Just a quickie: the header graphic on the David Davis website has now been edited to show a bit of ethnic and age balance. However, data from the 2001 Census shows Haltemprice and Howden to be 98.2% white, and 24.5% over 60. On that basis, I’d probably have opted for more older faces, rather than more ethnic faces. And in the 42 days context, I guess you could make a case for an obviously Muslim person. But hey, at least it shows they’re listening. They’ve also added comment functionality on the ‘blog‘, plus a rudimentary forum. It’s a start.
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Reason to be miserable
I can’t make my mind up about the media attention drawn by Labour MP, and junior transport minister Tom Harris, for comments on his blog. Or more accurately, by the reproduction of those comments on the front of the Daily Mail.On the one hand, I’m quite pleased that the word ‘blog’ barely comes into it. The Mail story doesn’t use the b-word until its final few paragraphs. Blogging is a fact of life, unremarkable in itself. That’s a good thing.
But the Mail piece misses the very point about it being on a blog. The rules of engagement explicitly allow for the personal and provocative. Stirring up (hopefully reasonable) argument is precisely the point. And in fact, if you look at the comments on the item in question, that’s precisely what he did.
Perhaps the most positive aspect of the story is the fact that the debate is continuing on Harris’s blog – with numerous people now writing ‘I heard you on the TV/radio this morning, came to check out exactly what you’d said, and here’s what I think…’
Now let’s be realistic: it’s the Mail. They have an editorial line, based primarily around ‘hell’ and ‘handcart’, and this story has been squeezed forcibly into it. They do quote the caveats from Harris’s original piece, but only having discarded them initially. They make no attempt to tackle Harris’s underlying point about long-term improvement vs short-term adversity. They ignore some of his incontrovertible points. Oh, and their round-up of a ‘day of desperate economic news’ fails to mention the rather more upbeat news on retail sales.
As a side note: it was announced yesterday that the Mail’s site is now the most visited among the UK newspapers’ web presences. But only 27.2% of its users were actually in the UK – ‘the lowest share of domestic audience of any of the national newspaper websites that publish ABCe figures.’ If the Mail readers care so much about the UK, why don’t they come and live here?
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Liveblogging alternatives
With Twitter continuing to struggle with the basics, web-based liveblogging continues to march ahead, with news of several new apps out there. But whether they will rival the current (clear) leader, CoverItLive, remains to be seen.
ScribbleLive is interesting from the very start: yes, you have to log in… but using existing logins from services like Facebook, Windows Live / Hotmail or (apparently) OpenID. Makes a huge amount of sense for a tiny startup to outsource one of the major annoyances to these big players: top marks already.
But whereas CoverItLive feels like a hosted broadcast event, ScribbleLive feels more like a conventional blog with instant commenting enabled (and yes, I mean ‘instant’). There’s no sense of ownership; it looks like everyone can edit/delete anyone’s entries. You can upload images into the comment stream, and even reference YouTube clips (with URLs automatically converted to embedded video… nice). You can email comments and pictures in, which is cool. he catch? – it all takes place on ScribbleLive’s site, with no easy ’embedding’ options as yet.
Writing in the comments on TechCrunch, co-founder Michael Monte describes it in terms of chat amongst friends. ‘You go to a concert or a conference, and you want to invite your colleges to contribute to the event or the last episode of Lost is on and you and your friends what to discuss as the plot unfolds.’ And whilst that’s fair enough, it doesn’t (currently) amount to much more than Instant Messaging on the web.
Backnoise has even fewer strings attached. There’s no sign-in whatsoever: you just need to know the name of the ‘chat’, and you’re there. All updates are posted anonymously, with input windows refreshing on a timer: no Ajax here yet. There’s a basic ’embed’ option, using IFRAMEs. But most remarkably, there’s a ‘wipe it and start afresh’ button (labelled ‘buzzkill’) available to every user?! One for the anarchists, I’d say.
And yes, inevitably, there’s talk of a WordPress-based solution. Currently in development, wpliveblog promises a ‘similar feature set to ScribbleLive’: and on reflection, it’s easy to see how that might work. WordPress has several levels of user rights, allowing one person (or several) to be designated as the lead blogger and/or comment moderator, with a few selected ‘guest panellists’ given lower-level rights to bypass moderation. I guess you’d use a similar technique to a plugin like Official Comments to apply a different presentational (CSS) style to ‘hosts’ comments’ and ‘contributions from the floor’. The normal WordPress admin interface might be slick enough to manage it already.
