European Political News

Accessibility and Useability are two features which are necessary for a website in 2008 to be successful, but not sufficient on their own. Bendy Girl asked about the accessibility features of the designs I am looking at for the Wardman Wire: I like the light background too, I always find dark backgrounds difficult on the eye and [...]

Further to my previous post about the new front end design for the Wardman Wire, I've tried it with a "light" stylesheet rather than a "dark" one.

Here is a screenshot which also includes a "video" module, showing Tim Ireland's video in support of the Campaign for the Iraqi Interpreters.

Over the weekend I've been playing with a new alternative front end for the blog. It is designed to give a more "newsy" view than the "time-based" view of the traditional blog format, and to help make it easier to keep track of the amount of material that we are now publishing. The idea is that there will be a more "magazine" style page on www.mattwardman.com, and the existing design will stay on www.mattwardman.com/blog/. Here is a screenshot of the prototype

Smartclient ftp setup: "Cannot install as Smartclient ftp setup is currently in use."

Ha ha ha! Very funny - I don't think.

Good package if you can get it to install, though.

Iain Dale reports that a Group Blog has started from the House of Lords, which seems to be Clive Soley expanding his existing project sideways - admirable. This is from Clive Soley, Lord of I’ve forgotten where: In 2003 I started a blog as an MP. I regarded it as a success and it certainly attracted some interesting debates. It was important for me because it enabled me to talk direct to people without first finding a media outlet. I saw it as a meeting room without walls. There are problems for an elected representative however. The more successful your blog is the more time consuming " and time matters for MPs! You also have to decide whether to answer all the points or just those from constituents or just let the blog run itself with occasional inputs from the MP Over the last 12 months I have let my blog http://clivesoleymp.typepad.com/ drift into gentle decline with only occasional posts. But down in the Westminster forest something was stirring. I had talked to the Hansard Society and to the House of Lords Library and Information department. The result? A new Lordsoftheblog http://www.lordsoftheblog.net/ has emerged blinking into the daylight! The Hansard Society has been a good midwife! Nine Lords are participating and I think that number will grow. The idea is, in effect, a group blog. We all make (hopefully!) two posts a week and no doubt each Peer will decided how and when to respond to comments. I hope it will give people a greater insight into the working of the House of Lords and enable Peers to inform people of their views and their actions, their votes and their policy aims. MPs and Peers need to find new ways of engaging with the public. A blog is not the complete answer to the feeling of alienation from the political system that many feel today but it is part of the answer. In the 1950 trade unions and the church played a bigger role in informing people about their political rights and duties. That has gone and the conventional media has been unable to replace it. There is no shortage of opinion today " almost everyone with access to the internet can have their shout but Peers and MP are legislators and what they think and do is more than opinion " it is also news. So we now have one more way of telling people what we are doing and why. Hopefully it will also give the public a chance to talk to us more directly even if we cant promise to answer all their comments or to do everything they would like us to do. My thoughts The welcome: I wish it well. Like Paul Burgin, I hope it helps make the workings of Parliament better known. And the niggles: Like nearly everybody else they have put it on an international dot Net domain, (http://www.lordsoftheblog.net/) which guarantees that it will be harder to find for people searching on Google UK. Welcome to the political blogging ghetto, M’Luds. In their case, the House of Lords profile may help. A serious one. Why do establishment blogrolls all consist of the same “Great and the Good” boilerplate. Has no one any imagination or willingness to spend some time looking for interesting hidden blogs (no, I don’t necessarily mean this one - I mean interesting real life blogs). You have some leverage to help demolish the walls of the political blogging playpen - please use it to link to blogs that don’t get enough attention. Why not a rotating schedule of those not in the Iain Dale 500?) I like the Terms and Conditions clause 5: “Dont submit comments which are substantially material from another website, publication, news feed or blog.” Someone will have some fun with that.For a start, the T&Cs themselves appear to be substantially material from the Food Standards Agency, WorkJam, DirectGov or the Department for Communities and Local Government Webchats (among others), and I claim my ?5. OK, two of those are Hansard Society Websites -but even so! I wonder whether corporate consultants (as opposed to micro-consultants who are far better value when not being discriminated against by the tax system) charged a 4 figure sum to write those T&Cs originally. Wrapping-Up Anyway, I’ll be following Lords of the Blog to see how it goes. Tags: lords of the blog, nine lords a leaping, clive soley, Lord Soley, Lord Norton, Lord Tyler, Lord Lipsey, Lord Dholakia, Baroness D’Souza, Lord Teverson, Baroness Young of Hornsey, Baroness Murphy

