Tag Archives: twitter

Daily View 2×2: 2 June 2009

By Helen Duffett | Tue 2nd June 2009 - 8:00 am

2 Big Stories

Expenses ‘mistake’ hangs over Darling
The Financial Times reports that not even the Chancellor himself is blameless in the MPs’ expenses controversy:

Alistair Darling’s future as chancellor was looking precarious on Monday after he admitted making “a mistake” over his expenses and Gordon Brown refused to say whether he would be in his job in 10 days’ time.

Mr Darling yesterday paid back £668 he wrongly claimed and apologised “unreservedly” but speculation was growing at Westminster that he could become the first chancellor in postwar Britain to be demoted in the middle of a recession.

Three things must ye know about …

Posted in Daily View | Also tagged alistair darling, ashley mote, bridget fox, european elections, gordon brown, mps expenses, richard allan and vince cable | 3 Comments

European Parliament uses social networks to promote elections

By Helen Duffett | Sun 17th May 2009 - 1:25 pm

The Eurovision Song Contest was last night but, Eurovoting and Eurovisual fans, you can still get your entertainment fix. (You’ll have to bring your own music though):

From The Register:

The European Parliament is treading bravely into the world of social networking in order to get the kids involved in the exciting world of European politics.

Bureaucrats have created profiles on popular social sites including Facebook, MySpace and photo sharing site Flickr. There will also be ad-word campaigns and banner ads on MySpace.

Elections run from 4 to 7 June, and the primary purpose of the campaign is to raise awareness of those dates as well as improving young people’s understanding of the European Parliament and the work of MEPs.

A YouTube channel has also been created.

The YouTube channel includes a short series of videos called “At the polling station” – these major on the speed and ease of voting, rather than the purpose or politics of the European Parliament. Short and almost non-verbal, they seem to be aiming for viral appeal. The “screaming” one is a bit much, though.

On the other hand, anything featuring both pedals and polling stations gets my vote:

Posted in Europe / International and Online politics | Also tagged european elections, european parliament and facebook | 1 Comment

Tweeting in adversity: Elliot Morley

By Mark Pack | Fri 15th May 2009 - 11:21 am

Last year I wrote about blogging in adversity:

When things go wrong or bad news breaks, it can be tempting to hunker down and say nothing. If you’re a blogger, particularly one who allows comments, the idea of having to write something for your blog can be very off-putting. The thought of ignoring the keyboard and just wishing that time would move on more quickly can be very alluring.

But is that the right response? It is a situation on which I have advised various people over the years, and nearly always the best advice is actually, “keep blogging”.

The same logic …

Posted in Online politics | Also tagged elliot morley | Leave a comment

Can we click it? (Yes, we can) – Politics and the internet

By Helen Duffett | Mon 20th April 2009 - 6:15 pm

The revolution will be tweeted? Well, it was in Moldova.

Two more stories which show that politicians and the mainstream press underestimate new media at their peril:

From Jemima Kiss at the Guardian:

Telegraph.co.uk has taken the ‘brave’ decision to publish a live Twitterfall stream of #budget tags on its Budget 2009 homepage.

Sounds simple enough, but, as some of Twitter’s more mischievous users have demonstrated, it does rather leave the Telegraph website open to editorial sabotage. Anything with a budget hashtag makes the page. Some moderation required, me thinks.

The Telegraph has now removed Twitterfall from its Budget 2009 …

Posted in News and Online politics | 5 Comments

How Twitter is fuelling a revolt against communism

By Mark Pack | Tue 7th April 2009 - 3:18 pm

Two days ago the Communists were declared victors in Moldova’s elections, triggering widespread unrest as people claimed the elections were rigged. Twitter has played a key role in organising the protests, as The Telegraph has reported:

Organisers used the social networking site Twitter to rally opposition to a Communist victory in legislative elections.

At least 10,000 protesters gathered and police fired water cannon but were unable to stop the crowd from breaking into the buildings…

“The election was controlled by the Communists, they bought everyone off,” said Alexei, a student. “We will have

…

Posted in Europe / International and News | Also tagged moldova | 8 Comments

Jury Team: so far, it’s a flop

By Mark Pack | Sat 4th April 2009 - 9:10 pm

Jury Team is the new political organisation that is letting anyone put themselves forward for selection as a European Parliament candidate on their behalf and is letting the public vote on who should actually stand.

Its launch got extensive mainstream media coverage, including from the BBC, Mail, Telegraph, Sky, Guardian and Sunday Times. Moreover, almost all of the coverage was very friendly, e.g. not pointing out the myriad of similar ventures in the past which have failed nor asking why their website goes out of its way to encourage anonymous donations.

