A few agreed with my general theme – that it really wasn’t up to snuff – while some thought I was too harsh, and should be giving Number 10 far greater credit for even engaging with new web technologies in this way, because few governments – if any – do.

On Perfect Path, social media guru Lloyd Davis points out that a major part of the work on the new site has been to install “better plumbing” – WordPress. Simon Dickson, who’s behind the site, agrees in comments this was an early milestone.

All of which is fine – WordPress is a very fine CMS, and now much more than just a blogging platform. The geek in me says it’s reasonably cool Number 10 is using it. But platforms are, of course, immaterial to users – they only see the output – and it still leaves the question of the site’s purpose. 

Part of the problem is that those of us working in the digital world view social media as a Very Good Thing. If you were around for web 1.0 you know it has brought the kind of interlinking of people and ideas we were dreaming of back in the day.

We see the values of Web 2.0 – of information sharing, collaboration and creativity – a unambiguously good and important, so it is hard to be critical of any site that claims to support those values, especially when it emerges from the highest echelons of government, even if the only evidence of that support is using the same tools as we do.

The drawback of this approach, though, is that not everything is a social media problem. Not everything needs to be bashed by the bloggy hammer. Being better at blogs than other governments is a doubly pointless measure of success; we can’t, after all, choose to be ruled by, say, Sweden, if it has a more enlightened approach to comment moderation.

So we need to ask if putting photographs on Flickr, videos on YouTube, and adopting a blog format for press releases really achieves anything, whether or not the comments are switched on.

What is this site’s purpose? Lest I be accused of being entirely negative (it’s been said) let’s look a something this site could be doing.

The government is not shy of complaining that its message is distorted by portions of the media. So one thing this site could do is allow access to briefings on what decision has been taken, or which position adopted, and why. That’s beyond a press release, or a press conference transcript, or speech text.

How exactly that explanation is delivered – through text, graphics, data or video – is up for debate, and is also where the space for innovation is (see MySociety). But what you’re trying to do is explain is the PM’s tactics for stopping knife crime, improving public health, reforming the NHS or dealing with Russia. I’d be fascinated to see more of Brown’s briefing material around these things (while accepting some, especially around foreign affairs, might be classified for good reason). After all, I’ve helped pay for it. I suspect many others would be too – not least Britain’s small but (finally) growing band of political bloggers.

This is the obvious social media angle here, also alluded to by Lloyd in his comments. It is not about building a social site at Number10.gov.uk. It’s about something much, much harder – something that runs counter to the DNA (even the interests) of all governments – being more transparent.

Maybe that’s the trouble here. As Ben Hammersley said in comments on the last post, “What bothers me is the mismatch between what they have to play with, viz a distinctly non-interactive, non-webby PM, and the choices they made.” Maybe this site really is just a roughly-executed Web 2.0 veneer for a very 1.0 PM, and without addressing that fundamental problem it can’t do things properly.

But as things stand, it’s neither starting a conversation, nor facilitating one.

That question, and some of the subsequent discussion, got me thinking about a talk given last week in San Francisco by Clay Shirky. It was, as ever, wildly clever, and re-reading it this week reminded me of some of its wonderful sense. Do go read it all.

Shirky sums up, with great elegance, where people are getting the time to build the web – to read web pages and watch YouTube, create Wikipedia pages, upload those Flickr pictures, issue pokes on Facebook and play games across the ether. It’s all to do with the “cognitive surplus” that has, for decades, been used up or masked by TV (it used to be suppressed by gin). We’ll “spend” some of that TV-viewing surplus doing other things online, thinks Shirky.

“It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?”

A big deal, indeed, and especially if you own a media company which, previously, filled some of that cognitive gap – either with TV, or another product. Huge, unifying cultural events remain important – hence the rise of “watercooler TV” talent shows and the importance of big sporting events to broadcasters. At the other end, narrow niche content that’s very appealing to a small number of people should also thrive.

The pressure, as far as I can see, goes on the squishy middle; generalist entertainment or information that might pass the time but fulfills no specific need, and which hits no heights in terms of quality. Unfortunately, a lot of traditional media content fits that bill, and the web gives us access to the very best examples of it anyway.

This is why the ongoing shift in media consumption presents such challenges. It’s not just YouTube hurting TV. It’s not just Craigslist hurting newspapers. If you’re generalist and, because you’re not a very good generalist, have relied on geographical monopoly to stay alive, then… life’s going to be hard, and Shirky has done a very good job of explaining why.

“Clinton’s strategist, Mark Penn, tried to downplay the importance of momentum. ‘Winning Democratic primaries is not a qualification for who can win the general election,’ he told reporters.”

