Ask have launched a preview of their new search page design, nominally called AskX. Appearing in a three column layout, which is similar to their AskCity product, it now displays results from other information sources inthe right hand section, as well as the usual results in the middle. The right column is reserved for narrowing or expanding your search.

It’s quite cool. I did a test search for my hero, Brian Clough, and as well as the web results, it dragged up stuff from Ask News search, their blog search and Wikipedia.

The main problem is the speed at the moment, but I guess this is something they can work on…

[tags]ask, askx, search[/tags]

Sam Sethi and Mike Butcher, erstwhile editors of Techcrunch UK have launched their own site covering ‘Web 2.0, mobile and new technology firms in Europe’ called Vecosys.

Not sure what I make of that name, and the domain forwarding thing they have got going there is pretty annoying – all the pages seem to be held on a Glaxstar server.

The incident which caused the two to leave Techcrunch was explained from TC head honcho Mike Arrington today. It sure is a mess.

Update: Sam Sethi has counterposted giving his version of events. It is difficult to know who to believe, but as much as I like reading TechCrunch, my instinct is to side with the underdogs…
[tags]TechCrunch, Vecosys, Sam Sethi, Mike Butcher[/tags]

Loïc Le Meur responds at length to the many criticisms going round the blogosphere about LeWeb3:

I apologize to the speakers and audience for the last-minute changes to the second day program and take personal responsibility for those changes. For opening the program beyond bloggers, however, I have no regrets

…

Criticism focussed on the politicians I invited at the last minute.

The background is that we in Europe are fighting a battle to raise interest about the Internet and its deeper changes to society. We do not yet have the Silicon Valley ecosystem, but opening an exchange with our politicians is a start. We need to talk to them and they need to understand us.

We need to encourage risk taking in Europe, teach entrepreneurship at school, make fiscal reforms to encourage creation of more start ups supported by investment from business angels and venture capitalists. The Internet creates millions of jobs in the United States. Why not in Europe?

[tags]Loïc Le Meur, LeWeb3[/tags]

So, the first post to hyprtext. Guess I better explain…

This is going to be a blog about the web. Talking about the new web services, Web 2.0 and all that stuff. Yeah, I know, another one. But I’m hoping this is going to be a little different.

One of the differences with this blog is that I don’t want to write it all. I really want other people to contribute. So, anyone email us to register then with the blog and allow them to submit an article. Please do so.

In addition to this, while we’ll be bringing you news of all the latest happenings in the world of the web, we’ll also be offering the occasional comment piece, full of reflection and wild predictions.

Also, we’re happy to host stuff for people. So, if you would like to start a blog, then get in touch. I’m sure I could sort something out here. I guess that’s true of other types of site like wikis, too.

Thanks to WordPress for being great as usual, and Mike Lococo for the original theme which I’ve hacked up a bit.

Oliver Kamm on the government’s craven actions over the BAE fraud enquiry:

Our overriding foreign policy goal is the defeat of aggressive terrorism. So pursuing an inquiry into corruption in an arms deal worth billions of pounds would risk disrupting a relationship with Saudi Arabia crucial to achieving those goals. Mr Blair placed emphasis on the national interest in vague terms so we have no idea what the interests are, because he did not say. The tacit assumption must be that the Saudis might withhold intelligence co-operation, and withdraw from the arms deal. Our security interests would suffer; so would British commercial interests.

This is not only the best defence but also the only conceivable one for a decision taken directly by the Prime Minister. Unfortunately, it is pitiful. The lamentable closure of the SFO inquiry encapsulates the method and reasoning of the banana republic. It jettisons the central principle of democratic government. The SFO said this week that: “It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest.” To say that this is illiberal scarcely covers it. It is the lowest point in Mr Blair’s Government, and will be a defining one. It gives cynicism a bad name.

John Naughton and Simon Dickson also comment on the story

From The Observer:

Google is on the move. The internet giant has held talks with Orange, the mobile phone operator, about a multi-billion-dollar partnership to create a ‘Google phone’ which makes it easy to search the web wherever you are.

