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 »
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 »
At the Foreign Office, we’ve made a small song and dance about the 3,000th tweet of the @foreignoffice twitter account. I can hide such vanity by noting that the 3,000th tweet is no morimportant than the 2,999 or the 3,001 (and less so if this blog is the subject). Yet it feels like a milestone,Read… Read more »
You may not have heard much of Twingly , but I’m happy to help change that in some small way. Twingly is, basically, a blog search engine with faceted, social search for the blogosphere. And if that’s a bit geeky and doesn’t mean much, then the traffic impresses – they tell us it currently servesRead… Read more »
Providing accurate and timely travel advice is one of the key functions of the Foreign Office, and one of the key drivers of our web presence. Our Travel and living abroad section provides background notes for travellers on every country in the world, including timely alerts of the implications of all sorts of issues whichRead… Read more »
Every year, the digital team at the UK’s Foreign Office reviews how well the post sites are doing, or not, as part of an annual health-check of our capabilities, which ties up with the not-taken-up-often-enough opportunity to talk to the editors of the FCO’s 256 sites .The post sites are critical to the digital deliveryRead… Read more »
I am in the midst of being assessed for an international business opportunity, during which I’ve been asked to submit to rigorous but objective assessments of my foreign language skills. It’s not often that professionals get to gauge perception vs. reality regarding claims of proficiency or fluency in any skill set, so I welcomed thisRead… Read more »