Today’s Times reports on the growth of Twitter and Facebook among councillors, noting in particular the work of one Lib Dem councillor/blogger, Daisy Benson:

Daisy Benson, a Liberal Democrat member of Reading Borough Council, used Facebook to encourage young people to take part in a scrutiny review of the standard of private rented housing in the area. “I used it because the issue we were looking at particularly affected students and young people and it’s a good way to reach them.”

Benson set up a Facebook group and listed the consultation questions. The group attracted more than 80 members. Among

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Something fascinating happened yesterday. I was browsing through one of the internet forums I regularly visit when I noticed someone posting that people should go to the Daily Mail poll page on their website and vote yes to the poll that asks “Should gypsies jump the queue on the NHS?” in order to mess with them.

When I got to the page and duly voted “Yes” I was astonished to see that the poll was at 93% Yes and 7% No. The forum I refer to has nowhere near enough people to make a dent in the thousands who vote in …

Welcome to the Sunday outing for The Voice’s Daily View series. As it’s a Sunday, today it comes with a bonus complaint and the easiest quiz question of the week.

2 Big Stories

Could Alan Johnson scrap ID cards?

Gordon Brown’s weakness means there is a set of senior Cabinet members who are now unsackable. If any of them were to take it upon themselves to indulge in a very un-Brownian desire to do something dramatic and decisive, it would be extremely hard for Gordon Brown to stop them.

Step forward then possibly, perhaps, just maybe Alan Johnson. (He is, after all, one of …

So I’m sitting in front of my laptop desperately trying to think of some new way to campaign that will complement shoving pieces of paper through letter boxes and isn’t just having yet another website.

I’m quite convinced, by the way, that only a limited percentage of even the best leaflets get read on their way to the recycling bin – and many local party websites only get visited by activists anyway.

And then my mind goes back to the lecture I attended at City University by the bloke who did Obama’s e-campaigning – and suddenly the brains …

2 Big Stories

Expenses ‘mistake’ hangs over Darling
The Financial Times reports that not even the Chancellor himself is blameless in the MPs’ expenses controversy:

Alistair Darling’s future as chancellor was looking precarious on Monday after he admitted making “a mistake” over his expenses and Gordon Brown refused to say whether he would be in his job in 10 days’ time.

Mr Darling yesterday paid back £668 he wrongly claimed and apologised “unreservedly” but speculation was growing at Westminster that he could become the first chancellor in postwar Britain to be demoted in the middle of a recession.

Three things must ye know about …

The Eurovision Song Contest was last night but, Eurovoting and Eurovisual fans, you can still get your entertainment fix. (You’ll have to bring your own music though):

From The Register:

The European Parliament is treading bravely into the world of social networking in order to get the kids involved in the exciting world of European politics.

Bureaucrats have created profiles on popular social sites including Facebook, MySpace and photo sharing site Flickr. There will also be ad-word campaigns and banner ads on MySpace.

Elections run from 4 to 7 June, and the primary purpose of the campaign is to

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Last year I wrote about blogging in adversity:

When things go wrong or bad news breaks, it can be tempting to hunker down and say nothing. If you’re a blogger, particularly one who allows comments, the idea of having to write something for your blog can be very off-putting. The thought of ignoring the keyboard and just wishing that time would move on more quickly can be very alluring.

But is that the right response? It is a situation on which I have advised various people over the years, and nearly always the best advice is actually, “keep blogging”.

The same logic …

The revolution will be tweeted? Well, it was in Moldova.

Two more stories which show that politicians and the mainstream press underestimate new media at their peril:

From Jemima Kiss at the Guardian:

Telegraph.co.uk has taken the ‘brave’ decision to publish a live Twitterfall stream of #budget tags on its Budget 2009 homepage.

Sounds simple enough, but, as some of Twitter’s more mischievous users have demonstrated, it does rather leave the Telegraph website open to editorial sabotage. Anything with a budget hashtag makes the page. Some moderation required, me thinks.

The Telegraph has now removed Twitterfall from its Budget 2009 …

Two days ago the Communists were declared victors in Moldova’s elections, triggering widespread unrest as people claimed the elections were rigged. Twitter has played a key role in organising the protests, as The Telegraph has reported:

Organisers used the social networking site Twitter to rally opposition to a Communist victory in legislative elections

At least 10,000 protesters gathered and police fired water cannon but were unable to stop the crowd from breaking into the buildings…

“The election was controlled by the Communists, they bought everyone off,” said Alexei, a student. “We will have

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Jury Team is the new political organisation that is letting anyone put themselves forward for selection as a European Parliament candidate on their behalf and is letting the public vote on who should actually stand.

