Welcome to the 151sh of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (3rd – 9th January 2010), together with a hand-picked quintet, usually courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed.

Don’t forget, by the way, you can now sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox – just click here – ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.

As ever, let’s start with the most popular post, and work our way down:

1. Liberal Democrats and Labour neck-and-neck on 28%, says voting study on Colin Ross’s blog.
Remember, opinion poll ratings can go down as well as up.

2. ***EXCLUSIVE*** Mrs Robinson’s Toyboy – Updated 22:44 on Stephen Glenn’s Linlithgow Journal blog.
“I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics.” Somehow, in Irish politics, that has a different meaning.

3. Could the Greens win Brighton Pavilion? Or Good Green Spin? on Colin Ross’s blog.
High praise for the Greens’ canny bar-chart tactics.

4. What if Iain Dale’s prediction was right? on Mark Thompson’s Mark Reckons blog.
Lib Dems on 69, with a Tory majority of 12. (Or is Iain cunningly playing the expectations game?)

5. Can the Party please SPEAK to the activists? on John’s Liberal Revlution blog.
I think Jonny Oates is doing his best, John.

6. Tories prefer Labour to Lib Dems on Nich Starling’s Norfolk Blogger blog.
No surprise there: the establishment will always stick together.

7. General election prediction: new figures out by Mark Pack on Lib Dem Voice.
And it predicts a hung parliament. (Quick, someone tell Iain Dale).

And now to the five blog-posts that come highly recommended regardless of the number of Aggregator click-throughs they attracted. As is now traditional we’re using the LibDig bookmarking website for party members to select some of the posts from the seven days in question which you’ve most ‘dug’. But, remember, if you want to highlight a Lib Dem blog article published in the past seven days – your own, or someone else’s – using the steam-powered method of e-mail all you have to do is drop a line to [email protected] (providing the web-link and author, and any tagline comment you care to have published).

8. Married Couples Allowance: what it tells you about how Conservatives think on Mark Valladares’ Liberal Bureaucracy blog.
‘Where you fit in: your personal guide to whether Conservatives think that bribing you is the right thing to do.’ (Submitted by helenduffett via LibDig).

9. Wootton Bassett – Calm down dear, it’s a democracy on Paul Walter’s Liberal Burblings blog.
“Paul Walter points out how there’s a legal process to follow for demonstrations – and we should follow the law rather than panic.” (Submitted by markpack via LibDig).

10. Where are the “it’s health and safety gone mad”/”we’re living in a nanny state” brigade when you need them? by Mark Pack on Lib Dem Voice.
“People aren’t moaning about a cultural meme that allows them to sit on their backsides while others fall on theirs”. (Submitted by scmjerram via LibDig).

11. Nick Clegg shows some nifty footwork as the election campaign kicks off by Angela Harbutt on Liberal Vision’s blog.
How a political leader kept all sides of his party happy on the trickiest question of them all.

12. Lib Dems are the Most Effective Spenders on Duncan Stott’s Split Horizons blog.
72p per vote, a snip at twice the price.

And that’s it for another week. Happy blogging.

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