Apologies if you’re somewhat disconcerted by the appearance of this blog. The white background has disappeared for some reason.
When I get a spare moment, I’ll wander through the code and see what might have happened. Perhaps it’s time to widgetise my sidebar?
Later:
And widgetise it, I did.
The online petition that Mark Pack and I set up to back Don Foster’s campaign to allow people to take alcohol into cricket grounds has been somewhat more successful than we expected.
At the time of writing, 793 signatories and climbing.
So who is the world’s first Liberal podcaster?
It’s possible to make a case for Gladstone with his 1888 recording on a wax cylinder for Thomas Edison (and you can understand from this extract of the Gladstone recording on the Liberal Democrat History Group website just how resonant and impressive his voice must have been). However this wasn’t particularly political in intent.
I think there’s a better case for Asquith and Lloyd-George who produced records for HMV in 1909 backing the controversial ‘People’s Budget’ - and are amongst the first politicians in the world to use mechanical reproduction of their voice in order to spread their message more widely - a closer analogy to the practice of podcasting.
It appears that Asquith was recorded on July 20, 1909 (listen to an extract of Asquith’s speech here) and Lloyd-George on July 23, 1909 (listen to an extract of Lloyd George’s speech here) - so Asquith has it by three days.
Reassuring to know that the current review of how we can use the latest technology to strengthen our campaigning versus the other parties is following in a proud Liberal tradition. 
Once again, it’s time to crack open the champagne. This time to thank James Graham for launching a Liberal Drinks blog.
We’ve mashed-up the Flock Together RSS feed for Liberal Drinks and the Google Maps API again to create a map of upcoming events.
I hope there’s plenty of entries for the Liberal Drinks logo competition.
Currently very excited about the wonders of Wordpress widgets.
There’s a real opportunity here to make it incredibly easy for party members to build effective campaigning Wordpress-based sites.
Indeed, I’ve just taken a break from coding my first political widget to write this blog entry!