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Paul Walter

How to handle comments

By Paul Walter | Published Sat 7th November 2009 - 8:50 am

Welcome to part five 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 Paul Walter, who looks at the question of how to handle comments which appear on your blog.

There are a number of approaches on handling comments. It’s a question of finding a method which you are comfortable with.

It’s probably best, at …

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Posted in Blogging guide | Tagged , | 4 Comments
Stephen Tall

LDV doesn’t do statporn, but if we did (Oct. ‘09)

By Stephen Tall | Published Mon 2nd November 2009 - 11:00 am

… We’d say a big thank you to the 31,331 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in October.

That’s a 10% uplift on last month’s readership, and a 38% increase on the same period a year ago, when just over 22,000 readers visited LDV.

This brings our absolute unique visitor readership for the last year to date (1 Nov 2008 – 31 Oct 2009) to 312,829, almost double the equivalent figure for 2007-08 of 169,320.

The 5 top-read stories during the month were:

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Posted in Site news | Tagged | 3 Comments
Mark Thompson

Where to get ideas for blogposts

By Mark Thompson | Published 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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Posted in Blogging guide | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments
Stephen Tall

Where are the the think tank bloggers?

By Stephen Tall | Published 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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Posted in Online politics, Op-eds | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments
The Voice

LibLink … Vince Cable: Flash a red light on reckless lending

By The Voice | Published Tue 20th October 2009 - 6:20 pm

Over at The Times, the Lib Dems’ shadow chancellor Vince Cable argues that the Financial Services Authority’s review on mortgages doesn’t go far enough to prevent a return to banks’ wild excesses. Here’s an excerpt:

Some of the more aggressive banks, seeking to expand their market share, are relaxing their offerings in terms of loan-to-value ratios. Any eagerness to return to former lending practices should be a source of concern. The housing market has not adjusted, at least yet, to realistic levels. Historical trends show a cyclical pattern of boom and bust, lasting roughly 15 to 20 years, going back to

…

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Mark Pack

The inside story of how the Lib Dem general election manifesto will be drawn up

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

The debates and disputes around the Liberal Democrats’ Bournemouth conference give a taste of what is likely to be a tricky process of drawing up the party’s manifesto for the next general election.

Formally, there is a three part process to that manifesto: the manifesto working group chaired by Danny Alexander will present work to the Shadow Cabinet which will then in turn (quite possibly amended) go to the Federal Policy Committee (FPC).

How will this process work and who will the key people be in drawing up the manifesto?

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Posted in Party policy and internal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments
Stephen Tall

Daily View 2×2: 19 October 2009

By Stephen Tall | Published Mon 19th October 2009 - 9:35 am

2 Big Stories


Labour’s Hain threatens BBC with legal action over BNP invitation

Labour’s Welsh secretary Peter Hain makes a bid for the media spotlight today by arguing that the BBC could face legal action over this Thursday’s edition of Question Time, due to feature an appearance by BNP leader Nick Griffin MEP:

… in his letter , Mr Hain … said the decision should be reconsidered in light of a legal case about ethnic restrictions on the BNP’s membership rules. The party has agreed to amend its constitution after the Equalities and Human Rights Commission sought an injunction, claiming the BNP was breaking the Race Relations Act by restricting membership to “indigenous Caucasian” people.

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Posted in Daily View | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment
Mat Bowles

What’s the best blogging platform for new bloggers?

By Mat Bowles | Published 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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Posted in Blogging guide | Tagged , , , , , , | 13 Comments
Gareth Aubrey

Y Barcud Oren #12

By Gareth Aubrey | Published Mon 12th October 2009 - 3:15 pm

To Wales, then, where it’s goodbye from him, and it’s au revoir from him …

And So, With Tears In Either Eye

In fairness to him, Rhodri Morgan pretty much kept to his end of the bargain in announcing that he would stand down as First Minister after the Assembly budget was agreed on December 8th (but since the promise was that he’d announce his intentions on or around September 29th, his end of the bargain wasn’t that hard to keep up). The inevitable political and journalistic encomium followed and you can’t begrudge it him; whatever his political failings, his personal popularity is unmatched in recent memory.

With the flag dropped, Larry, Moe and Curly were soon off and running to succeed him (not that they hadn’t been before, unofficially).