Umm… no, but it is the only qualification for those Democrats who want to have a go at the general election.

Sometimes, it’s true, strategists can be so busy staring at the blue sky in the distance they lose sight of the shit-filled ditch just ahead.

[And to add, before anyone else does: I know what he really means is Obama's not the man to take on and beat the Republicans later this year. It's the riff the Clinton campaign use a lot; that, somehow, a figure as polarising as Clinton is the only person to take on McCain. That's crazy too. And I think that if I were a Clinton strategist I'd be trying something new, because I'm being thumped by the man I'm putting down as an inexperienced leader and sucky campaigner.]

“Yahoo Inc would consider a business alliance with Google Inc as one way to rebuff a $44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft, a source familiar with Yahoo’s strategy said on Sunday.”

You’re supposed to be in competition with them, no? Indeed, that’s why you’re in this hole. Unless you really, really think content – the only bit of your business in which there isn’t real overlap with Google (and even then…) – is where your future lies. Really?

Charles Arthur, on Newsnight that day, also made good points* about (i) Microsoft using up all its cash pile – and more – to do this deal and (ii) Yahoo eventually being forced to change its technology to Microsoft’s, which will prove a huge distraction.

Reflecting on this over the weekend, the distraction factor may be the biggest hurdle for any new Microhoo. Whether or not they decide to integrate systems, bringing together two large companies with their different cultures and geographical locations will be tough. Finding that $1bn of savings will mean a lot of Yahoos and Microsofties losing their jobs, which is never good for morale. And the whole thing will happen under the cloud of a recession, and with the background noise of investors quickly getting more anxious for payback.

One thought: imagine you’re a developer, or junior or middle manager in Yahoo, and you’ve got an idea for what you think is the Next Big Thing. What are you going to do with it? Hang on until the takeover dust has settled, and pitch, in the hope it’ll even get noticed let alone successfully launched? Or spend some time in the canteen concocting a plan to breakout and go do a startup with your fellow employees?

The last dotcom slump produced a wave of productivity, as laid-off employees clubbed together and did creative things on small budgets. That creativity has waned in the last year or two as the money ploughed back in. So maybe the Yahoo/Microsoft collision will see the talented jumping ship first, powering the next bout of innovation. Bad for the new behemoth, great for us. Ho hum.

* Did Robert Scoble look as if he were constantly reaching back to the glory days in that Newsnight appearance? “I told Bill” this and “I advised Microsoft management” that? I’m told Scoble is a nice guy, but since leaving Microsoft the “Scobilizer” appears only to be marketing himself whenever he shows up online, on TV, or at a conference. This is a drag.

The guys from Innosight often advise us to separate innovative projects from the mothership. And they have a simple prescription: Be patient for scale, but impatient for profit. You need to discover whether a project makes business sense (i.e., can generate some sort of a profit) before you try to make it big.

Inside a newspaper, though, the drive is to make it big first, and hope for profit later. This can lead to big mistakes. A mistake is not always a bad thing, but you learn most quickly (with the least suffering) from a series of small mistakes.

But the tale of the KitKat in Britain, its home market, is a cautionary tale: sales have fallen 18% in two years, which is even faster than the sales collapse of the Daily Express. Taking the blame is a “hotshot executive” from Australia, now departed, who launched a pretty bog standard product development programme.

“For the summer months, it launched strawberries and cream, passion fruit and mango and even red berry versions. In the winter came ‘Christmas pudding’ and tiramisu, which contained real wine and marscapone. Even though Britons never fully embraced the Atkins diet craze, the company launched a low-carb version.”

The new flavours went down badly, piled up in warehouses, and have since been abandoned – and also take the blame for the core plain-old-choc-and-wafer version losing sales.

But it can’t just have been those flavours that caused the fall. They also callously disposed of that delicious ritual about eating one – removing the paper wrapper and running your thumb down the foil to snap off the four legs of biscuit. When they got rid of the paper and foil wrappers in favour of a plastic all-in-one wrap the ritual was ruined for all – even if the new packaging did have little perforations.

The ritual lent a humble KitKat great value – it simply lasted much longer than other biscuits – but it also allowed you to regard eating one as something a little more than simply scoffing “product”. The marketing people obviously didn’t get it. They changed the wrapping, reduced the amount of chocolate used on the things, added the ugly Nestle branding to remind us this is now a World Sweet, ended the “Have a break. Have a KitKat” campaign.

While many people don’t like big business, suspecting it of reducing us to mere retail pawns in the face of their cunning plans, it’s a reminder that even research-heavy conglomerates don’t necessarily have a clue about what makes their products successful in the first place.