Bloggers' Breakfast Briefing - 4 comments

Labour are hosting a breakfast briefing for bloggers this Wednesday (2nd May), between 9 am and 10 am.

• It will be hosted by Caroline Flint MP
• The briefing will be about the NHS and the Better With Labour campaign.
• There really will be breakfast laid on, though I can't furnish you with specifics...
• Venue: somewhere in the Westminster area.
  

If you'd like to attend, please RSVP to ecampaigns@new.labour.org.uk. The venue will be confirmed by email.

I don't think I'll be able to attend, though if these were on the menu I might reconsider...

The Web: enough already? - 2 comments

I'm getting increasingly irritated by articles attacking the political blogosphere (yes, blogosphere) - having covered the issue here already - online communities (e.g. Facebook), and user-generated content (e.g. the Wikipedia, and other Wikis).

Today's Observer has the latest: "Enough! The Briton who is challenging the web's endless cacophony":

Andrew Keen finds himself in the eye of a storm. The Briton, who made his living from the hi-tech boom in California's Silicon Valley, has dared to challenge the assumptions behind the internet revolution which began there and swept the world. America's massed army of bloggers do not like it one bit.

I've never heard of him, but he has a book out in June (what do you expect from a Sunday newspaper?), and appeals to authority (thanks, Wikipedia!) are just so tempting.

Keen, who still lives in California and works in technology, questions the euphoria surrounding the rise of citizen journalism, online communities such as MySpace and user-generated websites including online encyclopedia Wikipedia and video-sharing site YouTube.

First problem: he questions the euphoria. OK, I quite like the technologies mentioned, but I don't express euphoria, and have been easily able to avoid those journalists who promote it, so how about we agree to drop all mentions of euphoria and stick to how the sites are actually used, day-to-day?

Keen has been praised for applying the brakes to what seems to have become a runaway train: the idea that anyone can use technology to gain control of the media and change the world.

Runaway trains, massive influxes, rising tides... they're everywhere, nowadays.

On his own blog last week, Keen noted growing support for his views: 'It's game on. Now the fun begins.' Oliver Kamm, an author and columnist, has accused bloggers of 'poisoning debate'.

This is so, but Kamm's opener and response were cut to pieces by some of the best political bloggers around (e.g. here and here), and the remains danced-upon with hobnailed boots at Normblog:

Oliver picks me up at one point for comparing blog discussion with the public meeting, when his own comparative reference point is the press and broadcasting media; he's judging blogging as a form of citizen journalism. But blogging is sui generis. It may be like citizen journalism in some ways; yet blogs and their audiences can also be seen as micro-communities of bloggers, readers and discussants, virtual segments of the public square in which voluntarily formed collectives, with participants free to come and go, consider issues that they want to consider. What can 'overproduction of opinion' mean in this context? Should all these people stop writing and reading and commenting unless they have been certified as competent? The complaint of overproduction of opinion doesn't sit well with the theme of freedom of opinion, or with the rights of members of a democratic society to assemble as they wish for legitimate common purposes.

And no one is forced to be a consumer.

As no response has appeared, I consider that to be the end of that particular debate.

Keen's interview continues:

As the internet grows, so do reports of faked identities and stalking on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, deliberately misleading entries on Wikipedia, virtual vandalism in online world Second Life and accusations that YouTube is a forum for either copyright infringement or mind-numbing videos of skateboarding cats. Critics believe the trends may have reached their logical, horrific conclusion last month when Kevin Whitrick, a father-of-two from Shropshire, hanged himself in front of his webcam watched live by members of an internet chatroom.

Sensationalist drivel. Anyone old enough to have been internet-savvy ten years ago - or longer - will recognise the same themes, and the same scaremongering. Everything listed above could have - and has been - done before online, albeit in perhaps a cruder and less visually exciting form. All that's changed is that a journalist has decided to spin things the other way for a change: perhaps someone with a book to promote, or an identity to find.

Keen, 47, presents a dystopian vision in which people endlessly Google themselves and expertise counts for nothing; online communities gather merely to confirm their own prejudices; internet television purports to showcase amateur talent but is dominated by corporate marketing; newspapers are driven to the wall by online advertising and news sites edited at the whimsical click of a mouse; and knowledge of history and literature becomes smothered by an avalanche of blogs from self-obsessed teenagers.

I wonder if it's significant that Keen's age makes its first appearance here, in what could so easily be a rant about "the state of modern music". Ultimately it shows a detachment with the human race: an assumption that the masses click "whimsically", and that the deep appreciation of history and literature developed during their school years will dissipate as they helplessly click from one teenager's blog to another, imbibing the self-obsessedness of each.

