Proposal: flexible blog commenting for all - 8 comments

The Wardman Wire has a post about the relationship between blog aggregators (i.e. things like B4L) - or 'portals', if you will - and their constituent blogs, and asks whether or not those aggregators should (or indeed could) accept comments on behalf of those constituent blogs.

Perhaps I just haven't looked widely enough, but this seems to be yet another opportunity for some keen web developer to fill a yawning gap in the market and make life easier for a lot of people.

It seems to me that if you've taken the time to post a blog entry, and accept comments on your own blog, albeit with certain limitations (e.g. no anonymous commenters, or only approved people who appear in your WordPress database), you should be fairly comfortable with the idea that a Bloggers4Labour reader who reads your post might be able to (again, assuming they meet the same criteria) comment, without even having to click through to your blog. Plausible? Well, perhaps this is somebody who prefers to receive round-up emails, or use a feed reader application - they might not even Bloggers4Labour's site.

So, you'd be happy with wider access in theory, but what wouldn't be of any use to you is if Bloggers4Labour kept all those comments itself, causing you to have to check (and monitor) two sets of threads, rather than one. Unfortunately that would seem to be the only likely solution at present. I now refer you to the first comment I left at The Wardman Wire:

The vast majority of blogs use the comment facilities that come with their blogging package: if more could be persuaded to use external services then there’d be the opportunity for B4L (and perhaps other savvy aggregators) to accept comments for a syndicated post and push them onto the same queue/list that the source blog uses, which would seem to be the ideal: maximum exposure for comments, and without duplication.

I haven't come across any external commenting service that does allow this. Here's my next comment:

I guess if Google opened up comment feeds for the vast number of Blogger blogs, a service akin FeedBurner could wrap the vast majority of blog comment feeds up; they’d then only need to allow other (authenticated) people (e.g. those who run aggregators) to publish to them, and you’d have the kind of ideal system I mentioned earlier.

Nice little online business opportunity for someone there! Sadly I don’t have the time any more.

Just to clarify how this might work:

1. Google reveals how all Blogger uses can publish an authenticated comment feed URL.
2. 17-year-old web developer simultaneously launches new external comments service ('acmeComment.com'), having been inspired by this post, naturally.
3. Keen B4L blogger signs up with said service, entering his Google or Blogger account and password. A 'wrapped' comment feed becomes available within seconds. ('acmeComment.com/keenType/comments?type=rss'). All new comments on his existing blog will likewise appear there.
   
4. Keen blogger then grants B4L (itself) the right to display the relevant 'Comment' button/link.
5. B4L publishes that link for each article it syndicates. Though Blogger users might need to log in (depending on the Keen Type's requirements), B4L readers will be able to publish comments to the shared comments feed URL, that Keen Type will be able to track in any feed reader, or at: 'acmeComment.com/keenType/'

The procedure would be pretty similar for WordPress, etc. bloggers, who would instead have to submit their database login, and user table details, etc.

I'm not going to write any such system myself, but what level of enthusiasm is there for such a thing?

Presumably if the answer is "any", then it's only a matter of time before it appears (I notice that Google has just bought FeedBurner, for what it's worth), and perhaps if this post has inspired you, you'll buy me a drink with your first million of advertising revenue.

Back? - 1 comment

Well my 6 weeks of work training is over, so I'll be returning to more normal hours. Unfortunately you should be suspicious whenever you read statements like "I might make a full return to blogging this week...", recognising a symptom of blog-tiredness when you see one.

Not tiredness with Bloggers4Labour itself, or necessarily with what the most interesting bloggers are writing about politics, it's just that I can't bring myself to blog about it at the moment. Not national politics anyway, and certainly not via the regular route of pouncing on something stupid (and quite possibly misrepresented, misinterpreted, or only 'floated' in the first place for the benefit of the Sunday papers) at the BBC or Comment Is Free.

