Puffbox

Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

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    BNP's shocking WordPress-powered website

    Late last year, I noted that the British National Party’s website was (by some degree) the most popular among UK political parties – and got dissed by the Telegraph for not linking to it. I wrote at the time that the site wasn’t exactly up to much, and I don’t have reason to visit it regularly. But, in the process of gathering some data on parties’ online activity, I dropped by yesterday… and got quite a shock.

    At the start of the year, the BNP relaunched its website. ‘Making the maximum use of the Internet has always been a priority for the BNP because the Party is censored and so misrepresented by the establishment media,’ said an article in their newsletter, Freedom. (Well, yeah, OK, carry on.) ‘The updated website helps fulfil this ambition with the sites new web pages matching and even bettering the traditional news and politics outlets.’ You know what? They’re not entirely exaggerating.

    The new site is based on WordPress, and is managing to turn over half a dozen stories daily: a combination of news items and columnists’ contributions, all attracting decent numbers of reader comments, with sharing buttons included. They’re using a well-established, off-the-shelf theme (The Morning After), with a bit of (less than subtle) customisation. The overall effect is very slick, very professional… and yes, their claim about ‘matching and bettering’ probably does stand up.

    There’s a wider lesson here. Blogging – by politicians, activists, journalists and amateurs – is now an established part of politics. I know of at least one major government website which is about to relaunch itself in a blog format; now here’s the first political party site to throw itself properly into that game. I dare say it won’t be the last.

    PS: The theme they’re using? Designed by an Indian chap. 🙂

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    Why Parliament doesn't like YouTube

    LibDem MP Jo Swinson raised the subject of parliamentary video clips going on YouTube, during questions to the Leader of the House last week. You can see it below.

    Helen Goodman’s response is enlightening: video material isn’t allowed to be hosted on a site where it can be searched or downloaded ‘to ensure that it is not re-edited or reused inappropriately for campaigning or satirical purposes’. In this day and age, it’s ridiculous…

    …as is proven, of course, by the very fact that I can post the above video clip courtesy of TheyWorkForYou‘s new ‘mechanical Turk‘-style manual markup initiative, and BBC Parliament’s recordings.

    It’s another MySociety project where my overwhelming feeling is disappointment: it’s sad that it has to come to this. And unfortunately, where Amazon can offer cash, MySociety can only offer warm feelings. But they seem to be making startling progress.

    By the way… the list of signatories to Jo Swinson’s early day motion is interesting, with quite a bit of Northern Irish interest, and almost nothing from WebCameron’s Tories.

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    On the political parties' sites…

    I’ve been looking at the various political party websites today, planning a possible enhancement to my onepolitics website. A few nuggets you might be interested in…

    • Plaid Cymru are on Twitter. Only a token effort, and only 9 mates. But it’s a start. (And its bilingual.) To their credit, they’ve also got presences on YouTube, Facebook and Flickr (details here).
    • The SNP don’t seem to have a YouTube presence. Seems odd, when they were among the first to get into it. (Anyone know of it?)
    • One thing the SNP do have, and it makes me a little uncomfortable, is a News Aggregator on their main party site. Why uncomfortable? Because it’s effectively just republishing an RSS feed from www.scotland.gov.uk (using Drupal’s built-in aggregation tool, by the look of it). Yet another blurring of the line between government and politics… and very awkward, where independence is an important characteristic (eg National Statistics stuff).
    • and most worrying of all… if you look for the site of Ian Paisley Peter Robinson’s DUP, and you happen to be running Google’s Desktop search app, you get presented with this.

    Visiting this site may harm your computer!

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    The best we can do?

    Nominations have closed for this, the tenth year of the New Statesman new media awards. So the winners of the five trophies are (theoretically) listed somewhere on this page. You might find a few gems you didn’t previously know about, but overall, I instinctively find the list a bit depressing.

    Most nominees have only received a single nomination, in many cases by themselves, judging by the frequent use of the words ‘I’ and ‘we’. Most are pretty straightforward uses of off-the-shelf technology, by ‘one man band’ operations. And from a technical and/or creative perspective, most frankly aren’t great.

    Maybe there’s a lesson in that. It’s now trivially easy to set up a passable website. Quality still takes time and skill, but you can get to the start line in next to no time, and with minimal up-front investment. From there, it’s really a question of the passion and commitment of the site ‘owner’, and its readership / community.

    But I dare say it’ll be the bigger fish who will win. Expect at least one for MySociety. And I’d like to see recognition for the London Mayor ‘votematch‘ site, one of the few sites recently to really make me think. (The result it gave still haunts me.)

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    Meet the mainstream

    Just to draw your attention to the latest website traffic numbers published by Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale. Now I’ve no desire to stir up previous arguments about statistical validity, certainly not here. But I do note Guido ‘s observation that his blog is now more popular than ITN, and Iain Dale attracts more traffic than the Guardian’s Politics site (excluding Comment Is Free, which may or may not be valid).

    Guido uses this to lay down a challenge – ‘who is the mass media now?’ – whilst Iain observes that there’s ‘an increasing overlap, whereby bloggers are now writing for and appearing on the MSM with increased regularity and mainstream journalists are now blogging’. Fair points on both fronts.

    Meanwhile, look at the numbers (in February) for the official party websites. Tories top, BNP a close second, Labour a distant third. All well behind the site for a man we can’t even vote for over here, though.