Maybe Keen would like to differentiate between the Bloggers4Labour Facebook group and a real-life Labour branch, because if he can spot some kind of essential difference, I can't. Perhaps one the one hand we both "confirm our own prejudices". On the other, perhaps we talk about things and change our minds, in a rather human way, and would swiftly tire and go elsewhere if we couldn't. It's a thought, isn't it?

He continued: 'I'm nostalgic for the world I grew up in where there was a clear distinction between author and audience. I'm not attracted or impressed by the idea of collapsing that distinction. It's hard to be good at what you're doing, it requires expertise. In the same way that not everyone should be doctors or teachers or astronauts, not everyone should be an author. Most people do not have anything interesting to say.'

Well, we have technical qualifications so that people who fancy having a go at being a doctor can be assessed on their competency before killing their first patient, but except insofar as other members of the public put themselves in their hands, people should try different jobs and roles in order that they can be publicly assessed on their competency. Writing - in a democratic, pluralist society - is a public good. It should be encouraged, and anyone arrogant enough to say that "most people do not have anything interesting to say" should try living in solitary confinement for a week or so.

Blogging provides an easy way for anyone to publish their ideas, and just as easy a way for people to judge them. Anyone concerned that those with talent and expertise are failing to get the attention they deserve should consider the huge head, and enormously long tail that blog traffic demonstrates.

Keen criticises Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia for making it impossible to discern the important from the trivial. 'Wikipedia is going to become the internet,' he said. 'It does away with the distinction between the distinguished and the ordinary and becomes a bizarre compendium of information. The absence of editors means there's no way of determining whether something is important, so you get a longer entry for Pamela Anderson than Emmeline Pankhurst. I want to learn about Martin Luther's epiphany, not the epiphany of the 11-year-old who blogs next door.

What kind of person judges the importance of an article based upon its size, or popularity? Anyone who reads the Pankhurst article will quickly realise she was a key figure in the struggle for the enfranchisement of women - a matter of concern across the world - and be directed to articles that will allow them to continue their research. Anyone happening upon the Pamela Anderson article will realise that she has played, at best, a bit-part in the major struggles of the past century, and has limited relevance to the downtrodden of the Earth, if that's how you judge "importance". Encyclopaedias cannot teach you what is important: you have to bring that with you, and if you don't have a clue, you can hardly blame the Web for taking you off down blind alleys.

As far as I'm concerned, the Web is sufficiently large, diverse, and democratic to meet the objections of Keen and others. People are smart enough to ration their own intake of trivia and escapism; curious and intelligent enough not to accept everything they read as fact; sufficiently averse to online abuse to try to push it off their own sites and contain it elsewhere; while editors who manage repositories of information are generally sensible enough to preserve its honesty and integrity. Until someone can show me that these are not generally true on the Web (or significantly less true there than off-line), I'm going to continue trying to make the most of all these new opportunities.

Update (30/04): Yasmin Alibhai-Brown also has a pop at the blogosphere (via The Daily Ablution). You can probably imagine all too well how it goes, and sure enough, it takes Keen's piece and adds the hysteria of a Daily Mail reader who hears a crash and finds an asylum-seeker's football in their kitchen sink. It's completely and utterly awful.

The Agony of the Elite - no comments

This, from Sebastian Cresswell-Turner, via PooterGeek, is apparently not a joke:

A popular member of White's, the St James's club to which many of the old landowners belong, knows plenty of well-educated professionals who have fallen by the wayside. "First, they can’t afford to eat out," he told me, "then they pull their children out of [fee-paying] school, and you just stop seeing them." Brian Gill, a London-based debt counsellor, told me: "The poverty line is definitely creeping upwards."

As a result, socio-economic classes that used to be entirely immune from hardship are no longer safe; and if they do not have to contend with actual poverty, they are nevertheless plagued by a constant sense of precariousness. "Everyone we saw was utterly stressed-out over work and school fees,” said the wife of a best-selling British author now based in Italy, after a brief visit to England last summer.

Without wanting to seem uncharitable, or to advocate "levelling-down" as an end in itself, my instinct is to laugh mockingly at the phoney plight of the top percentiles of British society.

Chris Dillow believes these are the symptoms of being born to rich parents:

A household income of £140,000, even with two children, is more than 97% of the population gets. Even on £60,000, you're doing better than 75% of people in the UK. So how can someone in such a position think themselves poor?

This is where the curse comes in. Coming from a rich family raises your expectations; you expect to have (as Seb does) second homes, expensive meals out and private schools for your kids. And you often feel the need either to compete with your father, or to live up to his high expectations for you.
The upshot is that even if you do very well economically, you feel bad.

