By Stephen Tall | Published Sun 24th January 2010 - 10:45 pm
Welcome to the 153rd of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (17th – 23rd 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:
By Sara Bedford | Published Tue 19th January 2010 - 10:30 am
On this day in 1966, Indira Ghandi was elected as the first woman Prime Minister of India, whilst 20 years ago today, the rebel English cricket team, led by Mike Gatting, landed at Johannesburg airport.
Today we wish a happy 30th birthday to world champion Jenson Button and also commemorate the 132nd anniversary of the birth of former Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman. Voters go to the polls today in Massachusetts, to elect a Senator for the seat left vacant by the death of Edward Kennedy.
By Helen Duffett | Published Mon 18th January 2010 - 5:42 pm
The Conservatives think they can improve education in this country by making the teaching profession “brazenly elitist” but it looks like they haven’t done their homework. David Cameron’s latest wheeze would actually exclude Carol Vorderman, the Tories’ own Maths Taskforce chief.
David Cameron made a speech today at a south London school, outlining Conservative pledges:
The Tory leader said he wanted to make teaching the “noble profession” and would bar students with a poor degree from taking government cash to train for the classroom.
And in what was almost certainly a conscious echo of Labour rhetoric, Mr Cameron said: “Good education is the right of the many not the privileged few.”
Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, went further in confronting head on claims that the Conservatives’ policies favour the better off.
An incoming Conservative government would be guided by a “moral purpose” to make opportunity more equal, he said, adding that it was a ‘scandal’ only 79 boys in receipt of free school meals achieved three ‘A’s at A-level nationwide compared with 175 pupils from Eton alone.
“It’s a scar on our conscience and we are pledged to reverse it,” said Mr Gove.
However, “breaking open the supply of education” won’t be achieved by discouraging graduates with lower classes of degree.
By Mark Pack | Published Mon 18th January 2010 - 1:20 pm
Nigel Jackson (University of Plymouth) and Darren Lilleker (University of Bournemouth) have carried out a useful little piece of research into what prospective Parliamentary candidates get up to on Twitter.
Size of Twitter audience
Although size isn’t everything on Twitter, the number of followers a candidate can build up is relevant to the question of whether Twitter can be a useful medium for direct communication with voters (as opposed to indirect communication, i.e. reaching journalists and helpers on Twitter who then in turn reach the public).
This survey found PPCs with followers often numbering in the thousands which leaves open the possibility that some, at least, are reaching significant local audiences directly.
What sort of messages do PPCs send out?
Around 78% of PPCs use Twitter to send out messages discussing local issues and the same proportion also use it to promote their party, with these two groups of messages being the most popular.
Sharing information is also common: 69% promote their own campaigns but also 67% share non-news links, 53% share news stories and 35% provide local information directly in their tweets. That last figure suggest that, whatever the possibilities, many PPCs do not view Twitter as being useful to them for a direct local audience – or perhaps (very wrongly!) think a local audience is not interested in local information.
Personal touches are common with nearly 60% sending tweets about their personal life, just under half expressing personal preferences and 29% sending jokes.
Using Twitter to listen
Directly asking for views is fairly rare though, with less than one in ten asking for views on local or national issues. However, many PPCs are aware that by putting views or links on Twitter they are likely to get feedback, so the number of explicit requests for views understates the degree to which Twitter is used to solicit feedback.
The report also found that:
The number are following varies from 6 to 2,751. To give these figures some meaning we created a follows/following ratio, which compares the number of followers they have as opposed to the number they follow. Thirty six PPCs have a negative rating meaning that they follow more than follow them, so that for them Twitter seems largely about listening to the views of others. Ninety one have a follower/following ratio of 10 or under, suggesting that they use Twitter as a means of promoting their views, but do look at what others have to say. Only 2 have a higher ratio than this implying that for them Twitter is primarily a broadcast channel.
It’s all related
Number of followers, number of people being followed and frequency of tweets are all strongly correlated in the survey results. With the usual caveat about correlation not being the same as causation, it looks as if the more people use Twitter, the more they get out of it – which in turn of course encourages them in turn to use it more.
By Stephen Tall | Published Sun 17th January 2010 - 5:55 pm
Welcome to the 152nd of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (10th – 16th 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:
By Keith Halstead | Published Thu 7th January 2010 - 4:20 pm
Our ‘Britain’s Best MP’ competition has come to a close with Douglas Carswell, Conservative MP for Harwich, a clear winner. The final results are:
Douglas Carswell 47%
Gisela Stuart 16%
Tom Harris 12%
Lynne Featherstone 9%
Bob Russell 6%
Jo Swinson 6%
David Howarth 2%
Chris Mullin 2%
I appreciate that the results do not make happy reading for visitors to this site and the results of online polls cannot be taken too seriously, but please don’t dismiss this competition just yet.
Whilst acknowledging that our hope of getting people to listen to the MPs answers and then vote for their ‘best MP’ based on what they heard probably …
By Stephen Tall | Published Mon 4th January 2010 - 9:05 pm
Call it laziness, call it New Year ennui, but I’d half a mind not to re-commence my monthly LDV statporn posts. I realise they can be a little bit self-congratulatory and/or self-obsessed. But I’ve finally got round to doing it. And here’s why.
