The site is a blend of the US’s equivalent, data.gov, and Directgov | Innovate. It’s got a listing of available data packages, powered by the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, and user-generated lists of apps and new ideas. This is just right: the data you need, combined with a way to promote the things you make and a place to get ideas if you’ve got itchy typing fingers but lack inspiration.

It’s not perfect. Conspicuously missing is an organised way to browse data sets: but that’s coming, along with some other tweaks and twiddlings that’ll improve the site’s usability.

The site is powered by Drupal, with packages catalogued and hosted by CKAN. Meanwhile, data.gov.uk hosts a data store powered by Talis that can scale to 100 billion triples and is hosted on Amazon EC2. The system is federated, so departments can add and control their own data, lots of which is available as RDF, with the remainder downloadable in spreadsheet form.

Speaking of spreadsheets, they’ve even written an app that departments can deploy in-house to convert spreadsheets into RDF (kudos to John Sheridan!) which makes it much easier for departments to produce structured, linked data.

This is all working now, and was put together by the team at the Cabinet Office in the last three months. This is a massive achievement, and it sounds like it’s just the beginning: they have big plans. User submissions for new datasets. Metadata to describe provenance. More data sets on the site. More data as RDF. Organised browsing for packages. Source code releases. The list goes on.

This is such an encouraging thing to see. No expensive procurement exercises for clunky, bespoke sites: instead, we have the right tools for the job, joined together. Simple things that do one job well, combined to form a more complex whole. It’s the Unix philosophy in action.

This is how all Government IT should work.

Our hearty congratulations go out to the team at the Cabinet office, with special thanks to Richard Stirling for spilling some of the beans. I had lots of questions and nitpicks, and every single one of them was answered reassuringly.

They’ve got a plan, and it’s a good one.

This has really been brought home to me over the last couple of days by the Twitter blackout. This is a really nice idea for a protest — it’s really caught on and has no doubt brought the New Zealand government’s three-strikes shenanigans to the attention of lots more people than would otherwise have noticed.

It’s also made me realise how essential the avatars are to the UI. Without them, Twitter (or more accurately, TweetDeck) is quite a different place: I can no longer effortlessly tell who is speaking. Sometimes, when there are a few blacked out tweets in a row, it’s positively confusing. The username of the person speaking is there, but it’s quite small — and reasonably so, because it’s normally rarely needed.

What’s also interesting is that some people have obviously cottoned on to this already. One of the tweets in that screenshot is only partially blacked out — so it still gives you a bit of a hint as to the tweeter’s identity. Useful.

In any case, I expect Twitter will return to normal soon — hopefully as a result of the New Zealand government doing an about-turn on its crazy kick-people-off-the-just-internet-because-we-said-so legislation…

PS: that screenshot’s a fantastic example of Twitter at work, too. We start with Cory Doctorow croudsourcing ideas, presumably for a book. Next comes a funny meme, with which people are doing fun things. Finally, a product recommendation — the natural, honest, my-buddy-liked-this kind of recommendation, which is really the only kind that counts.

Sometimes, you’ll want to send customers an email automatically: “Your order is on its way” is the canonical example. These emails may be automatic, but there’s no reason why they have be engineered to prevent people from replying to them. Doing so is a missed opportunity: if a customer has a question about their order, these emails are an chance to hook them up with whoever on your staff manages queries about orders. No support tickets, no generic email addresses, no waiting in phone queues: they can just reply to the email and get directly to the person they need.

That’s good customer service. If you’re going to send messages to people, it’s not polite — or prudent — to prevent them from sending messages back to you. Some companies have realised that a personal message is A Good Thing ™, but seem to have got lost half way, as in this rather strange example:

Thanks once again for shopping with Bingo Bob’s Superstore.

Kind regards

John Smith

Customer Service Manager

This is an automatically generated email – please do not reply to it. If you have any queries regarding your order please email impersonal_slow_generic_helpdesk@bingobob.com

At worst, if you really don’t want a real person to deal with responses, set your automatic emails up so I can press reply and send a message to your generic customer services email address.

There’s no reason not to, and it saves me time — which everyone appreciates.