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Posted in Op-eds, Wales | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Postcode campaign gears up to save popular web services

By Mark Pack | Published Wed 7th October 2009 - 7:56 pm

A range of popular websites, providing useful services such as information on local job vacancies and planning applications, have been closed down following the Royal Mail’s decision to crack down on the use they made of its postcode address database.

As Alex blogged previously:

With postcodes so increasingly important to national life, it’s ridiculous that they are not public data that is, as a minimum, free to use for non-profit organisations.

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Posted in LDV campaigns | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

How to get Lib Dem Voice by email

By Mark Pack | Published Mon 5th October 2009 - 3:20 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 …

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Stephen Tall

Top of the Blogs: The Golden Dozen #135

By Stephen Tall | Published Sat 3rd October 2009 - 10:02 pm

Welcome to the 135th of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (13-19th September 2009), together with a hand-picked quintet, partly courtesy of LibDig, you might otherwise have missed. (And, yes, the Golden Dozen has kinda got a bit out-of-synch as a result of the party conference – #136 is here. Sorry about that.)

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:

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Stephen Tall

Wikio’s top blogs in the UK: September ’09

By Stephen Tall | Published Sat 3rd October 2009 - 7:30 pm

Those lovely people at Wikio have emailed The Voice with their list^ of the top blogs in the UK in June 2009.

(Lib Dem blogger Jennie Rigg has already published the list of top 30 politics blogs: below is the full list for all blogs, though there’s considerable overlap between the two owing to the dominance of politics blogs in Wikio’s weightings.)

1 Iain Dale’s Diary (=)
2 Guy Fawkes’ blog (=)
3 Liberal Conspiracy (=)
4 Liberal Democrat Voice (+1)
5 Labourlist (-1)
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Posted in News | Tagged , , | 2 Comments
Stephen Tall

LDV doesn’t do statporn, but if we did (Sept. ‘09)

By Stephen Tall | Published Thu 1st October 2009 - 12:55 pm

… We’d say a big thank you to the 27,708 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in September.

This takes us back closer to our pre-summer trend readership of c.30,000 – and is up some 43% on the equivalent figure for September ’08 of 19,435.

This brings our absolute unique visitor readership for the last year to date (1 Oct 2008 – 30 Sept 2009) to 306,418, almost double the equivalent figure for 2007-08 of 158,046.

The 5 top-read stories during the month were:

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Stephen Tall

A look back at the polls: September ’09

By Stephen Tall | Published Wed 30th September 2009 - 7:10 pm

We tend not to be too poll-obsessed here at LDV – of course we look at them, as do all other politico-geeks, but viewed in isolation no one poll will tell you very much beyond what you want to read into it. Looked at over a reasonable time-span and, if there are enough polls, you can see some trends.

Here, in chronological order, are the results of the 18 polls published in September – the number is extra high this month because of the recently instituted daily YouGov tracker poll. (Note to self: we need to find a way of averaging the trackers, otherwise they will dominate and distort LDV’s (very unscientific) monthly poll average).

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Posted in Polls | Tagged | 4 Comments
Alex Foster

Brown’s ID card loopholes #lab09

By Alex Foster | Published Tue 29th September 2009 - 4:37 pm

I’ll confess I am not actually listening to the Prime Minister’s speech to Labour conference, as I have far more important things to do, including biting my nails and feeding the cats.

However, a quick refresh of Twitter shows that quite a lot of my friends are. And some of them have even been a little taken in by Brown’s ID card commitment.

If Twitter is right – and I can’t be bothered to check – he said, “there will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens in the next parliament”

My goodness, but you can drive a double decker bus through …

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Posted in News | 5 Comments
Lynne Featherstone

Opinion: Where is the British Obama?

By Lynne Featherstone | Published Sun 27th September 2009 - 10:20 am

Earlier this month Lynne Featherstone gave the Heather Larkin Annual Lecture in Yate:

I am really pleased to be here tonight – yes it is a long trek here and back but worth it to pay tribute to Steve Webb. Steve is a great MP, a great campaigner, a great innovator on the internet – and a great intellectual force. The fact that we often agree on policy may have something to do with that!

