In my scarce spare-time, I’ve started work on a non-commercial ‘hyperlocal’ website in my neighbourhood. It has brought home to me just how near-yet-far local social networking is from achieving what it could do. It’s in it’s early stages, but go and have a look at Finchlinks and tell me what you think? The whole [...]

Tim Davies has written a post about the kind of obstacles that get in the way of organisations in promoting interactivity. He has then spun it out into a Wiki. It’s quite a brilliant idea of Tim’s and I’ve written about it here on the Local Democracy blog. My shorter version of a long post [...]

I meant to post this ‘20 signs you don’t want a social media project’ post when it appeared before Christmas, but for some reason I didn’t. It’s a response to Jeffrey Zeldman’s ‘20 signs you don’t want that web design project‘ post – one that it a great deal more familliar. I can vouch for [...]

Even after Googling for ten minutes or so, I was unable to work out whether it was Groucho Marx or George Burns who said, “The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”  That may be true for actors, but one of the hardest lessons that brands, politicians and marketers [...]

For a useful introduction to how assistive technology supports web-browsing for people with different ability sets, have a look at the new Ability Net ‘Easy’ website. Psst – viral marketing doesn’t work – pass it on!:

Though there are lots of ways to make a document available for commenting online, I’ve still not seen anything as effective as the use of a slightly hacked blog in allowing the public to get into the detail of a document. A few years ago, the Power Enquiry made it’s findings available in this way. [...]

… and why public sector procurement drives down quality Economists have a term for the way that quality is driven out of markets where purchasers don’t have a way of measuring quality. It’s called ‘the market for lemons’ Take web-accessibility for instance: Every governmental body needs to have it. Very few know what it really [...]

I’ve just written a post over on the Local Democracy blog about how web-accessibility can help you to get a job done properly if you are commissioning work from web-developers. Psst – viral marketing doesn’t work – pass it on!:

Over the next few days, I’m going to be looking at the possibilities that Google Apps provide in creating a ready-make extranet-cum-email system for large-ish voluntary membership organisations. I think that there are real possibilities in using the applications in the Google package creatively to ramp up the quantity of interactivity within activists of such [...]

It’s easy to get sidetracked by all of the whizzy interactivity of social media, but many organisations still need a good website that provides them with a powerful organisational communications tool. I’ve worked on well over 100 major website projects and I’ve seen all of the possibilities happen. Projects that failed because the wrong CMS [...]