It seems to me that Steve Job’s application of Ockham’s Razor will continue. The keyboard will be abolished and we will all have to communicate with our Macs in morse code using the single mouse button. Hmmm. Tags: steve jobs, ockham’s razor, mouse button, macintosh, mac

Today “Parliamentary Roundup Thursday” gains another report. In addition to Sadie’s “Westminster Watch” report, today Will Patterson - who writes the J Arthur MacNumpty blog and contributes to the Scottish Roundup - has done the first weekly roundup with news from the Holyrood Parliament. For now I’m calling the column “Holyrood Herald“, but we may come up with a better name (suggestions are welcome). Over the next several weeks a roundup from the Welsh Parliament (”Senedd Scan“?) will be added, and I’m working on similar roundups from Stormont and Brussels/Strasburg. The Roundup of the Papers will be out in the early evening today, and will be - shall we say - idiosyncratic. As a final note, I have added mobile websites to the Scottish Politics and Welsh Politics blog aggregators, and to the Comment from the Senedd Welsh Assembly AM Comment “blaggregator”. The links are, respectively, http://m.politics-scotland.co.uk/ http://m.politics-wales.co.uk/ http://m.senedd.me.uk/ These are experimental at this stage, so there may be some glitches - and I welcome comments. Tags: daily roundup, holyrood herald, will patterson, mobile phone political feeds, scotland, wales

If you visit http://m.mattwardman.com/ there is a version of the Wardman Wire formatted for mobile phone use. I’d be interested in your comments on whether it works on different devices - and how well. To create this version, I have used a service called Mowser that simply reprocesses your RSS feed. Tags: mobile feed, wardman wire mobile, mowser

Tom Watson has picked up on my proposed Guidelines for Civil Servants: Matt Wardman has a different take on the issue. Hes saying theres no need for any guidelines. For Matt, the civil service code will suffice. Id be interested to know if current blogging civil servants think that code provides the clarity you need to blog sensibly without fear that youre doing something wrong. I’m arguing for a strongly minimalist approach: 99.9% of Civil Servants are sensible and professional people of integrity. Civil Serf is an exception in not behaving professionally. Exception control for the 0.1% in this case should be by disciplinary action of the 0.1% under the Civil Service Code, not by creating guidelines for the 99.9%. Blogging guidelines are only an unnecessary result of a need to be seen to take dynamic action. A multiplication of guidelines like rabbits will only serve to generate more boundary quarrels, and waste more time in argument about whether the letter of the guidelines has been breached or not. And then there will have to be a review of the guidelines to identify the weak points. And a policy commission to evaluate the results. And then there will be even more guidelines. And they will have to be put under version control, and distributed to all the Intranets etc etc etc sod it go to 5 and continue in circles. In summary - Ockhams Razor just shredded the guidelines. Or the need for them. Just follow the Civil Service Code. And there is a further debate going on in the comments. Involving blogging Civil Servants themselves is an excellent - nay essential - idea. (more…) Previous in series

There are 7 ways I can think of to blog about your employer: Don’t Persuade them to let you. Be anonymous, but not anonymous enough. Ask, and risk a “no”. Be anonymous and notorious. Do it as part of your job. Employ yourself. In this article I describe each option, and my assessment of the pros and cons - where they occur. If you do blog about your employer, any option (except number one) should make your life more “interesting”, for a time at least. (more…) Previous in series Next in series

The site for the 18 Doughty Street online TV station is off the internet. I had expected the site to be preserved as an archive, but as the Feral Pigeonnotes: Am I the only one to notice that 18 Doughty Street has totally disappeared? Iain Dale told us it was going to get bigger and better. They even had a wordy statement on the website before it too went bye-bye. Where did it go? I was trying to find a show from last year that talked about Recess Monkey posting prematurely on the death of Margaret Thatcher, which later turned out to be a trick played on the editor of the left-wing blog. How can a TV station just disappear like that? I think it’s a mistake to let the site go off the air - the archive site that was left was doing a good job in preserving access to the output of an experiment that produced some quite significant material. To my thinking, the best material of all were the extended interviews with politicians, and some of the more idiosyncratic voices that had a real platform for the first time. Fortunately some of the archive is preserved, so I will post a daily video from the collection until I run out of material that I think will be of continued interest. They may be in popup windows, however, as I think the videos are wider than my blog template would permit. We’ll see. [Edit: I have softened my comment in this post slightly - without changing my sentiment.] Tags: feralpigeons, 18 doughty street, mike rouse