That this provides a psychological opportunity for ambitious people from ordinary families to progress at the expense of the rich doesn't leave me entirely satisfied. The ability of the rich to feed stories of their sham plight into mainstream newspapers under the cover of "Life & Style" tells us something more about inequalities of power and access.

Humanitarian Intervention post-Iraq - no comments

At a meeting on Monday 30th April (sorry, short notice) in the Jubilee Room, Westminster Hall, Houses of Parliament, "a panel of leading Ministers, MPs, and thinkers" will come together to discuss the future of humanitarian intervention, after the conflict in Iraq.

The speakers include:

• Rt. Hon. Hilary Benn MP, Minister for International Development and a candidate for the Labour party deputy leadership.
• Prof. Brian Brivati, Professor of Contemporary History and Human Rights at Kingston University.
• Nick Cohen, journalist for the Observer and New Statesman, and author of ‘What’s Left? How Liberals lost their way’.
• Gary Kent, Director of Labour Friends of Iraq.
• Pat McFadden MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Cabinet Office
• Karen Pollock, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust (tbc.)

Apparently, the meeting will be broadcast on YouTube. You can download full details here. I'll get back to you with a start and and end time for the event.

API: Connecting to B4L - no comments

I'm working on an API for Bloggers4Labour. Basically, that's a mechanism for other computers to talk to our site (specifically, our database and software) and "do things", just like you click on a URL and view our pages.

Initially, my aim is to provide the simplest possible way for other (probably) Labour sites - for example, the member's portal, MpURL - to submit their own blogging members to Bloggers4Labour. So, as you set yourself up a blog at MpURL, you can be automatically submitted to our list.

Perhaps later, we'll provide MpURL, and other partner sites, the ability to query non-personal information about our bloggers and feeds, thus helping to "glue" the sites together.

I've based what I'm doing upon what TheyWorkForYou has done on their own API page, and intend to follow the same technical decisions they have made, offering much the same output formats.

The blog submission is largely working already (on a test database), so let me know if you fancy testing it yourself.

Regular donations - no comments

The first generous person has set up a regular donation to fund Bloggers4Labour's work, using the new PayPal subscription links we've set up. That'll help us to the tune of £5 per month for the next 12 months (well, £4.63 after PayPal's cut). Twenty more such donations would cover all of our basic costs.

Euston Manifesto Conference - 2 comments

'Solidarity and Rights: The Euston Manifesto one year on'

The Euston Manifesto Group will stage a one-day conference at SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London, on 30 May 2007. The event will be hosted with the help of the SOAS Centre for Jewish Studies and take place in the Khalili Lecture Theatre, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OXG.

The meeting starts at 2.00 pm and continues into the evening (till 9.30 pm). The final speaker will be Michael Walzer. Each session will begin with the presentation of a short paper, which will be followed by open (chaired) discussion. Norm has the full running-order.

Please email for a ticket - each one costs £5.50. Once you've ordered your ticket, you can pay via PayPal, or send a cheque made payable to 'the Euston Manifesto Group' - please remember to ask for the address.

Update (07/05): Here's the full programme of events, available as a PDF to download.

B4L Assembly - no comments

Thanks to everyone who made the meeting in the House of Commons yesterday, especially to Tom Watson for arranging the room and for being our host.

It was great to see so many people, and to collect lots of good ideas. I haven't yet had time to go through my notes and organise them, but I've started out by posting the minutes of the meeting on the forum; I'll also email everyone who put their email address down on the list. A number of the ideas will come in handy for Thursday evening (as discussed) and beyond.

Here are a few accounts of the evening I've found so far, the latter account showing that highly-trained security guards are human beings too...

Update: As discussed, I've set up some PayPal subscriptions, which can be found on the new donations page. In an ideal world I'd like to see this organisation funded by small, regular, donations by a wide range of readers and member bloggers, and hopefully these subscriptions (£2, £5, or £10 per month) will help that happen.

Getting to the B4L Meeting - no comments

If you're coming to the meeting on Monday, at Committee Room 8 of the House of Commons, you can find directions here.

I'd suggest arriving at Westminster tube, followed by a careful crossing of Bridge Street amid a throng of Russian tourists. You should then head around the corner towards St Stephen’s entrance - (6) on the Colour Map referred-to above - where you will be met by barriers, sentry boxes, and policemen. You will have to speak to a policeman in order to gain admittance, and I suggest you say something like:

"I'm here for a bloggers' meeting in Committee Room 8"

And if that doesn't register, and/or you're asked which member is running it, you should simply say:

"Tom Watson MP"

You'll be pointed towards a Portakabin (well, some kind of a stand-alone, relocatable building), where a quick bag-scan and pat-search will take place. Within a minute or two you'll be inside the Palace of Westminster, in front of Reception, where you should ask for Committee Room 8. Repeat the sentences above if you have to. If we can arrange a guide, we will.

