Category Archives: Online politics

Andy Darley

Opinion: Campaigning for F1

By Andy Darley | Thu 29th October 2009 - 9:18 am

Somewhere around 2003, after almost 20 years of ALDC-approved campaigning and concentrated Rennardism, I burned out and resigned from every bit of Libdemmery I was involved in bar party membership.

Goodbye campaigning, I thought, and went off to do quieter things, like setting up a motorsports website supporting British drivers, www.BritsOnPole.com.

All went well until a chancer named Simon Gillett met a bigger chancer named Bernie Ecclestone and won a deal to take the Formula One British Grand Prix to cosy old Donington Park. Quite how the necessary redevelopment work would be paid for was unclear.

Since then, the slow, painful, but wholly predictable collapse of Gillett’s plans have led to worried fans of British motorsport arriving in droves at our site in search of news and reassurance.

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Mark Thompson

Where to get ideas for blogposts

By Mark Thompson | Sat 24th October 2009 - 9:00 am

Welcome to part three of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s appearing each Saturday between now and Christmas, with all the posts available via this page. The series will then be revised and collated into an e-book, so please do post up your comments as the series progresses. Today it’s the turn of Mark Thompson (the one with the blog rather than the one with TV empire) addressing one of the problems that befalls many would be bloggers: how do you keep on coming up with ideas for new posts?

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Also posted in Blogging guide | Tagged , , and | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

Lib Dem website comes close second in policy search tests

By Mark Pack | Wed 21st October 2009 - 8:55 am

News from Brand Republic:

Tamar, the natural search conversion agency, has today released the results of its first Political Search Index, which tracks how easy it is for voters to find official policy information from the mainstream political parties online.

The results show the Labour Party trailing badly behind the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Green Party and the Scottish National Party.

Tamar’s research looked at fifteen specific policy areas of interest to voters and examined how effectively the political parties have optimised content on their own websites for Google.

The overall scores were:

Conservatives 1.5
Liberal Democrats 1.9
Greens 3.1
SNP 6.8
Labour 25.9

You can read more here.

Tagged and | 4 Comments
Stephen Tall

Where are the the think tank bloggers?

By Stephen Tall | Tue 20th October 2009 - 7:15 pm

Yesterday saw the annual Prospect Think Tank of the Year awards ceremony, an occasion the glittery red-carpetness of which those of us on the outside can only dare to dream. Congrats are due at the outset to the UK’s only liberal think tank, Centre Forum, for winning Pamphlet of the Year for Giles Wilkes’ report, A balancing act: fair solutions to a modern debt crisis, about which he wrote here on LDV.

Awards are usually a moment to take stock, which is what I’ve done today. Because one of the points that has struck me over …

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Also posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , , and | 8 Comments
Mat Bowles

What’s the best blogging platform for new bloggers?

By Mat Bowles | Sat 17th October 2009 - 7:20 am

Young woman, blogging by windowWelcome to part two of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s appearing each Saturday between now and Christmas, with all the posts available via this page. The series will then be revised and collated into an e-book, so please do post up your comments as the series progresses. Today it’s the turn of Mat Bowles, advising on the technical side of getting started with a blog.

So, you’re thinking of starting a blog of your own. You could do what most people seem to do at this stage, and go sign up directly to Google’s Blogger service and just get writing. Personally, I don’t think that’s necessarily the best idea. I’m a Lib Dem, my membership card says on the back:

No one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity

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Also posted in Blogging guide | Tagged , , , , , and | 13 Comments
Mark Pack

What does the future hold for British political blogging?

By Mark Pack | Mon 12th October 2009 - 12:20 pm

Predictions that the next general election will be the one in which the internet will make a huge impact have regularly come and gone. Post-Obama ready yourself for another such clutch of predictions, but underneath this punditry froth the internet has got on with quietly shifting the way politics works. It’s been more at the unglamorous organisational end (imagine trying to organise a campaign without email) than at the eye-catching systems-shattering dramatic end beloved of pundits, but it’s been a major change nonetheless.

Following in the footsteps of email, blogging has also established a firm place in the logistics of politics, even if its impact on the overall style and conduct of politics is less clear and less dramatic. Blogs have become a key news medium for people involved in or significantly interested in politics, they have become a key part of the flow of news to and from journalists and for some MPs and candidates they reach local audiences large enough to be a significant factor in their election efforts.

