technology archive
Famous lost messages get lost
Wow. Both Google and Bing tell me at the time or writing that there is nothing, zilch, nada on the internet which contains the exact phrase “famous lost messages”. I guess all the references must have been, er…, lost.
Michael Bloomberg impresses with his cash prizes for better use of public data
This is an impressive sounding initiative from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Bloomberg, making good on a promise of increased civic transparency for New Yorkers, initiated an annual contest this morning awarding cash prizes to Web developers that create innovative Internet and mobile applications using city data… The amount of data coming out of New [...]
What should your online priorities be?
Cross-posted from the Mandate blog: Effective use of the internet requires a meld of two factors: what do you want to get from it and what does your audience want from you? You don’t have to take your audience’s current needs as an absolute given – you can hope to alter them over time – [...]
Writer's block: how bloggers can beat it
Sometimes you want to blog, you know you’d like to keep your audience supplied with posts, you know that you’ve not suddenly become an ignorant, boring person with nothing to say – but you just can’t think of an interesting topic. So what to do? My solution: look through your posts from a year ago [...]
Digital exclusion: how tough a problem is it to crack?
Cross-posted from the Mandate blog: The issue of digital exclusion – and its close correlation with wider social exclusion – has been steadily moving up the public policy agenda over the last few years. Last year the Government published a detailed report into digital exclusion for example. But what do the latest internet access statistics tell [...]
How not to judge a political website: the top six mistakes
Whether it is outsiders commenting on how parties and politicians use the internet, or people comparing their own party with others, or an individual looking to assess different website suppliers, reviews of political websites are a frequent occurrence. Across these reviews there are several very commonly made mistakes. Watch out for those explained below and [...]
Habitat and Twitter: what are the lessons to learn?
Habitat’s been in the news, in a bad way, for its recent foray into the world of Twitter. Although it’s a firm with a solid reputation for its service and its goods, that hasn’t transferred over to its tweeting. Instead, Habitat has been widely condemned – and apologised – for adding irrelevant hashtags to its [...]
How can you check how many backlinks there are to your site?
A handy YouTube clip from Google addresses this backlink question:
Facebook: big but poor
It’s become almost a cliché to illustrate the reach of social media by comparing Facebook’s number of active users with the population of different countries. The comparison certainly looks striking. Facebook has “more than 200 million active users“. If it were a country would make it the fifth biggest in the world, ahead of Brazil [...]
Colouring private calendar items in Outlook 2003
How do you make Private items in your Outlook 2003 calendar automatically appear in a different colour from other items? It’s easy to have items in different categories automatically appear in different colours, but the Private setting isn’t a category. The answer is rather buried away, so here’s a note to help me remember in [...]