It’s Sunday, it’s sunny and I’m at the computer typing because I’m grumpy. This morning the Grobserver has another “top bloggers” list - the most powerful 50 bloggers in the world. This one is as self-absorbed as all the others, being a (drum roll, hold breath, straighten shoulders, salute the Grobserver) list of (taran-tara): The world’s 50 most powerful blogs I hate this sort of list in the national media. The last one I looked at was the Evening Standard’s moronic “New Media London Top 50” list in October 2007. That included Tom Coates, Iain Dale, Tim Montgomerie and Alex Hilton. They are all good bloggers, but the “well informed media people” who compiled it had missed out Pete Cashmore of Mashable who was no. 8 on Technorati at the Time. They may say: but we didn’t know, he’s geeky and we’d never heard of him. Precisely. Now you know why such lists should not be compiled by individuals of species homo-sapiens-sapiens genus metropoli-mediatartus. Some Features of a List of Top Blogs Quotes measurements as if they mean something, but instead just succeeds in looking ill-informed by using different measurements in different places. So what if “Page Views”, “Hits”, “Visitors”, “People”, “Unique Visitors” all sound different - it doesn’t matter, ya? Geographical blinkers, like some racehorses and George Bush. 16 of the 50 most powerful blogs by Brits or based here? I don’t think so. Quotes blogs that have usually previously appeared in the MSM (apart from the “author’s darlings” selection included). The Grobserver List While I’m being grumpy, I note that only one of the authors of this list appears to have a blog. Hmmm. (For the record, Anna Pickard. Hi Anna.) A few questionable inclusions Marbury is in - it is a 3 month old British commentary blog on the US Election. PoliticalBetting, perhaps Britains best political website with much US Election coverage, a specially organised night during one of the primaries, and 1 million page views a month, is not in. Nor are blogs such as the Daily Kos or dozens of other top US Political Blogs. The FWord is in. An excellent niche blog - but the world’s most powerful 50? Come on, boys and girls. Private and Secret Diary. It’s a one man Norfolk version of the Archers, which isn’t even in the Technorati top 50,000. Why? Bean Sprouts. Good blog, but technorati ranking of 27,000. 409 visitors a day (OK call it 800 as Sitemeter misses around half). 84 RSS subscribers. Most powerful 50 in the world - what are you on? These 4 shouldn’t feel got at if you find this list. All damn good blogs that are being misdescribed by the Grobserver (as are about 20 others). If you’d said “50 blogs which we find interesting” you’d have no problem - but why all this “world’s top 50 most powerful blogs” self-puffery? “Power Bloggers” List Recipe for people with Contacts Here’s my recipe for the next list. Keep the list down to 50 or so (don’t exhaust the meme). Take a few (say 20-25%) obviously top blogs (careful to leave a different equally good selection out for next time). Add in an eclectic selection from the Technorati Top 1000 (or top 50000+) - need to be able to do different lists for next year/next month/next week/this afternoon. Add a sprinking of niche blogs very few people have heard of but which the compilers think deserve to be influential. If it’s for the Grobserver, remember to spell at least one blog incorrectly to fit with editorial policy - for example “Peteite Anglaise“. Wrapping Up Next time please save the money, save the administration, save the hassle, and save me the stress. Four suggestions: Try (just once) my algorithm above. Don’t use such an idiotic headline. Give the byline to Max. Don’t mention hills in north London. OK. You can go out to play now. Tags: guardian, observer, grobserver, Jessica Aldred, Amanda Astell, Rafael Behr, Lauren Cochrane, John Hind, Anna Pickard, Laura Potter, Alice Wignall, Eva Wiseman

Looking at Mike Rouse’s new website mikerouse.net, and there - nestling in the bottom corner under “Contributions” - is Mike’s “Wardman Wire Column“, under the title “Not a Number“. The colour scheme will wake you up of a morning. You have been warned. Hmmm. I wonder if mentioning this site will help him get a job. Tags: mike rouse, wardman wire

