A resurgent Liberal

The new consultation site for Liberal Democrat health policy is now up, joining the previous ones on climate change, crime, Trident and poverty.

The Taking Power consultation is also still going strong. Unconstrained by the wonders of the party’s formal consultation process, it’s had videos, podcasts, daily polls and all kinds of other wonders to keep visitors entertained. So far it’s had over 4,500 visitors with 118 people making, between them, 520 comments on the site - quite encouraging!

My brother David has just become a US citizen and met George Bush Sr. - all in the same week.

He poses an intriguing question: what would you say if you met George Bush Sr.?

Thinking back to the odd occasion when I have unexpectedly met famous people, I tend to have been struck dumb (Kofi Annan, Vaclav Havel) or not realised that I had just met someone famous (Scarlett Johanssen).

Admittedly in the case of Scarlett Johanssen, we were sharing a lift with several other people, and she had her back to me, and we were in the Chateau Marmont where it’s seen as decidedly uncool to get starstruck and even acknowledge that you are in a lift with a Hollywood superstar.

The bizarre thing about that particular encounter was that it was shortly after Lost in Translation had come out, and Michaela and I were, unwittingly, having a discussion about the merits and demerits (mainly demerits) of my only having eaten Kobe beef cooked shabu shabu during previous trips to Kobe.

The consequence of all this is that, while Michaela (who did spot who we were sharing a lift with) and I may not have actually spoken to Scarlett Johanssen, our overheard conversation did appear to make her laugh as she stepped out of the lift!

Not content with making Lib Dem video easily available for your website, it’s now available for your phone!

The last conference video done by Alastair Reed and myself is now available in 3GP format as follows:

ConferenceVoxPops.3gp (3GP, 1.8MB)

Let me know if there are any others you want converted into telephone format…

For some reason the original post for the new video news feed didn’t appear in Lib Dem Blogs, so here’s a link to the original post which explains how to add the party’s new (test) video feed to your site.

I’ve just put together a bit of HTML code that lets you display the latest party video on your website as follows.

The basic code is:

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://petitions.libdems.org.uk/showTV.php">
</script>

To set a particular width in pixels, just add some code like ?width=200 to set the width of your video box, giving something like:

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://petitions.libdems.org.uk/showTV.php?width=200">
</script>

To get the code in a form suitable for including in a PHP readfile, add &format=html to your URL.

@readfile("http://petitions.libdems.org.uk/showTV.php?width=200&format=html")

This should automatically update whenever a new video is added…

Here’s the first video produced with Alex Davies, Paul Tyler and Billy Bragg as part of the Taking Power consultation. There’s more to come…

It was an extremely interesting and thought-provoking conversation: unfortunately the camera ran out of batteries so we didn’t get it all on video, although we did get it all on audio. Later on we got to discussing Billy Bragg’s new book “The Progressive Patriot” , and a positive vision for English identity and values.

I’ll post it up as a podcast as soon as the videos are all done and I get a spare moment.