The collaboration between two of the most powerful brands in technology is seen as a potential catalyst for making internet use of mobile phones as natural as on desktop computers and laptops.

I’ve often thought that the future of the web is mobile: a Blackberry sized thing with a reasonably sized screen and keyboard. Let it boot straight up into a Firefox variant and then connect to web services. It doesn’t have to be through Google, Zoho have a perfectly good selection of apps, too. Everything is done online through the browser, which would mean no more synchronising of mobile devices with desktop machines.

Before this becomes a reality though, a better platform than AJAX needs to be employed, as Bill Thompson has pointed out:

There is a massive difference between rewriting Web pages on the fly with Javascript and reengineering the network to support message passing between distributed objects, a difference that too many Web 2.0 advocates seem willing to ignore. It may have been twenty years since Sun Microsystems trademarked the phrase ‘the network is the computer’ but we’re still a decade off delivering, and if we stick with Ajax there is a real danger that we will never get there.

Spotted at Google Operating System.

[tags]google, orange, observer, google operating system, zoho, bill thompson[/tags]

Steve Smith has updated his Tiger Admin plug-in. What does it do? It makes the WordPress admin screen look very nice indeed. Good job!

[tags]wordpress, WP Tiger Administration, steve smith[/tags]

Still not online at home, which makes my installation of Ubuntu a week or so quite frustrating: there really isn’t much I can do with it. Still, Pipex will be providing me with 6mb/s broadband in a week or so, which is something to look forward to!

Was having a poke about on Ubuntu though last night. I browsed through the repository of applications I can download and install, and was surprised to see that the majority of them state that they are unavailable for my system. This includes standard apps like Gnumeric and Abiword.

Could this have anything to do with the fact that I wasn’t online at the time, or is there something I should know about being able to install packages on Ubuntu?

[tags]ubuntu[/tags]

I’ve recently started my own Community of Practice over on the I&DeA communities platform, entitled ‘Social Media and Online Collaboration’. It will be a good way of getting the message across to people who work in local government that the internet isn’t just a distraction, it’s a tool that can have tremendous benefits in terms of sharing information, experience and best practice.

The CoP is a pretty nice platform. Using a bespoke system built by a firm called Conseq, it provides simple wikis, forums and blogs as well as a calendar and a space for uploading documents for sharing.

Of course, the issue is getting people involved. With a pretty minimal amount of effort, the Social Media CoP is one of the most active. I’ve created a few wiki pages detailing some of the stuff the CoP can do, my top ten blogging tips and a few other things on starting blogging and a Web2.0 site directory. It will be interesting to see how many others jump in.

The CoP platform is pretty similar to the site I have been working on, expanding the remit of my original LGSearch site, which is called LGNewMedia. It too has a blog, a wiki and a forum, along with LGSearch and the latest effort, which is a del.ico.us clone called LGKnowledge. Again, will anyone ever use this stuff? I don’t know. I know that they are already using LGSearch, which is cool, if unsurprising as it doesn’t need much effort to do so. The wiki serves a purpose as a documentation library, if nothing else, and the blog has a few subscribers, probably for news on LGSearch.

But I do think that LGKnowledge could be hugely helpful to people as a kind of simple knowledge management system, with appropriate tagging people could point stuff out to people in a really useful way. But it needs the committment from users to actually put the content in there in the first place, and I am not sure how they can be convinced that it’s worth it.

[tags]idea, communities of practice, social media, local government, lgsearch, lgnewmedia[/tags]

Will be taking an enforced break from blogging for a while. I’m moving to a new house, which as yet doesn’t have a telephone line set up, let alone a broadband connection.

Hopefully I’ll have things up and running again by the middle of December.

After a pretty speedy burst of activity at the beginning, things are going to tail off for a little while here at LGNewMedia.

I’m moving house this weekend, to a brand new place which hasn’t even got the phone connected yet. And when that’s done, I can get the broadband sorted.

Given that LGNewMedia is a one-man-working-in-his-spare time kind of project, it means things will slow down to a halt over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, why not enjoy a sneak peak at our latest service, the del.icio.us for Local Government service, LGKnowledge?