There are some sites there which have cost the taxpayer shocking amounts of money – including Business Link, which cost over £6m just for planning, over £4m for building and £4m for testing! On top of that there was £15m content provision costs and a staggering £4m per year to host – all for just 16m visits. Compare that with the WordPress-based Number10.gov.uk website, which receives almost as many visits – just short of 12m last year – but costs only £86k a year to host. Another WordPress-based site, Bis.gov.uk, received just over 1m visits last year, yet cost a measly £5k to host. Just to put that into perspective, you could host the BIS website at those costs for 1,250 years – over a millenium – and it would not even cost as much as it did to just plan Business Link!

Compared to the large Serco-made mess of the Business Link site, WordPress is clean and efficient, and doesn’t require a large infrastructure to run well. I suspect a large part of the Business Link £4m hosting fund is down to MS server license fees. The fact that WordPress comes with a user system and content management cuts out the costs of developing these too (which aren’t usually done too well, anyway). Using WordPress across the government keeps things consistent, and would keep training costs down in the long-term, as website staff won’t necessarily have to undergo much training if they’re moving from updating a WordPress website to another WordPress website.

There are many smaller WordPress sites within the Government, however no others are big enough to have been covered by the dataset released. Hopefully in the future they will be.

In the new age of budget cuts it will soon become clear that, inside Government, sites which have a smaller footprint when it comes to infrastructure, along with smaller initial development costs will survive the axe – which is soon going to fall on sites which have ridiculously large budgets and hosting costs.

UPDATE: Turns out the BIS site is not using WordPress anymore. It was doing last year, probably was just an interim site.

However, that’s not without its problems. I am one of those with an iPhone suffering the left-hand antenna problem, but I invested in a bumper (daylight robbery!) to alleviate it. Though I am more concerned about the yellow marks on the screen, which haven’t quite faded away yet – despite what some people have reported on Mac forums online. Will be heading back to the O2 store for a swap when I think they’ll have more in stock.

Overall though, I’m really pleased. Multitasking is pretty good and the battery life seems rather long. All in all though, the real potential of iPhone 4 and iOS 4 will come with developers updating their apps to take advantage of the new features.

Now, as concerned as I am about my own privacy online, I am even more worried that there are many people out there who don’t understand the concept of sharing with ‘Everyone’ actually means everyone - not just their friends. Unlike me, many people will share anything and everything on their Facebook profiles, from basic things like their school or work to pictures of themselves drunk at parties – things that they would rather not let an employer or their teacher see. People haven’t yet realised that Facebook can happily share these things to search engines that will store links to them for years, and even if you decide to delete your photos, Facebook’s policies clearly state that they can keep the image itself online for as long as they find ‘reasonable’, so anyone still could find the image itself on Facebooks’ servers years down the line.

I can control who I share with all I want, but that’s just for things I share myself. What’s stopping any friends with lax privacy settings uploading photos of me to the web, and then tagging me in them? I can go as far as untagging myself in the photo, or stopping people from viewing photos like that of me, but beyond that there’s nothing I can do. Oh, and don’t forget, Facebook own all your data you share with them. All of it. Yep, everything. And their Terms of Use even go as far as saying that if you don’t keep it up to date, they have the right to delete your account.

Isn’t it worrying that one large company with questionable privacy ethics now has control over almost everything we share on the web? At anytime they could change their policies and everyone could be burned – what if, for example, they decided that all your contact details could be made public to ‘Everyone’, and stop you from changing that? Sure, it’s probably a far-fetched example, but it can happen, and Facebook are perfectly allowed to do it within the Terms of Use we agreed to when we signed up. Probably a more realistic example would be that of Facebook’s relationship with advertisers. What if Facebook sold your user data to advertisers who then used it to target products at you? Facebook have tried it already with Beacon (and automatically opted everyone into it), and had a fierce backlash from users. It was only after considerable complaining that they let you opt-out of the service.

