Interesting to read about Hazel Blears meeting Howard Dean to discuss use of the internet.
When we met him back in May, he made it clear that he didn’t have much time for Labour due to their slavish support for George Bush and the war in Iraq.
I wonder if he told them as much as he told us? 
After a relatively successful trial of Skypecasting this evening, we’ll be going for it this coming Wednesday at 10.30 a.m. Hopefully a few people will be able to join.
Skypecasting means people can listen live and ask questions at the end.
You might still be able to spot details of the event on the Skypecasting home page! In case it’s not longer the lead story, check out the specific page for the Taking Power skypecast.
More about Taking Power, on the Taking Power website.
To join in, you will need to download and install a copy of Skype. To ask a question, you will need a microphone.
February 21, 2008: Version 1.2. Bug-fix to ensure that it works with the new datastructure in the latest versions of Wordpress. A huge thank you to Will Howells for fixing this.
September 16, 2006: Version 1.1. Bug-fix to ensure that it ‘remembers’ your root page when the Widget page is updated.
Here’s the first of two new Wordpress Widgets, and, for the first time, it’s not Lib Dem specific.
It lets you show a subsection of the pages of your Wordpress blog. The options page for the widget shows a drop-down box of all the pages in your blog. Select one of them and only pages below that will be displayed by the widget on the menu.
I’m using it on Make IT Policy to have a menu section that only shows the pages of the Make IT Policy policy paper.
You can find the Widget here.
If you already have widgets installed as part of your Wordpress installation, you can try this widget out yourself. All you need to do to use it:
er, that’s it.
If you don’t have widgets installed, head off to Automaticc’s Widgets project page and follow their extremely helpful instructions on how to install widgets and add them to your blog template.
You can find lots of useful widgets via the Wordpress Widgets blog.
I’ve already been hugely impressed by YouTube and Google Video as means of sharing video, but thanks to the TechCrunch blog, I’ve now visited a couple of sites that are truly astonishing.
all of which actually let you edit your video online and remix other people’s videos!
Is this the beginning of the end for the written word?
Here’s a nice discovery. A rather awesome Java app that displays Google Maps on your phone.
I was able to zoom in and look at a satellite picture of my house without too much difficulty. It was also possible to navigate around the maps considerably more easily than I normally can with my network’s location service (although unlike my current service, it doesn’t know where I am). Overall, a pretty handy piece of kit.
To download the program to your phone, visit www.google.com/gmm on your mobile browser.
Following all the other video activity on other Lib Dem blogs, I’ve been going on a bit of video frenzy to see what might be the best way to make Lib Dem videos. I’ve also used the Democracy Plug-In and Democracy Widget to set up an online poll to get your point of view.
So here goes…
First we have the mobile phone video:
Closely followed by some video on a Canon Digital Ixus 400.
I then experimented with supplementing the video with separately recorded sound using a Sony Microphone and an Olympus Digital Video Recorder.
And finally, I recorded some video on my webcam
Let me know what works best for you. Personally I think the digital camera with separate sound recording appears to deliver the best results - although the video on the webcam is higher res running at 25 frames per second rather than 15 fps on the Canon. From my own perspective, I find the better sound makes a bigger impact than having better video (although I suppose I could have done a synchronised recording on the webcam too). I’ll be interested in what other people say. The obvious missing category of video is video shot using a proper video camera, but unfortunately I don’t have one! You may need to go back to the home page to enter the poll.