Jason Slater Weblog

This weeks technology blog of the week is “ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden’s blog . . .” at http://ntouk.com. Technorati describes NTOUK as “Jerry Fishenden’s blog on all issues related to technology and public policy”. NTOUK stands for National Technology Officer - UK Web Site as Jerry is lead technology advisor and spokesman to Microsoft UK. I know what you’re probably thinking - this guy works for Microsoft. In my book that’s no bad thing as I like Microsoft products and in addition Jerry’s qualification list and experience is very impressive so I think if anyone can talk authoritatively about technology then Jerry Fishenden can.

Ok, lets see what the figures say. Blog Juice of only 1.4? Blog juice is a calculated from a combination of information collected from Alexa, Bloglines and Technorati. Technorati authority is only 20 with a ranking of 415,686 although there are more than three hundred blog reactions (blog reactions are other blogs or sites that link back to your blog). To get so many visitors reading a Blog whilst having a low ranking shows that you don’t have to rely on rankings alone to build a good blog. Mind you, if there is a secret to success I would love to know what it is.

Looking back into the archives it looks like NTOUK started in December 2004 with an interesting analysis of a comment made by Walter S Mossberg about the Firefox Browser in relation to Internet Explorer. If you are wondering who Walter S Mossberg is then check out this Wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Mossberg. The NTOUK Blog follows the format of one or two posts per week. There was a posting spurt around September 2006 where posting almost doubled for a few months before settling back to one or two posts per week. The Blog has been running for a long time (relatively speaking) and for it to receive its stated 1 million visitors per year then it must be doing something right. Some interesting posts include the search goes on - intellectual property models for the digital age which talks about the constantly tricky area of intellectual property models, something particularly important in Open Source developments. Another post online, offline - innovation talks about Microsoft Live Betas, Photosynth and online/offline clients and their ability to sync leading to smart clients. Accessiblity is always an important subject that sometimes gets overlooked in favour of design so it’s interesting to see this talked about in good design and accessible design. The most recent post Information Privacy and Data Protection in the Public Sector needs no introduction as public data loss seems to be an increasingly talked about and reported upon topic.

In terms of design and layout Jerry has opted for a simple clean no frills approach with, hurray, no advertising. For me the design works, it doesn’t get in the way, and drives me to read the information rather than play with little widgets that adorn many sites (although I have nothing against widgets - I have some on my own site!). One observation I would make is that, in my experience, it is fairly common to have something click-able in the banner/header section to lead back to the home page - I couldn’t find a way of achieving this on NTOUK and often had to put the URL back in to get to the homepage for the latest post. This is something you don’t have to worry about if you subscribe to the RSS feed of course!

NTOUK is an interesting read and offers some insight into aspects of computing that I certainly don’t see every day. NTOUK can be reached at http://ntouk.com.

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