If I was liveblogging something in the near future, I see no reason not to use CoverItLive. But the competition is heating up, and there’s unquestionable appeal in a WordPress plugin. I’m looking forward to seeing it in action.
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PM hails Google's model of globalisation
Gordon Brown’s big speech at Google’s Zeitgeist conference this morning saw the unveiling of a new initiative involving the MetOffice, British Antarctic Survey and Google Earth to visualise the (potential) effects of climate change worldwide. It’s quite nice, but ultimately you’ll load it up and go ‘hmmph’.More interesting perhaps was his citing of the lessons learned from the growth of Google’s industry for ‘how we build not simply a successful global economy but a global society’ – openness, non-protectionism, flexibility, inclusion.
He paints an optimistic vision of the future, based on a campaign in favour of globalisation. We get a few familiar tales of empowerment through technology, including yet another reference to crime mapping. And references to overturning protectionist monopolies will have gone down well with the Googlers in the audience, no doubt. ๐
It’s interesting to compare Brown’s words with David Cameron’s remarks to the very same conference, two years ago. Both reflect on the positive side to globalisation, but whilst Cameron’s focus is more domestic, Brown is talking (again) about the global economics of it all. ‘Zeitgeist’ is certainly the word.
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UK media endorses 'presidential' politics
There’s a very interesting revelation in Sky election expert Michael Thrasher’s analysis of last week’s election results. He notes the fact that Sky’s calculation of gains and losses was very different to the BBC’s: a question of how they both chose to handle boundary and allegiance changes. (An ugly consequence of the UK’s ever-changing geography, but that’s for another time.)
What intrigued me most was his revelation that the national media organisations have all agreed a common method for handling these calculations at the next general election, where similar boundary changes will also apply.
The national broadcast organisations, BBC, ITN and Sky, together with the Press Association, have agreed a set of estimated results for the 2005 election in newly created constituencies that sit alongside the real ones for constituencies whose boundaries are unchanged. The calculation of each party’s gains and losses are based on these agreed figures. Furthermore, the figures will take no account of any by-election changes or changes of party allegiance by individual MPs in the meantime.
In my mind, that effectively endorses ‘presidential politics’. You aren’t voting for an MP, you’re voting for a PM. It doesn’t matter if that MP changes allegiance; and by-elections can’t be taken seriously. The only count that counts is a general election.
Sadly, as often happens in statistics, there’s no right and wrong answer. You could very justifiably argue that it’s always better to compare like with like. You could equally argue that we already have presidential politics by default anyway. And that turnout at general elections is generally higher than by-elections, making them a more valid measure. All of which would make this decision the right one. So I’m not arguing with that.
It just seems a bit odd to see a formal institutional recognition that ultimately your choice of MP, whoever he/she is, and whatever happens to him/her do post-general election, is meaningless. So perhaps the only way forward for UK democracy is to recognise the presidential aspect, and separate the executive from the legislative. Yeah, like that’ll happen.
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Big fish in political blogging
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the right is better at blogging than the left. We can all think of reasons why – it’s easier in opposition, generally more affluent and more eloquent people, etc etc. But one factor I’ve started thinking about lately is the ‘big fish’ problem. Specifically how it relates to Comment Is Free.
Before I built my onepolitics political aggregation site, I hadn’t appreciated just how much content that one website generated. On a typical day, they publish 10-20 stories, sometimes as many as 30 – and all of them lengthy, considered pieces. The majority of items on the onepolitics homepage are usually from CiF; at certain times of the day or week, it can be entirely CiF.
My theory, still in development, is that Comment Is Free is too big. If you want to read left-leaning blog content, you could start and finish on that one website, and wouldn’t miss much. And if you’re a leftie blogger, getting an item on Comment Is Free would put your rant in front of many times more readers than any solo blog. (I believe it gets something like 400,000 unique users from the UK per month; that puts it well ahead of any pure ‘blog’, although it’s hardly a fair comparison.)
I was interested, in this context, to hear a comment from Slugger O’Toole founder Mick Fealty (hi Mick) – who, of course, manages to blog for both Comment is Free and the Telegraph. Asked about differences between the US, UK and Irish (North and south) blogospheres, he accepted that Slugger may have had a similar effect on blogging in its home patch of Northern Ireland:
In some respects Slugger was ahead of the curve. And it got big – probably almost too big, too quickly. And in some respects, in terms of developing a wider network, and people who would set up their own blogs, I think we may have been a slight inhibitor of growth.