It seems like they’re trying to do it again with Social Plugins. Even though they were only announced a few weeks ago, many sites have now added the ‘Like’ button to their pages, and Facebook will automatically share this back to your profile if you interact with it. Think about the tracking they can do with that – not only can they see what and who you interact with on Facebook, they are able to track what websites you visit even when you leave the Facebook site. And if that’s not bad enough, Facebook recently rolled out a feature where they will automatically share all your information to selected websites and services as soon as you visit them, without your consent. And those sites can store it forever – as they are no longer bound by 24-hour limits. They call this “instant personalisation” – but it’s an opt-out scheme which is hidden deep within the privacy settings if you want to disable it.

As I’ve described, Facebook plays games with your privacy, constantly pushing the boundaries on what they will do with it. Yet, as much as I want to join the people who are flocking away from the site, the service it provides is invaluable for keeping in contact with my friends. I think the amount of data (and the control of it) that Facebook has over its users is extremely worrying, but without a decent solution to the whole ‘one site’ problem, there’s nowhere else for users to go.

What I would love to see is a specification for social information along the lines of OpenID but with the flexibility of blogging – where all my social profile data would be stored on my own server at a web address, and then people can add me as their friends by entering my social address. The system would be completely open, so people could make clients or server-side software on whatever platform they liked, and for those who don’t have websites, they could sign up using an online provider – akin to how so many services allow you to sign up for an OpenID without the need for a server. The main problem with such a system is that it would seem over-complicated to users. Why would the average user, who may possibly not even know the implications of privacy, let alone care about it, move away from Facebook, a simple site to share content, to a strange system where they reference users by their web addresses?

However, to see an open platform like this be established would be great, and a positive step in the direction where we can truly be the exclusive owners of the content we share online, without the worry that one large service can hold all our photos, contact details, connections and our online activity, with no guarantees that they will look after it.

You’ve probably all been prompted by now to “review” your Facebook privacy settings in their latest update rolled out yesterday. In this dialog you’re nudged towards sharing select things with “Everyone”, but you can keep your current settings if you wish. Since I’d like to keep my private profile to stay how it was, I chose to stick to my existing settings and was on my way.

However, I’m the sort of person who (usually) knows what I’m doing with these sort of things. Already I’ve seen today people unaware they’ve accidentally published their entire profile, pictures and updates to the world, and in today’s all-encompassing digital age where nothing ever completely disappears from the internet, this is a very dangerous area. We’ve all heard of cases where people have posted insulting statuses about their boss, then realised they’re actually their friend. Now it doesn’t even take a friendship with the boss for him to see your incriminating statuses if you’re using Facebook’s “recommended” settings.

Even more infuriating is the now standard amounts of information which are shown on your profile to the public. I have no control over who sees my friends, my pages or even worse, the events I’m attending with the specific times and dates. Surely this stuff should be under the same controls as everything else?

It’s clear why Facebook are doing this – as already explained on various websites, they’ve struck a deal with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to provide public status updates to its searches. They are expected to do a similar deal with Google next year. To do this they’ve nudged their members to share all and covering it up by saying how much more streamlined it will be.

For me, Facebook was a private place I could chat with my friends, but if they can’t guarantee the privacy of my posts, events and profile, then I’ll think twice before posting that update or RSVPing to an event. I think they’ve got the complete wrong idea.

Jordan

PHPNW 2009 was AWESOME

This year it was held at the Manchester Conference Centre which seemed a much more suited venue than last year at the G-MEX, with two theatre-style rooms and a nice hall used for food and exhibitors.

Since I was helping out, I couldn’t see all the talks I was hoping to see, but they were all recorded and I think they will be online soon. However, the talks I did see were really interesting and I came away from the event with a load of things I’m meaning to follow up on!