07906 123390 is the number to call (after 6.00 pm, please) if you need guidance.

Brighton and Hove elections - 2 comments

Neil Harding has an excellent roundup of reasons to vote Labour in Brighton and Hove on May 3rd, which I can heartily recommend.

So far I've not done much in the local area, but I took delivery today of a big box of leaflets for the wards of [Con x 2] Central Hove (Labour candidates: Bernie Katz and Rachel Lyons), and [Lib Dem x 2] Brunswick and Adelaide (Labour candidates: Dave Boyle and Simon Gulliver). Having voted Lib Dem myself, in 2003, I think it's the very least I can do.

Flickr widget - no comments

I've temporarily removed the widget from the sidebar that displays a mini collage of images from the B4L Flickr group, as there have been a couple of complaints that it was causing problems on the page.

I hope it will soon return in a more useful and interesting form, but in the meantime, visit the group's page at Flickr, join, and submit some interesting politics-oriented photos to the pool.

Auto-login / B4L Customisation - 1 comment

Anyone with an account on this site - that is to say, a login, that gives them the ability to subscribe to a newsletter, and use our widgets on their own sites - will soon be able to take advantage of new facilities that will make Bloggers4Labour more useful and customisable: for example, the ability to say that they'd rather 5 recent posts appeared on our front page, rather than the long-standing 3 - or indeed none at all.

Basically, meaningful user preferences will exist for the first time. All you'll need to do is set up an account if you haven't already, then log in once. The cookie we send you will keep you logged-in for a year. Sure, I will gain the ability to steal your credit card records, take out mortagages in your name, and watch you through your webcam, just like in Sandra Bullock's The Net, but most importantly, you won't have to re-login every 30 minutes whenever you, say, want to add a blog post to a B4L-managed clip-blog, or maintain your personal favourites/links list, hint, hint.

As an aide-mémoire, a new box with a (currently) grey border will now appear in your B4L sidebar. Please click the link to log in if you aren't already, because the more people who do, the more it's worth my while to customise the site according to your preferences.

By the way, if you have any ideas for customisation, please let me know, or come along to the meeting on Monday.

Update: I'm afraid I clumsily broke some pages in the process - these were all fixed by approximately 3.10 pm today.

Mobile phone masts, and other incredible statistics - no comments

Says Rhod, via The Independent:

Two giant mobile phone companies are to move a mast at a primary school, after parents claimed their children fell sick [...]

I've long thought the "mobile phone mast health scandal" issue, that spreads from area to area rather like a circus - or a plague - was one of those classic situations where anxious parents' specious and unscientific claims were whipped up by ignorant journalists and ambitious local opposition politicians, with impressive-sounding statistics only being properly scrutinised after the political tornado had passed. Perhaps I've missed a subtlety somewhere along the line.

Their results showed 56 per cent of the children and 86 per cent of the staff had problems sleeping, 54 per cent and 59 per cent respectively were getting headaches and migraines, and 46 per cent and 95 per cent respectively reported fatigue and numbness.

The effects of the St Edward's RC primary school's phone mast - which is in Warwickshire - must be strong indeed, as I can attest to having experienced all of the mentioned symptoms during the 11 years covered, none of which could possibly be explained by other factors: everything from headaches, migraines, to insomnia, dizziness, and nausea. I've even heard "strange hums and clicks", but then I do like Autechre. It appears that staff are far more susceptible (95%, compared to 46%, are honest enough to declare this fact) to "fatigue and numbness". As the son of two teachers, I couldn't possibly comment on this scientific conundrum...

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Meanwhile, the BBC reveal that England cricket captain legend, Michael Vaughan, has successfully called a coin-toss six times in succession. Broadsheet science editors were "stumped" by this seeming mathematical impossibility until a Tipton resident revealed to the world's press that he owned a "powerful magnet", squeezed his eyes closed, and walked in circles around his sitting-room, humming loudly, and with his fingers crossed, while each toss was made, in order to achieve the desired result for England.

B4L Menus / Performance - 1 comment

Hope you noticed the new "gold" menu bar we're showing underneath the logo, and above the recent posts. I'm not normally a fan of menu bars on web-sites, but the motivation for this change was that the previous links section on our left-hand sidebar wasn't really professional enough, and did a poor job of showing off the many different things we do. It forced me to keep the number of links down, truncate the names, and made it difficult to categorise the facilities nicely. At last, now, everything is visible.

