Coulson: I didn't do it. Nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything

Andy Coulson tells MPs 'things went badly wrong' at News of the World

Former News of the World editor Andy Coulson speaks of deep regret but says he had 'no recollection' of phone hacking

What is the real Tory policy on social media + government IT?

Image by brothergrimm via Flickr

The Tories are very reluctant to spell out much about the policies this far in advance of a likely general election. As a result they keep sending out mixed signals on what they will actually do if elected, which are usually not picked up in the press.

An example would be David Cameron's high profile anti-homophobia stance vs a new report from Ian Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice which says that some rights of same-sex partners who are not biological parents should be downgraded, all in the name of maintaining 'normality'.

"We believe the desired objectives could be better achieved by giving a same-sex partner special guardianship status rather than by having two females registered as parents, since this is fundamentally incompatible with the heterosexual reality of parentage," they say.

Another bunch of mixed messages are on government use of social networks and IT.

Civil Pages is a new internal government social network which is based on highly successful ones used in many big businesses like IBM. The idea is to help departments work collaboratively, share knowledge and best practice, and avoid duplication of work.

The Daily Mail lept on it, dubbing it the government's 'Facebook' and ran to a Tory MP for a negative comment. They got Eric Pickles, the Conservative Party chairman no less.

"We have 2.26million unemployed people crying out for Government help and Labour are squandering taxpayers' money on Facebook. What people want is for the Civil Service to get on with their jobs and give the taxpayer value for money. What they don't want is people idly wasting their time indulging in meaningless gossip."

I can just imagine those other Tories who are using social media to promote the party and who are promoting government use of it, those who 'get it', quietly throwing up their hands at this rent-a-quote ignorant nonsense.

Now we have Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, going at public sector organisations sharing of IT systems and processes in the name of privacy.

Again sounding like a Daily Mail hit piece Green says:

"It has its roots in a false analogy with the private sector, which has indeed used ICT to provide services more efficiently and cheaply. The difference, of course, is that in almost all industries any private sector operator cannot compel us to use its services."

"Government can not only compel us to use them, but can change the rules, and the terms and conditions, whenever it suits."

Green also criticised the other two main elements of the Transformational Government strategy, describing the aim of designing IT enabled services around the citizen and business as "largely cosmetic", and the campaign to build IT professionalism in government as "largely comic".

So does that mean he supports the opposite? Going backwards?

There is much to criticise about the delivery of 'transformational government' but Green sounds like he wants to return to paper shuffling - and inefficiency - in his drive to knock the government.

"The cost of running Britain's state run databases over the next 10 years has soared to £34bn. This is presented as being for the convenience of the citizen, when the overwhelming driver is the convenience of the state."

Note the use of the scare word 'databases' and I would seriously question what that figure actually means. Nowhere does this Tory talk about efficiency and better service delivery.

Green proposes five principles 'to determine the relationship of the citizen and the state', the fifth one of which is 'the delivery of public services should not be determined by technology alone'. What the hell does that mean?

It sounds luddite, it sounds like he equates 'technology' with the advance of the robots, it sounds like a play to the Daily Mail-led gallery.

On government use of technology and social media the Tories speak with a forked tongue. Should those of us working to advance both be concerned enough to extend that metaphor?

New Tory slogans

Now this is more like it. A online Labour idea that's workin' ... snap.

Hardly a new idea - here's one where you can add your own slogan to that classic Obama poster, now in the Smithsonian - but a good one nevertheless.

It's the Tory logo generator. Go make your own. Here's some that others have dreamt up.

'Sucessful online politics needs community organisers'

So much 'stuff' in the Guardian's interview with Thomas Gensemer of Blue State Digital (Obama campaign) that it's virtually a transcription.

Nothing new on the ideas front (for there - for here there are stacks) but all put extremely well (Gensemer's a great salesman). Such as his criticism of the way British parties are currently approaching new media.

"They have focused too much on gimmicks and what they can sell to the press," he says. "Now Labour MPs are using Twitter, but the political capital that went into getting a couple of MPs to Twitter probably wasn't worth it. Prescott's petition on the bankers has 15,000 signatures, but what are they asking people to do? You could have asked for different things that would create a greater sense of engagement. None of this is a technology challenge; it's an organisational challenge, being willing to communicate with people."

And this point, about whether it woz the web wot won it, which continually gets lost:

"It comes back to the fact that we elected a president who used to be a community organiser, and that's a very different mentality from other campaigns".

Who are we

Strangely proud of Iain Dale today.

Strangely? Because he's a Tory and I'm not. We may both be gay but so what.