With that favourable background and now only 20 days to go until the close of poll for their candidate selection process, it seems fair to judge Jury Team on how it is doing so far.

And the picture is one of a party that has flopped. Because the latest figures from their website shows that in three quarters of the European Parliament electoral regions the number of number of people who have applied to be a candidate is the same (2 regions) or less (7 regions) than the number of seats up for election. In one region, there is not even a single name put forward. Letting the public choose your candidates doesn’t add up to much if there aren’t enough on offer to provide an actual choice.

Moreover, the number of votes cast in total to select the candidates has been tiny. In only four regions have more than 150 votes been cast in total by the public, with the total under 50 in three regions (and zero in a fourth where there are no candidates on offer).

Far from being a major step forward in involving the public, the number of votes cast across a whole region in most cases is smaller than the number of votes often cast in the selection of a candidate for just one Parliamentary constituency by one of the mainstream parties. Similar, the numbers of supporters on Facebook or people looking at their films on YouTube are extremely small.

Even on Twitter, although the number of followers is superficially more respectable (but still under 1,000), it is only half the number of people who Jury Team are following on Twitter. Following double the number of people who are following you is normally a sure sign of a Twitter account that is trying very hard to get noticed (becuase if you follow someone on Twitter, they will often follow you back), but failing.

Overall, it’s looking rather like a flop so far.

Here are the full figures, taken from the Jury Team website and other websites on Saturday 4th April:

Posted in News | Also tagged jury team | 20 Comments

Keeping your social network presences under control with NutshellMail

By Mark Pack | Wed 18th March 2009 - 1:08 pm

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 email alert settings on each service, so that you get emails for the information you want to know about – but nothing more. Then you can set up some rules and a folder in your email program to file these alerts conveniently together in one place, away from the immediate urgent items in the inbox.

It’s what I’ve been doing, but it can take a bit of time to create and refine the setup. And for many people saying “set up an email rule” is rather off-putting. It may not be nearly as hard as they think, but whatever the reason, if they’ve been put off then that’s that.

Enter then, stage left, NutshellMail.

Posted in Online politics | Also tagged facebook, linkedin and nutshellmail | 3 Comments

Lib Dems in praise of Twitter

By Stephen Tall | Tue 10th March 2009 - 9:10 pm

There’s an irony in me writing this post. It’s about a fortnight now since I sat down and forced myself to work out how Twitter works, and what it was good for. I’d set up an account in 2007 (my first and last update recorded that I was “working frantically”; for whose benefit I uttered such an aphorism I now forget), but that’s as far as it went. I’m now gradually becoming a convert to the cause, in spite of rather than because of the Twitter-phile joy in which my LDV colleagues regularly indulge on this site – of which there are two exempla already this week, here and here.

The Times’s Rachel Sylvester has today published a widely panned article deriding the Twitter phenomenon, spuriously implying an inverse relationship between the growth in politicians who Twitter and a “wider loss of confidence by the political class”. Quite what her logic is escapes me – it appears to be a recycled hack-job of just the kind of nonsense which was being scribbled by journalists about blogging not so long ago. Before they themselves started blogging, that is. Or about texting before everyone realised how handy it is. Or about television/radio/telephone before that. Mostly, the article reads like the special pleading of someone so insecure about her own inability to comprehend something new that she would prefer to stick to simple knocking-copy instead.

Twitter is, let’s remember, simply a tool which allow its users to communicate and interact with each other in a way which suits them. It may not suit Rachel, it may not even suit Guido – but there are thousands of others it does suit. And many of them are constituents with just as much right to communicate with their MP as a Times journo.

But don’t take my word for it – a few other Lib Dem bloggers have today been extolling the virtues of Twitter, especially following its widespread deployment during the party’s spring conference this past weekend.

Posted in News and Online politics | Leave a comment

The power of enforced brevity

By Mark Pack | Mon 9th March 2009 - 10:20 am

‘Quality, not quantity’ – that was a regular theme in predictions made for what would happen to social networks during 2009 (for example, here). In other words, attention would shift from ‘how many friends/followers/fans have I got?’ to ‘who can I drop so that I’m not drowning in information?’

