One of the blogs I subscribe to is Simon Dickson’s Puffbox. Simon’s a web consultant who specialises in news and e-government. Like me, he’s a real fan of the Wordpress blogging platform and a number of his client projects push the boundaries of Wordpress to create exciting and innovative websites. You can read about Simon’s use of Wordpress here.

Simon’s recently adopted Google’s concept of ‘20 per cent time’ to develop onepolitics, a site that provides an at-a-glance view of the latest posts on political blogs by journalists and high profile bloggers. The site’s updated every 15 minutes and provides a simple way to keep abreast of political blogs, without needing to understand RSS feeds or manage your own blog subscriptions.

Nicely designed and easy-to-use, I think it’s a great model for feed aggregation - and the flexibility of Wordpress should mean it can easily be tailored to provide an overview of feeds on a different topic or even a variety of topics. Great work, Simon!

Guardian Unlimited has issued an updated version of its talk and posting guidelines which apply to the blogs and messageboards across its website.

It can be tricky to find the right tone with guidelines on posting comments or taking part in discussion forums, but I think the Guardian has done an excellent job. The guidelines are clear, concise and accessible, and some of the principles could well be applied whenever you’re posting something online or sending an email. For example:

“Text isn’t always a great medium for conversation. Remember that tone of voice - sarcasm, humour and so on - doesn’t always come across when using words on a screen. Be aware that you may be misunderstood, so try to be clear about what you are saying, and expect that people may understand your contribution differently than you intended.”

You can read the full guidelines here

One of the blogs I read regularly - prblogger - recently reached its second birthday. To mark the occasion, prblogger’s Stephen Davies posted a recap of some of his favourite posts from the past two years. This kind of recap can be really useful for new readers and for regular readers like me too – it’s a great way of getting people to dip into the archives.

My favourite discovery is Stephen’s post on Firefox extensions from February 2006. Firefox is my preferred web browser, although I spend plenty of time checking sites in Internet Explorer as well. I’m already using the Google Toolbar and del.icio.us links extensions for Firefox, but most of the others that Stephen mentions are new to me.

I’ll definitely be testing out the Who is this person? add-on which allows you to highlight any name on a webpage and see matching information from LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Google News, Technorati and other sites, as well as Screengrab which allows you to save whole webpages as images. If these live up to expectations then they’ll be incredibly useful and time-saving devices for me.

Take a look at the Firefox Add-ons website for a full list of extensions for the browser, or check out Stephen’s list of extensions for a quick overview of some of the most useful add-ons.