You’ll have noticed the drift towards freeing up the information of the UK’s Foreign Office for others to use – the feeds, the API, the social media, and so on. Getting our travel advice especially into the sites, widgets, pages, applications that others are using is hugely important. We have to take this stuff toRead… Read more »
Over the short life of my blog on the site of the UK’s Foreign Office, I’ve posted a number of times about the ways you can access our feeds , some more feeds and how Directgov’s Innovate team in the UK took up the challenge to build an API. The thought behind this remains consistentRead… Read more »
A while ago I proclaimed the arrival of the Foreign Office on Digg. And now Digg looks like it’s in deep trouble, announcing cuts in staff of 37% earlier this week, following 10% cuts earlier in the year. I’m always sympathetic to people suffering cuts, for obvious reasons, and it’s sad to see a majorRead… Read more »
I’ve said before on this blog (as the sole avid reader will remember) that the mantra for what the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is trying to do digitally is distribution, not destination. We’re not trying to create a network of must-visit websites – experience tells us that government websites tend not to work like that,Read… Read more »
It’s odd having a problem of too much enthusiasm, especially when it comes to social media in government. It often falls victim to a risk averse culture (as well as internet security settings) and too little happens rather than too much. But we’ve developed a problem with YouTube. We have a procedure where we ‘signRead… Read more »
A few days ago, I was at the excellent PdfEU conference , and pulling together the notes for the wittering I was asked to do meant that I had to do the very useful and healthy process of pottering round the digital estate of the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office and working out the successes,Read… Read more »
We’ve been playing around with commenting functionality on the Foreign Office blogs for much of the summer – trying out our old system (which, oddly, asked you to perform basic maths before commenting), with Facebook Connect and with another proprietary system. In the end, we’ve plumped for none of them – and all of them.Read… Read more »
More travel news feeds, this time they come ready-filtered In August, I blogged about trying to get developers to use our information feeds to plug into their own sites and applications as a way of helping us to broaden the spread of some of our core information. It’s very much the case that accurate andRead… Read more »
The (UK) Foreign Office used to be on iTunes – doing , frankly, rather random podcasts in two different places across the iTunes store. Even with my best editorially-post-rationalising hat on, I couldn’t quite work out what we were trying to do. So they came down, both sets – clean slate and all that –Read… Read more »
To the casual reader of this blog it would seem that all I ever talk about is which social media bandwagon we’re jumping on to this week – Twingly here, Facebook there, twitter over there … Now, I prefer to think of this bandwagon-hopping as ‘agile’, but there is also some method to it. TheRead… Read more »