The menu bar works for me in Firefox 2 and Safari, as well as Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. Please let me know if you find any glitches.

If you're interested in employing a similar menu facility on your own site, you can find out more here.

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I reorganised the site slightly, late last night, in an attempt to throw off the spammers and (less charitably, perhaps) the victims of the virus/malware that set our server to be the HTTP Proxy in people's web browsers. It's early days, but it looks like we're back to running at top speed.

Africa's time-wasters - no comments

Dan at Hii Dunia rates some of Africa's worst leaders...

War on Terror - 2 comments

I don't quite understand the fuss made about Hilary Benn's comments on the phrase, "war on terror". This is a discussion about rhetoric, not about policy, and should therefore be of minimal importance to most people. Nonetheless, we - as liberal-minded democrats, and committed supporters of human rights and free speech - ought to be just as explicit in condemning things we should condemn, as affirming things we should affirm. To me, the phrase means something like:

Terrorism is the avowed policy of individuals, organisations, and governments around the world; it cannot be justified in any situation: it degrades both victim and perpetrator, breeds future conflict, and those who practise it should be countered with all the means at our disposal.

Or something. I don't share the view that it means:

There is a global conspiracy of terrorists, primarily concerned with destroying The West [this is only partly true], and only military defeat will break it.

Undoubtedly this view has attracted more attention, of late, than the former, thanks to those with a preference for military action, but we're talking not about the conduct of an ongoing "war on terror", but about the aptness of the term, and the underlying commitment of ours to actively and determinedly seek an end to the use of terror worldwide.

Nonetheless Benn continues:

"In the UK, we do not use the phrase 'war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organised enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives.

"It is the vast majority of the people in the world - of all nationalities and all faiths - against a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger. [...]

"The fight for the kind of world that most people want can, in the end, only be won in a different battle - a battle of values and ideas."

These are fine words of the sort we've come to expect from Benn, but where are the mainstream voices that disagree with those points? More importantly, amongst those values and ideas must be zero-tolerance of terrorism. So, just as we've had a War Against Want, and "wars" ("Crusades", even) against poverty, perhaps the "war on terror" is a rhetorical device that concentrates our minds on the problem, and that shouldn't be suppressed, or abandoned to hawks.

AC Grayling, in an article that finds it difficult not to drift off into irrelevance, offers the alternative: "peace-making on the various problems part of whose outcome is terrorism". It's hard to disagree with that goal, but it manages to incorporate the word "terrorism" without any negative connotation, and as if it were a natural consequence of a disagreement. Just as the "war on terror" device conceals the inevitable requirement for peace-making and diplomacy, Grayling's obscures the necessity that force be employed against terrorists, when all else fails. Moreover, his alone ("... it at least has the merit of being more constructive...") blurs the boundary between rhetoric and real-world politics.

Update (19/04): Once again I find that Norm has covered much the same ground already. He also makes a distinction I should have made:

First of all, choosing violence is not what characterizes terrorist groups, properly defined. It's that they choose violence against civilians targeted more or less at random. [...]

Any other business... - no comments

Whether you're coming to the Assembly meeting on Monday, 23rd, or not, you can still submit issues, questions, debates, and so forth, by either updating the Agenda page here, or contacting me.

We only have two hours, so there are no guarantees that any particular issue will be discussed, but please submit anyway - by the end of Thursday, please - and let us worry about the running order. I'll try to keep the Agenda page up-to-date as a reflection of what we'll actually be doing.

Viruses, and the League Against B4L - 3 comments

As some of you have noticed, this site has gone through patches this year where page-loading has ranged from slow to impossible. Essentially this has been a result of being hit by vast numbers of requests from a very large number of other computers, tying up resources on our server. What these computers are, and why they've been doing what they've been doing has been a mystery, but the geographical distribution suggests that these machines are infected with some kind of virus, if not completely under the control of ne'er-do-wells. We know that millions of unfortunate computers are in this position, the question is: why are they attacking us?

More alarmingly, though I was rather flippant about this report, I've had another person contact me to say that accessing (certain?) URLs in their browser (randomly?) opens Bloggers4Labour instead, in a browser frame, so that the original URL is still visible in the address bar. What I haven't been able to find out, yet, is if this is the work of a specific virus or script - deliberately targetting us to waste bandwidth, annoy the PC's (Windows being the one constant in all virus reports) owner, and tarnish this site's reputation - or if it's a wide-ranging problem and the malware chooses a site from a list when installing itself a particular PC.

