Logo - 3 comments

Just something I knocked up during the Bond film. Any campaigning, media-savvy blog needs its logo (corporate identity?), and here's something that us Labour-supporting bloggers could potentially rally around.

OK, it's not the Red Flag but it's a start.



What do people think?

Labour MPs Online - 4 comments

I think we've got all the blogging MPs, but Tom Watson has the authoritative list of Labour MP web sites.

If I have about 17 days free I'll manually check all 182 URLs to see if any MPs have recently been "bitten by the bug", gone with the flow, felt the Zeitgeist, and set the ball rolling by adding a blog to their site.

UPDATE: I ran the MP web sites through an automated checker: 18 of them (nearly 10%) don't work, and I didn't discover a single new RSS or Atom feed. There could be new blogs out there, but it means I would have to check them all manually.

It's bizarre. Setting up a blog not only gives you a news feed that people can monitor with no effort at all on your part, but publishing a blog - because it is done with a user-friendly environment, like Blogger - is much easier and quicker than designing your own pages, layouts, and maintaining a set of files, etc.

Even if you don't go the whole hog and write passionate opinion-pieces, having a blog saves the MP (and their assistants) time and effort, and misses a big opportunity to make their site more accessible.

Harry's Posts / New icons - no comments

As you may know, Harry's Place is in the Bloggers4Labour database, yet curiously no recent posts would ever appear in our list despite the frequency of Harry's posts.

Basically, although Harry's feed file shows up in any browser, it would refuse to play ball with the feed monitoring software that we're running, defiantly returning "type 403" error codes. Hence, no updates shown.

To get around this, I created a "wrapper" using the highly recommended FeedBurner service. What it gives us is a new feed (and a new URL), but which merely "wraps up" the content from the original RSS feed. So, fairly painlessly, we (like any web user) now have access to Harry's posts, but via a different URL - one which won't throw errors at us.

It seems to work beautifully.

Incidentally, that takes us to 50 active feeds. We do have more blogs than that, but one or two have broken feeds, or are missing dates, and therefore their posts won't show up in our "recent" list. Hopefully I can find a way to solve those issues too, and get them up and running.

New icons: MPs, MEPs, AMs, and Councillors should awake to find a colourful icon next to their posts. I take full responsibility for any crimes against good taste, though I think they look quite nice.

You may have noticed that, if a blog has specified an icon to display in the browser, Bloggers4Labour now works out what it is and displays it with the post. Shame more people don't have one set up, but I fully accept it's going to be low down our bloggers' lists of priorities.

Just another way of helping you navigate through the recent posts. Let me know if you have any other ideas...

New Media Awards 2005 - no comments

Bloggers4Labour is now nominated in the Innovation section (hope that was the right choice) of the New Statesman's New Media Awards.

What are our chances? Well just look how many entrants there are!



If you've come across other sites you like while perusing the Labour blogs, please nominate them too!

Welcome to... / News - 1 comment

• Battersea's Labour team
• Tooting's Labour team
• Sadiq Khan - Labour's choice to take over from long-serving Tom Cox as MP for Tooting, Balham and Earlsfield.
• Catherine Stihler MEP - Catherine represents Scotland in the European Parliament.
• and finally, Neil MacDonald, who is carrying Labour's flag in Central Suffolk and North Ipswich.

Thanks again to Jo for finding these!

I've also added a couple of News feeds - these will show up with a blue background for the time being. There's:

• the New Statesman New Media Awards 2005 blog, which should be of interest to most of you lot.
• plus there's the Guardian News blog.

Obviously I'm not suggesting these are loyal to the Labour Party, but I'm sure they will be of interest to Labour bloggers.

IE issues fixed - 3 comments

Just fixed a couple of problems with the site when running IE6 on Windows. I don't normally use either (which is probably why) but I won't go into that here.

Anyway, the problem where wide entries caused the central column to expand and push the right-hand column right down to the bottom is no more, and if you ever saw a mysterious JavaScript error, that should also be gone. Let me know if you see anything else peculiar.

AWOL - 9 comments

Sorry for the lack of updates - have spent practically all the last week in the vicinity of Southampton General Hospital as a close family member lies critically ill.

But, for the moment, I'm here! Some recent additions to the list:

• James Hamilton's blog - Psychotherapy, Neuroscience and current affairs.
• Labour Friends of Iraq. Their aim is to unite Labour Party members to build direct links of solidarity between the emerging Iraqi labour movement and progressive organisations and the British labour movement. Here's a link to their Nozad Ismail campaign.
• and finally, the Thimble - Bringing digitabulism into the 21st century.

Anyone else come across the Alastair Campbell blog? Is it for real? Suspiciously few comments being left (mainly from psychos, but who am I to judge?) and I haven't found too many links from other bloggers.