What we agree on is that the treatment of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown MBE tells us something is wrong in the UK. (Maybe the gay thing isn't so irrelevant after all.)

Alibhai-Brown is an Independent columist and commentator.

In a highly personal and moving video on the Guardian's site (fix this Guardian, put in ads like the US networks, embedding makes monetisation sense!) she describes her treatment as a Muslim attempting to travel to Scotland.

Dale:

Tell me you aren't ashamed at what our country has become when a middle aged muslim woman of Asian descent can be treated like this. She was questioned at length by plain clothes police officers who never once told her who they were or why she was being questioned. They frightened her so much she wet herself.

Draper's crowd should be proud of themselves. They rail against imagined racism, yet introduce laws which allow muslim women to be traduced like this. In the video, Yasmin says she loves this country. Hearing how this country treated her, I could forgive her if she had had other thoughts.

Yasmin and I agree on virtually nothing. Where she is right wing (and on some social issues she is) I am not, and where she is left wing I am not. So whatever your opinions of her writings and opinions, I hope you will agree with me, that when this sort of thing happens, for no apparent reason, it is grounds for us all to be concerned about what is happening to our liberties.

I was under the impression that we fought wars so British citizens weren't treated like this.

But to Dale's commentators Alibhai-Brown is NuLabor, someone who deserves this treatment, someone who invited it, someone who does not deserve sympathy. To them, those wars were fought for purely 'British' people, not her.

To them I say that sympathy is a British value. The same value which should be extended to gay men or lesbians fleeing Iran or Iraq — otherwise what are we but just another country? Or just the imperialist country everyone else thinks we are that behaved like thugs, racists and vandals down the years?

Strangely proud to be British in finding this agreement with Iain Dale.

The C team

This seems to be about the best we can come up with on the humorous political video front in the UK.

Mild chuckles ...

Ha ha

Here's Osborne in full Bullingdon Club mode circa 1992. Nat Rothschild is #7.



Worth a zoom in methinks ... very Brideshead ...

Honesty in backdrops

'


After years of seeing 'diversity', pearls and pants-suits in backdrops to male politicians it's nice to see some honesty coming from the Tories.

Scrapbook clips catch up

Shockingly slow catch-up ... so sue me!

Danny Finkelstein likes the new Conservative website and, er, so do I. It doesn't actually just adopt the US template (like Paddick did) and has some innovations. Like Danny I fancied the Conservative Wall with its pop out voters.

And two thumbs up for a strong accessibility statement.

Via arstechnica: Fake popup study sadly confirms most users are idiots

Via techpresident: Tracking a Political Meme: McCain vs Paris Hilton. This has some fab animated 'maps' showing the meme's spread across the blogosphere.

Via fivethirtyeight:Intrade Betting is Suspicious. Very interesting post about how some partisans are - apparently - gaming this major online betting shop, one which is often reported on as an impartial predictor.

HT: Tom Watson: Election 08 on Twitter. V. Useful pull-together of related twitter feeds.

These tools were also used to great effect during the Republican convention, where mass arrests, including of many journalists, and 'pre-emptive' raids occurred.



Andy Burnham threatened web regulation in a recent speech, which contained the following daft quote:

"The internet as a whole is an excellent source of casual opinion. TV is where people often look for expert or authoritative opinion."

Half world's population 'will have mobile phone by end of year', apparently. Speaking at a conference, Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the International Telecom Union, said:

"The fact that 4 billion subscribers have been registered worldwide indicates that it is technically feasible to connect the world to the benefits of information communications technology."

You'd have to think that much of the innovation will not come from the first world in this area (e.g. micropayments). Google has some good ideas though in this recent official blog post.

Two egov 'production' blogs - ones like the BBC's where the team feeds back and sources comment. Parliament and Aberdeenshire.

Very neat website add-on tool. odiogo converts text to speech for download or playing right there.

Another bit of political blogosphere content attracting shut-down notices and legal action, this time in Scotland.

An SNP councillor suing a Labour blogger for mentioning something that was already in the public domain is going to do more harm to the councillor and his party than ignoring it would have done. I hope that Alex Salmond has the sense to publicly distance the party from the individual actions of the councillor, otherwise the SNP will be open to attack for using the law to silence its critics.

Matt Wardman has more detail on blogger Christopher Glamorganshire's sacking from the Welsh Assembly and more from Wales. Plus a Welsh LibDem confirms that the recently worked out civil service blogging guidance doesn't apply to Wales (as they're writing their own)

Search text advertising has taken off big time in 08 election: Our Brand Is Crisis: Prez Candidates Buy Words To Brand Each Other Online.