Nobody's yet been able to tell me how the malware installs itself, except that it - extraordinarily - seems to affect Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2, and the 99.x% of the population who have never visited Bloggers4Labour before (so don't use that as an excuse to stop reading!) My correspondent tells me that even a good suite of commercial anti-virus tools has failed to identify the malware concerned, but whatever it is made a "system restore" impossible. They're going to try reinstalling Windows next. All incredibly annoying.

If anyone out there has come across a similar kind of problem, can suggest what the malware might be, or indeed a fix, please let me know - thanks.

I'm not normally conspiratorial, but B4L has had a pretty rough time of late, and it's hard to believe we haven't been singled-out for special treatment somehow...

Update (15/04): I've just been tipped-off with a solution to the "virus" issue. The theory is that some virus/script/malware has, at some point, changed the proxy settings of the victim's browser, or browsers affected, to use B4L's IP address (88.208.207.99) for the HTTP proxy, and port 80.

Why us, I still can't say, but I've checked what happens if those values are used and, sure enough, visiting the BBC News site will show a B4L page, albeit a slightly mangled one. This seems to fit both test cases exactly. It's all very clever, but at the same time, pretty stupid, if you see what I mean.

So, if you're affected, go to Internet Options... in IE, or the Settings... button in the Connection section of the Network tab in Firefox's Preferences, and either clear your "HTTP Proxy", or reset it to your ISP's default. Drop me a line if you need a hand.

Update 2 (16/04): This issue is also mentioned here. Unfortunately, a snooty administrator has deleted my advisory comments, which is a bit embarrassing, but I guess wasting people's time and sending them down blind alleys is still safer - from an IT security point of view - than trusting a stranger with a suspiciously simple suggestion, who joined the forum that day. Hrmph, though.

Normblog Profile - no comments

Read all about me here.

MPs' money to boost understanding of political process - 3 comments

Paul Evans, transpero.net, and Designing for Civil Society have already covered the vote (a fortnight ago, I admit) by MPs for a £3 million allowance to boost the "public understanding of Parliament" through web-sites (and other things). Still, here are a few thoughts of my own.

Firstly, as for the amount of money on offer, £3 million would be a bargain if it really did improve the public understanding of Parliament, or at least, the political process, the making of policy, the scrutiny of bills and government business, etc.

Expressed, however, as £10,000 per MP, it does sound high. Perhaps I'm missing something, but if I can host Bloggers4Labour (at a pinch, I hear you cry) for £1,000 per year, why should the running costs of any single MP's site be so very much higher?

I'd like to criticise the idea that the £3 million must be divided equally, rather than invested in a system (which, in the guise of TheyWorkForYou, already provides a sound basis for future development) upon which all MPs could host their presence. This has the following advantages: first and foremost, it reduces the amount of money spent on web design/web-development: on the wages of those who offer money for old rope, as well as the evenings and weekends of keen youngsters.

This isn't simply about the costs of web development: there should be a strategy - or, at the very least, guidance - on best practice in civic and political engagement. What the online civic/political world is crying out for is a mechanism through which electors and elected can maintain an informed, committed conversation as equals. The vast bulk of web designers, in my experience, know about CSS, graphics,"web usability", and perhaps how to embed a video widget or integrate a blog, but they lack a vision of how a site can, or should, be used to boost popular engagement. MPs are more likely to have a sense of that vision, but are constrained by their inability to speak the same "technical" language as designers. Furthermore, by being placed on a level playing-field, MPs could receive instructions together on making the best of the facilities provided.

I do have a few ideas for what a new-look, hosted, MP web-site would offer (DfCS offer six, most of which I'd mildly go along with), which I might talk about in future, but such a site would be blog-based, albeit with a narrower audience, and much closer interaction and commitment than is usually talked about. I would also try to work around Jack Straw's concerns that sites would simply turn into advertisements and exhortations for the MP and/or party in question (helped, perhaps, by the fact that such things would probably carry little weight with the public), so that the planned restrictions that Paulie rightly decries could ultimately be lifted.

In the meantime, surely organisations like TheyWorkForYou and MySociety should be lobbying in a similar kind of way to convince the government/individual MPs/groups of MPs to make the very best use of this opportunity, and the money as/when it arrives?

In defence of political blogging - 1 comment

In the light of Guido Fawkes' recent humiliation on Newsnight at the hands of The Guardian's Michael White, Oliver Kamm criticised political blogging in that newspaper on Monday. He concluded:

The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted - overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

I don't mind dishing out a bit of criticism from time to time, but I couldn't disagree more with this analysis.

The central thesis in Oliver's piece is that Guido failed because, as a (mere?) blogger, he developed in an atmosphere where talk is cheap, commitment is low, and facts aren't checked:

[...] He thereby illustrated blogging's central characteristic danger. It is a democratic medium, allowing anyone to participate in political debate without an intermediary, at little or no cost. But it is a direct and not deliberative form of democracy. You need no competence to join in.

