One of the curious of political blogging in the UK is how male dominated it is. Although the Office of National Statistics’s figures show that the majority of bloggers in the UK are female and the majority of voters are female too, take a look through lists of Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem bloggers and you see lists that are dominated by men. The same applies with other parties and independent blogs. Political blogging in the UK is male dominated. But why?
One explanation is that UK politics overall is male dominated. Just look at the number of MPs or Cabinet …
By Stephen Tall
| Mon 6th September 2010 - 6:32 pm
It’s two months since Total Politics asked blog-readers to vote for their Top 10 favourite blogs in their annual survey promoted here on LDV, as well as at LabourList and Iain Dale’s Diary. More than 2,200 people voted, and here is the full list of the Top 75 Lib Dem blogs according to the voters of Total Politics:
Excellent to see this new initiative, which is over at http://libdemsni.wordpress.com. Reading through the posts there so far I’m struck by how streaks of similarity poke through the many differences in Northern Irish politics compared to those of England, Scotland or Wales.
The blog got off to a good start with its star signing; let’s hope it prospers in the coming months.
Brighton & Hove City Council webcasts many of its meetings and makes the footage available for people to watch again afterwards. Cllr Jason Kitcat (Green) extracted from the footage examples of himself asking questions, put the footage on YouTube and blogged about the questions on his own site.
He only used footage the council has already made available, he didn’t alter the footage and he had a good reason for using his own copy rather than the council’s original (because at the time the council’s way of presenting the footage made it hard for people to go direct to a specific …
Welcome to a series where old posts are revived for a second outing for reasons such as their subject has become topical again, they have aged well but were first posted when the site’s readership was only a tenth or less of what it is currently or they got published and the site crashed, hiding the finest words of wisdom behind an incomprehensible error message. Today’s is a piece I wrote in 2007 for Iain Dale’s annual blogging guide. Three years and one general election on, my views on the matter are much the same – and in particular the …
Welcome to a series where old posts are revived for a second outing for reasons such as their subject has become topical again, they have aged well but were first posted when the site’s readership was only a tenth or less of what it is currently or they got published and the site crashed, hiding the finest words of wisdom behind an incomprehensible error message.
Gordon Brown’s foray during his premiership into YouTube in order to promote his plans for reforming MPs’ expenses was widely panned. So what lessons should be drawn by anyone thinking of using YouTube to strengthen …
In itself, an expensive website is not necessarily a poor use of funds as good, popular sites often also save costs (e.g. by reducing the number of phonecalls the council has to handle). As a result, Medway Council – one of those picked out in the article – may have a good case for spending £250,000 in revamping its site given that the last major revamp was in 2003. In the last seven years the internet has changed significantly as have …
Jodi Dean’s analysis of the economic, political and social impacts of blogging (and social networking more generally) covers broad themes that will be familiar to readers of technology authors such as Clay Shirky or media commentators such as Charlie Beckett. However, the particular aspects, the style of argument and even the vocabulary are heavily different – for this is a work of critical literary theory. The lack of overlap in cited sources, points of debate and choice of jargon highlights how even in the interconnected world of online punditry (all three frequently write online) there are many distinct niches and communities who rarely overlap even when the broad subjects of their interest are the same.
A new report about the internet and the 2010 general election (not headlined some variant on “was it an internet election?” thank goodness) has just been published by the Hansard Society. It contains some excellent contributions from across the political spectrum and, er…, one by myself.
My own piece looked at ‘Lessons from the disappearing phone boxes for the internet and politics’ which tries to get at why people so often ask the question ‘Will the next election be an internet election?’ followed shortly after by’Well, that wasn’t an internet election’ – and yet the use of the internet has become so pervasive in politics:
Does the rhetoric and analysis of Joe Trippi and Clay Shirky or the reality of the mobile phone more accurately foretell the future impact of the internet on British politics? That isthe central question for anyone looking to predict how technology may change politics andcampaigning over this new Parliament…
That’s the question which is – or perhaps more accurately, which should be – at the heart of many online lobbying campaigns which seek to flood people’s inboxes with emails. Done well, at the right moment and aimed at the right target, these mass email campaigns can be a very effective tool for stressing the level of support for a point of view and making people engage with it. Done badly, they are an extremely effective way at lowering the reputation of the lobbying organisation and damaging its cause.
A good recent example has been the online campaigning around electoral reform, …
Welcome to a series where old posts are revived for a second outing for reasons such as their subject has become topical again, they have aged well but were first posted when the site’s readership was only a tenth or less of what it is currently or they got published and the site crashed, hiding the finest words of wisdom behind an incomprehensible error message. I’ve slightly updated some information to keep it current.
It’s fairly cheap and easy to produce videos and make them available to the world via YouTube these days. But how do you get people to then …
1. Changes in daily election poll results could be estimated by measuring the changes in the relative amount of online discussion
2. We find that ‘traditional media’ maintains a high level of influence, and that the influence of ‘social media’ was small
3. The Lib Dem’s performance was similar to that of
A final reminder that time is running out: voting ends tomorrow in the Total Politics Blog Award… We hope readers may be inclined to list Lib Dem Voice somewhere, alongside many of the other fabulous Lib Dem blogging talent listed on Ryan Cullen’s Aggregator.