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Mark Pack

An introduction to political blogging

By Mark Pack | Sat 10th October 2009 - 8:18 pm

Welcome to the first part of a new weekly series on political blogging which we’ll be running here on The Voice between now and Christmas. It’s designed primarily to be an introduction for anyone thinking of starting a political blog, but packed full of enough information to be useful for existing bloggers too.

If the series is a success, we will turn it into a pdf e-book afterwards, putting all the advice together in one convenient document. There will be a chance to revise the posts before collating them, so you’re even more welcome than usual to post comments to the …

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Also posted in Blogging guide | Tagged , and | 2 Comments
Alex Foster

Help people searching for advice on cervical cancer jab

By Alex Foster | Thu 8th October 2009 - 4:05 pm

Last week, when I was writing Daily View hours later than I should, I linked to Mark Pack’s piece linking to Malcolm Cole’s piece about Google search results about the cervical cancer jab. Caron Lindsay has also written about this.

Last week, Malcolm Cole was warning that those worried about the cancer jab being given to teenage girls were getting misleading and inaccurate advice if they ran an internet search for more information.

Scary stories have legs, and it’s still the case, a week later, that if you search for information on this story, the leading results are …

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Alex Foster

Jo Swinson calls Tories’ bluff on engaging the public online

By Alex Foster | Thu 8th October 2009 - 12:45 pm

Jo Swinson MP has called for less talk and more action from the Conservative Party on proposals for public involvement in making laws.

Speaking at the Conservative Conference this week, William Hague announced his plans for a ‘Public Reading Stage’ for proposed legislation. The idea is that this would enable the public to become involved in the process of making laws by using an online system to make comments and spot potential problems. And it’s all a part of the Tory “Google Government” idea that I’ve covered for the Voice in a review of Cameron’s speech to the LGA …

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Mark Pack

Yes, council websites can

By Mark Pack | Wed 7th October 2009 - 1:20 pm

The October edition of Total Politics has a piece from me on how local authorities can learn from the Obama campaign’s mastery of the internet to build communities of active and engaged residents. You can read it over on my blog.

The basic theme – too many councils are trapped in the idea that a good online presence equals a 1990s style website which you then just expect people to come to – is one I also talked about in one of The Voice’s fringe meetings at Bournemouth Conference. The podcast of that, along the contributions of Jo Swinson MP …

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Also posted in Local government | 2 Comments
Alex Foster

Royal Mail shut down useful community websites

By Alex Foster | Mon 5th October 2009 - 10:13 pm

Last month at conference, in two of our conference fringes, speakers highlighted useful online services set to revolutionise politics.

At our first fringe, “Campaigning after Rennard,” James Graham thought that TheStraightChoice (reviewed by LDV here), a website that allows members of the public to upload the leaflets they have received through their letterbox, had the potential to revolutionise politics. No more would politicos be able to put out close-to-the-knuckle material in relative obscurity. From now on, James argued, we’d all have to assume that at least one blogger would read our leaflet, and at least one journalist …

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Also posted in News | Tagged and | 14 Comments
Stephen Tall

Lib Dem social networking web developments coming soon!

By Stephen Tall | Fri 2nd October 2009 - 1:45 pm

myconservativesMuch excitement across the Tory blogosphere this morning over the launch of myconservatives.com. The launch hasn’t been a totally 100% slick affair, as this screen-grabs illustrates – and as Chris Keating has already blogged:

Much angst at the ConservativeHome comments thread on this where many people seem to be reporting you can’t get through to it and that it redirects straight to the Tory Party homepage. Not great publicity, really. Someone should have thought that one through.

Still, it’s nice to know that technical cock-ups can occur in even the best-funded parties.

Those …

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6 Comments
Mark Pack

Welcome to the new bloggers…

By Mark Pack | Tue 29th September 2009 - 2:20 pm

Three blogs have recently joined Ryan’s Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

Good luck to all three, and why not take a moment to pop over to their blogs, take a read and post a comment?

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Mark Pack

“Lib Dems are leading the way” on Twitter

By Mark Pack | Sat 26th September 2009 - 11:20 am

A report published by the University of Plymouth and Bournemouth University concludes:

Research has revealed that nearly 67% of all tweeting MPs belong to Labour ahead of 18% for the Liberal Democrats, with the Tories relegated into third place with just 12%. When you factor in the proportion of MPs that each party boasts, it is clear that the Lib Dems are leading the way when it comes to embracing the popular social media site.

And yet overall, just 51 of our 645 MPs are classed as regular Twitter users…

MPs tend to use Twitter as a means of promoting their activities in

…

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Alex Foster

#ldconf podcast: Voxpops (including @katygordon)

By Alex Foster | Tue 22nd September 2009 - 4:30 pm

We asked delegates if their constituency was ready for the General election; if Nick Clegg was right on tuition fees; how a mansion tax would go down in their area; and how they were campaigning online.

