Aug 22 2008
Poliblog Perspective is Back
The title says it all.
This blog is back in business after a break.
I intend to post here once or twice a week, about subjects related to Political Blogging.
Aug 22 2008
The title says it all.
This blog is back in business after a break.
I intend to post here once or twice a week, about subjects related to Political Blogging.
Apr 02 2008
I am is currently having problems with a hack that is inserting phishing scripts into some of my domains, and has proved difficult to eradicate over the last couple of days.
We’ve spent some considerable time tracking this down already, and the easiest solution is going to be to rebuild from scratch and copy files across from the existing installation.
In the meantime I am closing down some of my smaller sites for a few days while I do the moves; they will all be back. In the first instance I will be moving the Wardman Wire itself, and the sites that are in the toolbar at the top of the page.
Please bear with us in the meantime, and my apologies for any convenience.
This is a major pain in the butt at a time when I am ready to launch some new facilities and features, but needs must.
Tags: wardman wire, phishing, announcement
Mar 26 2008
Further to my previous post about the new front end design for the Wardman Wire, I’ve tried it with a “light” stylesheet rather than a “dark” one.
Here is a screenshot which also includes a “video” module, showing Tim Ireland’s video in support of the Campaign for the Iraqi Interpreters.
The idea is that there will be a more “magazine” style page on www.mattwardman.com, and the existing design will stay on www.mattwardman.com/blog/ .
I’m going to be doing some beta testing this week via my Twitter Feed at www.twitter.com/mattwardman. I’m not going to post the URL here, as the prototype site can only deal with a relatively small number of visitors.
However, if you would like to help me with comments etc - please join those on Twitter, and I’ll be commenting there as I experiment with different ideas for the design.
Tags: Dan Harddie, Wardman Wire
Mar 26 2008
Iain has come out with a list of 75 top political books with links through to Amazon. This is probably the most widely use way of earning pocket money on UK Political Blogs. Nearly everybody does it - including me.
The way the Amazon affiliate programme works is that if a person purchases anything from the Amazon website within 24 hours of a click through on an affiliate link, then the affiliate receives between 4% and 10% of the purchase value.
There are certain wrinkles:
The one thing I’m not sure about is if I publish a book review, and someone clicks on my affiliate link less than 24 hours after clicking on (say) Iain’s link, who gets the commission.
I’d expect Iain’s link to dominate if it was first, but then the Net doesn’t always do what I expect.
75 top political books is a fantastic idea for drawing attention to a range of books, and encouraging a range of clicks at the same time.
Mar 25 2008
Over the weekend I’ve been playing with a new alternative front end for the blog. It is designed to give a more “newsy” view than the “time-based” view of the traditional blog format, and to help make it easier to keep track of the amount of material that we are now publishing.
The idea is that there will be a more “magazine” style page on www.mattwardman.com, and the existing design will stay on www.mattwardman.com/blog/ .
Here is a screenshot of the prototype (click through for a larger screenshot), then a couple of comments:
The presentation is “topic-based”, rather than time-based as in a traditional blog, and I have grouped the various categories into “channels”; for example, “Parliaments” covers reports from the various Parliament, “Comment” covers commentary columns, “Media” covers Online Media - and so on.
I also hope that the design will make it easier for occasional visitors to keep up with larger articles on a fast-moving blog.
Finally, I am integrating a variety of RSS feeds into the design, so that www.mattwardman.com will be a good place to keep up to date with the latest news and comment.
I’m going to be doing some beta testing this week via my Twitter Feed at www.twitter.com/mattwardman. I’m not going to post the URL here, as the prototype site can only deal with a relatively small number of visitors.
However, if you would like to help me with comments etc - please join those on Twitter, and I’ll be commenting there as I experiment with different ideas for the design.
[tags]wardman wire, new blog design, twitter, beta testing[/tags]
Mar 22 2008
The Open Directory (wikipedia article) is a human-edited directory of categorised websites, which has long been treated as an authoritative directory. Traditionally, it is a place to have your website listed to establish favourable rankings in web searches.
The site has lost some of it’s reputation over the last few years - due to alleged partiality by editors - but it is still one way of looking at the internet presence of UK political parties over time.
In this article I’m going to look at how the presence of how the presence of the UK Party Political websites have developed on the Open Directory since 2000. I’ve looked at the UK Political Parties category, and how it has developed since 2000 - taking the first Internet Archive Snapshot of each year (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, no data available for 2005, 2006 and 2007 ).
If you are interested in a “softer” angle, and a look at how listings in sites such as the Open Directory and Wikipedia help get the attention of the internet public, then you should look at my Blog Platform column for Sunday March 23rd tomorrow over on the Wardman Wire.
Note the absence of data in the Internet Archive for 2005. Still - pretty much the trend we would expect as the use of the web has become mainstream.