Its launch got extensive mainstream media coverage, including from the BBC, Mail, Telegraph, Sky, Guardian and Sunday Times. Moreover, almost all of the coverage was very friendly, e.g. not pointing out the myriad of similar ventures in the past which have failed nor asking why their website goes out of its way to encourage anonymous donations.

With that favourable background and now only 20 days to go until the close of poll for their candidate selection process, it seems fair to judge Jury Team on how it is doing so far.

And the picture is one of a party that has flopped. Because the latest figures from their website shows that in three quarters of the European Parliament electoral regions the number of number of people who have applied to be a candidate is the same (2 regions) or less (7 regions) than the number of seats up for election. In one region, there is not even a single name put forward. Letting the public choose your candidates doesn’t add up to much if there aren’t enough on offer to provide an actual choice.

Moreover, the number of votes cast in total to select the candidates has been tiny. In only four regions have more than 150 votes been cast in total by the public, with the total under 50 in three regions (and zero in a fourth where there are no candidates on offer).

Far from being a major step forward in involving the public, the number of votes cast across a whole region in most cases is smaller than the number of votes often cast in the selection of a candidate for just one Parliamentary constituency by one of the mainstream parties. Similar, the numbers of supporters on Facebook or people looking at their films on YouTube are extremely small.

Even on Twitter, although the number of followers is superficially more respectable (but still under 1,000), it is only half the number of people who Jury Team are following on Twitter. Following double the number of people who are following you is normally a sure sign of a Twitter account that is trying very hard to get noticed (becuase if you follow someone on Twitter, they will often follow you back), but failing.

Overall, it’s looking rather like a flop so far.

Here are the full figures, taken from the Jury Team website and other websites on Saturday 4th April:

One of the most common reasons I hear people give for not joining a social network site such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn is, “I know it’s useful, but where would I find the time to keep up with what’s happening?”

A typical way of tackling, at least in party, this dilemma is to go through carefully tweaking your email alert settings on each service, so that you get emails for the information you want to know about – but nothing more. Then you can set up some rules and a folder in your email program to file these alerts conveniently together in one place, away from the immediate urgent items in the inbox.

It’s what I’ve been doing, but it can take a bit of time to create and refine the setup. And for many people saying “set up an email rule” is rather off-putting. It may not be nearly as hard as they think, but whatever the reason, if they’ve been put off then that’s that.

Enter then, stage left, NutshellMail.

There’s an irony in me writing this post. It’s about a fortnight now since I sat down and forced myself to work out how Twitter works, and what it was good for. I’d set up an account in 2007 (my first and last update recorded that I was “working frantically”; for whose benefit I uttered such an aphorism I now forget), but that’s as far as it went. I’m now gradually becoming a convert to the cause, in spite of rather than because of the Twitter-phile joy in which my LDV colleagues regularly indulge on this site – of which there are two exempla already this week, here and here.

The Times’s Rachel Sylvester has today published a widely panned article deriding the Twitter phenomenon, spuriously implying an inverse relationship between the growth in politicians who Twitter and a “wider loss of confidence by the political class”. Quite what her logic is escapes me – it appears to be a recycled hack-job of just the kind of nonsense which was being scribbled by journalists about blogging not so long ago. Before they themselves started blogging, that is. Or about texting before everyone realised how handy it is. Or about television/radio/telephone before that. Mostly, the article reads like the special pleading of someone so insecure about her own inability to comprehend something new that she would prefer to stick to simple knocking-copy instead.

Twitter is, let’s remember, simply a tool which allow its users to communicate and interact with each other in a way which suits them. It may not suit Rachel, it may not even suit Guido – but there are thousands of others it does suit. And many of them are constituents with just as much right to communicate with their MP as a Times journo.

But don’t take my word for it – a few other Lib Dem bloggers have today been extolling the virtues of Twitter, especially following its widespread deployment during the party’s spring conference this past weekend.

‘Quality, not quantity’ – that was a regular theme in predictions made for what would happen to social networks during 2009 (for example, here). In other words, attention would shift from ‘how many friends/followers/fans have I got?’ to ‘who can I drop so that I’m not drowning in information?’

So far, those predictions aren’t looking that good, because not only has much of the buzz about social networks been around Twitter and the huge growth in the number of friends and followers, but also there hasn’t been a growth in applications and hacks to help with culling – usually a …

Breaking news! The Lib Dem Voice cupboard has a WINDOW! Yes, it’s a slightly unnerving black smoked glass internal window which reflects us as well as revealing the outside world, but it’s a window!

