Poliblog Perspective

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

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:

• Some high value products (e.g., cameras) have a capped commission.
• Certain peripheral parts of the Amazon supermarket do not pay commission.
• There are several scales of payment, and you can select one up to 23.59 on the last day of the quarter.

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.

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.

Introduction

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.

Overall Totals of UK Party Political Websites

Overall Totals

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.

Total Number of Websites by Party

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:

• How did a much smaller party (Lib Dems) get almost half as many again party affiliated websites listed as the larger Labour Party? There are two possibilities - they either have more websites getting “natural” listings or they are being publicised more effectively or more strategically. I think it is the latter, but we cannot tell whether there is a centrally driven “directory listing” campaign, or a highly aware set of webmasters (perhaps encouraged by workshops at Conference etc).
• The Lib Dems (and to a lesser extent the Tories) clearly had some sort of website creation, or website listing, “internet push” around 2005 - the time of the last election. The trend continuing into 2008 indicates that the Tories seem to have “relaxed” while the Lib Dems have “kept on trucking”.
• To my mind, the Lib Dems are quite effective at targeted Internet campaigning - both around raising awareness of particular issues, but also in taking a long-term, strategic approach. To explain why I’d point to three factors: firstly, it is easier to mobilise and maintain that mobilisation in a smaller body; secondly, a smaller group has less resources - and internet promotion in more or less free; thirdly, the Lib Dems have a greater tradition of prioritising the local - and all this can be done by local activists; finally, the Lib Dems seem (to me) to have a tighter co-ordination between the central Organisation and the web-activists - and a stability in the way the two have worked together over 5 to 10 years.

Whatever the reason, these numbers are quite impressive, and the Tories and Labour have some catching up to do.

Continue Reading »

I have a note from Unity that he has moved the Ministry of Truth web address to:

http://www.ministryoftruth.me.uk/

Worth updating if you review your blogroll.

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.

Wardman Wire Tag Cloud

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.

Recently Posted Articles

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.

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]

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]

I’ve been working with Jon Bright who edits the OurKingdom blog for a couple of months on a policy project that we are calling “The Stump” or “On The Stump“.

It is a rotating policy debate that moves around each week like the Britblog Roundup. There’ll be a team of up to about 10 people involved as “hosts”, but we would like that team itself to rotate in it’s membership over time.

(This was first posted at the weekend to make sure that it reaches weekday readers - my apologies if you have read it twice.)

How it works

1. On Sunday “host for the week” Blogger A publishes an article about any issue or aspect of policy that they are interested in on their own blog, and a short summary on stump.org.uk.
2. During the week (perhaps before Thursday night) anybody who wants to posts a response on their own blog and links back to the original post by blogger A (using a Trackback or Comment).
3. On the next Saturday the next host Blogger B publishes a summary and of the responses, and perhaps some analysis of their own, including linking back to all those who responded.
4. On Sunday (i.e., the next day) Blogger B becomes the host and publishes their own article about a question they are interested in, and the cycle starts again.

This process prevents anyone having to do too much work continually - the way this is organised will mean that team members will have to put in quite a bit of thought and time roughly once every two months.

Why is it organised like this?

We are trying to help do our bit in several areas:

How will the team work

• We are thinking about a team of around 10 people as hosts. But this area needs to be pragmatic.
• Our first thought is that team members will join for a period, be involved in the rotation for a time then leave to allow space for somebody else - that will give more people a chance to give input and build contacts.
• 6-12 months seems to be a reasonable minimum time to be involved as a host, since that is roughly the time needed to build a decent basic profile for a blog.
• The plan is to do the first team mainly by invitation to get a wide spread of bloggers and views - but if anybody is really keen there may be a couple of slots.
• If it works well, I’ll be happy to be the first team member to drop out - say after 3 or 4 cycles.

Wrapping-Up

We’re about ready to start, but we are still debating a few details, and some things are bound to change as we get going. So any comments or questions are welcome.

You can find the blog at stump.org.uk, and the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/stump. Watch these addresses for developments.

Please make any comments or ask any questions on the Wardman Wire copy of this post.

I’ve been working with Jon Bright who edits the OurKingdom blog for a couple of months on a policy project that we are calling “The Stump” or “On The Stump“.

It is a rotating policy debate that moves around each week like the Britblog Roundup. There’ll be a team of up to about 10 people involved as “hosts”, but we would like that team itself to rotate in it’s membership over time.

How it works

1. On Sunday “host for the week” Blogger A publishes an article about any issue or aspect of policy that they are interested in on their own blog, and a short summary on stump.org.uk.
2. During the week (perhaps before Thursday night) anybody who wants to posts a response on their own blog and links back to the original post by blogger A (using a Trackback or Comment).
3. On the next Saturday the next host Blogger B publishes a summary and of the responses, and perhaps some analysis of their own, including linking back to all those who responded.
4. On Sunday (i.e., the next day) Blogger B becomes the host and publishes their own article about a question they are interested in, and the cycle starts again.

This process prevents anyone having to do too much work continually - the way this is organised will mean that team members will have to put in quite a bit of thought and time roughly once every two months.

Why is it organised like this?

We are trying to help do our bit in several areas:

How will the team work

• We are thinking about a team of around 10 people as hosts. But this area needs to be pragmatic.
• Our first thought is that team members will join for a period, be involved in the rotation for a time then leave to allow space for somebody else - that will give more people a chance to give input and build contacts.
• 6-12 months seems to be a reasonable minimum time to be involved as a host, since that is roughly the time needed to build a decent basic profile for a blog.
• The plan is to do the first team mainly by invitation to get a wide spread of bloggers and views - but if anybody is really keen there may be a couple of slots.
• If it works well, I’ll be happy to be the first team member to drop out - say after 3 or 4 cycles.

Wrapping-Up

We’re about ready to start, but we are still debating a few details, and some things are bound to change as we get going. So any comments or questions are welcome.

You can find the blog at stump.org.uk, and the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/stump. Watch these addresses for developments.

Please make any comments or ask any questions on the Wardman Wire copy of this post.