Appalled at the paucity of Ping? Here are a few online music discovery sources which don’t suck.

• Ghostly Discovery – frankly awesome iPhone app which helps you discover new music based on your mood, the sort of tempo you want and a sliding scale from organic to electronic.
• Last fm – You’ve heard of this one, right? It’s my streaming music radio station of choice because of its fantastically reliable recommendations based on your listening habits (scrobbles), friends, neighbours, or single artists you like. See also Pandora ( no longer available in the UK) blip.fm and Spotify. (I’m ‘neilojwilliams’ on lastfm, blip and spotify if you want to connect – but much more active on lastfm than the other two).
• Taste Kid – Website and iPhone app which learns your tastes based on the artists (and films, books, shows) you tell it you like, and spits out extremely good recommendations of other stuff to try.
• The perfect five – weekly blog of 5 great hand-picked tunes, all free to download.
• 14 tracks – weekly selection of stand-out tracks from the knowledgeable folks at Boomkat
• 22 tracks - free streaming jukebox with 22 playlists across 22 genres, updated weekly by various DJs, music journalists, radio personalities and other new music obsessives. If only it had an RSS feed.
• Apple’s Genius - mostly I use this for making playlists from my existing collection but (very) occasionally it also recommends other stuff in the iTunes store worth checking out.
• Ministry of Sound dance radio – iPhone app which helps you find every dance radio station under the sun.
• Juno recommendations and podcasts – dance music download site offering unparallelled podcasts and recommendations. Search iTunes for ‘Juno’ to see what’s on offer. See also Hospital.

So how about you? What tools do you use to discover music and why?

Photo credit: DRB62

Where does responsibility for digital communications sit within a large organisation?

That used to be a fairly easy question (“In the web team of course!”) but it’s not so simple any more.

These days, it begs two rather more difficult questions: which bit of digital and what kind of responsibility do you mean?

Digital communications has evolved something like this:

• IT. In the beginning there was code, and only the tech guys knew how to transform it into websites. Responsibility for managing the channel was theirs accordingly, but this wasn’t terribly responsive to the needs of the organisation, was poorly integrated, and not at all focused on end users.

• Comms + IT. Databases (and later, CMSs) liberated content from code. Responsibility for the ‘new media’ transferred to the business, web teams sprung up in communications departments, while the underlying infrastructure remained with IT or got outsourced. Websites were still organisation-focused but awareness grew fast about accessibility, information architecture, and writing for the web.

• Devolved publishers + Comms + IT. With publishing volumes increasing faster than resources, web monkeying was incrementally farmed out across the organisation,  often without much of a plan for quality, editorial oversight and skills transfer. Much vanity publishing ensued and keeping all those pages current inevitably became like painting the Forth Bridge.

• Users + Devolved publishers + Comms + IT. Then came a growing recognition of the importance of providing a good online customer experience, with fewer, better pages and more usable transactions. Websites became more user-led, evidence-based, and search-friendly. Quality assurance and training of devolved publishing was tightened up, with more of the responsibility returning to the centre.

• Moderators + Users + Devolved publishers + Comms + IT. Along came forums, blogs, commenting on articles and the brave new world of ‘user generated content’. New responsibilities brought in new people (with no need for pesky CMS training) to moderate, facilitate and respond to users’ feedback. User-focused web management was by now a mainstream principle, but the organisation was still in control of its message.

• Everyone else + Moderators + Users + Devolved publishers + Comms + IT. Here comes everyone! And a zillion free tools to play with. The explosion in social interaction online created direct communications between customers and employees, and before long it will be happening all over the place. The organisation is no longer in control of where customer-employee or customer-customer interaction happens; let alone what’s being said. Digital communications is now, or will soon be, everyone’s job – listening, collaborating and responding online must become core competences for all if the organisation wants to continue to manage its reputation and meet the expectations of its customers.

So if everyone is going to be at it in future, where will responsibility for digital communications sit?  Will there be any need for ‘web teams’ at all? Could responsibility for digital become atomised like it has for Human Resources or Corporate Social Responsibility?

