Tag Archives: myspace

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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Posted in Online politics and Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , , , and | 7 Comments
Mark Pack

Facebook pages: big changes on the way

By Mark Pack | Wed 18th February 2009 - 2:51 pm

Inside Facebook has the story about changes due in the next few weeks:

With the Pages redesign, business Pages will now look much more like Facebook profile pages. According to information provided to advertisers, Facebook is moving Pages to a “Wall and tabs” design:

* The Wall tab, containing all the latest updates and Wall posts, will become front and center.
* Most static information will live on an “Info” tab, and most Photos will now live on a “Photos” tab.
* Most custom content and application boxes will be moved to a “Boxes” tab, though some narrow boxes can remain on the “Wall”

…

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Posted in Online politics | Also tagged and | 2 Comments
Mark Pack

Why do MPs use Facebook?

By Mark Pack | Tue 30th December 2008 - 11:50 am

Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:

When it comes to social media, Facebook is pretty much it as far as MPs go. For example, of the Liberal Democrat Shadow Cabinet members, 100% have a public email address, 90% have a website (the exceptions being in the House of Lords), 72% are on Facebook, 7% blog (and for another 7% there are party blogs covering their portfolio, even though they do not blog personally), and 3% are on Twitter. None have an active MySpace or Bebo presence (though there’s one that is now defunct).

Similar patterns – heavy email use, slightly lighter website coverage, many Facebook profiles, fewer bloggers and Twitter bringing up the rear – occur across all the main political parties.

This is not just a matter of new services taking time to catch on; blogging, after all, has been around for much longer than Facebook and the first politicians on Facebook came years after the first blogging politicians.

So what is it about Facebook that makes it attractive to MPs?

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Posted in Online politics | Also tagged , and | Leave a comment
Helen Duffett

Tories have “very little to show” for £1m online spend

By Helen Duffett | Sat 27th December 2008 - 1:13 pm

The Conservative Party has spent £500,000 on a campaign to launch supporters’ groups on four social networking websites: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and iVillage. However, research by the Financial Times has found that the iVillage group had only drawn one new member.

Tim Montgomerie, editor of the Conservativehome website said, ”The party has very little to show for more than £1m of expenditure on internet-related projects over the last year. Eye-catching initiatives have always been favoured over using the internet for long-term relationship building.”

As the Financial Times reports:

All the main parties are suffering from declining membership. Mr Cameron appears willing to commit

…

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Posted in Online politics | Also tagged , , and | 5 Comments
Mark Pack

US Presidential election: Facebook is the winner

By Mark Pack | Sun 2nd November 2008 - 7:50 am

Total number of Facebook supporters for Obama and McCain: 2,602,269
Total number of MySpace supporters for Obama and McCain: 1,024,128

(Figures from TechPresident.com, as of 31 October, via Weekly NetPulse email newsletter)

Posted in LDVUSA and Online politics | Also tagged | Leave a comment
Mark Pack

Book review: What should you be getting up to on the internet?

By Mark Pack | Mon 11th August 2008 - 2:55 pm

Should politicians blog? Does it matter if a local party has a website that allows comments or not? Is it a good idea for a councillor to stick a film of themselves up on YouTube? Is the local party organiser really doing something useful on Facebook?

Answering any of these questions requires more than a technical understanding of how you use the services. It requires instead an understanding of what your organisational and communication objectives are, and then how these technologies may, or may not, help you achieve them.

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell makes this point for commercial organisations. It sets out to help organisations answer the question of whether, and if so how, they should be making use of social computing – those tools which heavily rely on interaction between people, feedback and content generated by the public such as YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace and blogs.

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Posted in Books and Online politics | Also tagged and | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

What next for social networking?

By Mark Pack | Thu 7th August 2008 - 9:45 am

Predicting which companies and software are going to prosper and which are going to fizzle and disappear is a notoriously unreliable business, but it certainly looks at the moment as if Facebook, Myspace and Bebo are pretty well entrenched as the major social networking sites not only in the UK but also in many other countries, including (perhaps crucially in terms of predicting the future) the US.

