Simon Dickson reports on the new site from the UK Government which currently aggregates news from around the country on what help is available to help businesses and individuals through the current economic difficulties.
Fundamentally, in this initial build, it’s a news aggregation site – pulling together material not just from national sources, but regional and local too. The aim is to complement the citizen- and business-facing stuff, at Directgov and BusinessLink respectively, by showing what’s actually happening on the ground, well away from Whitehall and the City.
I’m involved in the project from a content point of view, which at the moment is mainly a job of identifying content to be tagged in Delicious to appear on the site. A dashboard has been set up to monitor various news sources around the UK to make sure we pick up a good range of stories.
The site came together very quickly and is a great example of agile and flexible development. We’re hoping to be expanding it in the future to produce some original content, but at the moment it presents a nice picture of what’s going on out there.
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