I missed Simon Hughes’ speech this morning, which is a shame as I am extremely hopeful about his capacity to advance the environmental agenda – we’ll bring you that video as soon as we’ve established that it exists.

Listening now to the motion on the Investing in Talent, Building the Economy paper (Adult, Further and Higher Education policy paper).

I’ve missed the movement from Stephen Williams, and come …

Lib Dem Twitterers unite #ldconf on 12seconds.tv

You can get your Spring Conference news here on this site, but did you know that Lib Dem Voice has its own boutique version for the time-pressed delegate, on microblogging site Twitter?

As well as tweeting when we’ve published a new post, there’ll also be exclusive photos and videos from Harrogate!

The first video on our new 12seconds.tv channel is a reminder of the conference hashtag – that’s a way of labelling tweets, blog posts, Flickr photos, etc, to make it easier to search for …

March’s edition of Total Politics carries the following piece from me about Twitter, and in particular why councillors and would-be councillors should consider using it.

The Voice has covered Twitter more than once before, but if you are one of the many people who are just have joined Twitter or are now thinking about joining it, this post should be a helpful introduction.

What is Twitter?

When a jet plane crash-landed on the Hudson River in January, one of the first – and the most striking – photographs was taken by Janis Krums. On a passing ferry at the time, he used Twitter to send a quick message and photo. It quickly spread round the world, illustrating Twitter’s power at swiftly distributing short pieces of news.

At heart, Twitter is really very simple. It’s a free blogging service which lets you make posts (tweets) that are no more than 140 characters long. It is growing massively quickly in popularity, with website traffic in the UK up by 874% in 2008 (Hitwise figures).

Twitter’s enforced brevity makes it is well suited to brief updates (“Remember – planning meeting about park development 8pm today”), friendly chit-chat (“Congrats on passing your driving test”) and flagging up snippets of news (“Found a fantastic politics blog – http://www.libdemvoice.org”).

Passing on information, having a friendly chat, sending out updates: doesn’t that sound like what is at the heart of the relationship between councillors (or would-be councillors) and their colleagues and constituents?

Sometimes 140 characters isn’t nearly enough. But think of the occasions you never quite have time to write the website story or blog post or lengthy email – or when by the time you do get to sit at your computer the moment has past. Tweets often fit the bill nicely, particularly as Twitter is designed to be very easy to update from your mobile phone. So anywhere you have a basic signal – and a battery that isn’t flat – you can update.

To read other people’s updates you can either access the Twitter website, or install one of a range of free programs to your computer or phone. (In some countries, principally the US, you can receive other people’s updates by text, but this is no longer available in the UK.) For the more technically savvy, someone’s Twitter updates are also available as an RSS feed; for example, your local party website could display an automatically updated list of your latest tweets.

Twitter can also integrate with Facebook; indeed, for some people their Twitter use is really just a way to update Facebook. Once installed, Facebook’s Twitter application lets you have your Facebook status automatically updated each time you tweet. So one text message updates your presence in both places.

Getting started on Twitter

Convinced?

Liberal Tweets is an aggregator (run by the king of Lib Dem aggregrators, LDV’s very own Ryan Cullen) which displays in one convenient place all the latest tweets from Liberal Democrat members who are using Twitter.

If you are one of those but aren’t yet being included, you can email

PS If you are a Lib Dem Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC) on Twitter, you can let know and your biography / contact information on the party’s main website will be updated to include Twitter.

Why backup Twitter?

It’s very easy to end up behaving as if an internet service will always be there and always be working, at least reasonably. But that’s a risky proposition, especially for free services – as was demonstrated at the weekend when Google, of all people, managed to wreck all the searches done on their search engine because of one wrong character in one place. Or as the Greek dramatist Agathon put it, “It is probable that the improbable will sometimes happen.”

Twitter is a relatively small company, with a technical track record that isn’t the finest and without an …

I spent at least some time this weekend mentally upbraiding Iain Dale for his paranoia in thinking that technical faults that got in the way of a David Cameron interview with Andrew Marr stemmed from Labour supporting techies pulling the plug.  Cameron had apparently insisted on being interviewed from home because the week before, Gordon Brown had been interviewed from 10 Downing Street.  Iain tells us further the Beeb were none to happy with the arrangement but Cameron insisted.

So clearly, the only rational explanation was that peeved techies forced to do OB work on a Sunday combined with Aunty’s …