barnesdmd.co.uk

I picked up on an article today from New Media Knowledge via the RSS feed I knocked together for them a while ago. Its about the Digital Dialogues study released into the use of online technologies between government and the people and is well worth a look at, err have a look at the comment from Ian below about the author! the author isn’t given but I’m assuming its Ian Delaney. I won’t go into the details on it as its perfectly readable on the NMK website but the thing that really got my attention was the cost of David Milibands blog. The figure quoted in the report is around £6000……and for that money we have…..a blog, no there’s nothing else, £6k well spent according to the government.

I took a look at this a little more to try and understand how they spent this much on a blog, the first thing of note is that from looking at the source code of one of the pages it appears to run on Community Server. This ranges from $0 to $1900, for that you get ummm a blog package, and in the case of David’s blog you deploy it with half the features such as trackbacks disabled!

I still struggle to see why they spent that much money, the top of the range software package with gold support equates to £976 in todays money. The domain itself I think we can ignore, the blog resides on a subdomain of the government website defra.gov.uk so this isn’t really relevant. However community server does have fairly hefty server requirement in terms of cost, Microsoft Windows Server 2000 or higher, Ms SQL Server etc aside from the hardware which will add a fair bit onto the total. Its just incredible that they went for this route, the team behind it apparently wanted flexibility, manageability and security, whats wrong with one of the free alternatives? Many of which support multiple blogs etc, far more features than community server offers and better integration into larger systems. My old college has just deployed a Blojsom system for 1200+ students, its feature packed, extensible and uses the same login as the rest of the college system, its impressive in many ways to say the least. But thats on another level, we’re talking in this context about a blog for one person, I don’t know if it actually has dedicated servers or not but it sure as hell doesn’t need it for one blog! I’ll finish this rant now as I’ve gone off on one a bit but this is something that could have been carried off perfectly well on a standard LAMP server config with Wordpress or similar installed for £500 or so at the most. Its just sad that it seems justified to spend that sort of money on setting up what is a fairly bland blog.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Internet, Life, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.