the easter break!

I’d be really interested to find out more about the people who read this blog, and what they make of it. So, I threw together this little survey. It’s done in Google Docs, and if you can’t access it for some reason but would like to complete it, just drop me an email and I’ll send you a version you should be able to use.

Thanks in advance!

Update: thanks to all who have taken the survey. I’ll publish the results soon.

An interesting innovation discussion

An interesting exchange online happened last week after the wonderful Robert Brook posted a piece on his site entitled ‘Boring Innovation‘ – all about how innovation can best happen within large, complex organisations, like those you tend to find in government.

It’s well worth reading in full, here’s a snippet:

How about this: a two-pronged approach. Introduce, recognise and support innovative thinking within the existing processes – and, separately, set up a sandboxed arms-length entity to take on the risk. But, make that sandbox small and real – very quick turnover of work, short iterations, very tight on the money.

This was quickly picked up on by James Gardner, CTO of the DWP and author of several publications on innovation (he got the link via another post by Stefan – everything’s linked these days).

James writes:

Everyone thinks innovatively all the time, whether they know it or not. But when it comes down to the press of doing the day job, versus changing it to accommodate innovation, most people will just do what they have always done…

That’s why you need an innovation unit, whether you bought it or grew it yourself. The name of the game is about starting lots of little, new projects. Without waiting for that random blue-bird superstar performer who can do it without any help at all.

Genuinely, how great is it that this debate is being held, in the open, online so that everyone can share in what is being said, and contribute to, if they choose to.

This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about in my discussion about the .gov.uk blogosphere. it’s great to see people like Robert and James being so actively involved like this – and as per my earlier post, Alistair and Carl too.

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