Poliblog Perspective

I’m trying out a new search facility on the Wardman Wire from a company called Lijit.

The search facility uses the Google search results, but allows me to nominate a network of websites from which an alternative set of search results are selected - so the service incorporates features of social networking websites into the site-search.

I have set up some of the other contributors to the Wardman Wire as my “network”, and I’d be interested to hear what you think.

You can find the search box at the bottom of the sidebar on the blog version of the site.

I’ll keep this short, sweet and straightforward.

Over the last 12 months the Wardman Wire blog audience has grown reasonably quickly by about 6-7 times, and I’m thinking where to take it over the next year. The actual numbers are open to dispute depending on how you count them; but the comparison is consistent.

We’ve experimented with lots of things including daily papers’ reviews and writing content for different niches (politics, technology related to politics, MSM bashing - which is fun but depressingly easy, news, web statistics, cartoons, campaigns, local government and various others).

I need some decent information about who is reading the site to inform my thinking (and - hopefully - help convince advertisers) rather than my own wibblings, so please could you help by filling in the reader survey.

I would have had a prize draw a la Iain Dale, but since I’ve asked for basic demographic information (age bands 0 0-18, 19-34 etc.) and income information information (0->15k, 15k->30k) etc. I thought that it was unreasonable to obtain email addresses that could potentially be correlated against individual details (even though I wouldn’t do it).

So I’ll be doing a sort of “collective reward” instead.

If I get more than 100 responses, I’ll run a prize draw for anyone who wants to enter. Prizes will (inevitably) include a £25 Amazon token first prize and a promotional button spot for 6 months on the Wardman Wire home page shared among about 6-8 runners up.

I will also be publishing an analysis.

Fill in the survey here. Thanks for your help.

Iain Dale posted last weekend that the Conservative Party were planning to launch a big new group blog.

This post is the first of several reflecting on blog strategy for political parties, using the new Conservative project as a thought experiment. In this first article I look at the pros and cons of launching a single group blog, and whether a more diverse strategy may be a better option as a way of encouraging multiple conversation points between the Conservatives and the public.

Is a Single Blog the right approach?

Iain comments:

The blog, as yet unnamed, will have blogposts from people across the party, from Shadow Cabinet, to candidates, CF members and ordinary activists, as well as guest blogs from non party members. The intention is for there to be 5-10 blogposts a day to make it as dynamic as possible. It won’t be full of boring party press releases but instead they want it to have colour, be anecdotal as well as a forum to discuss policy. Anyone can leave comments, and I am told there will “no Stalinist approach to moderation”.

My first thought is to ask whether this is actually too cautious. Will five to ten posts a day on one site be sufficient to communicate everything that needs to be put across? It may even result in another highly centralised, but informal, channel - rather than one that will give a wide range of voices engaging in conversation on a wide range of topics. If so, it won’t be centralised because of any “Stalinist” control - it will simply be that space on the site will be a scarce and precious resource and the Centre will inevitably win the competition for access.

Further, if it does take off, it could have the “Political Betting problem” - also as experienced by Nick Robinson now; up to 500 comments on a post may look like a sign of success, but it can be daunting to those on the fringe. And surely those on (or beyond) the fringe are precisely one constituency who need to be targeted via the informality of blogs - they are people who have proved to be beyond traditional “media-managed” political communication.

So, I can see at least two possible problems with this “single point” approach:

1 - The material, coverage and conversation may be limited in volume and number of contributors.
2 - A non-committed audience may be overwhelmed and give up.

I wonder if a more fragmented strategy may be more effective - on a front that is both broader and deeper, based around niche communication between more specialist interest groups within the Conservative Party and the relevant parts of the public. There could perhaps be a “News and Information” type blog, to give a broad “shop window”, but I don’t think a single site can fulfill the potential of blogs for the Tories.

Johnson and Redwood

If we take the examples of the two most senior Conservatives who have taken to blogging like ducks to water - in my view John Redwood and Boris Johnson - they have succeeded by having a strong and very particular style within their own area of interest. Boris Johnson’s blog has given me a strong sense of his personality, while John Redwood’s site has been a sustained policy seminar. Both communicate different aspects of the Conservative Party that appeal to different elements of society, but I’m not sure that either of these styles - which are essential - would work within a group blog.

The Example of the BBC

An interesting model is the BBC (which also has its faults!), where there have been steps over the last several years to open-up the organisation to give direct access to correspondents, but also to allow the interested public to talk to the people inside the BBC who are not correspondents.

They have gone beyond simply trying to use blogs as another, more informal, channel alongside the existing BBC1, 2 etc. The BBC have realised that blogs are a different kind of communication altogether.

On the BBC Blog Network there are several categories of blogs, for example:

(I’ve not turned these into links as they are all accessible from the network page linked above):

• Blogs which give sit alongside the broadcasts giving the backstory and some related commentary (e.g., Nick Robinson, Test Match Special, Evan Davies, Betsan Powys, Mark Mardell on Europe).
• Blogs which are fully integrated into the programmes to the extent of setting the agenda, exploring how “Broadcasting 2.0″ can develop (e.g., Pods and Blogs, iPM)
• Blogs which give insight into the programme-making process and/or BBC policy (e.g., the Editors, Sports Editors).
• Blogs which sit mainly alongside parts of the website (e.g., Ouch!).
• Blogs which are related to BBC institutions not directly concerned with broadcasting (e.g., Scottish Symphony Orchestra).
• Blogs which are related to issues or policy areas (e.g., Freedom of Information).
• Blogs which are related to allowing the public to help develop the service and organisation (e.g., BBC Backstage, Radio Labs).

Implications for the Conservatives

I’m not suggesting that the Conservative Party need as broad a network as this, and in fact a single group blog is possibly a good place to start. Done professionally and without - as Iain puts it - Stalinist moderation, a group blog has potential to give a more open debate between the Tories and the public, and a more “human” approach.

However, I am suggesting that there is also very significant potential beyond the use of a single group blog - for example regional blogs, policy area blogs, campaigning blogs for work with parallel interest groups, blogs to reach out in areas where the party is relatively thin on the ground (e.g., Scotland, the North), and group blogs with companion parties in other countries on common concerns.

Wrapping Up

I’ll be writing more articles in this series looking at other related areas, including:

• Some more specific ideas for a diversified strategy using blogs as a tool.
• Implications for the Centre of such a strategy.
• How to go about managing such an approach.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.