In both those professions, highly specialist, strategically important responsibilities once held in large central teams are now almost completely dispersed – with only a handful of experts setting the rules and giving guidance from the centre.

You could anticipate the same fate for digital. Just as HR can’t line manage for everyone, and just as CSR teams can’t be socially aware on everyone’s behalf, neither can web teams engage with all of the organisation’s many niche customer groups on many niche subjects with anything like the immediacy or authenticity that local teams and individual decision-makers can.

On the other hand, you might argue that this trend of decentralisation could lead to a stronger role for central digital teams in future – just a slightly different one.

That’s certainly my view. Not only because I have a mortgage to pay, but because ‘doing digital well’ is now of such strategic importance and involves such a complex and sophisticated mix of skills, disciplines and knowledge that it needs stronger than ever leadership from a centre of genuine expertise.

I’d even venture to say that in the past we may have devolved some of the wrong things.  It’s time for web teams to rein in control over quality of content and user experience, and let go of the local conversations – providing guidance, clear policies, support where it’s needed and light-touch monitoring where it’s not.

Rumours of the web team’s death (in the title of this blog post at least) have been greatly exaggerated. To me, the future of the web team involves a simultaneous strengthening of control by the centre and a transfer of trust and skills to the wider organisation. It’s about choosing the right bits of digital, and the right bits of responsibility to hold onto or to devolve.

The web team is dead. Long live the web team.

The British Hallmarking Council website relaunched yesterday on the Department for Business platform which – as I am intent on banging on about – was designed by my team as a shared service for BIS and all its partner bodies.

Here’s what their website looked like until yesterday:

And here’s how it looks now:

It’s not all about look and feel, clearly – I’m happy to say BHC has worked hard on improving the content too. But as far as it matters, this design really works; and curiously it works slightly better than the main BIS site whose templates it shares.

There are a few snagging issues to iron out, including some new ones I’ve spotted tonight while writing this post, but all in all it’s a dramatic improvement and I’m chalking this up as another success for the team.

(BHC, in case you’re wondering, are the folks who look after the classification of precious metals and not, as someone joked to me today, anything to do with greetings cards).

Major works by Whitehall webbies in the past six weeks have repeatedly got top billing on No 10′s legendary grid, and even made front page news.

This feels very different from even a year ago, when web teams had to work hard just to get their voices heard on the importance of the web for customer service, its power to humanise and its potential for government-citizen participation.

But now, and for the first time, it’s starting to feel like we can retire some of those old soapboxes and get out our toolboxes instead.

Here is a rundown of the biggest developments either by or affecting central government digital folk in the last month and a half:

• Your Freedom
  Launched today, this national debate about legislation, civil rights and the role of the state is by far the biggest online crowdsourcing exercise yet attempted in the UK. As such it’s also the first real test of the readiness of all parties – the public, public sector and politicians – for digital democracy on a large scale. It’ll take serious commitment from all three to be a success and, while it’s way too early to draw any conclusions about the algorithms of democracy, as I write the amount of constructive engagement by users considerably outweighs the inevitable speak your branes-esque commentary (despite sabotage attempts); and the commitment to listen from Whitehall and Ministers is clearly set out. There’s even a Twitter feed about how the technology is holding up in the face of higher than expected demand. As a precedent, a catalyst for change and a demonstration of the cultural shift from traditional PR to digital engagement, who could ask for a higher profile case study?

• Release of website performance data
  Last Friday, for the first time ever, all central government Departments reported the costs, usage figures and in some cases quality metrics for their websites. It’s not complete and it’s not totally consistent, as others have noted, but it’s a huge start to a process that recognises the important role of government websites, will be repeated annually and expanded to more government bodies. David Pullinger, Head of Digital Policy at COI, has the inside story and incisive analysis.

• Spending Challenge
  Effectively a ‘Your Freedom’ for the public sector, what’s interesting about this is that it’s taking place in the open, using free open source software (there, Simon, I said it!) to collect ideas in private while publicly showcasing a flavour of the ideas being sent in. And because it’s been promoted to every employee of every part of the public sector, it sends a clear message about the power and importance of two way digital techniques for mass participation in decision-making.

