Category Archives: cuttings

FOI Man: New guidance – FOI Man’s guide to making FOI requests

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"In these straitened times, it’s important that people recognise the stresses and strains that public authorities will be under and use their services, including FOI, appropriately. Even if you have little sympathy for public employees, you ought to be considerate of the impact of your requests, because ultimately poor and irresponsible use of FOI can lead to backlashes against these rights which will leave us all the poorer."

Advertising Age: ABC, Syfy and Best Buy? Retailer Launches Network

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More news on the retailers-becoming-online-publishers trend: "[Best Buy] is now a publisher, rolling out a multichannel network filled with original editorial content spanning everything from how-to videos and gift guides to new-technology primers and behind-the-scenes looks at popular movies. The network, called Best Buy On, includes a website it bills as an 'online magazine' and a huge in-store component with its content and ad messaging "broadcast" on screens across the store, including in the TV, mobile and portable entertainment sections."

The Northern Echo: Is contempt of court a thing of the past?

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Peter Barron: "I've had one or two interesting discussions of late with heads of the Crown Prosecution Service in the North-East over contempt of court. ... In those discussions, I have made the wider point to the CPS chiefs that it is increasingly difficult to know where we stand when the nationals get away with publishing more or less what they want. ... So I pose the simple question: Is contempt of court a thing of the past - or is it only local editors who feel the heat?"

BBC Open Secrets: FOI: Some end-of-year reflections

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Martin Rosenbaum: "I think we're at an intriguing stage in the development of freedom of information in the UK. ... This year has seen a rapid increase in the flow of government data being released to the public. It started during the previous Labour government and has accelerated under the coalition, particularly so far with financial data. And there's plenty more to come."

Guardian: OpenCorporates: why we’re crying out for this database of companies

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"In a world of where Tesco, for example, isn't a single company, but over 190 of them in the UK alone, it's important that there's a way not just of easily finding all them (try the same search on Companies House), but having a permanent easy-to-use URL for each of them, which can be used by different people, different websites as a common identifier. ... That's the goal behind OpenCorporates, a new website and service that's launched [December 20] to build an open database of the corporate world, and that's why we've imported all 3.8m UK companies (including dissolved ones), and have a web page (with a URL made up of their company number) for every one. And that's why we're importing the companies from other countries too – we started with Jersey and Bermuda, meaning there are now URLs for the companies google is using in its, er, corporate tax planning strategy."

ReadWriteWeb: R.I.P. Delicious: You Were So Beautiful to Me

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"Yahoo! announced internally today that it is closing down Delicious. It's a loss not just for the many people who used Delicious to archive links of interest to them around the web, it's a loss for the future - for what could have been. Five years later, people are just beginning to appreciate the value of passively published user activity data made available for analysis, personalization and more. That could have been you, Delicious."