This is partly true of the political blogosphere, and yet a poll of bloggers taken before Newsnight would undoubtedly have predicted the outcome: because Guido has a particular reputation for gossip, rumour, and rabble-rousing faux-scandals; because of the ludicrously effected anonymity; and because White is an experienced and reputed journalist, who, I daresay, fancied Guido's scalp. Bloggers4Labour is lucky to have some of the most thoughtful British political blogs pass through its aggregator, day in, day out, and it's hard to believe many of their authors would venture forth as foolishly as Guido did, for they are just as careful, and just as keen to avoid tarnishing their reputation by publishing and uttering nonsense, as "dead-tree" journalists, not all of whom could have wielded a scalpel as efficiently as White.

A secondary charge is that political bloggers can be lumped together as "a self-selecting group of the politically motivated who have time on their hands". One arguing this point would have to prove this was generally the case, and generally not the case amongst offline journalists. By definition, a professional journalist will have upwards of 40 clear hours per week to devote to their musings, while a typical blogger will have evenings and weekends only, to juggle alongside family, food, and TV commitments. As for "self-selecting" and "politically motivated", these are pretty weak charges: what would be left if we eliminated political motivation from public service, from literature, journalism, or other areas of human expression? I certainly selected myself to blog: if you don't want to read what I have to say, you can vote with your feet and read another blog, or perhaps a book. As long as you trust me not to mislead you, reader, I'm sure you're better off under such an arrangement than if someone else selected your correspondent.

I can't help feeling it's ultimately fruitless to maintain a distinction between bloggers and journalists: there are standards of behaviour, repute, interest, and quality, and these ought to be applied irrespective of the medium.

True, political blogging is partly "parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide", but that doesn't mean that political bloggers must narrow the conversation, any more than entering a verbal conversation with someone must. "Fisking"or otherwise undermining and correcting bad (illogical, inconsistent, demonstrably false, etc.) arguments gives people the chance to debate better arguments. It is frustrating when people are resistant to changing their mind with the balance of evidence/persuasion, but minds change, and new thoughts are introduced.

It is a shame that political bloggers keep so closely to their own political community, albeit with some on the edges feeling the need to lash out at opponents periodically, tackling the Party rather than the ball, and others dealing in the crudest and most hackneyed stereotypes. Nonetheless, I can't accept this is the generality: much of the hostility between political bloggers stems from a small number of trouble-makers. Political blogging has created a decent, and fair-sized online community here at Bloggers4Labour, whose affiliates have met in real life on several occasions, which has - I hope - done a little to increase political engagement, and is keen to do more.

I've posted before to criticise the "post-comment" model of political engagement, where politicians struggle to find a way of assimilating a disparate mixture of distracting, abusive, stupid, but also some sensible (yet contradictory?) responses to articles they have published. Perhaps only a small technological leap is required here; alternatively, a commitment may have to develop between local politicians with power, and local voters with an interest and a commitment. I'm convinced that the better political bloggers, together with the online civic society crowd, will take us there - and that a reaction against the blogosphere, back towards the reputed off-line journalists whose names we're all familiar with (journalists, perhaps, of the calibre of Madeleine Bunting), and whose articles make the journey from word-processor to printed Berliner page by some method beyond the ken of their readers, would be a retrograde step.

Over the past three-and-a-half years or so, I've found political blogging challenging and informative, and I believe I've learned a lot from some very intelligent people. It's not the solution to every political issue that faces us, it doesn't yet come close to approaching genuine popular democracy, and it shouldn't distract us from meeting voters on the doorstep, but I've enjoyed the opportunity to engage in it, and therefore I'm all the more reluctant to have my voice taken away just because some political bloggers - who it is easy to ignore - have acquired a bad name, and because other journalists can feel a hammering at the gates but see only barbarians.

Via Tom H.

Update: I've just discovered Tom Freeman has a response; as does Norm, who even chose the same title as me.

Update II (12/04): Oliver updates as follows: "I gave at the end of my post links to three blog posts by writers with much experience of, respectively, journalism and academe. They [...] declare themselves mystified at my criticisms of political blogging. In the next post or two, I shall oblige them by explaining why they're all wrong."

Mystification was by no means the only criticism, nonetheless, this I have to see. With the greatest of respect, making unnecessarily crude generalisations seems an unwise gambit at the best of times, all the more so when it antagonises the kind of blogger who, one assumes, wasn't the intended target.