Perhaps I need a holiday - I can't remember the last time I had one. Alternatively, I could look for the practical benefits of political policies rather than fall into the trap of becoming the kind of hack content to write solely off the top of their head, or on the basis of what someone told them over dinner.

Update: Sorry, I will be trying to answer emails, but I still have 22 drafts to work through. The general rule is that I'm not ignoring you, and not trying to snub you, I just can't think what to say/what the answer is, at present.

*

I wonder if a lot of time and intellectual effort wouldn't be saved by devising a kind of "automatic Fisking device" that could be deployed by bloggers against potentially offending articles, emitting a factual/logical demolition of the article within seconds. Perhaps the device/program could also be trained by experts with a dictionary of offending terms and phrases that mark the author and article as a potential offender (e.g. "Turbo-consumerism", "... the language of the BNP", "political legacy", "a time of change" - I'm sure you can improve on this list). Perhaps this way the "village idiots" (the Lawsons, Buntings, Clarks, Murrays, and Galloways of this world) can be dealt with swiftly, but not gratuitously, so we can be the more confident that serial critics really do have positive points of their own to make.

Another blogging witch-hunt - 1 comment

That the Mail on Sunday is happy to smear and victimise an individual (blogger) on the basis of their perceived political stance shouldn't surprise; what is depressing is to see other bloggers wading in to score the same political points.

It's not so much the Conservative-Labour aspect that bothers me - after all, I'm not at all sure that Owen Barder, the victim here, is indeed a Labour supporter - no, it's the crassness of the attack, the lack of thought for the individual concerned, for the reputation of bloggers, for the possibility of meaningful civil-servant blogging, as well as the resemblance of the perpetrator to something that shoots out from under a rarely-moved rug during a spring-clean.

Tim Worstall and Ministry of Truth have also posted about this.

Perhaps an alternative to the blogging "code of conduct" is some kind of "blacklist", that moves the burden of proof from the majority of bloggers who - for want of a better criterion - treat other bloggers as they would be treated, to the tiny majority who we only encounter when they sink their fangs into us, or someone we know. It shouldn't be too difficult to convince an independent panel of this, surely. How they could operate such a blacklist, once sentence has been passed, I leave as an exercise to readers. Just a thought.

I might make a full return to blogging this week...

Update: "Simon Walters is a Lying Scumbag" - the Mail on Sunday journalist, that is. I know, there's more going on in the world than this.

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.

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.

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.

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??

Blog Costs - 2 comments

David Miliband has gone into more detail on the costs of running his Defra blog, but it's short enough to quote in its entirety:

Contrary to the repeated falsehood that this blog costs £40,000, here are the facts. The initial start up cost of the blog at ODPM was £6,000. The changeover to Defra cost £1,250 and ongoing technical costs amount to £900 pa. Since I write my own blogs, read comments, and don't have a shadow blogger the admin costs are low: one valiant official spends part of his time posting blogs and comments. It is estimated that this takes around 10 hours per month at an estimated cost of £300.

This is public money, so it's David's responsibility to make it as useful and revealing a resource as he can, but as regards the costs, these sound completely reasonable and not at all extravagant. Suppose you were commissioning a branded blogging system for your organisation, designed and laid-out, and backed by a suitable database: would you object to paying for development, installation, and testing that equates to, what, 10 man-days at a UK-based web development company? Annual running costs are also, without going into too much detail, not a million miles from what is paid for this site.

P.S. There is a Budget-oriented post coming - maybe later today?

Power Bloggers II: a response - 7 comments

Fellow B4L-er Mike Ion has posted enthusiastically at Comment Is Free on the subject of political blogging, citing the extent of these bloggers' influence, and suggesting Labour's upcoming deputy leadership campaign indicates that Labour politicians are beginning to use blogging to engage ('meaningfully', no less) with potential supporters. You might be surprised to find that my assessments differ almost completely with Mike's. That's not pessimism on my part, I'm just optimistic about what can be achieved, and realistic about the value of what there is now.