Probably one of the best talks was ‘Tools and Talent’ by Plusnet developer Rowan Merewood. It was quite insightful into how to pester a development group into using a new tool and how to prepare for a large-scale migration between platforms. It was also rather humorous

It was quite good to see Microsoft doing a talk today. Despite the heckling, they showed off their new WebsiteSpark program and a new program called SketchFlow part of their Expression Studio series. They also had a prize draw, in which I won some Microsoft Points (and was also given some more by Phil – thanks!)

The day finished off with a meal and a free bar sponsored by Sun. There are further events on in the morning at the Museum of Science and Industry – I’ll try to get there but can’t guarantee anything.

On the whole, the event surpassed the expectations set by last year’s conference, and had a great line-up of talks and speakers as well as an equally-awesome group of attendees. See you all next year!

Jordan

Well I’ve just about recovered from a superb weekend down in sunny Cardiff for WordCamp UK. It was interesting, to say the least, and I met up with loads of amazing people who I have a lot of respect for in the industry!

Having booked the hotel at the last minute, I headed down early Saturday morning, made it down in about four hours. The morning started with a quick introduction session, going around the 130 people in the room, each giving quick overview of themselves and something they do with WordPress. I thought this worked really well and showed off the many interests and uses people have for WordPress. Surprisingly, it seemed that over half of the room make some living from WordPress too.

One of the notable sessions I attended was Jonny Allbut’s presentation about the WordPress site development process. It was really interesting and quite detailed, and named quite a few useful plugins. Another interesting session was Simon Dickson’s talk on WordPress being used in the government, and the controversy surrounding the launch of Number10.gov.uk on WordPress.

The evening social on the Saturday was really good. It was great to chat with people and I could put names to faces of people I’ve known for quite a while on Twitter and the like! I also had some time to chat with Matt Mullenweg, who was really interesting and called me a ‘natural’ with David Coveney’s camera

There was quite a bit of heated discussion in the wrap-up session when it was suggested that an enterprise-aimed event along the lines of WordCamp should also be run. Personally I don’t like the idea that much because I fear of it alienating the community and taking away the community spirit from WordPress.

However, on the whole, the weekend was a great success and I am looking forward to WordCamp UK 2010, which has been penned in at 17th-18th July 2010. However, I’m sure I’ll see a lot of you around before then, if not in conversation online! Thanks to everyone who organized, presented at, and attended the event!

Jordan

UPDATE: Can’t believe I forgot about the highlight of the weekend – the free bricks mints given out by the hotel. Oh we had a lot of fun with those

On Tuesday I got an email from Amazon telling me my order had been dispatched. Apparrently I could expect it either yesterday or today. However now I’ve just got an email from eXpansys saying the netbook won’t even be dispatched until tomorrow, quoting “overwhelming demand” for the problem. I’ve never known “Express Delivery” on a small item to take 6 days! Oh, and the only thing I’ll be getting back is a £5 voucher to use on eXpansys’ website. Oh great. I’ll save it for something I could do without for a few weeks.

Ideally I’d like my delivery charge refunded – this is scandalous and even though Amazon say it shipped yesterday and should be here today at the latest, it’s not even been dispatched.

Well I know who I won’t be buying from in future.

I am hoping to post more often on here now – I get so many ideas for posts and by the time I get round to writing them, I think to myself that the idea has probably been and gone, and that I’ve probably missed the boat with it. Maybe that won’t happen so much in future.

I would like to write more about some of the music I’ve been listening to recently as I’m quite a big fan of indie artists and move through different groups quite quickly. I’m also willing to take some suggestions of new bands to try!

Well it’s 1:30am now and I’m falling asleep. Before I go, just want to send some link-love over to Francis’ new blog – A General Repository. He’s jumped aboard the WordPress bandwagon now and I’m looking forward to reading some of his upcoming posts! Check it out at http://ageneralrepository.wordpress.com/

Jordan

Other than the manual process of blocking accounts which post spam, what other measures can Twitter do to prevent it? It is obviously is a rather big problem.