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    Re-engaging the public through violence

    Super Political BoxingI blame the Tories. They brought us ‘A Kick in the Balls‘, an attempt to make political capital from some (apparently) frank exchanges round the Cabinet table, with a Flash beat-em-up game aimed squarely at the viral market. Tekken it wasn’t. (In fact, playable it wasn’t.)

    Now, remarkably, we have Super Political Boxing for your mobile phone. It’s a reworking of a previous apolitical sports game by mobile specialists Glu, which goes for cartoon-style fun along the lines of the classic Punch Out, more than the simulation of EA Sports’s Knockout Kings / Fight Night series.

    It’s your chance to vent your anger against such world leaders as Bush, Berlusconi, Putin, a remarkably beefy Angela Merkel, and our own Mr Brown (with a guest appearance by his predecessor). It’s far from the most sophisticated mobile phone game I’ve ever played, but I’m partial to the occasional boxing game. The graphics are well done, it’s actually playable as a game, and it’s a laugh. Which, I guess, is all it was ever trying to be.

  • Brown comfortable on camera?

    Just a quick return to the subject of yesterday’s speech by Gordon Brown to the Google Zeitgeist conference. Having failed to watch the Windows Media stream on the No10 site, I was glad to see the speech posted on the event’s YouTube area. And it’s remarkable for one reason: look how relaxed Gordon Brown seems, for a man supposedly at political rock-bottom. Granted, we could do without the ‘watching tennis’ head movements, but be fair to him – he’s only got one working eye. (Hat-tip: Dizzy.)

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    Sky News covers threesome live

    There’s no stopping CoverItLive, the specialised live-blogging app. It’s becoming a regular feature on some of the leading political blogs… and now the Sky News website has arrived at the CIL party, carrying a live three-way interview (you can’t really call it a ‘chat’) with the leading candidates in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election this morning.

    They’ve used it as a pseudo-chat application, which (as I’ve said before) isn’t its optimal use case. It’s a live blogging tool, intended for one individual to post rapid-fire comments, with occasional contributions from readers. Yes, you can use the same functions to deliver a moderated chat function, but that’s really not the point. To be honest, reading back through the chat transcript, it’s really quite hard to follow without the strong leadership of an active moderator/host.

    Still, it’s quite interesting to see the very different approaches to the live chat medium. Lengthy contributions from an eager LibDem candidate, occasionally too eager on the copy-and-paste a few times; mind you, host Martin Stanford did the same a few times. Snappy – almost too snappy? – answers from Labour’s Dunwoody Jr. And (it must be said) very rare contributions from the Tory, who appears to have arrived late.

    PS: I’m just sorry they didn’t invite the Monster Raving Loony candidate, The Flying Brick (?) to participate. My favourite from the list of policies on his website: ‘I will introduce piranha to the river Weaver, this will make fishing a spectator sport. Tourism would be increased tenfold and jobs increased in the Leighton Hospital. I propose a new, world leading, ward opened specialising in fish bites.’

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    Web as a weapon: visionary stuff from Gordon Brown

    It didn’t generate much media coverage, but there were some stirring words in Gordon Brown’s speech on Saturday to the Church of Scotland general assembly. One of the recurring criticisms levelled against him has been a lack of a defining vision: well, try this one for size.

    The greatest arsenal of power today is not nuclear or biological or chemical but people – the discovery of our capacity to come together across borders and oceans and to stand together as one. And what I want to argue is that the joining of these two forces – the information revolution and the human urge to co-operate for justice – makes possible for the first time in history something we have only dreamt about: the creation of a truly global society.

    A global society where people anywhere and everywhere can discover their shared values, communicate with each other and do not need to meet or live next door to each other to join together with people in other countries in a single moral universe to bring about change. I believe that these vast and swiftly summoned movements of people coming together can now become the most powerful weapon for justice ever put in human hands.

    It’s great to see a politician, the Prime Minister indeed, going a step beyond the ‘information revolution’ phase, and talking about the impact on society and human relationships both nearest and distant. Steadily we’re seeing The Establishment start to recognise how far the transformation goes. But one wonders if the PM will feel it even more directly after the Crewe by-election on Thursday night: the Tory bloggers, like the party they support, are pushing as hard as they possibly can.

    Interestingly, what little media coverage there was – particularly in the Scottish papers – has been overwhelmingly positive for the PM; in stark contrast to virtually everything else from the nationals lately. ‘If Gordon Brown was Prime Minister of a better Britain, then his speech yesterday would have confirmed this son of the manse as the man Britain believes is right to run the country,’ writes Scotland on Sunday’s Kenny Farquharson. The Sunday Mail was even more direct: ‘On his home turf he showed that he is still the man to lead Britain.’ It’s not all bad out there.

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    Blears backs wider use of online petitions

    Writing on Comment Is Free, Hazel Blears reckons Labour’s problem is that it has become distanced from its voters. ‘The problem is the powerlessness within the system for the majority of people,’ she writes. ‘People feel that their views disappear into a black hole, without the slightest echo.’

    Hazel’s solution is ‘a healthy dose of direct democracy’: more directly elected mayors, a reinvigorated co-op movement, and online petitions. ‘Petitions, especially on-line, should be used to guide the deliberations of local councillors and ministers,’ she says. ‘Petitioners should be able to press for debates in council chambers and even parliament.’

    If that inspires anyone to set up their own petitions system… don’t forget that the Downing Street petitions system, built by MySociety, is ‘open source’, meaning you can download and use it free of charge.