It’s that time of year again, when Total Politics asks you to vote for your Top 10 favourite blogs. This is the fifth year of the poll. The votes will be compiled and included in the forthcoming book, the Total Politics Guide to Blogging 2010-11, which will be published in September. For the second year running, …
TakeBackParliament.com has launched a competition to crowd-source the design talent of bloggers who support abolishing first-past-the-vote and replacing it with the Alternative Vote in readiness for next May’s referendum.
Andy May – occasional contributor to LDV – has mocked up this effort to get the ball rolling:
A gentle reminder to our readers of the fast-approaching deadline … We hope readers may be inclined to list Lib Dem Voice somewhere, alongside many of the other fabulous Lib Dem blogging talent listed on Ryan Cullen’s Aggregator.
It’s that time of year again, when Total Politics asks you to vote for your Top 10 favourite blogs. This is the fifth year of the poll. The votes will be compiled and included in the forthcoming book, the Total Politics Guide to Blogging 2010-11, which will be published in September. For the second year running, the poll is being promoted/sponsored by …
Good luck to all the new bloggers, and why not take a moment to pop over to their blogs, take a read and post a comment?
Do you know of a blog by a LibDem which isn’t listed? Why not get them to add it as well?
Whether you are one of these new bloggers or someone who has been on the aggregator for rather longer, why not add you blog to the Wikio Directory? It’s a simple online form, gives your own blog a little more publicity and adding your blog means any links you make to other blogs helps raise them up the Wikio rankings.
Much is made of our MPs and their use of social media. Steve Webb and Facebook, Jo Swinson and Duncan Hames announcing their engagement via Twitter (we only had Facebook in my day…), the increasingly sophisticated websites, all of these serve to connect Parliamentarians to the communities they serve. However, on the red benches, the need to reach out is heightened by the relative lack of coverage for their activities in the mainstream media, and there is increasing use of social media to achieve that.
Perhaps the best known source of commentary comes from Lords of the Blog, a collaborative …
Simon Wright, the Lib Dem MP for Norwich South who did the nation a service by vanquishing Charles Clarke, is the first of the newbie MPs to take part in a viral video campaign called ‘Mpinions’. Here’s the spiel from its creators:
Mpinions is allowing new MPs to properly introduce themselves to you and all in a few easily-digestible minutes! Consider it the speed dating of the political world! The video campaign itself will be running until the end of August and is being sponsored by The Electoral Reform Society and supported and promoted online by the Hansard Society, Operation
In the early twentieth century, large public meetings and lengthy public speeches were expected of – and needed by – Parliamentary candidates fighting vigorous campaigns. A century on, candidates fighting vigorous campaigns frequently get by without organising any public meetings or giving any public speeches longer than a few minutes of opening remarks at a local organisation’s hustings.
Yet although these forms of personal, direct contact between candidate and voter have declined sharply over the last century, the opportunities for such contact via the internet have increased sharply in the last few years.
It’s that time of year again, when Total Politics asks you to vote for your Top 10 favourite blogs. This is the fifth year of the poll. The votes will be compiled and included in the forthcoming book, the Total Politics Guide to Blogging 2010-11, which will be published in September. For the second year running, the poll is being promoted/sponsored by LabourList, LibDemVoice and Iain Dale’s Diary.
The rules are simple.
1. You must vote for your ten favourite blogs and ranks …
The Freedom Bill (previously known as the Great Repeal Bill) has been a Liberal Democrat policy for some time and now that we’re in coalition government it’s become the Your Freedom initiative – an online consultation to identify laws to repeal.
In two respects this is good news – online consultation is becoming more of a habit for government and it’s also becoming a welcome pattern to see long-standing Liberal Democrat demands move towards actual implementation by government.
But in one respect I think the Your Freedom site does not address a key issue as well as the party did when …
As a Lib Dem working in online and multimedia communications, the concept of an ‘Internet election’ is something I have thought quite a lot about. In the build up to the election I expressed my concerns about the Lib Dems use of online tools on my own blog.
I am pleased to say that on a national level my fears were misplaced. Our online campaign was excellent, and by far the best of the three major parties. In particular the Labservative spoof campaign was innovative, eye catching, and added a new entry to the politco dictionary. It was exactly the …
For some people and organisations Twitter has become, at least in part, simply another way of sending out timely news. Issue a news release? Check. Put it on website? Check. Send out tweet with headline and link back to site? Check.
All sounds fairly typical and unexceptional and if you’d asked me a few days ago I wouldn’t have added an exception or caveat to that sort of process, even if it didn’t involve a formal press release or link. If you treat Twitter as an outlet for official, timely news then that’s how you use it. I say “a few …
The Yoosk website recently put together a panel of bloggers to answer questions about the impact of the internet, and social media in particular, on British politics. Alongside Iain Dale, Alex Smith and James Evans I answered a range of questions:
Jon Gnarr is an Icelandic comic. In late 2009 he started a political party – The Best Party – as a satire on Icelandic politics. In this month’s municpal elections in Reykjavik his party emerged the largest (with 6 of the 15 seats) and he is now Mayor. This was his campaign video:
Daniel Walker @Kira
Current Lib Dem policy calls for the regions of England ...
Richard Flowers "Sex" and "gender" are used pretty much interchangeably in British Law.
So I rather feel sticking the word "biological" on the front of "male" or "female" i...
Mick Taylor In 1968, the Labour Government passed the disgraceful, racist Kenya Immigrants Act, to deny to Kenya Asians with British passports the right to come to the UK a...
Will Straw from Left Foot Forward has 
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