Election paperwork let me down, so I'll stick my head in the clouds

If you've ever so much as passed a cursory glance over any of my ZDNetUK blogs before then firstly thank you and secondly, I hope you'll know that I like to keep things topical, acerbic and in-your-face. So much as I would have liked to dig into the electronically supported electoral process today and talk about the general election, I fear joined up government UK plc etc has let me down.

With all the government IT jawboning that goes on these days, you'd have thought that some progress would have been made. But moving from Surrey to Dorset over the last six weeks meant that it came down to me filling in a paper form and handing it in at the council offices to ensure I was issued with a polling card.

Upon chasing it up and finding that I am unable to vote today I was told that, "Oh, well it would have gone into the IN-tray but we've been really busy." So no polling card for me then it seems. Apparently the Daily Mail loves this kind of thing and thinks there are conspiracy theories all over the place making this happen, but I refuse to visit their trashy web site to look for evidence.

That's web 2.0 government for you isn't it?

Not that I could add anything to the excellent leader piece already heading up ZDNetUK today anyway, so I'll move on and stick my head in the clouds.

More specifically, I'll stick my head into composite content applications and ask whether this is a new leverage point for cloud-based services?

But what is a composite content application? Well, Gartner defines it as a, "Combination of content and process components that delivers business value when coupled with the reusable logic provided by third-party domain experts in a number of solution markets."

Basically, it's public or private cloud-based apps that rely on web 2.0 content management and content infrastructure software to make them work. I mention this technology because it would be lovely to think that the next government's IT strategy is able to embrace the concept of virtualising disparate content repositories and application services – surely there must be terrible fragmentation throughout the government's national data grid. After all, even paperwork is a challenge these days it seems.

I also mention this subject due to my developer ear-to-ground having picked up a web 2.0 content management and infrastructure software announcement earlier this week from Day Software whose CRX 2.1 Developer Edition is hot of the press just now.

Day’s open source CRX 2.1 release, it says here, promotes rapid development, deployment, and scalable hosting of composite content applications in either a public or private cloud. The company says that this will help, "Consolidate development and hosting of mission-critical web applications on a single unified platform for increased productivity and compliance."

Now there's far to much deep-dive technology here to discuss in this blog, but it just made me think about politicians who try and talk about government IT and have been prompted by their spin doctors to use the terms "cloud computing", "web 2.0" and, god forbid, "mission-critical web applications".

That said, they could do with a little more web 2.0 and a little less IN-tray action where I live. Oh well, there's no Monster Raving Loony's standing today anyway.