Some awards you actually have to pay to enter. Not these ones. The New Statesman very generously throws its doors open with its New Media Awards. Here are some of the sites that didn't make it past the in-house Simon Cowells.

Aboutmyarea.co.uk is an inviting web address, promising to tell us everything we needed to know about our area. Unfortunately, its definition of "our area" only extends to those living [...]

I never thought I'd see the day, but the Police are getting into spamming videos onto mobiles.

West Yorkshire Police has launched 999tv.org showcasing video featuring advice from a number of the region's police officers, as well as the Fire and Rescue Service.

Force website communications manager Patrick Brooke said: "With the proliferation of video based websites and the movement towards an increasingly technology based workplace, this [...]

The National Audit Office says many government departments are unaware how much their websites cost, who is using them and why. The NAO report found that although internet users rate government websites reasonably well, the quality of those websites has improved only slightly since 2002.

It recommends departments carry out regular research to ensure they are providing the right services to the public and collect and analyse usage [...]

With broadband at the kind of pricing that a dial-up modem went for in the mid-90s you'd think the whole nation was online playing World of Warcraft by now. Wrong.

The latest research says the "digital divide" between those with convenient access to the Internet and those without is actually deepening. The report shows that that three in four people counted as socially excluded are also "digitally [...]

Apparently we will soon be able to petition Parliament electronically. That, at least, appears to be the implication of a small, almost unnoticed section of Gordon Brown's 3 July speech last week. In it he said: "I also encourage this House to agree a new process for ensuring consideration of petitions from members of the public."

Buried in a wide ranging parliamentary statement on constitutional reform, the statement was [...]

The government is obstructing a bill to establish a new website for information on public sector spending on the grounds that it would cost too much.

The bill originated in the House of Lords, but is now being led by Conservative MP David Gauke. He argues - not without merit - that it would improve transparency and enable people to engage in important public debates: "What better way of [...]

David Cameron has a lot of answer for. His WebCameron site created a stir when he started posting up YouTube style videos. Evidently it hasn't worked on his own party, who are still confused about policies (along with the rest of us), but whatever he's done, he helped start a vogue.

Now the European Commission has launched a channel on YouTube to allegedly improve the way it [...]

MP Margaret Moran is working with a group of female journalists to produce a site that would provide audio and visual content from a range of sources. The BBC and Parliament have said they will make content that had already been broadcast available for streaming through the site. Women's Parliamentary Radio, as the project is called, is now looking for funds to develop and launch the site which will [...]

Ofcom, the independent regulator of the UK telecommunications industries, plans to analyse the economics behind of the provision of public service digital media content to try to work out if there is any "shortfall in provision". I doubt that means another overhaul of the BBC however.

Behind the scenes Ofcom has been consulting many people in the digital media industry about using online to deliver public service "audio-visual [...]

Parliamentary consultation has gone online, as can be found in the work of the Select Committee. The first committees to try this are the Medical Care for the Armed Forces (Defence Committee), Local Government and the Draft Climate Change Bill.

As William Heath at The Ideal Government Project says: "It’s taken a while, and it’s a slow start... Parliament is where consultation can make a huge [...]