According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.

The COI report has some detail – £6.2m on strategy and planning, £4.4m on design and build, £4.7m on hosting and infrastructure, £15.3m on content provision and £4.5m on testing and evaluation. What I can’t work out is why that cost is repeated for three years.

Go and read some of the comments on that post to see the figures people who have built equivalent sites are quoting, the actual costs should be about 1% of the figure we, the tax payer, ended up paying.

Absolutely this is a complete rip-off. I know that part of the problem is the size company the government is forced to deal with (by its own rules) and long tender processes add expense. There’s also the issue that the government has to, and has, it’s own, expensive options in place because it requires security (the branch of the MOD I worked for had to run across a separate WAN created by BT, which cost just just that one department £300k a year), but this is still way over the top. Personally I’d like to see charges brought.

It’s not just services that need looking at though, some of commentators mention that staffing needs reviewing. There’s usually a cap on staff, but not on contractors, which means, you guessed it, lots of overpriced personnel to cover gaps.

To give you an idea, I showed some interest in the web in my time in IT support, so when we restructured the support teams I got asked to head up a new team to look after the internal and external websites. My team consisted of three people and our combined salaries for a month were less that the one contractor we replaced was paid for a week (he was on, I believe £650 a day, project managers were on £1000 a day).

Will it change, unlikely. Just remember when you hear all these headlines about job cuts in the civil service, what is actually happening is that they get rid of staff, but the work still needs to get done, so they hire contractors to fill the gaps who don’t get classed in the head count. So it’ll end up costing us more.

Just 46 websites cost £94 million to build, with staff costs of £32m

Go a read that again, £94 million. That’s in excess of £2 million each! The government websites don’t do enough to warrant anywhere near those costs, if they came close to a million I would have been up in arms.

I suspect this is the case of government departments being ripped off again. I could save the government billions very easily, review their buying and contract negotiation teams. Fire the lot and hire in some of the guys who work in the commercial sector.

I worked for a branch of the MOD at one time and we were paying more for a PC from our suppliers that I could if I walked into PC World. On the scale of purchases alone they should have been paying a fraction of the cost.

Trust me it’s no better in councils either, that’s where our tax money goes, into the pockets of companies who manage to get government contracts.

The reason for this is because I have never found a situation where I would require a shorter URL. If I want to share a link with someone I copy the URL out of the address bar and paste it into the app I am sending, which typically will auto-link it. Job done. If it’s on a post or comments and I want to keep it short, I use an HTML anchor tag, which is what it was designed for. At no time have I thought: “What I need is a shorter URL. I know, I’ll go to a third-party site, paste in the URL I just copied, generate another link and then use that.”

Another great reason for using the original URL is because it identifies the link, it tells you where it points, that was the whole point of domain names in the first place, so we didn’t use IP addresses! Instead, someone invented shortened URLs which consist of the site’s domain name and a random hash. It’s completely unmemorable and tells you nothing about the link. When I click it I haven’t got a clue if it’s a useful site or a malicious one.

I have fairly long URLs, I’ve written about the benefits of having dates in them before, but I could just as easily have the post ID as the URL, one of my sites does use this method in fact. I could even drop the ‘archives’ bit of those URLs so all you get is http://domain.tld/postID – it’s not much longer than a shortened URL. There are also plugins for some platforms to do this for you while allowing you to maintain the long ones for everything else. So most webmasters/blog owners could change their URLs to make them shorter, but there’s no point!

One of the highest profile uses of URL shortening is Twitter. Shortening the URL obviously makes sense as you only get 140 characters, and the URL counts. From a UI perspective it’s pointless, as I mentioned, shortened URLs don’t mean anything, they’re anonymous, so they might as well just link the work ‘Link’ as link text for the shortened URL. From Twitter’s perspective, maybe they just store the shortened URL, thereby saving them a few bytes of storage, which, when multiplied by the number of tweets, equals a lot of storage. For a user, it doesn’t make any different except that linking to an actual URL would be useful to check it before clicking it.

Ironically, there are now a ton of websites, scripts and plugins to expand shortened URLs. So now there are services to help me expand an URL that was shortened using another service when we could avoid the hassle and just use the original! Imagine the global time savings.

Aspects covered in both of these are some of the reasons I’m migrating my photos away from Flickr, why I stopped posting to my Tumblr blog (and created snippets here instead) and why most of the (rather large amount) of content I produce is now hosted on sites I own. It’s also partly why I’ve stopped using things like Google Docs. It was one of the reasons I didn’t move my site(s) to a hosted WordPress.com account.

That’s not to say these services don’t have benefits. My photos on Flickr have had far more comments and favourites on them than they will ever get hosted by me. My sites get far fewer visits than if they were part of a network, because they tend to do cross-promotion. During the re-design I shied away from comment services like IntenseDebate (despite the fact that I trust Matt Mullenweg) and Disqus. When this site dropped out of Google’s index back in Jan (for no reason, it’s been happily listed for five years) my site traffic dropped by about two-thirds, lucky I don’t rely on this site for my living, I’d be looking for a way to sue.

