Month: April 2006

Petition calling for Charles Clarke’s resignation

Rob Fenwick, together with Mark Pack and yours truly, has just put up a petition calling for Charles Clarke’s resignation on the front page of the federal site. Rob did the design and graphics. I did the ‘petition engine’ (of which more at a later date) and most of the buttons. Mark drove the project overall, sorted out the fundraising and did the rest of the buttons.

Lost - 1,023 prisoners - Charles Clarke must go - link to Lib Dem petition site

Nick Clegg has written a short piece which not only lays out why Clarke should go, but also points out how this fiasco illustrates the hollowness of Labour’s sanctimonious rhetoric on crime.

At a time when more and more of UK government is being driven by central mandate rather than local democracy, it’s essential that those making the mandates are held personally to account. These are, after all, people who believe so strongly in their own personal judgement and abilities that they believe that they should be able to unilaterally change the law without a vote in parliament.

If losing 1,023 prisoners isn’t a resigning issue, then what is?

Old chums connection?

Stephen Tall wonders why the BBC continue to retain Frank Luntz over at ‘A Liberal Goes A Long Way’.

I wonder if he’s seen the earlier comments on the ‘David Davis for leader’ blog?

BBC management probably like Luntz because he makes entertaining TV and he predicted the Cameron victory – although several commentators have made the case that the causality actually went the other way and that his Newsnight Focus Group made a major contribution to the Cameron victory (discussed at length in this thread on politicalbetting.com).

However, anyone who’s spent any time in marketing or market research knows how easy it is to ‘throw’ qualitative research, how easy it is to bias research group stimulus, and, particularly, how easy it to selectively edit the results, particularly if you’re looking for people to endorse your product (or politician).

A couple of minutes’ research shows pretty clear evidence from the US is that Frank Luntz has a strong link to the Bush administration and the conservative right as well – this PBS interview is particularly illuminating. There’s also evidence that he has misled media companies about those links. In light of this, I’m surprised that the BBC continue to use him as an ‘independent pollster’ rather than as a ‘conservative pollster and commentator’. Perhaps entertaining TV provides enough justification to throw any attempt at neutrality out of the window.

Perhaps we should get Media Matters for America – who wrote to MSNBC to complain about their use of Frank Luntz in 2004 – to write to the BBC in 2006?

Google Calendar supported by Flock Together

After finally working out how to make the maps in Flock Together clickable, I’ve now also added the functionality to put Flock Together events automatically into Google’s newly launched Calendar. [For an example, check out the button at the bottom of this page or try the button below].

Google Calendar button

Unfortunately, Google don’t appear to support the RSS/xCal feed that I’ve been using for publishing events. They’ve published a fairly simple standard for entering individual events via a single URL (which I’m using), but to enter a series of events it looks like you need to provide an iCal feed or their own format of XML feed.

In a burst of enthusiasm last summer, I put the functionality into Flock Together to publish iCal feeds, but I’m a bit loath to switch it on. iCal feeds (or .ics files) tend to get opened by Outlook on many PCs and, as far as I can recall from when I last tried it, Outlook falls over if you ask it to open more than one event in a single file. It’s also not currently clear whether Google will index external feeds, so, unless there’s an immediate clamour to the contrary, I will wait and see how many people use the Google calendar service via Flock Together before taking things any further.

The Hope of the Web (New York Review of Books)

Just finished reading an interesting (and long) article on how the internet is being used in the US to revitalise the Democratic Party.

Fortunately, the New York Review of Books also has a copy online.

There’s a great deal about The Daily Kos and the way their Scoop technology allows broad involvement in the site. They’re using the technology for policy development and it is proviing a real engine for grassroots activism and fundraising.

There are quite a few parallels with the UK. During the recent leadership election, Lib Dem blogs was probably the most influential online party meeting place. Liberal Review is also becoming an increasingly important online centre for party members and supporters. As far as I know, we’re not yet using wiki technology for policy development (although it has been used to write a few policy motions) – and we don’t yet have the level of interaction and involvement that the Daily Kos seems to be able to achieve in the US.

All grist to the mill.

More champagne?

Just heard from a former Vodafone colleague that the ‘3 minute conversation’ campaign has been recognised as the UK campaign of the year by Mobile News…

In case you’ve forgotten it, here’s an execution from the campaign:

So many thanks to the Mobile News Awards 2006 for the award for “National Advertising/Marketing/PR Campaign”.

First the world and now the UK. Here’s some more virtual champagne to celebrate.

huge amount of champagne in the Taittinger cellars