I must say that if I was tasked with defending and promoting blogging, I wouldn't introduce well-known right-wing gossip blogs (with which you're already familiar) so soon into the conversation, not even to indicate the level of 'influence' bloggers have, nor would I substitute online media pundits for off-line ones by introducing ConservativeHome's Tim Montgomerie as a a "respected and influential commentator". Still, if blogging influence is to be measured by being given the opportunity to appear on Sky News at 2 am and read blogland title-tattle to a fuddled news anchorman in order to pretend one has important information the dead trees don't, then I'm happy to plough my lonely furrow - or rather, we are.

Debate is all well and good, but what this article doesn't address is (slightly going back to my "2020 Vision" points): how are arguments actually won online? How do you change minds? How can you bring the power of your argument to bear on a policy-maker? How does a politician actually assimilate 'feedback' in the real world, when talk is cheap, and voters can be strategic rather than honest? Blogging, as it stands, doesn't represent the slightest step towards a more participatory democracy: whatever progress has been made towards a more 'reasoned debate', the absence of any direct responsibility between on-line politician and blog-reading voter, and the limitations of the current blogging model - where politicians post and then respond to reader comments in the hope/belief that they are a guide to public opinion - just frustrate policy-making. Moreover the noise and anger of the most vocal political bloggers has fostered - so often - a poisonous atmosphere that prevents co-operation between people with different political views. This seems to be prevalent even among politicians as close to the electorate as local councillors - particularly so, from my experience, especially when Liberal Democrats are involved.

There have been some happy consequences of the upsurge in Labour-oriented blogging caused by the deputy leadership campaign. Activists from all sections of the party have clearly felt there is an opportunity to get their message across (at least, those with a matching candidate). It has also encouraged on-line community-building, with large Labour groups now developing on FaceBook. Best of all, activists are brought closer into the online Labour fold, as can be seen at Bloggers4Labour.

Nonetheless each glitzy deputy leadership themed blog site that appears represents tens of hours of some young designer's time that can't be transferred either to the wider movement, or to the delivery of policies. There's little evidence from around the sites of any great attempt to involve people online more substantially than the same old "post and comment" model, and I'm not at all convinced that the candidates, if polled, would honestly admit they knew what blogging was really about. Take away the RSS feeds and too often one is still looking at a "poster" site, packed with photographs, extracts from speeches delivered elsewhere, endorsements from "the great and the good", and destined to disappear or gather dust if the candidate fails to win through.

What this creates is a ghostly impersonality, when what would surely appeal more to voters is a feeling that a politician 'inhabits' the site, is watching and listening, is ready to respond honestly and frankly to questions and comments, and that the voice that responds really is that of the named politician, not that of a young acolyte. I don't want to discourage politicians from blogging, but when Mike refers it as being a "simple, efficient and effective means of engaging with [...] supporters", I think that misses the point of, and the seriousness of, the challenge - as well as being short of substantive evidence. The fact that supporters no longer need to fear email newsletters is a small prize indeed.

Blogging is a fine and worthy thing if you have a story to tell, want to explore ideas, resolve issues, crush bad arguments, and create links with other human-beings, but "politician blogging" is still in the Dark Ages. As is the 'new technology' that Mike cites (hand-coded HTML and messed-up templates in 2007?). Perhaps only when the 'web' of the future is unrecognisable, keyboards pensioned-off, and Blogger.com long-forgotten, will ordinary people be able to fully engage in an online democracy. I don't know (to use another predictable historical reference) what the "Great Leap Forward" is going to be, or how we're really going to make this democratic vision work and re-engage a disillusioned electorate, but (a) there has to be that leap, (b) YouTube clips sure as hell isn't it, (c) whatever it is, Nick Robinson will be telling us about "the mood amongst backbenchers" instead, while (d) Bloggers4Labour is as keen - on your behalf - as anyone to make it happen. We can almost touch it.

