Obama grasps IT; his vice president clearly doesn’t grasp it. Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, doesn’t either; his ministerial colleague, Tom Watson, does.

Like the public, many politicians seem to be very unfamiliar and uncomfortable with computers. They see computers as some evil, corrupting force, despite the fact they should be using them for a significant amount of their time.

It always scares me when I hear politicians, or senior civil servants, make idiotic remarks about computers or the series of tubes. Why does it scare me? These people are responsible for formulating governmental IT policy, yet they clearly have no knowledge about them. There is a general fear, amongst politicians and the public, of learning new skills. Why else has it taken until 2009 for the UK government to give its blessing to OSS?

In the UK, our National Health Service’s IT programme is years behind deadlines and costs taxpayers billions. I suspect many of the civil servants involved have minimal technical knowledge. In my opinion, governments need to use true technical experts. Not expensive consultants from organisations which just puppet Microsoft!

On the other hand, politicians are beginning to capitalise on the Internet. All major British political parties, for example, have Twitter and Facebook accounts and Twitter and Facebook arguably played an essential role in Obama’s campaign. Some politicians maintain their own website, but I suspect many simply use ghostwriters.

I hope politicians and civil servants become more tech literate. With any luck, billions of pounds of taxpayers money will be saved.

What is public sector IT like for you?

For many years, I – like many others – despised the audio and visual aspects of the BBC website which relied primarily on the dreaded Real format. This required me to install a media player which was effectively a glorified piece of adware and more frequently than not, my web browser would crash when I actually tried to play it!

When the BBC released iPlayer, I was pleasantly surprised to see Flash (a relatively universal format) being used (in addition to WMV, unfortunately, for downloads). Whilst some may advocate the use of a format such as Ogg over this, I believe Flash was a better choice as for the average internet user, it was more accessible and the web browser plug-ins are more stable.

BBC’s choice of utilising Adobe AIR for their Linux and Mac iPlayer applications was also very interesting. Once again, I felt wary of the BBC relying on a propietary runtime environment as opposed to simply compiling their own applications as standard binaries for the operating systems. Practicability was probably the issue as AIR allowed FLV etc to be integrated with ease and smoothly and the BBC also realised that AIR is quite cross-platform (since the release of a version for Linux) and now quite accepted. Whilst an open-source solution in many ways would be ideal, it is impossible as the BBC demand to use DRM, something which could no doubt be hacked with ease if the sourcecode were public.

The BBC News website has been very good for a long time. Unlike many news websites, redesigns and the style of URL has not rendered many articles dead. I think the BBC are clever in keeping stories from a period in that period’s design; it ensures compatibility, gives a reflection of the era and prevents confusion (for example, based on the design alone, anyone can tell this article is no longer accurate). Their news website is also remarkably usable when compared to those of their competitors; it has clearly defined but small and accurate categories (’Africa’ has its own category, as opposed to just being ‘World News’), there’s a clear navigation system and there isn’t an excessive amount of pictures or videos.

Many people behind-the-scenes at the BBC now maintain high quality blogs which add depth to reporting. Whilst the ever-so-neutral Daily Mail criticises these ‘Leftist’ blogs , lots of it is just commentary, explanations for views which may have been inferred and information about working at the BBC. The effect is that the organisation becomes more human as opposed to a vast inhuman public broadcaster. They are attempting to reach as much of their audience as they can, maintaining a Welsh language blog!

The BBC seems to have realised what their audience wants and instead of having an inaccessible website, they’ve embraced Web 2.0 and made the media seem more human and their webpages significantly more user-friendly.

Mac’s “Get a Mac” campaign gave us Mac users a sense of superiority for a couple of years but Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” is actually starting to work. The average PC user is starting to no longer accept my jibes about their operating system and see my remarks as snobbery (how dare they!) as opposed to the truth.

The interesting thing about Microsoft’s campaign isn’t that it portrays PCs as cool, in my opinion, but rather as ‘normal’ with everyone, all sorts of people, using them. Whilst Mac’s campaign focuses on Mac’s being fun and creative.

Naturally, the advert has some problems. There seems to be lots of Windows users in Africa but I imagine Linux is much more affordable for them; shame Microsoft don’t support OLPC!

Your thoughts on the adverts?

Well, perhaps the title is an exaggeration. I spent the majority of Thursday night fixing the machine of a gamer; I found myself amazed that a nerd would happily run Norton (which was the cause of the problems) on his machine. Is it not amazing that people who spend the majority of their free time online have no clue about software?

A fairly new class of nerd has suddenly become very popular: the gaming nerd. There’s nerds like me (with a relatively good knowledge of technology and all sorts of miscellany); the Napolean Dynamite nerd (who are somewhat lacking, in both intelligence and social skills); the book nerd (amazing knowledge and intelligence but no speciality in technology); and then there’s the gaming nerd, with level 80 WoW characters but nearly no knowledge of technology.

The gaming nerd loves l337, energy drinks, gaming and Windows. Their knowledge of their chosen games is often amazing; but their knowledge of their computer is not. The only aspect of their computer’s hardware of which they remotely understand the specifications is the graphics card (for it is the only piece of hardware they care about!), they don’t know their ROM from their RAM and they cannot do as much as open command prompt. Long story short, they listen to the salesman at PC World and pay the extra £30 for some sub-standard security suite instead of just using AVG like most nerds!

This isn’t to say the gaming nerd has no role to play outside their games. Sites which produce great memes, like 4chan, are populated by this sub-culture of nerd (amongst others naturally) and software like Skype is frequently used by them.

Gaming nerds (generally speaking) don’t understand their best friend. They use their computer for gaming and only know what they have to. They love games; not computers.

I thought you all deserved an update.

My posting schedule, quite frankly, has been very sporadic and I doubt it will improve until about 20 July.

I’ve been really bogged down with work (I’ve almost forgotten what fresh air tastes like!). As soon as I’ve got home, I’ve been working. Obviously, I had no time to blog.

Whilst work is finally beginning to become less hectic, I will be going to France and Belgium next week and the week after that I’m out of town for about 3 days.

So long story short, no time to blog. No time to even compose this in a proper manner!

Hopefully, I will have my blogging schedule back up and running very soon. Heck, I might even have some motivation to write much more innovative and imaginative posts to the ones which I’ve been publishing of late.

Sorry again, this really is only a temporary thing.