Electronic voting machines are going to be extensively deployed in the election and a lot of people don't trust them. So a campaign is being organised to get tekkies to sign-up as supervisors - citizen undercover monitoring.

FT on how Google doesn't rule all of the world: It's mainly to do with language.

New York becomes first city to accept photos and video from computers and cell phones for emergency services (they already handle text).

“Internet optimists” versus “Internet Pessimists”: TLF groups recent books.

Adherents & Their Books / Writings

Internet Optimist	Internet Pessimists
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks	Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur
Chris Anderson, The Long Tail and “Free!”	Lee Siegel, Against the Machine
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody	Nick Carr, The Big Switch
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia	Cass Sunstein, Republic.com
Don Tapscott, Wikinomics	Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited
Kevin Kelly & Wired mag in general	Alex Iskold, “The Danger of Free”
Mike Masnick & TechDirt blog	Mark Cuban

And here’s a rough sketch of the major beliefs or key themes that separate these two schools of thinking about the impact of the Internet on our culture and economy:

Beliefs / Themes

Internet Optimists	Internet Pessimists
Culture / Social
Net is Participatory	Net is Polarizing
Net yields Personalization	Net yields Fragmentation
a “Global village”	Balkanization
Heterogeneity / Diversity of Thought	Homogeneity / Close-mindedness
Net breeds pro-democratic tendencies	Net breeds anti-democratic tendencies
Tool of liberation & empowerment	Tool of frequent misuse & abuse
Economics / Business
Benefits of “free” (“Free” = future of media / business)	Costs of “free” (“Free” = end of media / business)
Increasing importance of “Gift economy”	Continuing importance of property rights, profits, firms
“Wiki” model = wisdom of crowds; power of collective intelligence	“Wiki” model = stupidity of crowds; errors of collective intelligence
Mass collaboration	Individual effort

Academics need guidance on how to make best use of web 2.0 technologies, according to a report from the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA).

UCISA also says that higher education institutions need dedicated local champions to promote and develop the new methods. It calls for academics to be given the time to learn and develop the skills to use technology based tools.

Begging for it

David Cameron on his £100,000+ hols.

I feel a caption competition coming on.

Telling one source from another

In PM Questions today Gordon Brown referred to ConservativeHome as the Conservatives website.

The Conservative party’s members’ website, ConservativeHome, also said this morning:

“A clear majority of the British people favour a longer detention period. We believe that the British people are right. They won’t readily forgive any politicians who allow a major atrocity to occur because our detention procedures prove to be inadequate.”

The right hon. Gentleman must answer also to members of his own party.

It's not the "members’ website", it's Tim Montgomerie's.

I hope this is a one-off, from a bad No. 10 researcher, confusing an individual's website with those of the party they're in sympathy with. There's been enough of this in the US election, including bizarre, deliberate attacks on out-there comments or images on Democrat-orientated sites like dailyKos or HuffPost somehow being the site's or 'the liberal left's' (aka Democrats) responsibility. Something similar is happening at the moment confusing my.obama.com with Obama's stated positions.

What made it even stranger was Brown pointing at how ConservativeHome was supporting 42-days detention. Actually, all it was doing was pointing at a Telegraph poll ... and that quote is wrong.

Also, ConservativeHome, never mind the Conservative party, appears to have missed this Prime Ministerial faux-paus.

All very odd and hopefully not a trend in the making.

Google Reader clips catch up

• Twitter at the tipping point
  [NB: I'm leaving my original text but Rory tells me this is meant completely ironically - read it now in that light!] From BBC dot.life. Contains an opening paragraph of such sheer onanistic pretentiousness it's worth repeating for a good belly-laugh:
  

  Suddenly everyone is talking Twitter. Just as Facebook hit the mainstream a year ago, so the short message social network has become the media flavour of this month - to such an extent you can even find me talking about it on the Today programme.
  
  But I'm not convinced that Twitter is really going to spread, in the way Facebook did, beyond the digerati into millions of people's lives. What's more, I'm struggling to understand the business model.

• Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand (David Barstow/New York Times)
  Investigative reporting, the sort they didn't do before the war.
  
• Mail Online's new look
  Jemina Kiss @ the grauniad. According to comments, it's a 2MB load! Really bad design as well.
  
• New ways into blogs
  The BBC's blog comments problem fixed (but not the 502/404 error message, now several years old)
• No Whining About the Media - Three quick points on the Democratic debate last night: (David Brooks/Campaign Stops)
  Memorandum has Brooks' defence and the critics of Brooks (that's why I like their presentational format for such online debate).
  