Aside: I notice Iain Dale has picked up on Mike's post. Read the comments, if you like your generalisations about "writers on the left since Orwell" broad and sweeping. And stupid. There are some nice touches from the left, though.

Update: Some sites I could have mentioned favourably: the serious-minded Ministerial blogs (David Miliband; the DWP's Pensions Reform, and Welfare Reform blogs), and My Society. Over to you, now.

Power bloggers - no comments

I will be responding to this - just not right now, as it's my penultimate day at work and I'm trying to remember (for documentation purposes) what I've been trying to forget for the last 839 working days!

Most popular posts @ B4L - 2 comments

Here's a list of the 20 most popular posts (hits appear in brackets) that have been posted at B4L over the (gasp) two years and ten days. As you can probably guess from the top post, these are not necessarily my 20 favourites, nor the 20 best - I blame the general public entirely:

1. fish-girl - the sensational tale of the girl who allegedly kicked a Koran and turned into what can best be described as an obviously bogus, plastic lump, vaguely resembling a discarded Doctor Who sea monster suit stolen from a dumpster behind BBC Television Centre. Depressingly, relentlessly popular (1159)
2. immigration-amnesty - economic reasons for a full immigration amnesty, and why I couldn't go quite that far... (684)
3. british-empire - is a picture of whipped slaves an accurate, and/or constructive introduction to the British Empire? (507)
4. labour-home - my rather graceless welcome to LabourHome (319)
5. making-labour-our-party - I plug the LabOUR Commission (295)
6. meeting-in-manchester - I announce our 2006 Conference meetup (294)
7. labour-blogs - I plug Labour's new blogs page. Incidentally, this was almost exactly a year ago. We had 160 blogs then, 408 now (280)
8. labour-home-ii - a more comradely introduction to LabourHome. So why don't we work together? (262)
9. road-pricing-and-stealth-taxes - I aim to justify the principle of road pricing - something the roads lobby is loath to engage with - and to show that not only need the cost of motoring not rise, but that it couldn't be less like a stealth tax (240)
10. compass - my first comment on the Compass group. Once upon a time I felt that might be my natural home on the Labour spectrum (so to speak). I can't help feeling now that it's almost the opposite of where I am, if you can believe that (226)
11. euston-enemy - my first, rather bad-tempered, response to speculation about the Euston Manifesto Group. Actually the follow-up was even more forthright, and produced a record number of comments (206)
12. party-funding - why capping donations ignores political influence (205)
13. blairwatch - I used the f*** word for the first and only time in a post here, but it actually contains a pretty good defence of the autonomy of party-political bloggers (202)
14. sea-of-trivia - covering the media's obsession with Blair's date of departure (191)
15. top-political-blogs - my response to Iain Dale's selection of top political blogs (185)
16. new-blogs - a round-up of new blogs, up to April 2006 (182)
17. guest-post-1-jo-salmon - our first guest post. Jo talks about teenage pregnancy (179)
18. new-bloggers - a round-up of new blogs, from April-July 2006 (178)
19. invalidity-benefit - I tried to challenge the idea that the kindest policy was to allow disabled people to live on benefit without being helped/encouraged into the workplace. That was the plan... (162)
20. bloggers4labour-summer-essays-4 - James Hamilton's marvellous contributed essay, What's Left? (158)

Feel free to plug your most popular posts too.

Blog and Post reviews on the Wiki - no comments

I've created two more pages on our Wiki site that everyone (yes, everyone, whatever their political persuasion) has the right to contribute to. What they give you is the opportunity to post reviews of Labour blogs, and reviews of the top posts (as judged by the Recommendations facility).

