Creating Community Conversations - Gallomanor

Blogs: Literature or Politics

Today it was announced that Riverbend, the author of Baghdad Burning, has been longlisted for a £30,000 Literary Award.  This follows on from the critical acclaim for the somewhat less worthy Belle de Jour.  Congratulations to the anonymous bloggers.

The other high profile arrival in the blogging world is very much not anonymous.  Rt Hon David Miliband MP, Minister of Communities and Local Government, has pressed the "Go Live" button on his blog.  So far, so good it seems to me.  It is clearly written by the man himself (or hats off to the ghost writer doing a brilliant job) and the comments section has not been heavily edited or "astroturfed" as some previous "conversations" have been.

A lot of comments focussed on the issue of using ODPM's resources for a Minister to blog when he could have used a free service like Blogger.  There are two issues.  The restrictions on talking politics that he feels are imposed upon him are not good for the conversation but will inevitably mean more focus on his role as Local Government Minister rather than as a Labour Politician which I expect is the intention.  Secondly the cost which David tried to deflect with some transparency today by clarifying that it only cost £200 for the software and £6,000 for the design, configuration and integration into the ODPM site.  I expect this made some eyes water in the blogosphere.  After all the Political Weblog Project has offered to do all that for MPs for a tenth of that sum.

All said and done a blogging minister is great news.  Welcome.

Horror Movie anyone?

Viewing the visitor logs for your blog can make strange reading sometimes.  Three weeks ago I wrote a post about a project called BlogCode.  BlogCode was intended to help visitors to a blog find other similar blogs that they might enjoy.  One of the unintended consequences of BlogCode is that sometimes a good match for a blog leads not to a like minded blog but one that has diametrically opposing views.  For example Bloggerheads and Guido Fawkes for a while seemed to be a good match even though the authors do not share many views.  Tim Ireland, of Bloggerheads, wrote that Guido was his "evil twin"

Well, the unintended consequence of writing that post is that this site features quite highly on some unusual Google search terms.  Such as "How to find the evil" and "Find the evil"

Anyone want to buy some Horror DVD's?

Online Diaries?!?

I don't want to come across all evangelical about blogs, but it is annoying to see the official Electoral Commission report on Election2005 refer to blogs as online diaries.  It will be very difficult to get politicians using blogging as an engagement tool if such influential bodies as the Electoral Commission persist in mis-representing them.

Political Weblog Project

Last night I attended the first seminar given by Tim Ireland of the Political Weblog Project. These seminars aim to convince MPs and their staff of the benefit of producing a weblog. 

In short. 

MPs should have a weblog for the following reasons:

• Protect their online presence.  A weblog can ensure top search results for an MP.  Without one a proxy blog or a newspaper might feature more highly in search rankings. 
• Issue control.  Because a weblog boosts your search rankings any posts on your key topics will appear highly in Google when people search for those topics allowing your viewpoint to come first.

When setting up a weblog MPs should:

• Use the right technology - such as Movable Type - and set it up correctly so that their weblogs can be as effective as possible.
• Use their own domain name, such as www.johnsmith.com, so it can be used even when the MP is not an MP (such as during an election) and so that you retain the flexibility to change your technology
• Be prepared to engage - not allowing comments and using the weblog as a one way broadcast will not endear you to other bloggers who are crucial to get your site high in the search rankings

More seminars are planned for the new year.  I'm hoping to get to work with us on producing something similar for Councillors along with a practical workshop on getting started.  Let me know if you're interested.