  
• Postcards From Yo Momma
  HT: Etre. Really funny true-life emails to offspring.
  
• PoliticsWeb2.0: On the Future of Government in the Digital Era
  TechPresident has a good series of 'semi-liveblogging' from a London conference. Opens with a report of Helen Margetts, of the Oxford Internet Institute, presentation covering UK eGov.
  

  Right now the UK govt has embarked on a high risk "supersite" strategy of centralizing e-govt services on two sites: DirectGov and BusinessLink (while closing down 2500 disparate e-govt sites at the same time). Both have low brand recognition and problems competing with other sources.

  This is what I've been saying for a year!
  
  
• Obama Targets Pennsylvania Voters with Pure Persuasion Ads
  ClickZ. This is new. Before they were just pleas for money.
  
• Blog On Blogging
  More BBC.
  

  The act of blogging wasn't, and still isn't, entirely uncontroversial, even here at the BBC
  

• Twitter spam spirals out of control
• If Robert Scoble is right, then Web 2.0 is dead
  A current Silicon Valley meme. Something to do with content being repurposed.
• Networking Journalism
  Great stuff from Bill Thompson who says:
  

  What has happened so far [to MSM] can be compared to the mild tremors felt before an earthquake.
  
  As the internet spreads there are more and more places where we can simply ask those who are living through the events what they think of them and seek insights and analysis from those who know the people and the places involved.
  

  This would be the death of the 'foreign correspondent' (that's you, Orla Guerin, praise be).
  
• The Pleasures of the Flesh
  George Monbiot on why we should eat less meat.
  
• Downing Street removes Labour Party link
  I had a delightful spar with the fierce looking (check the typeface on his blog) Tory wideboy who found a hole in Downing Street's bleedin' edge. Yes, the phrase 'grow up' was used.
  
  
• Civicsurf in action
  Shane McCracken has blogged at Cllr 2.0 about the experience of Norfolk County Councillor Tony Tomkinson who started blogging at the beginning of this year.
• Hillary Clinton To Appear On "Colbert Report"
  And it was dull. As was Stephen dazzled by Michelle Obama. Is he morphing into David Letterman?
  
• [Paul Bradshaw] User generated content? Or great place for a prank? Sky gets photoshopped on Marathon day
  This was truly hysterical.
  
• Social media and the dark side of doing PR
  Simon Collister on the growth of 'ghost blogging'.
• Top 10 UK search terms: social networks dominate the list

Not on Reader:

• The First 21st-Century Campaign
  National Journal overview by Ronald Brownstein on how the Democrats are reaching new heights in raising money, recruiting volunteers, hiring staff, buying TV ads, contacting voters, and generating turnout (and hence have a big edge for November).
  Time also has a piece on this - Why Democrats Rule the Web
• Youth Work and Social Networking Research Project
  Very interesting blog with some new research.
• Will economics put newspapers to bed before the readers do?
  Justin Williams blogging in the Telegraph
• Implications of Google Transit in the UK
  Tim Howgego has a very in-depth analysis on Google's latest project.
• Could the web win it in London?
  The BBC adds a bit more detail on my post Ken's already lost online but doesn't actually answer that question

Ken's already lost online

Here's the latest video from Ken Livingstone's campaign



Er, where are the gays? Nowhere. I sat through all the vids on the YouTube channel. Absent. And this isn't a minor point - gays are a really big part of the London electorate, maybe a million Londoners, and a lot of them are not voting for Ken and practically all of them use the Interweb. AKA - in this tight election, there's your winning margin.

A gay targeted vid would 100% definitely go viral, but the whole vid campaign is just .... I'm holding my head in my hands. This is just one example. Views for these vids are in the hundreds, which is pathetic and just not worth bothering with unless you're going to at least attempt to make them go viral.

They're actually running Google ads (which they need to, he isn't top search hit on his own name, though it has improved), but the link sends you to a 'Be Involved page' - not what it's advertising. Basic, basic 'I could scream' f*** up. YouTube isn't plugged on the main landing page. The website is text, text, stale, stale.

Are they (I doubt it) and if not, why not, involving tekkie supporters in this campaign? There's a lot of donkey work which can be 'devolved'. Or are they just whingeing on about 'not enough time' or money? Is it just 'top down' like Hillary's campaign?

Not that Boris is doing that much better. Try a YouTube search for 'Boris Johnson' and his channel is nowhere. And the viral vids on Boris (thousands of views) aren't complimentary. On BackBoris, YouTube is pretty much invisible.They should thank god for Iain Dale and the other Tory bloggers who actually have a significant web presence. On the plus side, they're running no Google text ads (they don't need to, he's #1 for his name) and Boris is dominating searches:



Paddick, now that he has some real expertise on board, has a in-yer-face great site. This is how to do it and I am hugely impressed. It's pretty much a carbon copy of US and Australian tried'n'tested methods (because they work). With some amateurish LibDem stuff embarrassingly tacked on at the bottom.