Answering our questions were Tom Holvey and Chris Wiggin, from York, Katy Gordon for Glasgow North, Alan Bullion from Tunbridge Wells / Sevenoaks and Brendan D’Cruz from St Albans.

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Alex Foster

Engaging through twitter

By Alex Foster | Mon 21st September 2009 - 3:00 pm

It does seem this year that the hashtag has landed this year. Hundreds of people are using twitter from conference. Hundreds of them are using the hashtag so that their thoughts can be shared with other similar users.

But it’s wider than that. People from other organisations are trying to use the hashtag to influence us, either from the voluntary orgs with stands at conference or from other parties trying to bait us into engaging with their views.

Here are some examples from the conference. RNID are using twitter to entice delegates to their stands – but …

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Also posted in Conference | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

Please be nice and helpful…

By Mark Pack | Sat 19th September 2009 - 11:20 am

… and complete this online survey.

As the blurb says:

This survey is designed to explore the views and activities of the users of four UK Party-related websites – LabourHome, Labour List, ConservativeHome and Lib Dem Voice. The overall goal of the project is to better understand how and why party members, supporters and voters in general are using the web and blogs to engage with politics and political organisations.

The first section asks about your background and some general questions about your political activities and interests. The second section explores your views of the site and how you engage with it.

…

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3 Comments
Stephen Tall

Revealed: the three blogs Lib Dem MPs respect

By Stephen Tall | Tue 8th September 2009 - 8:40 pm

Iain Dale has the results of a ComRes survey of 151 MPs (undertaken back in April-May this year) to find out which journalists and which bloggers they most respect. Here are the findings:

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Alex Foster

Open thread: Lib Dem internetty meetup thing

By Alex Foster | Sat 5th September 2009 - 10:00 am

A few years ago, a group of us decided to organise a Liberal Drinks at federal conference in Brighton. We were building on James Graham’s simple but successful model: nominate a pub, decide a date, publicise it; then have convivial chats with whoever turns up. In Brighton, we followed the same model, deciding on that nice-but-tiny real-ale place near the station. We arrived, a small but respectable number of people turned up, chatted the night away, and at some point moved on to a Chinese restaurant in the vicinity before winding up back at the conference …

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Also posted in Events | 16 Comments
Alex Foster

“Taxpayers don’t want Web 2.0!”

By Alex Foster | Thu 3rd September 2009 - 5:03 pm

So runs the rather foolish quote from the Taxpayers’ Alliance in a story from the Daily Express expressing outrage at a job ad for a Director of Digital Engagement.

The Government should have better things to spend money on than a pointless deputy Twittercrat. The public sector as a whole should be tightening its belt during times of economic hardship, and this job would be a scandalous waste even during good economic times.

Taxpayers don’t want more Web2.0. They want an end to wasteful spending.

Neither the TPA nor the Conservative Party can see the point, instead frothing at the mouth …

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Mark Pack

The Government’s farcical slowness over updating election imprint rules

By Mark Pack | Thu 3rd September 2009 - 2:20 pm

Six years on from receiving a recommendation from the Electoral Commission that existing legal powers should be used to clarify how the rules regarding election imprints apply to internet campaigning, the Government has still failed to act. This is despite the Government acknowledging in its official response to the recommendation the “importance” of getting this right. But it has decided that due to it being a “fast-evolving” area doing nothing for six years is the right response.

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Stephen Tall

Top 75 Lib Dem blogs: the Total Politics List

By Stephen Tall | Tue 1st September 2009 - 9:00 am

It’s six weeks 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 1,500 people voted, and here is the full list of the Top 75 Lib Dem blogs in the Total Politics list:

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Mark Pack

More people use Facebook in the UK than it takes to elect a government

By Mark Pack | Sun 30th August 2009 - 8:21 pm

A bit of whimsical statistical trivia for the bank holiday weekend:

Number of votes won by the winning party at the 2005 general election: 9.6 million (BBC)
Number of Facebook users in the UK: 11.2 million (TechCrunch)

(Before anyone starts threatening me with a slide-rule: yes, this does compare apples and oranges a bit since Facebook’s minimum age requirement is less than 18 and also allows people who aren’t qualified to vote to become users . However, unless there’s a very unusual skew in their user base, the broad picture still stands.)

