Pezholio

It’s been a few weeks now since I posted my first foray into the Edubase dataset, and since then, there’s been a few changes to the dataset, so I thought I’d give it another crack – the end result meaning I might have something exciting for everyone to benefit from! Since the dataset was published, [...]

With all this talk of data, and online, we can often lose sight of the real, physical world (as a certified iPhone addict, I know I do – there’s been a few times I’ve almost walked into a lampost due to me paying more attention to my phone than what’s going on in front of [...]

Certainly not me! We as councils are constantly being asked to save money, and one big element of this is front facing customer services. It’s estimated that it costs councils £6.56 to deal with enquiries face to face, £3.22 by telephone contact, and 27p for online *. So, imagine my joy when I get this [...]

As a lot of you probably know, I’m a big fan of open data, as well as driving innovation and making it easier to share information, it’s also a lot of fun. Now, councils are pretty slow in picking this stuff up, for all sorts of reasons (lack of knowledge / interest, lack of technical [...]

In case you’ve had your head buried in a good few feet of sand, then you’ll know all about the issues surrounding the new Birmingham City Council website. I won’t get into it too much here, but, suffice to say, the project was over budget, late and didn’t deliver half of what is expected from [...]

A thought occurred to me when driving to work this morning (‘cos I’m sad like that) about the kinds of services councils need to manage their social media (in particular Twitter) presence well. This is particularly pertinent with the demise of Twitapps, which, amongst other things, allows you to keep tracks of @ replies via [...]

For those of you who don’t know, Twitter have recently announced new terms of service, mainly in an attempt to clear up stuff about who owns your tweets, but also to try and stop the flood of spam. Now, as someone who hates spam on Twitter with a passion bordering on the psychotic, this is [...]

Health warning Before I go any further, it’s worth pointing out that my views are my own, and not the views of my employer – just so you know like. Well, it’s finally happened – massively over budget, and over three years late, Birmingham City Council’s website has finally launched. And what a disappointment it [...]

With the recent publication of the Digital Britain report and Gordon Brown calling on Tim Berners-Lee to help open up access to government data, there’s been a lot of talk about public organisations opening up data. Most of this has focused around APIs and linked data (something I’m very passionate about already), but there’s much [...]

Just a quick brain dump here, arising from a discussion that I had at the ‘unpanel’ at Localgovcamp. The online community in our council area is getting larger and more vocal, with blogs, pressure groups and other communities cropping up. Often, there are things said that attack the council. In the ‘olden days’ (when attacks [...]