First, because I think it’s only fair to LDV’s readers and, more importantly, our contributors (both those who write for us, and those who comment on what’s written here) to know how many people read this site. It is not my blog, or that of any of the small, volunteer team who runs LDV: it is …
By Keith Halstead | Published Wed 23rd December 2009 - 1:20 pm
You may remember that back at the beginning of December we launched our ‘Best MP’ campaign to highlight the fact that not all MPs should be tarred with the same brush as the ‘expenses cheats.’
We asked users of our website – Yoosk – to send in their nominations for Best MP and to send us the questions they would like to put to the nominees. All eight nominated MPs agreed to answer and you can compare what they said on our website now and cast your vote in our Poll, which will be ‘live’ until the 31st December.
Here is a sample of how we edited the answers together to make them easier to compare. This question came from ‘artichelper’ and received most votes from our users:
‘What do you believe is the best change in policy that you, yourself played a significant role in making that change happen?’ And you can view a compilation of the answers below.
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
By Stephen Tall | Published Sun 20th December 2009 - 2:00 pm
Welcome to the 148th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (13th – 19th December 2009), 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:
By NewsHound | Published Mon 14th December 2009 - 4:30 pm
Lib Dem shadow home secretary Chris Huhne has an article in today’s Times noting that how much it costs the Treasury to borrow money depends on three ratings agencies … and asks the crucial question: are they fit to wield this power?
Chris’s credential for writing an article outside his brief? Well, he founded the sovereign group at Fitch Ratings, and was group managing director. Here’s an excerpt:
Last week Moody’s — one of the big three international ratings agencies — warned that the UK’s top bond rating would be under threat if Britain failed to sort out its public finances
By Mark Pack | Published Sun 13th December 2009 - 4:50 pm
Some people like regularly visiting a site to see if there’s new stories of interest. Some people like subscribing to its news feed (RSS) and checking that way. But if you prefer email, you can instead sign up to get a daily early morning email with a summary of the previous day’s posts from Lib Dem Voice, complete with convenient links to click on if any take your fancy and you want to take a read.
Just go to our email sign up page to start getting these emails. You can also sign up for a special once-a-week email, bringing …
By Philip Young | Published Sun 13th December 2009 - 10:05 am
Over at the Daily Mail, is the shine coming off Brand Cameron, or, is this just a kick up the pants? First comes the big slap…then the boot, with a stiletto heel.
Daily Mail, leader-column, 12.12.09:
“At a time like this, it’s madness to ring-fence any budget at the expense of the rest. Even sacred cows can be hugely overweight. Since 1977, billions have been poured into health and education, without the improvements in standards we’d expect.
“How can Mr. Darling claim there’s no scope for cuts in the NHS, on the day we learn it is spending £1 …
By Stephen Tall | Published Sun 6th December 2009 - 2:00 pm
If you could choose up to three items for your Christmas stocking, what would they be? That was the question LDV posed to a group of Lib Dem bloggers. And over the next two days we’ll reveal what they told us, with all their choices added to the Amazon carousel widget featured on our home-page, referral fees from which will help support Lib Dem Voice: so get clicking and ordering. In part one, four bloggers – Jennie Rigg, Millennium Elephant, Mark Pack and Alex Foster – give us the low-down on their Xmas faves.
By Stephen Tall | Published Fri 4th December 2009 - 1:20 pm
After two months of poll fluctuations triggered by the ups-and-downs of party conference-dominated media coverage, November gives us an opportunity to look at the parties’ popularity, as measured by the polls, for the first time since early September.
Here, in chronological order, are the results of the 10 polls published in November:
By Helen Duffett | Published Fri 4th December 2009 - 8:27 am
It’s December 4th, and 210 years since the day William Pitt the Younger introduced income tax to help pay for the Napoleonic Wars. By that time, The Observer (the world’s first Sunday newspaper) was already celebrating its ninth birthday.
2 Must-Read Blog Posts
What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:
By Robson Brown | Published Wed 2nd December 2009 - 2:17 pm
December 5th will see the Copenhagen climate change summit get underway, for two weeks of talks that must lead to a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and perhaps something as binding and successful as the 1987 Montreal Protocol that led to the phasing out of harmful CFC and HCFC propellants.
The talks are a long time coming; 2009 is the tail-end of the deadline for agreement already set by world leaders in Bali in 2007.
Frankly, this is unacceptable, and we think it’s time for a bit of old-fashioned co-ordinated civil action to remind world leaders that actually, the people of this planet want to see radical action on a bold, even savage, scale. The time for talking is over – we need firm commitments on what will happen and how, before it’s too late. So why not join us and thousands of others this Saturday to help save the world?
By Alex Foster | Published Wed 2nd December 2009 - 11:20 am
Just two weekends ago, we helped run a moderately successful Bloggers’ Unconference in Edinburgh, the guests of the Scottish Liberal Democrats at their HQ in Clifton Terrace. The Scottish Lib Dems were generous with their facilities and their time, giving us a room for a day, feeding us, and making sure lots of interesting senior Scottish Lib Dems came to talk to us. In the end four English bloggers made the …
By Stephen Tall | Published Tue 1st December 2009 - 12:50 pm
… We’d say a big thank you to the 29,252 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in November.