• Transparency commitments and the freeze on marketing and advertising spend
  Together these two developments present a huge challenge but also unprecedented opportunities to Whitehall’s digital communications professionals, leaving no room for doubt that digital channels and skills are going to be right at the heart of delivery of publications and campaigns from now on.

• Commentable coalition programme
  Now closed for comments, this site is still worth reflecting on for the fact that the first major publication of this parliament was a commentable website, not a PDF. (Alright, not just a PDF). Also noteworthy for the very fact that the comments are closed. It was time-limited, running for just a few weeks, during which it received nearly 10,000 comments – more comments in a shorter period than any previous outing for the Commentariat-inspired format, and as such it remains probably the biggest case study to date for that platform.

A few observations arising from all this:

• An obvious point but let’s spell it out: online participation in government policy has now moved from the fringes to the mainstream – it’s become the norm, no longer the domain of a handful of early adopters.
• Open-ended engagement looks set to give way to shorter, time-limited consultations – the coalition programme and spending challenge sites were both burners, built to be used and thrown away.
• After many successful precedents, online consultation is becoming more trusting and open – the Your Freedom site uses post-moderation and trusts its user community to flag up abuse, quite a departure from everything that’s gone before.
• Whitehall’s web teams are becoming more collaborative – every last one of the developments listed above have involved Departments pooling their digital resource, for example to share ideas, compare notes and muck in on specifications, wireframes, testing and moderation. Good for gov webbies, good for the public purse.
• The much-discussed culture change needed for ‘government 2.0′ is happening now - very high profile commitment from Ministers + hierarchical nature of the civil service = crowdsourced opinion taken seriously by Department officials.  Only the thickest-skinned of Sir Humphreys can ignore this latest groundswell, surely?

That’s because ECGD are the first customer for the BIS shared web service, using the ready-made templates and CMS platform we developed for use by any of our partner bodies and a handful of central government departments with whom BIS shares a minister (ECGD being one of the latter).

I wasn’t directly involved in the migration and launch, so can’t say too much about that, but am pleased to welcome them on board and proud of my part in enabling the dramatic improvement shown in these before and after shots below – all at a far lower cost than could ever have been the case if they’d gone it alone.

Lots more sites will follow ECGD onto the platform in the months ahead, with flexible options to re-use the same set of ready-made ‘BIS partner’ templates or to develop their own, saving lots of lovely public lolly in the process.

ECGD site before:

And after:

Today the man they call @lesteph is leaving the Civil Service to work on… well, other le stuff. Read about it in his own words here.

I’ve spent the best part of a year working alongside him since the creation of BIS brought our two teams together in June 2009. If you’re reading this blog you’ll most likely know Steph already so I won’t bang on about his personal qualities – it’s just not British. Instead I’d like to say a few things about what he’s done.

• Redefined how to consult online. Government webbies used to experiment with ways of collecting feedback using established tools like discussion forums, webchats and wikis. Enter Steph with the ‘commentable document‘ approach, Commentpress and Commentariat which have since become standard issue for any online consultation worth its salt.
• Gave us cool free tools to do it ourselves. By open sourcing what he built, even lending hosting and tech support here and there, Steph made the previously impossible easy, saved public money and influenced digital bods across Whitehall to come up with similar solutions – and to open source their stuff too.
• Opened doors …and held them open. It became easier to persuade risk and security people that the sky wouldn’t fall in when there were examples we could point to. UK government’s adoption of digital engagement was sped up in no small measure by the tools, precedents, advocacy and even cheeky lobbying that Steph brought to the party.
• Set strategy and defined digital engagement. He gave us his take on what digital engagement is all about and how it fits into the traditional work of a government department, refining it into this listen > explain > engage > convene model, which I for one swiftly nicked.
• Pushed the boundaries of government PR. I’m pretty sure he introduced the social media news release into the corridors of power (or at least press office), not to mention doing interesting new things with dashboards and email alerts.
• Shared, shared and shared some more. He blogged, he coded, he lunched, he hosted, he spoke at events for the civil service and beyond, and he got the rest of us sharing too, setting up cross-government groups for both the digital engagement and intranet folk.
• And last but not least, he defined the scale and complexity of the operation with this slightly mind-boggling Venn diagram. You could base a consultancy on this alone. And maybe he will.