There are a number of motivations for these new facilities. Firstly, they're part of a move away from "recommendation by authority" - self-styled (what else is there?) blog gurus selecting their own favourites, however reliable their skill and judgement might be. They're also a move away from opinion polls - however cunningly set-up and well-meant, little commitment is required by the voter, and rarely any opportunity to make a detailed statement. All the evidence suggest bloggers like to write, like to write about their friend's blogs, and are thrilled to have things written about their own blogs and articles. Seeing as most of us would be shot-down in short measure if we tried to set up Wikipedia pages for our blogs, here's a similarly democratic and decentralised alternative, albeit without the entry requirements. Malicious or abusive entries will, of course, be dealt with, just as they are on Wikipedia.

If you look at the pages I set up, you'll see a few rules and suggestions, but these are just intended to keep people on the straight-and-narrow. I'd like to see as many blog- and post-reviews as possible - at the very least, so people are more likely to find good and accurate ones. If this catches on, I don't think it's too fanciful to think we might have something worthy of (paper) publication. So, if you're worried that Tim Worstall's BritBlog roundup has given the same few dozen blogs enough gongs already, perhaps we can breathe some life into the whole democratic blog-reviewing genre.

Once again, if you've seen some posts on a B4L blog that you like and fancy reviewing in one or two paragraphs, or want to immortalise a few of your favourite blogs in text form, please head over to the relevant page. Do also check in to see if you've been reviewed yourself, and help us spread the word on your own blog!

RSS feeds are available on each Wiki page.

Blog-linking scandal of the day - no comments

The Labour Humanist reports that our own David Miliband MP - whose blogging progress we have watched with genial interest - links to a mere three Labour blogs. Iain Dale responds, gracefully (or not?), with "Diddums", and in entirely unrelated news, right-wing trolls scuttle over to the Labour Humanist to leave snide and unfunny comments (especially unwise if your name is "Reagan Fan", I should have thought).

I say relax. Bloggers4Labour is neither linked to by David nor by Iain: surely that must mean our finger isn't on the pulse, that we're not on the inside track, or that we don't write in a compelling manner. Nah. You wouldn't believe how peacefully I sleep at night.

18 Doughty Street and Ken Livingstone - 26 comments

As you might have noticed, 18 Doughty Street has been publishing adverts through the MessageSpace ad network promoting an "attack ad" on Ken Livingstone. This has failed to go down well on the Labour side, or among those Labour bloggers who accepted ads from 18 Doughty Street on the basis of that site/organisation being a non-partisan political news and discussion service for "adults", rather than the Conservative front organisation it appears to be (why else would anyone want to interview a Tory MP on the make?), and everyone thought it was when it started.

I did reply to Benjy's comment earlier this morning along the lines that I felt our readers were intelligent enough to make their own mind up - and Ken has hardly not always behaved in a way that has united Labour supporters in his support, with his embracing of Islamists and South American dictators - and so I'm not sure I've got a very strong reason to demand that those particular ads are taken down. I should add that we've made a grand total of £1.69 from 18 Doughty Street, which hardly equates to thirty pieces of silver, and is not my motivation.

Surely, though, if 18 Doughty Street isn't, in fact, a Conservative front organisation, and wants to reach out to all strands of political opinion (in an adult way), then it ought to consider whether the "attack ad" is compatible with its avowed aims, and mightn't be grounds for anti-Conservatives to take their stories, their plugs, and their vox-pops elsewhere - at least until the organisation comes clean about its objectives.

What do people think?

Update (15 Feb @ 1215): Minor edit - too strong before.
Update (15 Feb @ 1328): I foolishly wrote "South American dictators" when I should have said "dictators from South America and the Caribbean".

Shooting Fish / Competitive Sport - 2 comments

What strikes me about journalists - and this seems to be particularly the case with bloggers - is the temptation to pick the softest of targets when a deadline looms, so that one's word limit can be reached with the minimum of original thought, and the maximum of boilerplate text that the intended audience will instantly recognise. Familiar concepts, familiar language, and familiar targets allow the reader to sail from beginning to end without feeling short-changed, with a vague feeling that something significant was said, even if they are unable to identify what the point was.