I can’t say I’ve drawn a firm conclusion from all of this, but I’m quite prepared to propose that CiF has had a similarly negative effect on left-wing blogging in the UK. I emailed the Guardian a couple of weeks back, asking if they’d ever done any analysis of their usage patterns, or their position in UK blogging. So far, I’ve had no reply.
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New Puffbox.com site now live
Thanks for coming. Now go away.
As announced here a few weeks ago, I’ve taken the brave decision to leave behind my WordPress.com-based blog of two years standing, in favour of a self-hosted solution under my company Puffbox’s brand. It makes sense for all sorts of reasons I won’t list here. If you want to keep receiving my regular rants and reflections, you’ll now need to visit the all-new puffbox.com instead.
If you’re signed up to the RSS feed, and you’re in the majority who changed their settings as instructed, you shouldn’t now have to do anything. If you didn’t, shame on you. Hurry up.
I’m planning on leaving this site ‘live’ as an archive; in time, I may migrate all the old stuff over to the new site, but I’m reluctant to do so in these early stages, in case it’s seen as a ‘splog‘.
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Whitehall staff have no life
MySociety’s new travel-time maps are a fine piece of data visualisation / mashing, and a sociological warning.
In his book Bowling Alone, Harvard professor Robert D Putnam concluded that ‘every ten minutes of commuting reduces all forms of social capital by 10%’. By which calculation, if you live more than 50 minutes’ travel from your workplace, your involvement in your community and society reduces to – er – zero.
Meanwhile, the latest data from the Council of Mortgage Lenders shows first-time buyers are typically having to borrow 3.3x their income. And National Statistics data puts the median gross salary of a civil servant at ‘approximately ยฃ20,000 on an FTE basis’ (Sept 2006, see PDF).
Put those numbers together with the MySociety maps, and the picture is pretty bleak: Whitehall staff on all but the highest salaries can’t expect to live anywhere near their work, and hence can’t expect to have any kind of a social (capital) life. We end up with a central government bureaucracy ever further distanced from the citizenry it’s trying to service. Or am I stretching things too far?
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New Independent site: what an improvement
There’s no denying the Independent’s new website is a dramatic, and I mean a dramatic improvement. (Mind you, it couldn’t have been any worse.) Presentationally at least, they’re right back up there with their ‘broadsheet’ rivals.
They’ve struck an excellent balance, putting a lot of content and navigation options up-front, without becoming overwhelming. The use of Proximic to deliver related content seems to work well (although I hate the labelling); and the comment functionality, where they’ve chosen to use it, is nicely executed. Countless RSS feeds throughout the site – more than they publicise, as it happens. It looks like you can get an RSS feed of pretty much every level in the navigation structure, simply by adding /rss to the URL. In theory you can also get RSS feeds of search results, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Excusable teething troubles.
Interestingly, when it comes to blogging, everything’s still over at Typepad. (I confess, I never knew they did so much blogging – but judging by the low numbers of comments, nor did/do many others.)
According to the Press Gazette, the site ‘previously carried only news stories that had been repurposed from the newspaper’ – and having dropped by the site several times today, to see a virtually identical homepage, that’s still undoubtedly the core of the web offering. Sure, there’s a bit of ‘today’ copy from PA in there, but that doesn’t constitute rolling publication as such. I’m a bit wary of news that they’ve ‘taken on six members of staff to upload breaking news stories throughout the day’. We’ve surely gone beyond mere ‘uploading’, haven’t we?
But that’s just nit-picking, isn’t it. Well done, Independent. You just caught up, big time.
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Telegraph's new election map
I quite like what the Telegraph have done with their hexagon-based election map… a few holes in the data, slightly too long for comfort on a normal screen config, and a few not-quite-accurately-placed places (especially in NI), but a nice app nonetheless. I still have a soft spot for the Tetris-style presentation of the Electoral Calculus site, though.
Oh… and while we’re on the subject of the Telegraph, full credit to them for embracing OpenID. On one hand, it’s a smart branding move: its readers see themselves as ‘Telegraph people’, so why not authenticate themselves against the Telegraph site? On the other, it’s smart project management: sometimes the best way to get from A to B is to go via C.