MPs have had a rough time of it in the press over the past week or so, since the Parliamentary expenses were published.
My view: proper democracy costs, and is worth every penny a well-managed and properly-resourced MP's office costs.
In other news, the TheyWorkForYou.com mailbox received a most pleasing missive from David Taylor, MP for North West Leicestershire the other day, congratulating us on the site and pointing out a bug with our scraper.
Good man.
Stef has been busy integrating the wikipedia and technorati APIs into his 'wikiproxied' vesion of bbc.co.uk/news
Next, I want him to build a feedback mechanism that allows users to correct erroneous wikified links, as well as suggest their own phrases & associated links.
User-suggested and rated phrases & links (and maybe scopes) be a great way of building up a social search engine, if you could get enough scale. .
Stef's also hopeing to do a toolbar which does similar chicanery for the whole web. This is harder than it looks, due to the wide range of browsers out there needing to be managed in different ways. Technorati have just had one done one for FireFox only.
Barney looking the part before he heads off to footy practice where he'll doubtless kick lumps out of the massed ranks of Arsenal & Chelsea-supporting wunderbrats.
Makes a dad proud, it does...
William Heath, the vertically exuberant founder of KableNet, has set up IdealGovernment.com, an open-but-moderated month-long blog to which anyone can submit ideas on how UK e-government should work.
It'll run for another couple of weeks or so, after which William will:
...produce edited highlights, with credits to contributors. I'll send it to five top UK politicians and offer to present the output to new UK government CIO Ian Watmore and government's efficiency review process boss John Oughton.
It's an excellent initiative, and is already getting busy with interesting contributions. I'm setting aside an hour or two tomorrow night to scribble some thoughts down.
We hate wiki spam, so it's gonna remain passworded, but anyone who wants to can take a peek at the TheyWorkForYou.com Development Wiki to see how we built the beast.
username: theyworkforyou
password: n0vemb3r (n-zero-vemb-three-r)
Feel free to disseminate, but please don't post the link with the login details embedded in the url.
Stef has highlighted a couple of the very early sketches. You can see why I never passed my technical drawing exam.