Category Archives: Online politics

A postal referendum is currently taking place on proposals for a Manchester congestion charge, with the ballot closing on 11 December. The campaign has reached YouTube as this clip shows (and it’s a typical sign of the times that people’s reaction to the events in the clip is to whip out their mobile phones to take photos):

Why, share it with others via Ryan Cullen’s excellent LibDig of course 🙂 The ALDC website is running a brief piece from myself on what it is and why it is a good idea to use it; read it here. Lovers of circular reasoning may wish to er, LibDig the piece.

From the official YouTube blog:

Like you, we’re continually surprised, moved, and entertained by the videos people post on YouTube. And, like you, we’re occasionally dismayed when people use YouTube for less positive purposes. That’s why we count on you to know our Community Guidelines and flag videos you believe don’t belong on the site.

We’ve recently made a change to our flagging menu we think you should know about: We replaced the category “minors fighting” with “youth violence.” You can find it in the pull-down menu under “Violent or Repulsive Content,” and we’ll still follow our usual process of reviewing

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The Liberal Democrats Account system (LDA) allows party members to create one username and password which then work across a range of different party sites – including the members only site, the OurCampaign online petition tool, Flock Together (scroll down on the front page to the section just underneath the map and postcode search box), our new letter-writing tool, our online surveys tool, Liberty Research, and the brand new LibDig tool announced earlier this week.

LDA usernames are only available to party members, and each time you login the system checks that you are a …

The party’s extranet is a resource for party activists, elected representatives (including councillors) and staff and the home for artwork, campaign materials, policy briefings and also resources to accompany the party’s major national campaigns, such as the environment campaign and the 1 million doors challenge.

Access is open to all party councillors, staff, approved Parliamentary candidates, local party Chairs, EARS officers and Membership Secretaries, trainers and up to eight other nominated people per local party.

Full access details are on the site and if you’ve not yet registered, you can kick off the registration …

The headline says it all really, so watch, enjoy and learn:

I’m occasionally asked for advice by Liberal Democrat bloggers, particularly those just starting up, on how they should approach comments. Should they allow them all? Or moderate just those that are libellous? But what about abusive ones? Or ones that might not be from who they say they are? Or comments from political opponents? And so on.

My general advice is:

• Moderate comments that just contain abuse – because they don’t add anything, and often put other people off from commenting (though that won’t stop someone occasionally accusing you of being the worst censor since the invention of the written word just

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Carshalton and Wallington Labour Party has lost a case over the suttonlibdems.org.uk domain name, which it had registered.

Gerry Jerome from Sutton Liberal Democrats took the case through Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service, which concluded that Labour’s action in registering the domain name and using it to urge people to vote Labour amounted to an “abusive registration”.

Unless Labour appear by 10 October, the domain name will be handed over to Sutton Liberal Democrats.

(Gerry is happy to advise any other local parties in similar situations; just let me know.)