April has seen a lot of comings and goings for Focus, including Mike's homecoming, Jim's departure, and the arrival of our newest recruit, Paul Springett.

We've waved a tearful goodbye to our web developer Jim, who has swapped his keyboard in favour of a camper van and the open road. He'll be travelling across the Iberian Peninsular for the rest of the year and hopes to learn more about green technologies.

Filling Jim's shoes will be no easy feat but picking up the gauntlet is Paul Springett, our newest recruit at the Bristol office. We chose him from a promising bunch of candidates for his invincible Jedi coding skills and penchant for Apples.

Mike has been back in the UK a few weeks now and has been sporting his brazil nut tan with a certain air of pride! Far from feeling travel sore, he's already planning his next trip overseas - to the Americas this time!

E-consultations have become an essential tool for many local authorities, helping them to fully engage with the general public. We have developed a new e-consultation module that is simple to use, and will help website administrators build their own questionnaires from scratch with the minimum of fuss.

Bristol City Council have recently embraced this new tool to consult with young people using the website, Go Places Do Things. Their aim is to gain an insight into how the website users feel about a wide range of complex issues affecting their daily lives. This information will then be used to improve services for young people in the local area.

E-consultations could work equally well in the private sector, helping businesses develop a greater understanding of their clients' needs. The resulting statistics are effectively displayed using easily downloadable graphs and charts to include in reports. Each questionnaire can be reused, edited, and scheduled to run over specific periods of time.

Please get in touch if you would like more information about e-consultations.

A message from the Queen - if you've ever been lucky enough to receive one - would traditionally be in the form of posted letter.  High quality paper, HRH watermark, the Royal seal encrusting the envelope, all that jazz.  The kind of thing you'd frame, or put away for grandchildren to admire. 

Now you can receive emails from the Queen!  Fully embracing modern culture, our beloved HRH has recently sent a bunch of adoring fans a response to their various posts on the Royal website... electronically!

I suppose this makes sense.  A number of them live in the farthest flung corners of the Commonwealth possible, making postal deliveries rather difficult.  A 12-year old girl living in the Australian Outback received her email after inviting Queen Elizabeth to swap Buckingham Palace for a life on a remote cattle farm 200km from the nearest town.  I'm sure Lizzy managed to deal with this offer with the greatest aplomb - having a lifetime's worth of polite engagements to attend you would rather hope so!

I like the idea of our Queen embracing modern technology, although the day we see her sitting at her Mac, tapping Her Royal Feet to iPod 'choons' and emailing Philip using txt speak is still very far away!

A joint project between Bristol City, South Gloucestershire and Bath & North East Somerset Councils, 1 Big Database is the leading online resource of information for families and the community throughout the West of England.

For the past few months our design and development teams have been working on a whole series of improvements, including:

          --> Search enhancements, including a single search for the directory and events; postcode lookup and auto completion of search terms.

          --> Introduction of results weighting to optimise the relevancy of search results by giving priority to some fields in the database when a search is carried out – such as organisation name.

One of the major improvements is that the system is now set up to accommodate a daily feed of information from Bristol, Bath & North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire to the Parent Know How Directory. It will also provide local users with the facility to search 1BD and the national directory simultaneously.

"We have been working with Focus New Media for about 4 years now and the team always provide us with a creative, responsive and incredibly competent service. Attention to detail is a priority for them and explaining complex processes in non technical speak a skill they all seem to possess.. We have all been working on a large project recently and because of the Team's ability to research, plan and deliver it's success has been seamless. The Focus New Media team are flexible, informed and a pleasure to work with."

Jackie Fielder
Family Information Service Manager
Bath and North East Somerset Council

Read more about 1Big Database developments here.

I wasn't overly surprised at seeing today's leading article on the BBC Technology page.  Google's Streetview project has precipitated much debate on topics ranging from personal privacy to crime since its official launch two weeks ago.  In this instance, residents of a small town in Buckinghamshire physically blocked the passage of a Google streetview car, insisting angrily that the invasion of their privacy was too much to bear. 