Possibly this trio will change slightly in composition, having one of its members replaced or being joined by a fourth or fifth, but at the moment all three seem set pretty …

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Posted in News and Online politics | Also tagged , , and | 9 Comments
Mark Pack

A case of media bias? The Sun, MySpace and Facebook

By Mark Pack | Sat 2nd August 2008 - 11:51 am

Is The Sun (owner: Rupert Murdoch) indulging in a campaign of partisan reporting designed to damage Facebook, one of the main rivals to MySpace (owner: Rupert Murdoch)?

That’s a question that has been raised a few times on blogs (such as towards the end of this posting ), so I thought I would take a look at The Sun’s website and compare the coverage on there of Facebook versus MySpace.

To be fair to The Sun, I asked the site’s own search engine to give me the top fifteen headlines for stories including the word “MySpace” and then the same …

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Posted in News | Also tagged , and | 19 Comments
Mark Pack

Are UK politicians right to concentrate on Facebook?

By Mark Pack | Tue 22nd July 2008 - 9:45 pm

Take a look round Facebook, and you’ll find multiple examples of all the main political parties, and their MPs, making use of it to promote their wares and network with supporters. However, look at other social networking sites such as Bebo or Myspace and you’ll find only a relatively sparse party presence, with very few MPs around.

Is this concentration on Facebook justified? After all, it is only one of several social networking sites, and as recently as June last year it only got 16% of the UK social networking site traffic, lagging behind Myspace on 29% and Bebo on 34%.

However, …

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Posted in Online politics | Also tagged and | 23 Comments
The Voice

Brian Paddick has a new website

By The Voice | Tue 8th April 2008 - 1:00 am

Oooh, that’s nice, and it looks to come with the full set of social networking – not just Facebook, but also Myspace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and (new today) Eventful.

Posted in London and Online politics | Also tagged , and | 4 Comments
Richard Huzzey

Elected Lib Dem Bloggers: The List

By Richard Huzzey | Sat 25th August 2007 - 8:14 pm

There’s still time to vote in the 2007 Lib Dem Blog of the Year contest, to nominate blogs for our expert panel. Find out more here.

But who, you may struggle to recall, is a publicly-elected Lib Dem blogger from amongst the many you’ve read? How many bloggers we read are secretly councillors? How many elected parliamentarians blog? How many blogs are actually eligible for the category?

I asked Mark Pack f he held such a list. He didn’t. I have therefore set out to compile one, despite my better judgement that this will be a boring and thankless task; but such a list probably ought to exist. It combines well with reading aroundly widely for the purposes of composing the Golden Dozen, at least!

This is an unofficial long list of everything which strikes me as eligible for the elected representative category, but not being one of the judges my opinion is clearly not final. They’re listed as ordered on Lib Dem blogs.

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Posted in Best of the blogs | Also tagged , and | 17 Comments

Scottish LD candidate comes a cropper thanks to social network websites

By the founding editor | Fri 30th March 2007 - 9:30 am

Be careful what your friends post.

Incidentally, if you use MySpace / Facebook et al there is a school of thought which suggests that under the principle of better safe than sorry, you should consider putting an imprint on your profile page.

Posted in News | Also tagged | 14 Comments
Mark Pack

How you can get political revenge online…

By Mark Pack | Wed 28th March 2007 - 9:34 pm

… if someone misuses your work. Nice.

Posted in Online politics | Leave a comment
Adrian Sanders

Adrian Sanders MP calls for new focus on Community Politics

By Adrian Sanders | Tue 2nd January 2007 - 9:50 pm

Adrian SandersIf 2006 was the year of the renaissance of 007, 2007 could be the renaissance of the Lib Dems.

Despite taking a seat from Labour in a great Parliamentary by-election victory, launching the most radical green tax switch policy to reward work and punish pollution, and remaining the only force in Parliament around which opponents of the war in Iraq could unite, it was something of an Annus Horribilis.

The New Year offers us new opportunities to carve out distinctive positions on foreign affairs, domestic reform and where we stand in relation to the Government and Conservative opposition.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 3 Comments
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