Here's his (snaps fingers) wor-king, wor-king, wor-king lead video:



Though it's sitting on a LibDem channel not a Brian Paddick channel, which is a mistake. This branding I can imagine someone who knows what they're doing yelling about - and losing. Actually, it smacks of 'we're going to lose but please vote for some Libdems ... ' And is Brian saying brianpaddick.com, brianpaddick.com, every chance he gets. Can't because for some bizarre reason he doesn't own it. It's brianpaddick.org - and is that being plugged at every single opportunity? Er, I doubt it. Why bother? He's wooden on TV.

Come on Ken's campaign! I have emailed suggestions but they're ignored. I have the button but they don't list me, just the in-crowd. Do we have to beg or are you plain deaf? It's both tiresome and a losing strategy.

Think before you blog!

Object lesson for bloggers in the story of the Medway Tory Councillor, John Ward, now resigned, who posted about sterilising so-called 'welfare mothers' on his blog:

"A pushy cold caller at the door got me so irate and upset that I didn't finish what I was doing correctly".

Despite his rather Nazi-like sympathies (Lynne Fetherstone gave a good example of where this thinking would lead), I actually felt sorry for him. He can think what he likes (and one look at the Mail's comments shows just how prevalent this type of thinking actually is) — it helps no-one if he blogs it without thinking through and in anger (or blaming someone else who's trying to make a probably very small living).

There are lots of resources and support for blogging councillors and many have now been doing it for ages: all the perils are well understood, explained and out there. Did the council actually support his blogging and do any of that, I wonder?

Try Designing for civil society, David Wilcox's blog, and a host of others in my eGov links.

NB: Ward has a really badly designed site - but it's not as bad as this ... get out the sunglasses.

Home Office aligns with George Galloway

Some absolutely shameless statements by a Home Office Minister in the Lords yesterday.

Lord Spit, sorry, Lord West of Spithead (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Security and Counter-terrorism), Home Office), made the claim that in the one case they'd investigated it wasn't homosexuality which the execution was for but for rape.

This echoes George Galloway's repetition of the Iranian regime's lies.

For the Home Office to:

1. admit they have investigated only one case
2. use the Iranian regime's lies against gay asylum seekers

is almost hard to take in. The complicity is just astonishing. Shameless.

Spithead said:

We are not aware of any individual having been executed solely on the grounds of homosexuality in Iran.

We do not consider that there is systematic persecution of gay men in Iran.

We have no evidence of anyone we have sent back being executed
[Ugandans sent back (including lesbians) are immediately hauled off to a detention centre and tortured. This is known to have happened to at least one gay Iranian.]

In the one case that we looked into, because it was shown on television, we found that two young males were hanged because they were found guilty of raping a 13 year-old boy. They were hanged for the offence of rape.

He is talking here about Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, pictures of the execution of the two boys are widely available (as are those of other barbaric executions), and - yes - Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have said that rape in that case may be true and it was also true that the case was used by the exiled Iranian opposition for their own purposes.

In Iran, one of the two partners arrested can find themselves able to escape the death penalty only by charging rape.

But there are numerous other well-documented cases (the link is to Human Rights Watch), so for this to be the one he chooses to mention, to, like Galloway, imply that executions are always for rape and to admit that this is "the one case that we looked into" just shows that they aren't being at all 'careful' about deportations. "We are not aware" is not true - aka a lie.

It is exactly like 1939 all over again: when we made it as hard as possible for Jews to flee Germany - the Kindertransport was largely due to Jewish effort. Or 1946 when thousands were returned to the USSR and certain death. As a tireless defender of gay asylum seekers, Omar Kuddas, puts it:

"To say that homosexuals are safe as long as they are discreet and live their lives in private [that's their policy!], is to say that Ann Frank was safe from the Nazis in WWII as long as she hid in her attic."