If I do post stuff, it will be about things other than work. Normal (sporadic) service will resume afterwards.

But as of last night she’s broken cover and written her first ever blog post for the BBC, where she has a regular writing gig for daytime drama Doctors. It’s a great post, too.

So we’re now a two blog household, one if them considerably better written than the other. I’ll get to work on Dylan to make the hat trick. (Not that I can take any of the credit for getting Joy to blog, mind you!)

Website launches aren’t what they used to be. Back in the day, the birth or re-birth of a website would be heralded with a big ‘welcome’ story on the homepage, a press release, a section gushing about its new and improved features (probably none of which anyone had said they wanted) and – if you were really lucky – a scrolling marquee with an animated gif or two.

These days, it’s all a bit more sophisticated. The unified BIS site went live quietly this weekend, without much fanfare either before or after. Our comms plan said:

This plan proposes a soft launch externally, in view of the current political and economic landscape and in line with web users’ attitudes to change. (…) In developing the site, we have deliberately minimised the impact on end users. The site design is an evolution of the current site and all URLs will be redirected. Users have told us in research that they do not want things to ‘keep changing’.

Instead of drawing attention to the features, we hope the site’s visitors will just find it familiar, intuitive and somehow more satisfying to use than the three sites it’s replaced. We don’t want them to notice it’s all that different, particularly, just to feel that it’s better. And if it’s not, to tell us what we’ve got wrong so we can improve.

So we’ve switched it on quietly, added a short reassuring message about what’s happened, asked for feedback via an unobtrusive Get Satisfaction widget, and encouraged our email subscribers and Twitter followers to give us their thoughts.

But while we may not be trumpeting what’s good about it via the official channels, there’s no reason I can’t on this blog. Here are just some of the things I’m most proud of:

• The platform. It’s not quite my fantasy CMS but it’s the best I’ve yet seen of its class. We ran a tough competition, won by a worthy supplier, with a developer team who’ve helped us build an enviable amount of flexibility, usability and control into the CMS (in pretty short order; with the mother of all MoG changes in the middle of it, in good time and on budget).
• The savings. Just by switching this site on and turning the old ones off we’ll save more than £2.5m over the next four years. ‘Nuff said.
• The shared service. We’ve built a system for the enterprise. From the terms of the contract to the adaptability of the templates, this is a platform designed for convergence – and one which I’m confident our partner bodies will actively want to join and help us develop, saving money and effort in the coming years.
• The transparency. For those interested in such things we’ve quietly published the costs of the project, the slides from our user research and given access to our web stats using a clever thing Steph‘s cooked up from the Google Analytics API. And, by dint of the level of accountability intrinsic to Get Satisfaction’s company-customer pact, we’re committing ourselves to dealing openly and frankly with feedback, questions or complaints in the first few weeks of live use.
• Nine-way redirection. Merging three websites into one meant preserving URLs from three domains, with three places to send them: to the new site (for content we’ve kept), to the archives (for content we’ve weeded) and to other sites (for content we’ve relocated). Plus a long list of friendly, short URLs from all three sites. It’s not been easy, but we think we got most of them.
• Manual migration. With 3 months to move around 5,000 pages you’d have forgiven us for automation. But the team and I were dead set on that being a disastrous strategy and we’ve done it the hard way instead – cutting the total number of pages nearly in half and updating what’s left in the process.
• Metadata-driven IA. I’ve written about this before. By ditching hierarchy in favour of serving up content by various  metadata fields we’ve flattened the site, reduced the numbers of clicks, brought the stuff people care about closer to the surface, done away with pointless intro pages and – we think – more closely reflected the niche interests of our audience groups. And made the site architecture MoG resistant (if not entirely MoG-proof) in the process.