But one of the highlights of Parliament is listening to thoughtful and powerful speeches from which you learn and which help shape your own views. Steve’s speeches …

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Posted in LDVUSA, Op-eds | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments
Stephen Tall

YouTube ‘cos we want to: bumper conference catch-up special edition

By Stephen Tall | Published Thu 24th September 2009 - 6:40 pm

Welcome to this very special bumper conference edition of our occasional LDV feature, YouTube ‘cos we want to, featuring some of the most memorable moments from the past week. For those Lib Dems who’ve been isolated inside the ‘Bournemouth bubble’, missing out on all the media coverage I hope this selection of clips gives you a sense of what you missed while you were, erm, there.

From Nick’s leader’s speech to Vince’s dust-up with Paxman on Newsnight, Chris Davies’s rant to the Huhne ‘n’ Pickles show on Radio 4 – it’s all collected here for your viewing/listening pleasure. Enjoy …

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Posted in Conference, YouTube | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments
Issan Ghazni

Policy development – mainstreaming equalities!

By Issan Ghazni | Published Sat 19th September 2009 - 8:30 am

If you have been reading your papers for conference, you might have noticed something new. Tucked away at the back of the policy papers is a page headed ‘Policy Equality Impact Assessment’. If you work in the public sector, you may already be familiar with these, as they have been compulsory in schools, hospitals and other public institutions for some time now. As a political party, we are not expected to complete such assessments as a matter of course, but have started to introduce them as a sign of our own commitment to the principles of diversity, equality …

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Posted in Conference, Party policy and internal matters | Tagged , , | Leave a comment
Stephen Tall

The state of the Liberal Democrat blogosphere

By Stephen Tall | Published Fri 18th September 2009 - 2:45 pm

There is of course no such thing as ‘the Lib Dem blogosphere’. For sure there are hundreds of Lib Dems who write blogs, but any suggestion we can be neatly bundled together into one coherent entity is wide of the mark – we’d scarcely be liberals otherwise. Which is why if you visit the Lib Dem Blogs Aggregator – a site which collates the feeds of more than 220 active bloggers – you will find posts about potholes and proportional representation, pop-culture and Palestine, all nestling alongside each other. If anything defines ‘the Lib Dem blogosphere’ it is this eclecticism.

We can separate political blogs – whether Lib Dem, Labour or Tory – into two broad categories. First, there those bloggers who write primarily for (and are read primarily by) those already interested in politics. And then there are those bloggers – usually political campaigners – who are primarily writing for readers in their electoral patch.

In each case it’s true to say the Lib Dems punch well above our weight. You don’t have to take my word for it.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , , | 4 Comments
Alex Foster

Google Calendar of Conference events #ldconf #ical

By Alex Foster | Published Wed 16th September 2009 - 11:38 am

I apologise from the outset, but this is going to be one of those posts that not everyone understands. If you’re not technical, or if your diary is still entirely paper based, look away now.

Neil McGovern, a Cambridge City councillor, has grepped the conference directory so that you don’t have to. He’s written a program that scrapes the information about the training and fringe events (including LDV’s fringe fiesta) and plugs them into a Google Calendar.

This means that if you use GCal yourself, you can import all those events into your diary – and from there, straight into your …

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Posted in Conference | 4 Comments
Millennium Elephant

Millennium’s Credit Crunch Diary… August: It’ll All Be Over By Christmas?

By Millennium Elephant | Published Fri 11th September 2009 - 4:10 pm

Before we start, a word about bankers’ bonuses.

With the head of the Financial Services Watchdog, Mr Airhead Turner, placing bankers on a scale between Socially Awkward and Totally Useless, people have been coming up with plans to curb excessive bonuses. Mr Airhead himself floated the idea of a transaction tax or Tobin tax, where you charge the bankers for passing money across the border.

Captain Clegg and the Liberal Democrats don’t think this would work, because the bankers would just pass their money over everyone’s border but ours!

We’d rather see bonuses cut down to size by cutting the BANKS down to size, breaking them up so they are no longer too big to save when it turns out that they are too big to let fail.

For the Conservatories, Master Gideon Oboe said that if banks didn’t stop awarding big bonuses he would have the regulator write them a VERY STERN letter, warning them that he would not sign off on their pay package. And if they persisted in paying out, well, he’d write them ANOTHER very stern letter! That would sort them out.

And Mr Frown, the Prime Monster himself, promised to try very hard to put a STOP to that sort of thing, and then tried very hard to scupper Monsieur Sarcastic and Ms Angular Meercat’s plan to ACTUALLY stop that sort of thing!

