I heard a great phrase on the radio this morning that I thought I'd share. The programme was about the use of internet technologies and social media by governments and PR people to their own ends.

SPINTERNET

The argument was along the lines that blogs, wikipedia, twitter etc. are being used to circumnavigate censorship rules and processes to 'put out' ideas and opinions that can't be made through other media. Not a new idea but a great word.

Well it's all gone to plan so far (more or less - one small glitch last Thursday but that's a lesson learned for the next one) and all six of the Salford sites are into RedDot. Just the tidy up to do on the main site and then hand over for QA. We expect the five smaller sites to go live this week, the big one will take a little longer to QA and catch up with the content freeze backlog.

We have also been receiving a lot of inquiries about the migration service. Salford City Council have been gracious enough to permit us to use this project as a case study so that will be produced and circulated very soon. 

The last phase is now well under way with the five smaller sites already extracted and on their way into RedDot (actually we kicked it off on Friday night as it can take a while). These should be released for UAT over the next few days and the main Salford site gets under way later this week. This phase should be relatively straight forward as the development runs will have shown up any issues but still nice to see it all running smoothly so far. However, we've been on enough projects over the years to stop us getting complacent.

I'm off down to London tonight to the SOCITM annual 'Building perfect council websites' event. Looking forward to the workshops and another presentation by Gerry McGovern. Last year he suggested that the concept of two or three clicks to the most used content was no longer valid, the most used content should either be on the home page or linked to directly from the home page. Great idea but I've not seen any site that has taken his advice.

For me this is more of a networking opportunity but it is interesting to understand what the public sector site owners are thinking. I see from the exhibitors list that this is a sector that is becoming attractive to more vendors too.

I don't think there has been a UK holiday I've taken since 1976 where the sun has shone so much. Just back from a week in Center Parcs in Cumbria (except for Tuesday when I got  train to London for a presentation) and the weather was great. We had a really relaxed time (except for Tuesday when I got  train to London for a presentation) and my kids did so many activities they can't remember any of them. I now understand what my dad means every time he says 'that holiday was wasted on you'. In the nicest possible way.

Anyway back to work today and a boiling hot office. This week sees an EPiServer demo for Bargain Booze, the kick off of a migration project (Livelink WCM to RedDot) for Salford City Council, a migration demo for HS, more work on the Livelink to Immediacy migration project for VisitScotland and a meeting with a design agency with a view to forming a new partnership. Holiday? What holiday?