I empathise, having felt a deep uneasiness at seeing my front garden two clicks into a Google search.  We are all well aware of increased surveillance and presence of cameras within city centres, but for me this goes a bit too far.

There are benefits to the service though, that I shall no doubt take advantage of.  It will make visits to unknown destinations much easier for a start, as you will literally be able to trace a virtual journey from your start point to destination.

The biggest question I have is what the real purpose of Streetview is.  How do Google propose to monetise this new feature?  I'm guessing a merge between Google Adwords and Local Business Centre (once they sort through their algorithm problems) will allow businesses to advertise their products and services from a virtual shop front, but surely this has already been done more effectively by Second Life?

With Microsoft's plans to launch a rival service later this year on beta, my head shakes with Luddite pensiveness.  This new technology could either take off and thrive in a social networking fashion, or wither away under a backlash of suspicion.  I'm not entirely convinced either way but will be interested to see what the general consensus will be once the launch hype has died down and people start experimenting with both Streetview and GeoSynth.

The newest recruit to our burgeoning development team has a penchant for all things Apple related (ahem, the company, not the fruit), and when not at work will most likely be found dancing around at The Croft, 02 Academy, or Mr Wolf's. 

A graduate in Computer Science from Cardiff University, Paul impressed us with his extensive portfolio of freelance development work.  With proven all-round experience in developing web-based projects, we aim to take particular advantage of his Jedi skills in Rails coding.

A baby photo has been promised for our 'meet the team' page but we shall have to make do with the current shot opposite for now...

So the adventures of founder Mike Newing and his amazing round the world adventures continue.

Mike and Lynne headed north up Australia's east coast with trips to the Blue Mountains, Sydney (controversially described as "a bit of an urban sprawl"), Port MacQuerie (dolphins everywhere), Byron Bay (rain, rain) and Brisbane (more rain). After an emotional goodbye with some of the locals (see pic), it was time to catch the short flight to Auckland and head for the great outdoors of New Zealand.

NZ has taken the breath away with it's lakes, mountains, wildlife and a close encounter with a whale and despite some fairly wet weather, they're loving it. Although Lynne banned Mike from attending an international cricket match he wanted to go to.

Next stop Fiji, then Singapore, then.....errr....Heathrow......

Youth in Bath & North East Somerset have been busy making movies!

B-active is now providing rich content via an integrated media module, showcasing video and audio clips created by young people and managed by the website's administrators. Digital video in any format - taken from camcorders or mobile phones - can be uploaded to their content management system, converted to a web-friendly format and then appear within an embedded player on the site.

Launched to promote youth candidates for the UKYP elections, the B-active media area now contains videos made by young people about local services on offer throughout Bath & North East Somerset.

Windows 7 - Microsoft's beta version of the OS that will take over from Vista - has some promising features (easier ways to set up home networks, interact with external devices and a better toolbar to use along the bottom of the screen)  but is essentially taking elements from the Apple iphone and making them available for use on a pc.

These links make interesting reading on the subject:

Pros and cons of Windows 7
Microsoft fined $1.4bn by EU for anti-competitive behaviour

The W3C have recently brought out a new series of guidelines for web accessibility (WCAG 2.0) that we've been  digesting here in the office.  The most immediate change noticeable is the shift in how accessibility is defined.  There are now four principles that all have to be adhered to for conformance, rather than a series of levels you can choose to comply with or not.  The levels are whether your website is:

1. Perceivable - Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
2. Operable - User interface components and navigation must be operable.  (This means that the interface cannot require interaction that a user cannot perform)
3. Understandable - Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable.
4. Robust - Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

Ref: WCAG Introduction 

Although there are several improvements, the language is still very jargony, and an attempt to simplify some of the terms has actually resulted in making some areas more vague.