This graph shows the trends up until the middle of 2007. As of March 2008, the totals for March 2008 are: Labour 493, Tory 594, Lib Dem 695. My reflections:
Whatever the reason, these numbers are quite impressive, and the Tories and Labour have some catching up to do.
Mar 20 2008
I have a note from Unity that he has moved the Ministry of Truth web address to:
Worth updating if you review your blogroll.
Mar 18 2008
I’ve added a couple of extra features to the blog today - a tag cloud covering 1200 articles, and a feed of recent articles at the bottom of the “single article” page.
The first is that I have turned on the tag cloud page in Beta Form:
About 90% of our posts (i.e., nearly all of mine and some of the other writers’) were tagged when written, and I have turned the feature on this morning. The number after the tag is the number of times that tag has been used.
Tags included here have occurred at least 4 times in the past year. There is clearly some “noise-removal” to do, but I hope that in the meantime this page provides an alternate way to navigate our posts.
Comments will be welcome.
I have also introduced a “recently posted list” going below single posts and pages (example - scroll to the bottom), as a way of (I hope) persuading those dedicated people who read all the way to the bottom of the comments to read another article.
This works by pasting an RSS feed below the post by calling a plugin called “Feedlist“.
This was a slightly more complex job than I had intended, and in the end I created a custom feed through Yahoo Pipes (which was necessary to truncate the post excerpt to a reasonable length).
I still need to trim the excerpt it to “end of word”.
This is still in Beta too - comments are welcome.
Mar 10 2008
The blogger Civil Serf first mentioned (to my knowledge) by Dizzy a couple of weeks ago is - according to Ellee Seymour - to be covered on Newsnight this evening. I got this via Twitter:
More than 800 hits today thanks to civil servant post, the story is on newsnight tonight, michael crick has tried to find her.
(That’s one thing it’s for, Mr Devil.)
If you’ve been incommunicado for the last 36 hours, Ellee said yesterday:
A civil servant who wrote an unflinching blog where she described her working life, the incompetences and inadequacies she regularly encountered, could now be in very hot water for publishing her views.
The Civil Serf blog now seems to have been removed after it was highlighted in today’s Sunday Times, with the headline: “Hunt is on for demon blogger of Whitehall,” while the Sunday Telegraph reported: “Blogger lifts lid on Whitehall failings”.
Her blog is easy enough to find, and the Times even has a link to it. But the site shows an error message saying the page does not exist. It’s obviously been pulled.
Ellee’s article includes some quotes. It is snarky and - in my view - must surely be too close to the bone not to be a breach of contract.
I stand by the comments I made on Ellee’s post on Sunday (edited slightly):
I gave her six months when I first saw it.
I think that civil servants cannot write critical blogs without being in violation of their contract (conduct bringing employer info disrepute etc.). If they do so, they must be bulletproof in their anonymity.
Pulled on a Sunday implies that she may have pulled it herself.
It is a dangerous game to play - especially in the political niche.
It’s always a tricky one - if you plan to avoid work in your writing they could still say no if you ask.
I have to decide whether to blog about clients, and it somethgin I have thought quite carefully about, and I still don’t know if I got the balance right.
(Note: my policy is not to blog about current employers, and never to break a contract or confidentiality agreement - criminal activity notwithstanding).
At this point it looks as though Civil Serf pulled her own blog, so she may get away with it.
Tags: civil serf, anonymous blogging, dooced, blog about employer[tags]civil serf, anonymous blogging, dooced, blog about employer[/tags]
Mar 10 2008
The site for the 18 Doughty Street online TV station is off the internet. I had expected the site to be preserved as an archive, but as the Feral Pigeon notes:
Am I the only one to notice that 18 Doughty Street has totally disappeared? Iain Dale told us it was going to get bigger and better. They even had a wordy statement on the website before it too went bye-bye.
Where did it go? I was trying to find a show from last year that talked about Recess Monkey posting prematurely on the death of Margaret Thatcher, which later turned out to be a trick played on the editor of the left-wing blog.
How can a TV station just disappear like that?
I think it’s a mistake to let the site go off the air - the archive site that was left was doing a good job in preserving access to the output of an experiment that produced some quite significant material.
To my thinking, the best material of all were the extended interviews with politicians, and some of the more idiosyncratic voices that had a real platform for the first time.
Fortunately some of the archive is preserved, so I will post a daily video from the collection until I run out of material that I think will be of continued interest. They may be in popup windows, however, as I think the videos are wider than my blog template would permit.
[Edit: I have softened my comment in this post slightly - without changing my sentiment.]
Tags: feralpigeons, 18 doughty street, mike rouse[tags]feralpigeons, 18 doughty street, mike rouse[/tags]