There are some creases to iron out, both in the content and code, but fewer than you might expect with a project of this size. I hope you’ll agree it’s a move in the right direction and one the BIS team should be proud of.

Well done and thanks in particular to John Turnbull, Will Callaghan, Kevin Herrmann, Ian Azille and the network of web publishers at BIS; and Julie, Jane, Adam and Robin from Eduserv for all working ridiculously hard on this project, bringing so much creativity and doing such a fantastic job.

[Edit, before they notice:  I forgot to thank the guys at Redweb for their input on the wireframes and creative design. They pulled out all the stops to turn it around exceptionally quickly back in the late summer last year. ]

Familiar?

Source. Via Spaghetti Testing.

The good doctor‘s brilliant piece on the tyranny of content management systems has spurred me on to write this post I’ve been contemplating for a while, about my own frustrations with WCMS software and what an ideal platform for government websites might be capable of right out of the box.

Having been close to the requirements spec, procurement, implementation and testing of a couple of CMS-based websites in government in recent years, and used a dozen or so CMSs before that, I am consistently astonished by the (to my mind) fundamental things some of the big name platforms struggle to do, and the lack of features to help organisations manage website content as opposed to just publish it. And I feel that if any industry needs to innovate, it’s this one.

A quick blog search suggests I’m not alone. Even their free pens get a ribbing.

The best of breed tools have considerable strengths, of course, and it’s not fair to expect them to be all things to all men nor automate everything. But if the amount of bespoke modding by customers with common needs can be kept to a minimum that’s got to be good, right? There’s a lively discussion over on David’s post about ways to do just that through consistent schemas for government content, better interoperability, clearer client specification and even open sourcing a government-ready platform. So in that vein, what would a perfect gov CMS need to do?

I’ve started this list on uservoice of the stuff I’d like to see any platform capable of doing from the off. It’s a mix of crushed hopes of yesterday and starry-eyed dreams for tomorrow. (There’s prizes if you can tell them apart).

Feel free to chuck more ideas on there, vote them up or down, tell me why I’m wrong and what software can do it all already. I’ve learnt a lot from your comments on similar posts in the past.

Here’s my personal top five as a taster:

• Government-ready template pack
  Preset vanilla templates based on COI usability wireframes, for common government content types, with standard fields, eGMS metadata and semantic markup. To contain: Minister’s profiles, speeches, statements, news stories, publications, consultations… (more)
• Write and publish everything on the fly
  Set up all the bits you need for your page (metadata, images, downloads, widgets) there and then, not in some other part of the CMS. And when you publish the page, publish all the things it contains too. Is that so much to ask?
• Embeddable code snippets
  Insert any kind of third party embed code (video sharing, maps, slide decks, documents, widgets and apps) or javascript or flash anywhere you want it to appear, without the CMS chewing it up.
• Review schedules and alerts
  Preset tools for reminding authors (not CMS users) to check content, and escalation options for when they don’t. Hook it up to analytics and SEO insight tools to give authors tough love about how well or badly their pages are performing… (more)
• Quality assurance tools
  Information for admins about contributors’ past performance (this user has had 40% of their pages rejected in the past). Diff tools, dip sampling, quality assurance checklists and scorecards built in. Automatic feedback to contributors when their pages are corrected. Promotion and demotion of user roles based on QA activity… (more)

See the full starter list of 35 ideas here and please do comment, vote and add your own.

The stakes are pretty high, if you ask me, with the reputations of individual digital teams and the profession as a whole at the mercy of what their chosen system will let them do. (“That cool thing you saw on that website you like? Sorry boss, we can’t do that with our CMS.”) Vendors should be mindful of the power they yield, for as long as they still yield it.