I think it is time to put a fresh proposal on the table.

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , | 2 Comments
Stephen Tall

Gavin Webb quits Lib Dems, joins Libertarian Party

By Stephen Tall | Published Wed 9th September 2009 - 9:40 am

A little less than a year ago, Lib Dem Voice welcomed Stoke-on-Trent city councillor and Burton parliamentary candidate Gavin Webb back to the party after a protracted and controversial internal party inquiry suspended then un-suspended him.

Now it’s time to bid him farewell again, with news today that Gavin has quit the Lib Dems and joined the Libertarian Party (LPUK). Gavin’s full statement follows:

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Posted in News | Tagged , , , | 139 Comments
Stephen Tall

LDV doesn’t do statporn, but if we did (August ’09)

By Stephen Tall | Published Tue 1st September 2009 - 9:30 pm

… We’d say a big thank you to the 19,655 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in August.

This is our lowest readership figure of the year to date, down a notch on last month’s 22,000 – not surprising in a holiday month and when genuinely exciting political news is scarce. For the record, August’s 20k is still more than 50% up compared with the same month last year (13k).

This brings our absolute unique visitor readership for the last year to date (1 Sept 2008 – 31 Aug 2009) to 299,315, more than double the equivalent figure for 2007-08 of 147,363.

The 5 top-read stories during the month were:

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Stephen Tall

Top of the Blogs: The Golden Dozen #132

By Stephen Tall | Published Sun 30th August 2009 - 3:45 pm

Welcome to the 132nd of our weekly round-ups from the Lib Dem blogosphere, featuring the seven most popular stories according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (23rd August – 29th August 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:

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Helen Duffett

Podcast: The foundation of the Liberal Party

By Helen Duffett | Published Sat 22nd August 2009 - 1:25 pm

150th anniversary

One hundred and fifty years ago, on the 6 June 1859, at Willis Rooms in St James, Westminster, Radical, Peelite and Whig Members of Parliament met to formalise their Parliamentary coalition to oust the Conservative government and finally brought about the formation of the Liberal Party.

To commemorate the compact made at Willis Rooms in 1859 and the consequent founding of the Liberal Party, the Liberal Democrat History Group and the National Liberal Club organised a joint event at the Club on 20 July 2009. The evening was …

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Helen Duffett

Have you nominated your Lib Dem Blog of the Year?

By Helen Duffett | Published 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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Posted in Best of the blogs, Conference, Online politics | Tagged | Leave a comment
Alex Foster

Interview with Durham campaigners

By Alex Foster | Published Thu 20th August 2009 - 12:27 pm

Last week I was up in Durham on a singing week in the Norman cathedral there. While I was there, I took the opportunity to meet with a group of local Lib Dem campaigners for the latest in our LDV interviews.

In Durham, they’re smarting from local government re-organisation; still proud of what Lib Dems achieved whilst running Durham city council; champing at the bit to build more social housing; and adamant the Lib Dems should not resile from their commitment to abolish tuition fees.

Hear all that and more by clicking play below (or here if you are reading …

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Posted in Podcasts | 1 Comment
Alex Foster

Conference starts here on Lib Dem Voice

By Alex Foster | Published Wed 12th August 2009 - 10:40 am

The party’s Federal Conference in Bournemouth is now just a few weeks away – and the key policy papers including the Agenda are now available from the party website.

Conference is such a huge topic, and will be covered so extensively here on the Voice that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Here are just a few interesting things to highlight:

  • The timings are a little different this year. Conference kicks off on Saturday morning with consultative sessions, and is formally opened Saturday afternoon. It continues through until Wednesday afternoon when the Leader’s Speech will be after lunch. Conference

…

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Stephen Tall

Top of the Blogs: The Golden Ton (Nos. 61-80)

By Stephen Tall | Published Tue 11th August 2009 - 5:50 pm

‘Tis the season for lists… All this week we are publishing the top 100 posts by Lib Dem bloggers, in descending order of popularity, for the last year – August 2008 to July 2009, inclusive, according to click-throughs from the Aggregator.

(Profuse thanks to techno-wizard and stat-monkey Ryan Cullen for compiling this table.)

In today’s second instalment we run through 61-80:

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Posted in Best of the blogs | 3 Comments
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