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Mark Pack

“Soc-Nets and Web Strategies Can’t Replace Door-to-Door”

By Mark Pack | Fri 28th August 2009 - 10:20 am

An interesting piece from the American Campaigns & Elections site which acts as a salutary reminder that, for all the impressiveness of Obama and his use of the internet, there’s rather more to campaigning:

Two recently released surveys on how Americans perceive brands and make decisions gives us geeky political junkies an idea of how different campaign tactics work to win votes. The first survey, released by Harris Interactive last week, indicates that while adults “use a mixture of traditional media and new media, including those that would constitute ‘push’ (advertising and websites) and ‘pull’ (information from neutral, informal communication),” Americans are persuaded (and informed) most by face-to-face communication.

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Also posted in LDVUSA | Tagged and | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

MPs on Facebook: leading the way or forgetting to change the defaults?

By Mark Pack | Tue 25th August 2009 - 2:20 pm

Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:

A new studyof MPs on Facebook shows widespread use of the social network by Parliamentarians, but also a range of curious choices about how to use the medium which may in part reflect a failure to change default settings.

The study, carried out by Woodnewton Associates and based on evidence gathered in May this year, found that:

  • 26% of MPs have a Facebook presence (a page or profile).
  • Liberal Democrat MPs lead the way in Facebook usage, with 65% being on Facebook. 25% of Labour MPs and 21% of Conservative MPs are on Facebook.

Whilst a static presence in …

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Mark Pack

Lessons from the Republican internet catch-up efforts

By Mark Pack | Sat 22nd August 2009 - 1:06 pm

The way the Repubicans are trying to get to grips with improving their internet presence following last year’s Presidental election defeat suggest some interesting pointers for the UK. As I’ve often written in the past, US politics is very different from British politics – and so one should be cautious at reading across lessons from one country to another. Nonetheless, the Republicans efforts to catch-up do highlight what they feel are the most important areas.

Yesterday’s CNN report on the topic highlights two facets to this: the importance of Twitter and the degree to which a successful internet presence relies on senior figures being willing to move away from traditional modes of communication.

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Helen Duffett

Have you nominated your Lib Dem Blog of the Year?

By Helen Duffett | Fri 21st August 2009 - 12:20 pm

Time’s ticking till close of nominations for the Lib Dem Blog of the Year Awards, so here’s a reminder of the categories and an exhortation to vote early!

Nominate in any or all of these:

• Best new Liberal Democrat blog (started since 1st September 2008)
• Best blog from a Liberal Democrat holding public office (The Tim Garden Award)
• Best use of blogging / social networking / e-campaigning by a Liberal Democrat
• Best posting on a Liberal Democrat blog (since 1st September 2008)
• Best non-Liberal Democrat politics blog
• Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year

To be eligible for ‘Best blog from a …

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Also posted in Best of the blogs and Conference | Tagged | Leave a comment
Alex Foster

Top MP blogs published

By Alex Foster | Tue 18th August 2009 - 3:49 pm

TotalPolitics (in association with Iain Dale) now have published their list of top MP blogs, as voted for by over 1500 readers.

In the top 30 are Lynne Featherstone, Willie Rennie, John Hemming, Steve Webb, and John Barrett.

Only one party leader features in the list, and that’s Nick Clegg.

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Alex Foster

Second day for #welovetheNHS

By Alex Foster | Thu 13th August 2009 - 6:36 pm

Yesterday we brought you news about the bizarre battle between American rightwingers spreading misinformation about the NHS, and British users of the NHS who were actually quite proud of it.

24 hours later and Tweetminster (which monitors the twitter updates of MPs and PPCs and provides a service where you can search them) reports

65 #welovethenhs tweets from MPs & PPCS. 8 from @UKLabour MPs & 4 PPCs, 3 from @LibDems MPs & 3 PPCs, 1 from @Conservatives PPC

Our own Nick_Clegg was amongst them, as was Prime Minister Brown (whose tweet looks like it’s had help from …

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Alex Foster

Here at LDV, #welovetheNHS

By Alex Foster | Wed 12th August 2009 - 3:49 pm

One of Obama’s key pledges in the US Presidential elections was major healthcare reforms.  The US is a deeply divided nation on health as in many other policy areas – it is simultaneously home to some of the planet’s best hospitals, the best research in medical advances and the best healthcare practioners – and also home to some of the worst poverty and barriers to healthcare, the worst developed-world child mortality rates.

Without being facetious, almost all of my knowledge of the American healthcare system comes from my knowledge of US TV.  And whilst House has access to an amazing battery …

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