I’m Simon Dickson.

Did you catch Huw Edwards’s toady performance with Bill Gates on the Ten O’Clock News? He did ask the ‘killer question’ of why we were paying double what the Americans are being charged for Vista… and clearly had The World’s Richest Man on the ropes. But no knockout blow. A clearly unbriefed Bill’s best answer was that: ‘We try to keep our prices largely inline from country to country.’ Well, Bill, you clearly aren’t trying hard enough.

And you can’t get away with blaming exchange rate ‘drift’. Amazon.com has Vista Home Premium Upgrade for $153.99 (equivalent to £78.63 at today’s exchange rate of $1.96-ish). Amazon.co.uk has the exact same item for £144.99. That would equate to an exchange rate of $1.06 to the pound. It hasn’t been anything close to that low since March 1985 (as this US government data proves). That would be eight months before the release of Windows 1.0. You’re either the world’s greatest forward-planner, Bill, or… well, you tell me.

Incidentally - I’ve checked the recording, and Bill definitely said: ‘You’ve always got to obsolete your old products’. Aside from the inherent crime against grammar there, I’m with the Green Party on this one. We’re looking at ever more power-hungry components, and lots of perfectly adequate machinery being chucked in the nearest landfill. Your current XP machine simply is not obsolete, no matter what the Vista Upgrade Advisor thing tells you.

But while we’re at it… it’s generally A Good Thing to see a UK translation of the Apple ‘I’m a Mac / I’m a PC‘ ad campaigns from the States, featuring Mitchell and Webb. Internet-only apparently, although I did see a poster at Oxford Circus tube station earlier today. If only Apple would like to consider applying the same transatlantic conversion principle to its prices. Based on today’s exchange rate, we should be paying £561 for a MacBook. Not £749. ‘And that’s a bad miss,’ one might say.

A few weeks back I interviewed for a possible new contract. It wasn’t a bad interview, but we didn’t really click, and I didn’t get the offer. But one of the questions I was asked - and it was clearly the interviewer’s ‘killer question’ - was this: what are the three key qualities to a good website? Er, not one I had a stock answer for.

I’m actually quite pleased about the answer I gave ‘off the cuff’; even if I’d had time to prepare, I don’t think I’d have answered it differently. But I’m interested to hear if anyone’s got any better ideas?

Standards, formal and informal. I hope I don’t have to make a case for the use of formal standards: it’s good citizenship, and it should pay dividends in the long run. But informal standards matter just as much. There’s a reason why most websites have a logo in the top left corner, and a search box in the top right: because we (virtually) all do. Visitors will simply refuse to spend time learning your innovative new metaphor for navigation, and will go elsewhere. Make it easy for them, by making them feel comfortable.

Plain speaking. Yes, ‘plain English’, avoiding tech jargon and all that - but I think there’s more to it. Most people spend most of their online time dealing with friends and family (even at work?). Email, instant messaging, blogs, whatever. They are used to a certain tone of communication when they sit down in front of keyboard and monitor: casual, informal, chatty. I’m not saying that FTSE100 companies should have a homepage saying ‘hiya mate, how ya’ doin?’ But if you’re looking for one-to-one engagement, and most of us are, then you need to adopt that informal tone. Lose the pompous authority, lose the vague marketing-speak.

Know your statistics. It never ceases to amaze me how little attention people pay to their usage data.  In there, you will find everything you need to know about your user base. What do they like? What don’t they like? What did they want, and did you supply it? Cost just isn’t an excuse: your website is churning this stuff out free of charge, and a powerful analysis tool like Google Analytics is also free. Any decent web manager should be able to recite details of his/her traffic levels and trends without even hesitating. And then doing something about them.

If anyone agrees or disagrees, or has any better suggestions, that’s what the comments box is there for.

Now Iain Dale’s stirring about the cost of government blogs. He points to a PQ in which DWP admits that it’s costing half a staff member’s time to run the Welfare Reform and Child Poverty blog. Once again, the retort is that ‘well, I do it in my own time for next to nothing’.

Iain - who, let’s remember, isn’t even an MP yet (although not for lack of trying), never mind having ministerial experience - falls into a classic trap here. It simply isn’t fair to compare the two. Iain’s blog is a personal project, with no formal or official standing; no chain of management to answer to; no need for the left hand to check what the right hand is/was doing; no concerns about the expression of strong political opinions in the comments. As soon as it’s an official initiative, on a .gov.uk server, with the Government ’seal of approval’, it’s a whole new ball game.

So - for example - Iain can shrug off any difficulties with his blog’s hosting, where government would be (rightly) lambasted if they trusted an official website to a freebie with no recourse in the event of such problems.

Even if the comparison were valid, is Iain is a glass house with a pile of stones? Questioned by the Guardian in October about online TV channel 18 Doughty Street, he said this:

Viewing figures, he says, seem to be up in the thousands but are hard to determine at this stage and, anyway, “We’re not going to let the viewership dictate what we do.” A former bookshop owner and publisher, he says, “It’s like when you publish a really good book that only sells a few copies - it was still well worth doing. That’s the way we look at it, and we’ll see where that takes us.”

So is it OK to condemn the value of an initiative on account of low readership/audience numbers, or not? (I’m guessing Doughty Street viewing figures are ‘low’, judging by the Alexa trendline and an apparent lack of any official statement to the contrary… but I’m happy to be told otherwise.)