Lying. Incompetent. Shameless. I am ashamed of my government.

~~~~~

Human Rights Watch - one of the NGOs whose work Spithead is selectively using - have been supporting Mehdi Kazemi's case for over a year. This includes November when the Home Office last rejected his asylum claim and over Christmas when they last made a real attempt to seize and deport him.

Here's what a Tory London MEP, John Bowis, said about people like Lord Spit last week in the European Parliament during the debate on a resolution supporting Mehdi and Pegah Emambakhsh - the Iranian lesbian who is on her last legal thread and under real threat of being secretly shipped out like Mehdi almost was. The resolution passed nearly unanimously. Bowis' EU MEP Group was divided, with a Forza Italia MP speaking for and a CDU MEP abstaining for that Group.



"It is my country which, if it does not relent in this case, should hang its head in shame."

My country ...

Until the Home Office is finally forced to change the policy which lies behind these cases people just like Mehdi - and Mehdi himself is not safe yet - will continue to be shipped back to torture and death. And they know this. They are lying when they say otherwise.

And who does this attitude appeal to? Who do they think this appeals to? Where do they think the votes are in playing at 'hardliners'? I have been carefully surveying the comment reaction and those who support Mehdi's deportation are very few and very far between. Someone should do a poll.

Even on the websites of the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and - yes - even The Sun many, many conservative, middle-england 'don't-like-refugees' people find this policy obnoxious. Even on muslim/Pakistani Boards I am reading many people supporting Mehdi. Times readers are overwhelmingly commenting that the Home Office's actions are not-in-their-name. The one Tory blogger I could find supporting deportation of gay Iranians prefaced his comments with 'sorry but ...' He sensed the shame of which Lord Spit has none.

Then there's the damage to us around the world. Never mind the blogosphere, on US Prime Time news shows right-wing people have expressed horror at these actions in our name - and how often does Britain ever get a mention there?

The coalition of opposition is enormous and I'll say it again: Jacqui Smith is complicit in murder and if he doesn't do more to end this appalling stain on Britain, Gordon Brown is too.

John Oliver on the Primaries

Still on Daily Show spin-offs, UK comedian John Oliver - late of the News Quiz - has been a huge hit with his reports to Jon Stewart. They cheer him like Oprah disciples.

Channel Four News decided to interview him in a little cross promotion (the Daily Show's on More4) and you can see the unedited version on their crappy website (the one with MS Word downloads), which you have to go to to view - no embedding, of course, not even a 'share by email' link on the video, just 'send this article to a friend' at the bottom of the page where no-one will look. I'm watching! Not reading the intro blurb! FCS! How many adviews do they lose by not enabling Daily Show fanatics to share even this (they would)!

The humourless journalist tries to compare US vs. UK and assumes we're plain boring. Oliver: "Doesn't Cameron thinks he's quite entertaining? I wouldn't be surprised to see him do something as despicable as that Tony Blair/Catherine Tate collaboration. Which really made me want to tear my own eyes out". About Hillary's appearance on the show (the journalist asks why she wasn't putting her policies forward): "It's like a dating video".

On Cameron, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Oliver is right. The hilarity - albeit unintentional - is on view in this Observer Food Monthly article where he talks ("I like food. I'm very greedy") about his neglected vegetable patch, amongst other 'eco' things.

'Oops!' says Cameron, closing the front door behind us, and swooping up the three empty wine bottles that are languishing on a kitchen surface. 'Thought I'd recycled the last of those, ha ha!'

Convenient right-wing language

Checking some blog reactions to the Mehdi Kazemi case I've seen a few right-wing bloggers making the usual arguments about 'not imposing our culture', 'he claims to be gay', 'the floodgates will open' and asking Jacqui Smith to 'stand firm'.

Here's what I told one of them:

1. It’s not a ‘claim’ to be gay - that’s your convenient belief.
2. “Deporting Mehdi Kazemi back to Iran” - you forget to add “to his death”.
   
   You guys always forget the last bit, knowingly back to his death. I wish you would actually say this instead of this pretend language.
   
   Say it. Stop talking ‘uphold the law’ bollocks and say it. ‘ We must be prepared to be tough and send people knowingly back to be hanged’.
   
   Are you a real Tory or what?
   

It interests me that they usually preface these opinions with a 'sorry but ...' then somehow forget to name what they're actually asking for. How convenient for their conscience.

• medhikazemi.com for all news updates

Trying really, really hard

I wasn't going to blog this because I'm too kind :} but an email from Shadow Chancellor George Osborne's office claiming that the government eGov Minister, Tom Watson, is stealing George's lines landed with me and a lot of others yesterday. It came from a - I'm guessing - young staffer and George (maybe) nodded OK. Ya live, ya learn ...

Into the sharks lair ...

Simon Dickson