Image credit: zaveqna

• Why I’m going dark for purdah – Steph explains why he won’t be blogging during the election period. (I won’t be writing about work stuff during that time either for the same reasons, but intend to resume blogging about other interests and this could be a good time to do it).
• Richard Sambrook: Big Thinker – on how journalism has changed in the last 35 years and where it’s going next
• Opening Times – via @alistairreid, all UK opning times in one place.
• The benefits of blogging – DFID’s Julia on the back story of their frontline bloggers.
• Uncorrected Evidence 219 – Matt Tee evidence to PAC on gov comms. My Twitter doc gets a brief mention.
• Radical shift in Government ICT will save £3.2 billion annually in public money – Get in!
• Slides from GovCamp: Making the Political Sell – Simple messages for digital workers in government about where to focus the lines of attack.
• UKGovCamp as the future – “I suspect we are moving from “Homebrew Computer Club” towards “MS-DOS 1.0″, and as our small world grows, there are a few fractures along which it could splinter…”
• UK Govcamp 2010 – Sessions – Write-ups galore from the recent UK govcamp.
• Apps On the Move – What Does .Gov.UK do Next? – Some pretty good app development ideas here.
• Minister wants departments merged – Northern Ireland Minister proposing equivalent to merger of BERR and DIUS to create BIS.
• Google Reader Lets You Subscribe to Any Page on the Web – that is, pages without RSS.
• OMG: brains can’t handle all our Facebook friends – Dunbar’s upper limit of 150 meaningful relationships is the same online.
• In The Eye Of The Storm: Can Government Do Beta? Direct.gov Travel News – A constructive critique of Directgov’s travel news app.
• Amplicate – Making Your Opinion Count – A brand monitoring tool with a black or white outlook. (Everything either rocks or sucks).
• Fingertips transcription services – Reliable, cheap transcription services.

This is just a quick one to send you over here, to the team BIS tumblog Alistair set up, where I liveblogged my notes from two sessions at Govcamp 2010 today (alongside posts from @alistairreid and @lesteph). Namely:

• Setting up a group for public sector web professionals – progress from Socitm and how to get involved.
• Digital campaigns in government – how they are planned, who owns them, what the challenges are.

It was a great day, and a packed schedule, in the awesome venue that is Google UK – lending just the right kind of innovative atmosphere.

Open data was a dominant theme this year, and I dipped in and out of several interesting discussions, not least of all Richard Stirling from the Cabinet Office talking about the launch of data.gov.uk, merely 2 days after it went live to huge acclaim.

Inevitably I missed (and am about to miss – there’s a few sessions to go as I post this and head home to prior engagements) loads of good stuff. I am depending on good write-ups from others – especially the sessions on what digital means for the future of press officers, personal blogging, and defending digital innovation in a climate of cuts. I’ll add links here as I find them.

Meanwhile the Twitter stream is still going strong.

Updates:

• Steph ‘the machine’ Gray has blogged about his and Anthony’s session on being brave in an atmosphere of cuts. Awesome.
• Check out Paul Clarke’s great photos of the day on Flickr

Updates II:

• Organiser supremo (and now Epic Visionary?) Dave Briggs has blogged his reflections and a load of links here, including a de-brief interview with himself and Jeremy Gould
• Sharon O’Dea has posted her reflections and notes of the Socitm web professionals session, which are far better than mine
• Kevin Campbell-Wright has blogged here including a few notes from the session on journalism

Updates III:

• Dave’s updating his list now, so I don’t have to. Go see uncle Briggsy.

A lot of my focus at work lately has been about how we publish to the web – who’s doing it, with what tools, and to what standard.

While the boss is focusing on what goes up when and how to make it more engaging, I’m mainly working on three things:

• building the platform: merging two big government sites into one, as a shared service to merge many more
• building the people: making sure we’ve got an efficient and professional content management operation
• building the process: setting up governance to ensure quality and best value for the organisation and customer

Underpinning all three of these, I’ve been working in my spare time on a checklist of quality criteria for web pages.  (You know me, I love a good document).  Feel free to grab it in PDF or Excel if you’re interested in taking a look:

• Quality assurance checklist (Excel)
• Quality assurance checklist (PDF)

I’ve got my doubts about its practical application day to day, so I thought I’d share it here and get your feedback. It builds on work I did at my last place, owes a teensy bit to the much meatier Directgov equivalent, and has had some input from the guys in my team. But it’s also only a draft, was written outside work hours and is in no way an official publication from my employer, OK?