So far, those predictions aren’t looking that good, because not only has much of the buzz about social networks been around Twitter and the huge growth in the number of friends and followers, but also there hasn’t been a growth in applications and hacks to help with culling – usually a …

Posted in Lib Dem TV and Online politics | Also tagged 12seconds and horace | 4 Comments

Conference: Higher education paper

By Alix Mortimer | Sat 7th March 2009 - 12:01 pm

Breaking news! The Lib Dem Voice cupboard has a WINDOW! Yes, it’s a slightly unnerving black smoked glass internal window which reflects us as well as revealing the outside world, but it’s a window!

I missed Simon Hughes’ speech this morning, which is a shame as I am extremely hopeful about his capacity to advance the environmental agenda – we’ll bring you that video as soon as we’ve established that it exists.

Listening now to the motion on the Investing in Talent, Building the Economy paper (Adult, Further and Higher Education policy paper).

I’ve missed the movement from Stephen Williams, and come …

Posted in Conference | Also tagged david howarth, education, higher education, paula keaveney, simon hughes, stephen williams, tuition fees and universities | Leave a comment

Try Twitter at Lib Dem Spring Conference!

By Helen Duffett | Thu 5th March 2009 - 11:23 am

Posted in Conference and Online politics | Also tagged #ldconf | Leave a comment

You’d be a twit not to tweet

By Mark Pack | Thu 26th February 2009 - 10:20 am

March’s edition of Total Politics carries the following piece from me about Twitter, and in particular why councillors and would-be councillors should consider using it.

The Voice has covered Twitter more than once before, but if you are one of the many people who are just have joined Twitter or are now thinking about joining it, this post should be a helpful introduction.

What is Twitter?

When a jet plane crash-landed on the Hudson River in January, one of the first – and the most striking – photographs was taken by Janis Krums. On a passing ferry at the time, he used Twitter to send a quick message and photo. It quickly spread round the world, illustrating Twitter’s power at swiftly distributing short pieces of news.

At heart, Twitter is really very simple. It’s a free blogging service which lets you make posts (tweets) that are no more than 140 characters long. It is growing massively quickly in popularity, with website traffic in the UK up by 874% in 2008 (Hitwise figures).

Twitter’s enforced brevity makes it is well suited to brief updates (“Remember – planning meeting about park development 8pm today”), friendly chit-chat (“Congrats on passing your driving test”) and flagging up snippets of news (“Found a fantastic politics blog – https://www.libdemvoice.org”).

Passing on information, having a friendly chat, sending out updates: doesn’t that sound like what is at the heart of the relationship between councillors (or would-be councillors) and their colleagues and constituents?

Sometimes 140 characters isn’t nearly enough. But think of the occasions you never quite have time to write the website story or blog post or lengthy email – or when by the time you do get to sit at your computer the moment has past. Tweets often fit the bill nicely, particularly as Twitter is designed to be very easy to update from your mobile phone. So anywhere you have a basic signal – and a battery that isn’t flat – you can update.

To read other people’s updates you can either access the Twitter website, or install one of a range of free programs to your computer or phone. (In some countries, principally the US, you can receive other people’s updates by text, but this is no longer available in the UK.) For the more technically savvy, someone’s Twitter updates are also available as an RSS feed; for example, your local party website could display an automatically updated list of your latest tweets.

Twitter can also integrate with Facebook; indeed, for some people their Twitter use is really just a way to update Facebook. Once installed, Facebook’s Twitter application lets you have your Facebook status automatically updated each time you tweet. So one text message updates your presence in both places.

Getting started on Twitter

Convinced?

Posted in Online politics | Also tagged #hashtags and total politics | 1 Comment

A little Twitter gem for those interested in what Liberal Democrats are saying

By Mark Pack | Fri 20th February 2009 - 12:10 pm

Liberal Tweets is an aggregator (run by the king of Lib Dem aggregrators, LDV’s very own Ryan Cullen) which displays in one convenient place all the latest tweets from Liberal Democrat members who are using Twitter.

If you are one of those but aren’t yet being included, you can email [email protected]

PS If you are a Lib Dem Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC) on Twitter, you can let [email protected] know and your biography / contact information on the party’s main website will be updated to include Twitter.

Posted in Online politics | Leave a comment

How to backup Twitter

By Mark Pack | Tue 3rd February 2009 - 12:10 pm

Why backup Twitter?

It’s very easy to end up behaving as if an internet service will always be there and always be working, at least reasonably. But that’s a risky proposition, especially for free services – as was demonstrated at the weekend when Google, of all people, managed to wreck all the searches done on their search engine because of one wrong character in one place. Or as the Greek dramatist Agathon put it, “It is probable that the improbable will sometimes happen.”