Be warned, Mr Dale. Despite the best efforts of myself and the small number of people like me, Government - or more particularly the civil service - just does not work that way. If/when the Tories win the next election, and if you decide to bring in the zero-cost ‘guerilla communication’ philosophy, good luck to you… and I’d be delighted to help. But comments like these are certain to come back to bite you in the behind.

Yesterday it was News 24’s new graphics, today it’s BBC coverage of Celebrity Big Brother. Somebody at Media Guardian has clearly been tasked with monitoring the BBC’s blogs, and turning each day’s pieces into a shocking exposé. Please stop it. It’s unquestionably a good thing for editors to be prepared to engage with their audience, and take the criticism as and when it arises. And hey, guess what - if you invite feedback, sometimes it won’t be praise. This in itself is not a story.

Regular readers may be aware of my little side-project, Findless - which aims to provide shortcuts to frequently sought information. We’ve done a few Google-based search engines with a ‘whitelist’ of recommended sites, tailored for the health & safety and education sectors. There are a couple of map-based mashups, featuring English and Scottish Premier League football news, and your local MP.

Most recently, I threw together a quick inflation calculator called Inflation Buster, which lets you compare prices for any two years - as far back as 1750. I’ve used a few javascript tricks to offer slider-based date selection, and in-page results. It’s not pretty, but it’s really just a technical proof-of-concept.

Just to let you know that Inflation Buster has just been updated to include the new 2006 inflation data, and I’ve fixed some IE7-related presentation problems. So for example, if you’re wondering what level to set your kids’ pocket-money, based on what you got as a child, we’re here to help. I also upgraded the project blog to the new version of WordPress, which was remarkably quick and straightforward. It isn’t often that an upgrade or installation routine manages to make me smile, but WordPress did. Love those guys.

The dollar-pound exchange rate is heading ever closer to the magic £1:$2 point, which suddenly makes it all too easy to compare prices on both sides of the Atlantic. And the first victim of such calculations, I suggest, will be Microsoft. Brace yourselves, TVP.

US residents will be expected to pay $239 for an upgrade from Windows XP to Vista Home Premium. A quick bit of mental arithmetic reveals that to be about £119.50 sterling. But according to stories circulating here at Christmas, you should be expecting something closer to £200 - or higher.

Oh, and to make matters worse: Microsoft will be making it available as a download to North American purchasers, who use the exact same internet that we do in the UK, at those same lovely dollar prices. I look forward to seeing them justify it.

I’m personally getting a bit tired of Second Life. I thought the hype had died down, but then Sky News runs two (or was it more?) packages in the Technofile slot saying how great it is. So thanks to Jeff Jarvis for some hard numbers, which I hadn’t seen elsewhere.

At this morning’s session, John Markoff (New York Times) admits that he hasn’t gotten past the opening and I admit I have not either. It’s small. They have 334,000 “regular visitors,” (David Kirkpatrick of Fortune magazine) says - though that’s only people who come back after a month while 2.6 million have come and most, like Markoff and me, give up.

Er, yeah. Me too. (I keep threatening to try it again, though. I refuse to accept the possibility that I’m just too old for it.) 87% of your registered user base seems a lot to have lost, especially after such a long and painful install/registration process.

Climbdown! Backtrack! A deluge of complaints! Oh the humiliation! The Guardian eagerly notes that the BBC’s new News 24 on-screen graphics haven’t been universally popular. Or to put it another way, the BBC proactively explained what they were doing, and offered a forum for people to voice their opinion on it. They have listened, and now they’re acting on the feedback. This is unquestionably a good thing.

The Guardian - who, at the same time, trumpet the success of their Comment Is Free debate - should be ashamed of their choice of words here. It sums up everything that’s wrong with the media and public life in the UK. If you dare to talk to your audience, and - heaven forbid! - listen to their responses, you are portrayed as weak. No you’re not.

My verdict, for what it’s worth: I think it’s an improvement. Good riddance to the OUTRAGEOUSLY LARGE FONTS. But doesn’t it look a lot like Sky News now, eh?

This might be useful for more than just the next series of the brilliant QI… you know how Tony Blair said he used to sit behind the goal watching Newcastle footballer Jackie Milburn, except it turned out that Milburn retired when Blair was only 4, and there weren’t seats at St James’s Park at the time? Well, cue Alan Davies…

Yes, it actually turns out that it isn’t true. (If you believe this piece on the Newsnight blog, that is.) He never said it. Yet it has passed into folklore as fact… and I reckon, if you asked people for ‘evidence’ that Blair is a liar, that’ll be the first or second example that springs to many minds. Google reckons it has 1450 pages mentioning both Blair and Milburn - and a quick scan doesn’t reveal many trying to debunk the story. The top two hits are both from the Guardian: the second one declares it to be an urban myth… but sadly, the top one propagates it further.

I particularly like the line from New Statesman editor John Kampfner, in an article on his website reproduced from the Daily Express: ‘Who can forget the Jackie Milburn reminiscences?’ Er, strictly John - who can remember them? When they didn’t actually happen?

Yesterday, Edelman reported that Brits’ trust in politicians has hit rock-bottom. Lower even than media. Well, maybe - just maybe, that’s a bit harsh.

Interesting to see leading blog platform WordPress following in the footsteps of leading Linux distribution Ubuntu in pre-announcing the precise day of its next release. From one perspective, it’s brave stuff. But I’m personally a firm believer in the timeboxing approach of project management approaches like DSDM - where resources are fixed, time is fixed, and deliverables are variable. Pragmatic decisions about ‘what’s realistic for this release’ are no bad thing.