Here’s what I’m trying to achieve with this, if it flies:

• make it clear to everyone who creates or edits pages on the site what’s expected of them
• provide a basis for light-touch quality checking of their work
• bring a consistent and fair approach to giving feedback on skills and output
• show senior colleagues the breadth and importance of proper web content management
• help audit incoming content when sites are merged

So what say you? Useful or likely to be ignored? Too detailed or not detailed enough?

(This is a lazier than usual post for a lazy New Year’s Day. Normal service will resume when the year is in full swing…)

I don’t know about you, but I can’t so much as glance at someone else’s iPhone without wanting to grab it and have a nose at what applications they’ve installed. So for any fellow members of Appaholics Anonymous who read this blog, here’s what’s cluttering up my iPhone* on the dawn of the new decade:

Social web apps

• Tweetie 2 – the Twitter client to rule them all. Beats its major competitors (Tweetdeck, Twitterific) hands down on all fronts if you ask me. Only one tiny niggle: a bit too didactic on the etiquette of retweeting.
• Boxcar – does the one thing Tweetie 2 doesn’t, and does it very well: sends you push notifications of Twitter replies and DMs. Alerts you about Facebook too if you want. (Nah)
• Facebook – of course, Facebook. Gotta have the Facebook. The app can be a bit clunky and hard to find your way around though (a good companion to the full site, then) …but it beats trying to use Safari.
• LinkedIn – I mostly use it to accept new connections and supplement my iPhone contacts, but you can do pretty much most things you can do with the full site.
• Touch BB – a PHPBB forum client for iPhone. I use this every day, hooked up to a private forum I run for some old uni friends.
• WordPress – if you’ve got a WP blog, you need this app – it’s great for deleting spam comments while away from a computer, editing existing posts or drafts, or drafting (short) new ones.
• Huddle – to be honest, I’m yet to have much call to use this. But as a member of several Huddle communities, it’s bound to come in useful soon.
• Red Delicious – I use this app to access my Delicious bookmarks and a bookmarklet in Safari to add new ones. Am sure there are better ways of doing this, any recommendations?
• Skype – one of the first apps I installed and I’ve never used it. I’ve never been sure why I need Skype, but am prepared to be convinced and so I keep it installed in readiness for my VOiP epiphany.
• Audioboo - as per Skype, I’ve barely used this but can’t bring myself to delete it.
• Photoshop.com mobile – easy to use and elegant app, useful for cropping photos and applying basic effects.
• Flickr – for quick access to my own photos on Flickr and to search for others, e.g. to use on this blog.
• Shozu – a powerful media sharing app that works with Flickr, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and more – and which I have barely begun to use. Keeping it to give it more of a trial run sometime.

Productivity apps

• Things – my ‘to do’ list app of choice. Much simpler than Omnifocus, mush better looking than ToDo. Syncs nicely with the desktop version over Wi-Fi. Only wish there was a cloud equivalent too.
• Evernote – for more substantial list making and occasionally taking photos of phone numbers on tradesmen’s vans.
• Quick Office - MS Word, Excel and that in your pocket.
• SimplemindX - An intuitive mind mapping tool.
• Pingdom – for checking server status of your websites.

News/content apps

• Newsie / Byline / Mobile RSS – I’m running these three clients for Google Reader and am yet to settle on any one which does it all (sharing, starring, offline reading, tweeting, emailing, unsubscribing, recategorising…) Your advice welcome.
• Independent / Guardian / Sky news / Thomson Reuters News Pro - I dip into one or more of these virtual ‘papes on my commute most days.
• Mashable - geek news on the move. I prefer using this sort of dedicated app to just using the RSS feed, but don’t ask me why!
  
• Instapaper – where saved webpages go to die, if I’m honest.