Twitter is a relatively small company, with a technical track record that isn’t the finest and without an …

Posted in Online politics | Also tagged agathon, flickr and tweetake | 2 Comments

Lib Dem MPs on Twitter

By Alex Foster | Mon 12th January 2009 - 3:40 pm

I spent at least some time this weekend mentally upbraiding Iain Dale for his paranoia in thinking that technical faults that got in the way of a David Cameron interview with Andrew Marr stemmed from Labour supporting techies pulling the plug. Cameron had apparently insisted on being interviewed from home because the week before, Gordon Brown had been interviewed from 10 Downing Street. Iain tells us further the Beeb were none to happy with the arrangement but Cameron insisted.

So clearly, the only rational explanation was that peeved techies forced to do OB work on a Sunday combined with Aunty’s …

Posted in News | Also tagged andrew marr, david cameron, gordon brown, iain dale, Jo Swinson, lynne featherstone, rant, technology and tweetminster | 3 Comments

Someone’s attacked you online; should you respond?

By Mark Pack | Mon 5th January 2009 - 8:50 am

The US Air Force may not seem the obvious place to go for advice on this, but they do seem to take online communication seriously and are an organisation whose activities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, are frequently talked about online.

Being also rather a large bureaucracy, they’ve created a flowchart to help decide how to respond to online comments. Some parts are, er…, very American management speak (“proactively share your story”) but there’s also a lot of good sense in it, particularly in its five headings about responding to blog postings:

Transparency (make clear who you are)
Sourcing (give sources for your …

Posted in Online politics | 5 Comments

Reasons to like Twitter…

By Helen Duffett | Sun 4th January 2009 - 8:55 pm

…The Daily Mail doesn’t!

Posted in News and Online politics | 2 Comments

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?

Posted in Online politics | Also tagged bebo, facebook and myspace | Leave a comment

London is top location for Twitter users #SOTwitter

By Mark Pack | Sat 27th December 2008 - 8:50 am

HubSpot’s “State of the Twittersphere” report documents the sharp global growth in the use of the micro-blogging service Twitter over the last 12 months. It now has an estimated 4-5 million users worldwide, with traffic to its website up 600% over the last year.

Between 5,000 and 10,000 new Twitter accounts are being created each day, though without knowing how many are either becoming defunct or never really started, this number is of limited use.

Twitter users can type in their location in a brief biographical section. As this is free text, the entries are not easily analysable by country. …

Posted in Online politics | Also tagged Jo Swinson | 3 Comments

If you’re not at the Climate March…

By Alex Foster | Sat 6th December 2008 - 1:02 pm

Then the magic of hashtags brings you interesting news from those who are.

There’s a collection of updates from marchers, including the Voice’s own Kate Adie Helen Duffett, over at twemes or Twitter Search.

She’s also uploading pictures as she goes, including ones of Liberal Youth and Susan Kramer.

Posted in News | Also tagged #climatemarch | 2 Comments

Perhaps even I should think this is taking Twitter too far…

By Mark Pack | Thu 4th December 2008 - 7:55 am

Luddites may wish to mutter, “Really, why didn’t he just take two steps forward instead of doing this?”

PS Eagle-eyed viewers will notice the absence of a hashtag too 🙂

Posted in Online politics | 1 Comment

Nick Clegg: first British politician to promote hashtags?

By Helen Duffett | Tue 2nd December 2008 - 2:50 pm

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has emailed party members today to publicise Saturday’s National Climate Change March in London (email reproduced below).

Hashtag fans like me particularly liked the PS: Nick is encouraging participants to use the hashtag #climatemarch on Twitter and Flickr. As far as I know, Nick Clegg is the first British politician to promote the use of hashtags.

Whilst it’s a powerful thing for thousands of people to join together in one place and show their solidarity for a cause, this is a way for individuals to give their own report on events. Tweets bearing the …

Posted in Online politics | Also tagged #climatemarch, #hashtags, facebook, james graham and nick clegg | 12 Comments

Twitter, hashtags, electoral fraud and the US Presidential election

By Mark Pack | Thu 30th October 2008 - 10:52 pm

If only I could find a way to work chocolate into this story too… but TechnoSailor.com has a concise round-up of how Twitter and hashtags are being used as the US Presidential election draws to a close. The basic idea is to get in reports very quickly from around the country of any problems with / abuses of the voting process on Tuesday, which is a task well suited to Twitter (as people can quickly post updates from their mobiles whilst at the polling venues) and to hashtags (which provide an easy way to pull the information together).