Some of these services seem to be moving into the realm of utilities, imagine if one company ran the email system and suddenly went under, it’d cause chaos, well some of the social networks and other sites are starting to become platforms and governments may have to step in and protect some of them in the future to keep the rest of us running smoothly. In the same way broadband is slowly moving from a luxury to a necessity online services may do too.

I haven’t got an answer, I hope some of the smarter people out there will, but I like open standards more and more.

As it turns out my account has already run out and reverted to the free account, as far as I can see Flickr never bothered to send me a reminder it was running out.

The reason for looking at other options were mainly down to two things:

1. I’m not massively happy with Flickr.
2. I don’t use it very much.

Why am I not massively happy with Flickr? Very simple, it doesn’t work the way I want. For starters, it’s US-based, which means it doesn’t have any option for people wanting to order prints in the UK. One of things I use my account for is when I go to social events I can load the images for others to see, but to allow them to print them I end up loading them to a Photobox account, I’d rather not have to do both (ironically it appears you can use Photobox to grab photos from Flickr to print).

Another function is to share these pictures, now these are generally private events so I don’t want the photos accessible to everyone. Flickr allows me to set them to be viewed by friends or family or both, but the relevant members have to create an account and login and I need to designate their role. What I want is the ability to create an unguessable URL and assign a password of my choosing, then I can just email out the password and the URL and people can login quickly and easily (to be fair, just a secure URL might be sufficient).

The other point is that I don’t use Flickr that often. I don’t take that many photos and don’t load all that I take. The last ones I uploaded were in July last year. So paying $24.95 a year for it seems a bit OTT. I have plenty of web space from my web host so I could use an installed solution.

So I went hunting for alternatives and was a bit disappointed. There are plenty of alternatives, paid and not, hosted and self-hosted. Most seem to be lacking in some way. My requirements are fairly simple:

• Low-no cost for unlimited storage.
• Integration with a UK photo printer.
• Easy upload and basic organisation (albums).
• Leave comments without registering.
• Ability to secure albums/photos and provide password-protected URLs.

Not a massive list, but no one seems to do them all (and printing especially).

LocateTV is a specialised search for finding TV programs, it’s not really IMDB for TV, but it has many similar features, it’s main goal is to allow you find when a show will next be on air (so if you miss Heroes you can see when it’s repeated, for example). It has some other great features too, like the ability to embed this information in your site, so if you run a Heroes fan site you can embed some code which will be updated to show when it’s next on TV so you can let all your visitors know. You can do this for actors too, so if you love Keira Knightly or Colin Firth or whoever, you can easily see when they’re next on the box (kind of like stalking by TV). You can limit to a region, and select what services you’re interested in (if you don’t get Sky then obviously you’re not interested in getting results on Sky channels).

So, useful for finding when a show, or movie, or actor is next on the box.

Unfortunately, many sites don’t use this at all, especially some of the larger companies (most newspaper, magazine and news sites, for example). So, either we need more people using date in the URL, or Google to identify when a page was last published.

I was thinking, not along ago, of adding a section to my film blog where you could add recommendations for similar films (I forget what I had just watched which had such a resonance with another film). I had gone looking for such a site, only to find the only thing near it, Tagomatic, was somewhat lacking (you couldn’t browse, it was full of spam and the recommendations weren’t much cop). IMDB has a recommendations feature, but again, not that accurate.

The idea’s still valid though, and as they showed, could easily be applied to more items. It seems to be fairly common for recommendations for music, find similar artists, etc, but not so much for books and especially films. Which seems a little tragic. So, while I don’t seem to have the time, I thought I would launch the idea out there and see if someone else could take it and run with it.

I think it would need to be community driven, automated systems wouldn’t cut it. It would need to be simple to add a recommendation, a text entry, no login (unless you wanted to, then perhaps you could attribute recommendations to people and have a points score or something, might encourage return visits). A page for each film with listed recommendations, with links to those films (some details would be good so you can get at least a plot synopsis, again, possible to allow this to be added by the community).

Each recommendation would have a vote attached, how many agreed, how many disagreed and a remove option (with a some sort of rule that if the votes were negative and you had three people click delete then it got removed). Maybe only allow registered members to delete. Possibly add the extra functionality of comments to allow people to express why they recommended a film to this one.

RSS feeds, maybe notifications and a way to browse by title (you don’t want people to have to add more than a title really, which you then need to try and consolidate if people put in an incorrect/slightly different varient), I would say by genre but that seems too much work.

Obviously neat-looking and ajaxified to make it nice and quick. Anyway, not an easy task, but a good site if you can get it running.