Travel and location apps

• Mini A-Z / Tube Deluxe / London Bus - aka the Knowledge.
• Directgov travel news – good work, fellas. Well worth checking before any long journey.
• AddLee.com – the best taxi firm in the world, in your pocket.
• The Trainline / National Rail - train times, bookings and live departure boards.
• Around me / ATM Hunter / Urbanspoon – pretty reliable for finding nearby banks, hotels, cafés, restaurants etc
• Fix my street – MySociety’s tool for complaining to the council about graffiti and potholes. Never used it yet but you never know.
• Google Earth – mainly for impressing old people. (Hello, dad!)

Music

• Last.fm – personal radio and streaming music; my music discovery engine of choice.
• Shazam – for identifying songs and buying them, and impressing old folk some more.
• In the Mood – for tweeting about what’s playing. Probably a bit annoying.

Telly & film

• Sky+ – lets me schedule my TV recordings from anywhere. Utterly awesome.
• Radio Times – because, although I wish there were more choice in the TV mag market, and in spite of it being utterly obsessed with Dr f**king Who, ‘RT Choice’ is probably the most reliable filter of decent quality telly around.
• Flixster – handy for seeing trailers of upcoming movies and keeping lists of stuff you’d like to see.
• Movie Genie - an IMDB client.
• [LoveFilm - doesn't exist yet, but I'm told it's coming. I love LoveFilm's online DVD rental service but an iPhone app for managing my rental list would make it so much better.]

Shopping

• Red Laser - another one for impressing people, this fun app lets you scan the barcodes of almost anything and get price comparison results for buying it online.
• Amazon / eBay UK – making it dangerously easy to spend my money.
• Ocado – yet to use this Waitrose online grocery shopping app, but if there was a Tesco or Morrissons equivalent I’d use it in a flash.

Reference

• Yell.com / Dictionary.com / Wikipanion / iTranslate / All recipes UK – these do what they sound like they do, and get you there in fewer steps than firing up Safari.
• Musée de Louvre – because it’s free and maybe I’ll be bored enough on a plane one day to improve myself wiv a bit of culcha.

Games

These are the keepers at the moment:

• Jewel Quest / iBlast Moki / Fling / Puzzle Bobble - Great puzzle games I never tire of and may never delete.
• Ravensword / Spider / Rolando 1 and 2 - Adventure and role player games.
• I Dig It Explorations / Robocalypse / The Settlers / Worms - Simulation and strategy type games.
• Fantastic Contraption / Crazy Machine / Crayon – Highly addictive physics games.
• Star Defense / Sentinel 2 / Tower Madness – Tower defense games.
• Speed Forge / 3d Rollercoaster Madness – Racing games.
• Scrabble / Hold’em / Table tennis / Arkanoid / Smart Go – Classic games.

Toddlertainment

Tried and tested on my two year old:

• Birds UK – bird calls and songs of all common British birds. Teaching daddy a thing or two in the process.
• Dora saves the Crystal Kingdom – and rides on a rainbow slide while she’s at it. And shouts a lot.
• Bubblewrap – mindless popping.
• Preschool Adventure - six activity games for toddlers.
• Balloonimals lite – inflate and pop balloon animals, without hiring a clown.
• Little Red Hen – the classic story, with animal noises.
• Pocketphonic – alphabet games
• Peekaboo Barn – animal noises
• iTot cards – great set of digital flash cards

Hmm, that’s a much longer list than it seems just from flicking through the screens on my phone.

And yet… with over 100,000 apps in the app store and counting I’m bound to be missing some gems. Personal recommendation counts for a lot against those odds, so I hope you’ve found my list useful and would really love to hear your suggestions too.

(H)appy new year and here’s to the next ten years of jaw-dropping advances in web and mobile technology. I’m rubbish at predictions but feel pretty confident in saying all this stuff will probably just look like Pong in comparison to what we’ll be using in 2020. (And my son will be better at using it than me).

*other smart phones are available. Hold your tongues, Android fans, I’m not an Apple fanboy.