Hopefully to everyone - since this article is to introduce a whole new set of political websites and RSS Feeds that I have been working on since before Christmas. I have also added them all as a toolbar to all the sites. The most significant additions are websites and RSS feeds for blogging members from: The Westminster Parliament The Welsh Assembly The Scottish Parliament The European Parliament As far as I am aware, these feeds are not available from elsewhere - at least with such memorable addresses (see below). Niche Blog Aggregators I’ve been developing niche aggregators since last year, and I’ve now added a toolbar to a number of sites above. I explained my ethos in full here. Briefly, I only use the Excerpt from each article and link directly to the sites concerned - to drive traffic to each blogger’s website rather than keep visitors on the aggregator, and build a combined RSS feed from each website. List of Websites Here’s the full list of websites included in the toolbar above. The Wardman Wire - Matt Wardman on Politics, News and Culture Poliblog Perspective - The Nuts and Bolts of Political Blogging Daily Roundup by Matt Wardman - Matt Wardmans Daily Roundup of News and Comment in the British Media English Political Comment Aggregated - Political Comment from English Bloggers Euro Political Comment Aggregated - Political Comment from Euro Bloggers Irish Political Comment Aggregated - Political Comment from Irish Bloggers Scottish Political Comment Aggregated - Political Comment from Scottish Bloggers Welsh Political Comment Aggregated - Political Comment from Welsh Bloggers Comment from Westminster MPs Aggregated - Comment from Westminster MPs Comment from Senedd AMs Aggregated - Comment from Senedd Ams Comment from Holyrood MSPs Aggregated - Comment from Holyrood MSPs Comment from Brussels MEPs Aggregated - Comment from Brussels MEPs Feed Addresses This is a full list of the 12 feed addresses. http://feeds.feedburner.com/mattwardman http://feeds.feedburner.com/poliblogperspective http://feeds.feedburner.com/dailyroundup http://feeds.feedburner.com/politics-england http://feeds.feedburner.com/politics-europe http://feeds.feedburner.com/politics-ireland http://feeds.feedburner.com/politics-scotland http://feeds.feedburner.com/politics-wales http://feeds.feedburner.com/uk-parliament http://feeds.feedburner.com/senedd http://feeds.feedburner.com/holyrood http://feeds.feedburner.com/europarl OPML File You can get it as an opml file here. This was exported from Feeddemon, so it should be compatible with most RSS readers. Put me in / Take me out Email “mattwardman [at] gmail [dot] com”, and I will consider adding you to the relevant aggregator. The only tricky one will be the English Aggregator, as there are a large number of English Political blogs. If you want your personal blog removed from any aggregator, then I will do so without question for private individuals. I will need more persuasion to remove Elected Officers, as I think inclusion is a matter of public interest; I also stuggle with the concept of any Member of Parliament wanting less publicity. I may also get slightly grumpy with anyone who calls a stream of weekly press releases a “blog” ! Wrapping Up If you know of any Members of Assemblies or Parliaments who I have missed, please drop me an email and I will add them. Please also do so with any bugs you discover. I have not developed a site for the Stormont Assembly, as I do not know of any members there who maintain blogs. There’s some tuning to do with these sites on content, but they should be quite stable. I hope they are useful - especially in saving some time for bloggers keeping up to date. Tags: matt wardman, blog aggregator, senedd, holyrood assembly, scotland, wales, england, house of commons, europe, brussels, ireland, politics, current affairs

When I started talking the Daily Roundup podcast, back in January I said: I have been running a short alpha trial across my sites and a number of blogs of friends and colleagues who are kindly helping to test the system - these are currently highlighted at the top of the page. It seems to work reasonably well, although it has been interesting figuring out a way to collect credible statistics. I see the alpha trial as continuing for another week or two. The trial has been running for around a month now, and I have done about 25 podcasts. The three key points are: It has taken me roughly 1 hr on a good day to prepare the roundup and podcast. This is too much time to spend every day for one person without making it a really major priority, but has a lot of potential. There is a good deal of advantage in doing both a written roundup and an audio podcast - perhaps as much as 25% on the total time. I am doing one more podcast for tomorrow with reflections, and I will be looking for a small number of collaborators to look at continuing to produce the podcast. If you may be interested, please drop me an email. I’ll be writing a more detailed set of comments as my Blog Platform column tomorrow. Tags: daily roundup podcast, daily podcast, daily paper roundup, matt wardman