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The Prime Minister is on FriendFeed!
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The PoI taskforce have a blog. Quite right too. Thanks to Shane for the pointer.
Andrew O’Hagan
I’m reading the marvellous The Atlantic Ocean by Andrew O’Hagan at the moment. It’s a collection of essays, mostly taken from The London Review of Books and is a wonderful eclectic collection of writing. Take this little gem, for example, from the opening lines of a piece about celebrity memoirs:
If you want to be a somebody nowadays, you’d better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can’t prove they’ve been nobody all along.
Thoroughly recommended.
It’s stuff like this that proves, I think, that print has a future. Longer essays like these, don’t really work on the web. It’s hard to concentrate on the screen for too long, and often these pieces need mulling over, book or paper in hand, curled up on the sofa.
links for 2008-06-09
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PicLens transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing photos and videos across the web. Via John Naughton.
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“Whatever the merits of his other changes, Harding should restore leaders to their proper place.”
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The Pirate’s Dilemma tells the story of how youth culture drives innovation and is changing the way the world works.
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Nick Booth: “We can’t bridge the digital divide simply by providing internet access.”
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Nick Booth pokes holes in a Charity Commission consultation document, then finds it almost impossible to give the CC his feedback.
I got me a MicroTrack!
I’ve been after a decent audio recorder for a while, and on the recommendations of Neville Hobson, who regularly blogs about such matters, I opted for an M-Audio MicroTrack 2. And very nice it is too.
I’m still waiting to use it, because my Compact Flash card hasn’t arrived yet. I haven’t ever seen one of these before, always previously having used SD or Sony’s Memory Sticks. I’m guessing CF cards are pretty big – the slot in the MicroTrack is huuuge!
Drip, drip… more ICELE news
David Wilcox pointed me in the direction of the latest E-Government newsletter from Headstar, and their article about ICELE’s slow and rather painful death:
In the medium term, the government is considering an overhaul of e-democracy policy which could bring into being a new cross-government agency to replace ICELE and draw in elements of similar work currently scattered across the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. Progress in that direction will be made following the publication by DLG this summer of a white paper on citizen empowerment…
CLG concern over ICELE’s operations is thought to centre on its spending on staff and management and a failure to achieve its initial broad objectives. However, Ellis told E-Government Bulletin that charges of overspending were “plainly not true”.
Interesting! But also rather messy and unpleasant…
I was giving a little thought the other night to th poor councillors who had started blogging using ICELE’s system, ‘Blog in a Box’, and who might now be a little concerned about where, if anywhere, their platform might be going now.
My advice to them would be to move to WordPress, either by using the free hosted option at WordPress.com or by hosting it themselves with their own install from WordPress.org. If any of you come across this blog and need some help, let me know.