There’s a wee Linux utility called pdftohtml that I’ve used to convert the Digital Britain report and it’s trimmed a bloated 6.7 MB PDF into 3 HTML files (frameset and 2 sets of content) that weigh in at a mere 256 KB. However, there’s some bad news if you like eye candy: all the images have been stripped out. Please contact me if you’d like a copy.

-W

The Guardian’s experiment in crowd-sourcing http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/ is interesting here. It is the first example I know of, where a mainstream news paper has used the Web to effectively facilitate such shared action.

Stephen

They have published PDFs of over 1m scanned documents, which are therefore not searchable. This is technologically backward.

If the government can’t get simple things like this right, what chance do they have of getting the big things right?

Seriously though, you make a good point. Apart from the bandwidth issue, I find large PDF’s like this very hard to read and navigate on line. The Digital Britain team offer some “social media” outputs here http://pressitt.com/smnr/building-britains-digital-future-government-unveils-action-plan-for-the-digital-economy/124/ This includes videos etc but I can’t see a HTML version of the report.

Your point about MESH networks highlights how complex this issue is. If, in a Digital Britain, we anticipate more people will make a living through their digital skills, the question of who gets paid for what is not going to go away soon
Stephen