This brings our absolute unique visitor readership for the last year to date (1 Dec 2008 – 30 Nov 2009) to 292,073, over 40% higher than the equivalent figure for 2007-08 of 205,099.
By Alex Foster | Published Mon 30th November 2009 - 3:53 pm
Yesterday saw the conclusion of ALDC‘s annual training event Kickstart, designed for councillors and campaigners who are defending and targetting council seats at next year’s local elections.
Next year is a special year indeed, because in all probability the General Election will happen on the same day as local elections. Whilst this is nothing new, the councils that are facing election this time are …
By Alex Foster | Published Mon 30th November 2009 - 11:15 am
Last Saturday at the Bloggers’ Unconference, our final interview of the day was with Jo Swinson MP – which was particularly kind of her, since she’d flown back from New York the day before, and must have been jet-lagged.
Falling at the end of the day, the discussion we had with Jo was one of the most informal of the day, but was all the better for that. Her enthusiasm for finding new ways of communicating really shone through, and she talked to us about creating the video below. In particular, she was really keen to show us her new Flip video camera, which is extremely portable and can be used by just the one person, without needing fancy lights, an off-camera microphone or an extra person working as camera operator.
Jo used her Flip to make a series of mini videos about the work she was doing at the UN, and quite simply to give some basic impressions of what visiting the UN buildings in New York are like. The buildings are iconic, but not particularly fancy. Working in the main office block is like working in any slightly old fashioned tower block. She also takes time out of her schedule to show us a moving statue rescued from the rubble of Hiroshima – on the face, undamaged and intact; on the rear, scraped raw by the heat and debris of the nuclear explosion.
If you follow LDV’s twitter feed, you may also have seen this message promoting a short audio interview with Helen Duffett asking Jo the questions.
Lots of familiar names on the 2009 Q3 list, with five/six-figure gifts coming from the following: Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (£231k), Bloomberg Tradebook Europe Limited (£25k), Mr Christopher Nicholson (£21.5k), Professor John Howson (£10k), Mrs Joan Ramsden (£10k), and Philip Young (£10k).
Fewer Parliamentarians than normal contributed this quarter – the most generous I spot-checked were:
By Stephen Tall | Published Sun 29th November 2009 - 10:50 am
Welcome to the 145th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (22nd – 28th November 2009), together with a hand-picked quintet, partly 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:
Guido’s story is that of all the reportable donations given to all the parties in the Electoral Commission’s third quarter, 55% of the moolah went to the Blues.
This report from Guido came hot on the heels of a couple of bits of information about Conservative fundraising efforts in Ealing, which has caused a bit of a stir in the local papers. An email arrived with a copy of a Tory letter, and a letter in the Ealing Gazette, which I reproduce below:
By Mark Pack | Published Sat 21st November 2009 - 8:50 am
Welcome to part seven 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 The Voice’s Mark Pack to talk about building up your audience.
There are many reasons for blogging and, depending on your own …
Clegg, who had called for the speech to be cancelled and the remaining Parliamentary time before an election to be used to clean-up politics, said there was nothing in the proposed legislation to help create jobs, boost bank lending and fix the UK’s “rotten” political system.
And here in full is what Nick said today in response to the government measures announced by HM The Queen:
All the pageantry in the world cannot cover up the fact that this is a fantasy Queen’s Speech from a government that has run out of road in a Parliament that has lost the people’s trust.
This Queen’s Speech won’t give people the help and jobs they need in this recession and it won’t fix our rotten politics.
After 12 long years, in which this government has passed nearly 500 different laws, along with countless thousands of statutory instruments, it is right to stop and ask the question: what is this Queen’s Speech really for?
Gordon Brown will begin a six-month election campaign this week with one of the shortest but most deliberately political programmes of recent years. … In a podcast on the Downing Street website, Mr Brown said that Britons wanted world-class public services underpinned by “guarantees not gambles”. He was referring to legislation this week that will enshrine in law the right of NHS patients to get treatment within 18 weeks or to see a cancer specialist within two weeks — or be granted
Nick Baird The problem in 2019 was "Vote Lib Dem, Get Jeremy Corbyn", as was being illegally fly-posted around Cheltenham on polling day.......
David Wright The problem in 2019 wasn't that we were going to "rejoin the EU if we won", but that we were going to do so without another referendum first, something we'd bee...
Sarah I am glad to hear that Charlie and others are pushing Ed for change. He’s ignored the stagnant polls and the frustration among MPs for far too long. He’s be...
Hywel Well, looks like the first shots have been fired.
Interesting fact, the leaders who led the Lib Dems to their previous two high water marks (Ashdown 97 and K...
Tristan Ward "Badenochs ............ is now moving her party on economic and defence policy"
To those criticising the party leadership
1 They have been talking about...
Welcome to part seven 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 
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Tristan Ward 