Amusingly, it condemns the Watson speech as a ‘mashup’. But hold on. Surely it’s entirely in keeping with the whole ethos of open source, to take good ideas and build on them? Didn’t you say mass collaboration was a good thing?

Yep, keep the humour in. It is funny :} We're not laughing at you, young staffer, but with you ...

Dave Briggs

Why not post this on a blog somewhere, point us to it and start a discussion around it?

Yes, told them that. Didn't seem that bovvered.

Mick Fealty in the Torygraph:

.. this is not exactly a secret. The free economy of the Internet means a lot of this stuff is common knowledge.

Funny how NetMums is somewhat of a meme here though, eh?

Nick Booth

To accuse the other party of stealing ideas simply because you are making the same argument is very tired Government 1.0. If you really believe in the power of collaboration then get involved in a conversation online with Tom, recognise your common understanding and ambitions and get on with improving the way we are governed, not disapproving of the fact that you agree.

Ministry of Truth go to town on the detail

Where shall we start?

Dizzy (he bites!)

Do we need more evidence of a Government that is really being led by the Opposition?

So that's one blogger on side with the plagiarism idea.

I am kind, and was in responding to the staffer. So, apart from Simon and others points, from those freebie tips:

• Don't do this stuff if you're not going to put it on a blog with full links backup etc. — especially if you want follow up.
  
• Expect the lot you've sent it to to examine it closely and not receive it as gospel.
• 'We said it first!' is a bit schoolboyish/Westminster Village.

And my main point

• This isn't of much interest to the public — meaning, try looking at what's actually not happening/going wrong. Directgov anyone? Or try 'India + sms' maybe to start?

Maybe they could get some ideas by actually reading some of the blogs they mass BCCed? As the staffer wrote back to me:

It is slightly frustrating that we haven't punched past the blogosphere with some of our online policies.

And ..

We are trying really hard.

Be kind, Paul, be kind ...

Google Reader clips catch up

• Helping funders find you online
  Dave Wilcox interview with US-based consultant John Kenyon on nonprofit fundraising.
• The power of information
  V. interesting speech by egov Minister Tom Watson.
• Attacking the great digital divide
  Sydney Morning Herald explains the difficulties and opportunities in providing IT for remote communities: bugs and floods.
• Oops! 'Ferry crash' unstitches Google maps
  The perils of 'stitching' in GMaps.
• To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You
  New York Times front-page on the developments in ad targeting.
• Can you blog away the blues?
  Psychological benefits of blogging.
• Rainbow over Palestine
  Palestinians now have an LGBT organisation.
• Off the Record? Not Unless You Agree Ahead of Time
  John Battelle's take on the Scotsman/Obama campaign episode.
• How Are Candidates Spending Their Money Online?
  From TechPresident.
• Search within a site: A tale of teleportation
  New tweak from Google.
• Richard Pope’s GroupsNearYou.com launches
  Another bit of MySociety genius.
• Newsweek Advances Andrew Keen's Ignorance
  It lives!
• Download: The True Story of the Internet
  New Discovery Channel documentary.
• Countering British Government Paranoia
  Americans liking anti-camera actions.
• Facebook study group equals cheating?
  Scary story from a Canadian University.
• “The web and I” - a reflection
  Amusing speech from an old-time Civil Service Head.
• Local search in the UK
  Apparently, Google has taken this over too.
• Watchfire WebXact and Bobby Online are dead!
• Botanicalls Twitter
  Reaaally loving your plants.
• Justine Lam on Ron Paul's Networked Campaign
  "We didn't coordinate that at all".
• Labourspace: great idea, awful execution
  Say it, Simon.
• Error message
  Tekkie take on Obama vs. Clinton.
• No10’s new recruit is a geek
  Sloooow progress.
• Blogging While Female: 5 Conservative Women Bloggers Talk
• Chris Kelly: McCain Sex Scandal Blonde Missing -- Day 12
  Very, very funny.
• mySociety’s Freedom of Information site goes live
  Yet more MySociety genius.
• Bespoke vs Off-the-shelf - watching the BBC blogs comment problems
  Really why it isn't working.
• New Media Awards 2007 Finalists
  From the New Stateman.
• Web lifeline for mums is big business
  Onto a winner.
• Obama's Million Donors: Why They're Important
  Changing the ballpark.
• the Missing proof
  Twitter @ work.
• Info links for government communicators
  Useful links.
• Tories need friends
  .. on Facebook.
• Automated killer robots 'threat to humanity': expert
  Be very afraid ...
• Rupert Murdoch's black sheep
  Is the WSJ pushing it's luck?
• What gov webbies can do to improve awareness of their published consultations
  Jeremy Gould on the ball.

Turning web buzz into votes: how Obama does it

Techpresident ran a good summary of how the Obama campaign in California used various web-based tools to connect offline with online — and get out the vote.

This is crucial stuff for those seeking to convince UK and other parties and politicians to invest more in online but we don't yet have real studies or much data on offline effects, i.e. how many extra votes, new voters, convinced late deciders or new organisers the online campaigns have generated over previous tools, such as direct-mail, or traditional shoe-leather methods. This will undoubtedly happen in the post mortems but the evidence already points to a real effect, particularly in generating momentum.