Sadly, this approach has a cancerous effect on comment-pieces that deal with Tony Blair. It is so widely believed that his authority is diminished, and it is so rare for commentators to defend him/his record, etc. that the journalistic bar has been lowered to not much more than an inch above ground-level. This is what makes reading Blair-themed blog posts (not all, just too many) so dispiriting: it's the fact that, time and time again, the opportunity to post a powerful critique is squandered in favour of something trivial; an opportunity to make a constructive point wasted; and it's the recognition of a writer patently jumping on the band-wagon.

Opportunists will defend themselves by stating that their target is power and authority, even when that power and authority is evidently now in name only, and their iconoclasm is applied only narrowly. Critics can also be accused of being loyal ("slavish", and "unthinking" are popular synonyms, depriving critics of their human faculties) to the target, incapable of independent thought.

Frankly I could pick a couple of Comment is free posts a day to illustrate this, but I just happened to pick on Dave Hill's post, Off the ball, the tagline of which makes the following extraordinary claim:

The prime minister's failings are never more sadly exposed than when he talks about sport in schools.

With the courage of a man confident he won't be challenged, Dave begins:

I've been meaning to respond to the PM's words ever since, but it's been hard to find the time, what with my long nights of weeping interspersed with bouts of hysterical mirth. [...]
As facile claptrap goes it may be small potatoes compared with his evasions over Iraq. [...]
Thus spake the pillock...

Having actually read the whole piece on the Labour web-site, I'd say it was a wide-ranging, and pretty reasonable coverage of the issue of sport in schools, covering societal change, health implications, Government funding and initiatives. It's also very long piece, not well-suited for a one paragraph summary. The aspiring journalist, however, spots the following paragraphs...

[...] for too long, a damaging argument was allowed to run. It said that competitive sport is bad for children. It was thought to be aggressive and set people apart from one another. Actually, like most areas of intense competition, sport of course teaches people to co-operate.

An unholy alliance between some well-meaning but misguided teachers and schools with a peculiar ideological view of sport and a failure to invest in the basic infrastructure of schools, let alone school sport, led to a slow decline.

... is waken from the lethargy that comes from reading something dull and worthy, and 15 minutes later the completed article is ready to be handed over. OK, I don't think anyone's claiming that his "unholy alliance" was universal by any means, but what I'd expect to see in a critique of this is an analysis of how competitive sport is bad for children, how it does encourage aggression, and does indeed set people apart from one another. What do we get?

It is and always has been utterly untrue that participation in competitive sports is automatically a good thing for children.

Who said anything about automaticity? Can you name one single thing that is automatically good for children? Perhaps competitive sport is good for 60% of children, and bad for 20%? If so, it would surely have about as much right to be on the syllabus as any other subject.

I say this as someone for whom the thrill of chasing some sort of a ball around a field was only ever rivalled in his schooldays by that of snogging, but who can also never forget the sheer, pointless misery the inclusion in the timetable of double games on a Wednesday afternoon represented to too many of his male peers.

Well, speak for yourself (though I find the snogging claim rather hard to believe). Either way, the popularity of sport among children tells us nothing about whether sport encourages good health, or aggression, or sets people apart from one another, and is therefore irrelevant to the issue in hand. If you expect school subjects to be popular, you can expect sweeping changes to the syllabus...

A truly brave and progressive physical education policy would start from the conviction that different approaches are needed for different sorts of kids, and that those who are suited to competitive team sports should get a social education in the process of participating in them.

So this is what it boils down to: we should encourage a range of physical education, with competitive sports available for those who like that approach, and those sports; non-competitive sports for others; and perhaps general health education for all. I don't know if this can be called "truly brave and progressive", it seems pretty uncontroversial, and doesn't seem even remotely to contradict Tony Blair's words.

It's great that we can find a consensus on an issue like this - just a pity that we have to wade through so much pointless rhetoric, personalised attacks, and point-scoring to get there.