Posted in LDVUSA and Online politics | Leave a comment

Twittering away

By Mark Pack | Wed 22nd October 2008 - 2:20 pm

A couple of weeks ago the Politics Online newsletter featured this piece from me about the use of Twitter. Knowing how badly LDV readers will be suffering from Twitter wittering withdrawal symptoms, here it is:

The recent withdrawal in the UK (and most other countries around the world) of free text updates from the micro-blogging service Twitter might have signalled a massive reduction in its use by the Liberal Democrats, but instead it has continued to grow in importance, helped by our experiments in tagging.

The party has just held its major annual conference, on the south coast of England in sunny …

Posted in Online politics | Leave a comment

Will the unthinkable happen on the internet?

By Mark Pack | Tue 30th September 2008 - 9:27 am

Internet users – myself included – have got used to relying on free online services which rely heavily on either online advertising or investors being willing to put up large pots of money even when there isn’t a clear way of turning users into income.

Many of the services have become such a key part of their users’ lives that their failure is often unthinkable to people. What would happen if you woke up tomorrow and discovered Facebook or Flickr or Twitter or Google or one of a score of other major free services had gone bust?

Well, you’d probably have more …

Posted in Online politics | Also tagged facebook and google | 13 Comments

Website news you may have missed during conference

By Alex Foster | Tue 23rd September 2008 - 12:02 pm

There was a huge upsurge in the quantity of posts during conference, so for your convenience, here is a quick recap of some of the technology news we featured during the week.

There’s a new Lib Dem website. Same address as the old one, but with buckets of new functionality. Hopefully, it will be introducing new people to local parties all the time, automatically.

The people who brought you Lib Dem Blogs are now bringing you Lib Dem Tweets – one handy, easy to find page bringing together the best of Lib Dem Twittering.

Posted in News | Leave a comment

Hashtag taxonomies: the last word in Tweeting?

By Helen Duffett | Sun 21st September 2008 - 3:19 pm

Wait, come back! It’s me, Helen, and I’m not going to blind you with science – just give you a guide to the craze that swept this year’s Liberal Democrat Conference. Or at least among its Twitter users. By the final day of Conference it had gained national media coverage. Because I slipped it into an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live!

It’s pretty simple: Twitter is a micro-blogging service which lets users send each other text-message-length updates. This can be done by sending an SMS to Twitter, or by logging on to www.twitter.com and posting there. Then your friends can follow them on the website, and in some countries (but no longer in the UK) receive a text containing your latest offering.

These short posts are known as ‘tweets’ and the overall effect is like being surrounded by birdsong; various voices calling back and forth. Bursts of communication that let others know, ‘I’m here.’

Posted in Conference and Online politics | Leave a comment

Hashtags – not just for Twitter!

By Alex Foster | Sun 14th September 2008 - 8:28 pm

The Tweme site I have been linking to over the last few days to show how hashtags work also has a photo section which works with the photo sharing website www.flickr.com

So, when I uploaded this photo I took of the hardworking Voice team yesterday afternoon, (including volunteer Gavin Whenman, recently co-opted Voicer Helen Duffett, multiple-award winning Alix Mortimer and in the distance suitably aloof commissioning editor Stephen Tall) I tagged it with #LibDem08 and it showed up on the website along with all the exciting Twitters.

Posted in Online politics | Also tagged flickr | Leave a comment

Twitter: a hit at conference

By Alex Foster | Sun 14th September 2008 - 6:23 pm

Oh dear – here we are again – hashtag taxonomies again, snigger, snigger.

Actually, twittering from conference is working quite well. It’s all the more important when hotels and conference centres are charging obscene fees for access to wireless access and the useful free internet access is massively oversubscribed.

And there have been really useful uses of the system this afternoon. I could commission Gavin Whenmen to write about a fringe because I knew he was there because he twittered about it.

Posted in Conference | Also tagged david cameron and Jo Swinson | 2 Comments

Hashtag taxonomies revisited

By Alex Foster | Sat 13th September 2008 - 7:05 pm

There has been concerted, and probably justifiable mockery of my phrase “hashtag taxonomy” coined in this post from yesterday. And it also didn’t help to find that somehow we promoted a subtly different version of the tag from the original suggestion – tags, after all, work best when they are consistent.

But despite these teething troubles, the idea has caught on with a key handful of twitterers who are now helpfully labelling their tweets with the phrase #LibDem08

I sense an entire audience out there on the edges of your seats earnestly waiting for an explanation of how this is at all …

Posted in News | 1 Comment

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