As I noted earlier, Obama's online edge obviously hasn't pushed him over the top but traditional negative campaigning has been seen to hold him up. Similarly, Ron Paul's massed online supporters couldn't translate that into votes, although they did work alongside a central operation which didn't properly harness that energy.

As web campaigning guru Patrick Ruffini puts it: "Ultimately, it’s all about fundamentals. If a candidate doesn’t have mainstream appeal and isn’t ready for prime-time, Internet activism isn’t going to make a difference." There are a lot of competing, complex factors in actual vote generation which will only be unpicked and properly analysed later.

Online to offline

The two main tools which Obama has used are:

• a social networking tool that helps self-organisation
• a tool which translates that into a get-out-the-vote operation
  

Social networking is centred on my.barackobama.com using a Blue State Digital toolset which progressive organizations like moveon.org have used and developed.

Get-out-the-vote for Obama used a - crucially - distributed deployment of the Voter Activation Network (VAN). It can generate what's called 'precinct walk and call sheets' as well as a virtual phonebank and lots more.

Republicans have used the Voter Vault database from the late nineties and very effectively in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential, but in a closed and centralised way (the Tories also have this). This was enhanced by using commercially available data right down to pizza toping choices to profile potential supporters.

VAN was deployed by the Obama campaign using volunteers who went through a Camp Obama training session, which could either cover a weekend or ten minutes training via video and written tutorials. Much of the work in developing the tools was done by volunteers. What it utilised was in-group, including Knitters for Obama, and local contacts contained in VAN.


Texas Obama Precinct Captains homepage

In California this led to:

• An initial 105,000 contacts statewide through the social networking tool
  
• Of those, more than 10,000 signed up to be precinct (local) captains
• 7,000 or so VAN login accounts were deployed
• Of those, four to five thousand became active

Those people then managed more than 60% of the average 100,000 contact attempts per day, 40% came from more traditional phonebanks. In the whole state more than 10% of eventual Obama voters had been contacted by a neighbour — which is unprecedented.

Campaign geek volunteers also developed a predictive analytic model using live feedback from those calls to refocus pro-actively on more specific demographic pockets.

The Clinton campaign in California focused on absentee, early voters using the Catalist toolbox.

Other impacts

What the better use of volunteer energy in California meant for the Obama campaign was more central resource spend available for the other Primaries on Super Tuesday and the following eleven straight wins. Plus the bottom-up drive led to Obama's one million donors — by some counts already as many individual donors than the entire Bush campaign of 2000, and almost as much as Kerry 2004.

Some of the issues which remain unresolved or in early development are:

• scaling up and strengthening capacity
  
• can these volunteer networks be used to repel smears?
• earlier use to target mail-in voters (as Clinton has done)
• retaining and using volunteer energy post-campaign
• what will the diversification of fundraising away from big money interests mean?
• what will happen when all campaigns are using the same toolboxes and tactics?

Marketing misses

What's been missing thus far is much use of online marketing energy and tools, in particular geo-targeting. This is the method of determining the physical location of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on location, such as country, region/state, city, postcode, organisation, ISP or other criteria.

Email marketing still dominates expenditures (62%) with display, search and video ads just 11% of online budgets (the balance is for web development, with many more local candidate sites). Only $78m is expected for total online spend by all candidates in the primary campaign. Which could be less than the Clinton campaign spends on doughnuts and pizza runs.

One reason why online ad spends are so low is that consultants cannot make as much money from it.

What web advertising there has been has actually been dominated by McCain and Romney with the Obama campaign spending very little, although they did run "Have you tried the convenience of early voting? Find your early-vote location" ads in Texas. These drove users to landing pages featuring a video message from Obama but apparently didn't work so well on the day for potential volunteers. The Clinton campaign has run virtually no web ads.

All these tools and techniques can also be employed elsewhere.

In the UK internet use is already by a majority, is growing over other media use and is only going one way - up. I would imagine that the Tories are ahead of the game on this (my impression, though I'm advised it may well be the Libdems - it's definitely not Labour) but once the real facts have been unpacked it would be a huge mistake for the other parties to just think 'fundraising' and not recognise that - as well as having a compelling candidate - running from the bottom-up, empowering supporters and making use of the Web's power is really what's behind Obama's success.