New Puffbox.com site now live

Thanks for coming. Now go away.

As announced here a few weeks ago, I’ve taken the brave decision to leave behind my WordPress.com-based blog of two years standing, in favour of a self-hosted solution under my company Puffbox’s brand. It makes sense for all sorts of reasons I won’t list here. If you want to keep receiving my regular rants and reflections, you’ll now need to visit the all-new puffbox.com instead.

If you’re signed up to the RSS feed, and you’re in the majority who changed their settings as instructed, you shouldn’t now have to do anything. If you didn’t, shame on you. Hurry up.

I’m planning on leaving this site ‘live’ as an archive; in time, I may migrate all the old stuff over to the new site, but I’m reluctant to do so in these early stages, in case it’s seen as a ‘splog‘.

Whitehall staff have no life

MySociety’s new travel-time maps are a fine piece of data visualisation / mashing, and a sociological warning.

In his book Bowling Alone, Harvard professor Robert D Putnam concluded that ‘every ten minutes of commuting reduces all forms of social capital by 10%’. By which calculation, if you live more than 50 minutes’ travel from your workplace, your involvement in your community and society reduces to – er – zero.

Meanwhile, the latest data from the Council of Mortgage Lenders shows first-time buyers are typically having to borrow 3.3x their income. And National Statistics data puts the median gross salary of a civil servant at ‘approximately £20,000 on an FTE basis’ (Sept 2006, see PDF).

Put those numbers together with the MySociety maps, and the picture is pretty bleak: Whitehall staff on all but the highest salaries can’t expect to live anywhere near their work, and hence can’t expect to have any kind of a social (capital) life. We end up with a central government bureaucracy ever further distanced from the citizenry it’s trying to service. Or am I stretching things too far?

New FCO blogger: Kosovo calling

Another new FCO blogger: this time it’s Ruairi O Connell, Deputy Head of the British Office in Pristina. ‘We are where we are,’ he writes in his first posting, putting his diplomatic training to good use. Sky News foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall is rather more forthright on his excellent blog: the ‘last question’ in the Balkan Wars, namely the fate of Kosovo, is about to be thrashed out one way or the other. Serbia is midway through a two-round Presidential election, with the ‘ultra, and I mean ultra-nationalist’ candidate winning round one; round two takes place on 3 February. An insight from the UK’s Embassy-in-waiting could be very timely indeed.

I note, incidentally, that two senior FCO people spoke on Wednesday at a conference on ‘Transforming Public Sector Communications’, one giving a case study on the FCO’s blogging initiative. Would have been nice if they’d written some of it up on one of the various blogs.

New Independent site: what an improvement

There’s no denying the Independent’s new website is a dramatic, and I mean a dramatic improvement. (Mind you, it couldn’t have been any worse.) Presentationally at least, they’re right back up there with their ‘broadsheet’ rivals.

They’ve struck an excellent balance, putting a lot of content and navigation options up-front, without becoming overwhelming. The use of Proximic to deliver related content seems to work well (although I hate the labelling); and the comment functionality, where they’ve chosen to use it, is nicely executed. Countless RSS feeds throughout the site – more than they publicise, as it happens. It looks like you can get an RSS feed of pretty much every level in the navigation structure, simply by adding /rss to the URL. In theory you can also get RSS feeds of search results, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Excusable teething troubles.

Interestingly, when it comes to blogging, everything’s still over at Typepad. (I confess, I never knew they did so much blogging – but judging by the low numbers of comments, nor did/do many others.)

According to the Press Gazette, the site ‘previously carried only news stories that had been repurposed from the newspaper’ – and having dropped by the site several times today, to see a virtually identical homepage, that’s still undoubtedly the core of the web offering. Sure, there’s a bit of ‘today’ copy from PA in there, but that doesn’t constitute rolling publication as such. I’m a bit wary of news that they’ve ‘taken on six members of staff to upload breaking news stories throughout the day’. We’ve surely gone beyond mere ‘uploading’, haven’t we?

But that’s just nit-picking, isn’t it. Well done, Independent. You just caught up, big time.

Telegraph’s new election map

I quite like what the Telegraph have done with their hexagon-based election map… a few holes in the data, slightly too long for comfort on a normal screen config, and a few not-quite-accurately-placed places (especially in NI), but a nice app nonetheless. I still have a soft spot for the Tetris-style presentation of the Electoral Calculus site, though.

Oh… and while we’re on the subject of the Telegraph, full credit to them for embracing OpenID. On one hand, it’s a smart branding move: its readers see themselves as ‘Telegraph people’, so why not authenticate themselves against the Telegraph site? On the other, it’s smart project management: sometimes the best way to get from A to B is to go via C.

NY Times invests in WordPress

On my to-do list for today: a list of ten reasons why you should be using WordPress. So helpfully, glancing through this morning’s RSS feeds… Automattic, the company behind WordPress, announces ‘a $29.5 million round of financing’.

The numbers don’t mean a lot to me, although apparently it’s ‘massive’. Much more interesting is the fact that one of the investors is the New York Times. CEO Toni Schneider also reveals: ‘we are also entering a partnership with the Times to expand their existing WordPress blogging infrastructure and to create new ways of connecting WordPress bloggers with the New York Times and its readers.’

Plus of course, at last week’s Crunchies awards, WordPress won both ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ and ‘Best CEO’. That list is writing itself.

Quick update: did we know that About.com (ranked #141 by Alexa, whatever value you choose to put on that) is built on WordPress? We do now.

Government’s ‘trust bounce’

Just in case you miss it: Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer study shows ‘trust in business is higher than in government in 14 of 18 countries’. But in the UK, the key finding is a ‘trust bounce’ for business, media, NGOs and government, with media and governmental credibility doubling (albeit from a pretty low base).

Here’s the odd part. For all the company’s appetite for new media, including live Twittering by Simon Collister and David Brain, it’s surprisingly hard to find decent, substantial online material to link to. Here’s the global press release; here’s the UK ‘microsite’, with YouTube-hosted video; here’s the summary of findings, in a web-unfriendly PDF. Expect more in a few weeks time.