B4L General Assembly, London, 23 April - 4 comments

All Labour bloggers and elected members are invited to an event on Monday, 23 April, at Committee room 8 in the House of Commons. If you haven't visited before, I've only been once, and it wasn't a problem. Start time is yet to be confirmed, but I think 7.00 pm is a safe bet. The meeting will last no longer than two hours, and we can accommodate 50 people.

An agenda will be distributed shortly, but it can be summarised as:

"How can we make Bloggers4Labour the most useful resource it can possibly be for the growing Labour blogosphere, especially at election-time?"

This is your big chance, so please bring your selves, your thoughts, and your questions. Until the agenda appears, you can start by reading this, or heading onto the forum and looking here and here.

Guest speaker: again, to be confirmed. Let me know if you have suggestions or volunteers.

Update: Could people indicate, one way or another, if they think they'll be coming, and - if so - whether they'd be able to help out on the night?

Update II: OK, the agenda is here: http://bloggers4labour.wikispaces.com/assemblyAgenda

A Likely Story - no comments

A correspondent writes:

Today after a long days work (Yes I work weekends and holidays in a failing attempt to cover the direct and indirect taxes your party has inflicted on us) However having missed my nephews birthday I tried to log on to my bank to give hime what I hope will be a tax free birthday gift.

Unfortunartley I was unable to do so as my PC has been infected by a virus that will only open your odius website. My bank has also suspeneded all of my internet activity till "further notice"

I'm disgusted and be assured will be taking thi s further

[Name supplied]

I responded by pointing out a few inconsistencies in the account, and offered the following pieces of advice: (1) don't make unsubstantiated threats; (2) buy a virus scanner; (3) stop using Microsoft Windows. I know computer-newbies can get very confused, but isn't it pathetic to see people so consumed by political paranoia?

Happy Easter, everyone!

Volunteers, and Participation Inequality - 3 comments

I'm on the lookout for volunteer organisers from among Labour bloggers. The target is for, perhaps, a dozen of you to give up some of your free time on a regular basis to develop our network, and boost political blogging (contra this).

What's in it for you...

• Being an active part of an organisation.
• The chance to arrange meet-ups with other bloggers.
• Incentives to succeed: the more effective you are, the more interesting life will be: more social events, better links with the political community where you are, and so on.
• A small symbol of your status is available - from central funds (i.e. my pocket).

If you don't read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox newsletter on Web usability, you should look in from time to time. This edition, from October 2006, concerns inequalities among online groups:

All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don't participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.

In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. [...]

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers [...]; 9% of users contribute from time to time [...]; 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions:

Jakob speculates that this situation could be improved to 80-16-4. Perhaps - it would be great: one advantage of decentralising is that it increases the chances of someone finding that key and passing the knowledge back.

My expectations of volunteers...

• You must have a vision in mind of how blogging can help the Labour Party, help society, and make for a healthier political culture.
• You should invest some of your own time, or hand over to someone who will - it's the only way. However, you'll be completely free to say how much time, and when. You'll be your own boss, in other words.
  
• You should build links with Labour bloggers in your area and make the case for (ethical and thoughtful, ideally) political blogging. You should also encourage party members you know - plus potential members and other supporters, and especially councillors and other elected members - to give blogging a try.
• As social events will help here, you should arrange and promote these (perhaps quarterly), or else add a segment to existing party meetings, perhaps getting together before or after the main feature.
• Our network can do more when we have regular, and decentralised funding: so you should encourage donations.
• You should report on progress using the forum, as and when necessary.
  

These are all things I try to do, and perhaps should do more, but I cannot hope to adequately cover the entire UK. It won't work, and (arguably) it hasn't worked. Anyone who knows me well must realise that it's only a matter of time before I go under a bus, whether on Borough High Street, or Church Road, Hove. I don't want to sound egotistical, but who would take the lead then? The least I can do is decentralise to others, and help get them up and running. The alternative is that many of these fine ambitions will not be realised, and we'll be sitting around in two years wondering why not, spending our Friday afternoons checking Bloglines, or setting up Facebook groups and websites to try to bind together something long since dissolved.

In some ways this is a problem of economics that I'm hoping to solve in a non-financial way, by encouraging "public spiritedness", rather than individualism.

"Territories"...

I would like each organiser to cover a particular region; a county; or perhaps even a city, when Labour bloggers has a strong presence there (e.g. Manchester, Oxford, London, Brighton & Hove, perhaps), and make it their own. I don't think sharing an area would work. Alternatively, a volunteer could take on the role of building links with a Labour (or allied) party from another country (e.g. Australia, Ireland).

In summary, if you're interested in becoming a volunteer organiser, or helping out in other ways, simply get in touch, or post on the forum.

Update (05/04): Nobody at all interested??