Yes, it does appear to support the Labour Party (in a somewhat fundamental manner), but it'd be nice to know it was genuine...

Today's new blogs - 4 comments

Welcome to our newest chums:

• Eric the Unread - "The corpse of old news, spin, rhetoric and sanitized propaganda", as described by the pseudo-left.
• Harry's Place - Harry Hatchet and friends discuss international and UK issues from a democratic left perspective (in case you haven't heard of it!)
• and finally, mad musings of me - Britain's first blogging councillor, now just blogging...

Where's my recent post? - no comments

I've recently fixed an issue where some people with Atom feeds didn't see their posts appearing on the recent list - basically the dates were appearing in a different place to other Atom feeds. Anyway, all is now well.

As a result of that fix, we're now seeing posts for our latest addition, Norman Geras' normblog, plus a couple of other sites.

Now some blogs on our list don't publish dates at all in their feed, a notable example being Clive Soley MP's site. The unfortunately result is that posts won't appear in the recent list. I don't think it's a TypePad issue, as some of their users have Atom feeds (e.g. Hattie Ajderian) and they work. I wonder if we can persuade Clive to change his settings...

Meanwhile, if 4 recent posts isn't enough for you, here's a list of everything from the past 48 hours.

Always first with the News - no comments

Not much point us having a link to an RSS/Atom feed for every one of the Labour-supporting blogs on our list without actually doing something with the information! I should mention that this was originally Lance's idea, though I hadn't really thought much about it until the middle of this week.

What we now do is scan every Labour-supporting blog on our list to display the very latest articles and news stories at the top of our main page.

While testing it, I was able to pick up new articles within a minute of them being published, which is not bad going.

It's like creating a BlogLines account for every reader and pre-filling it with all the best Labour blogs. It's also a great way to find out about the less well-known ones. Whether the site is known to millions or to just a handful, if it is regularly updated, it has a great chance to appear among the most recent entries.

I've only really used BlogLines (which is what we would call an XML News aggregator) for the past couple of weeks, having tended to randomly flick from one blog to another, but I now use the new facility myself, and - honestly - it's really useful (and enlightening).

At the moment, only the 4 most recent updates are shown, but that's only for reasons of space. There's lots of potential.

Click to Join our list.

More Welsh blogs - no comments

Two new ones added for Tuesday: Assembly Labour News, and the blog for the Grangetown Branch of Cardiff South and Penarth.

New for Saturday: PooterGeek / Prizes - 2 comments

Coming highly recommended, PooterGeek is the latest addition to our little (but growing!) clan.

Describes himself as a "sad scientist Labourite [who] rails against stupidity, ideology, and drab indie" ... but what a hit count!

Everyone: do let me know if you track down, or regularly read any Labour-supporting blogs that we don't already have on the list. I'm not ruling out sending prizes to people who spot good ones!

New blog: Gauche - no comments

Another new blog - Paul Anderson's blog, Gauche - Democratic Socialism with a Libertarian punch. Here's a snippet that's definitely worth thinking about (my bold):

Of course, bloggers are of variable journalistic quality. Some of them are very good: brilliant polemical writers and editors, serious gossip-hounds, relentless investigators. But most of them are rubbish. Plenty can't write grammatically, let alone coherently. Too many mistake lazy prejudice for analysis. Most don't think about their readers before posting. Many could benefit from basic journalism training.

But so what? The blog scene is new and raw. There are loads of ideas that haven't been tried that might just work, plenty that are hopeless, a few that might make fortunes for sharp businessmen. And it's open politically. In the US, where blogging is most developed, it is overwhelmingly and hysterically right-wing, but there is no reason to expect it to go the same way everywhere else.

Yes, as Lloyd argues, bloggers need to get smarter in terms of basic journalistic standards - and, yes, there will always be a problem for any isolated individual doing journalism without the resources of a massive international news organisation (or even a small-circulation magazine like the New Statesman). But the solution is for bloggers to get together and create collaborative blogs that have serious journalistic credibility. Who knows? Such projects might one day attract serious investment.

Probably not ideal for lone Councillors and MPs, but for those who'd like to discuss political and philosophical issues, and set the agenda, it would be nice to see more collaborative blogs. That is rather what I'm trying to achieve with Hove Labour 2005. Perhaps it's impractical to expect large numbers (e.g. 10+) members to be able to post, while maintaining some sort of consistency, but at the very least I'd like to see it tried.

PoliticalHack UK - no comments

Is the latest addition to the list, described as the "thoughts of a Birmingham-based political junkie and party hack, Labour member and activist."

http://politicalhackuk.blogspot.com