Author: Martin Tod

Martin Tod is a marketing professional and Liberal Democrat living in Winchester.

And what do points mean?

This year, for the first time, there’s going to be a competition for the ‘Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year‘ at conference.

There’s an online entry form on the federal party site.

The party has declared an interesting criterion:

the blog that has done the most to promote liberalism in the last year

Not necessarily the same as ‘the most entertaining’ or ‘the blog you go to first’.

The competition, combined with the various bloggers’ parties planned for conference, suggest an encouraging increase in the party’s engagement with the blogosphere.

I probably will post here when I’ve decided how to vote, but first I am going to go and reread the archive of Lib Dem blogs and see which posts, if any, made it into my del.icio.us tags.

Putting video on your own website

I’ve posted a few times about how to use Google Video or YouTube to post your videos on your website or blog.

Michael Pollock has written an excellent article on how to use the free Riva Flash video encoder to create your own videos and put them on your blog using the FLV video player without needing to rely on a third party service.

Here’s an example:

While on the subject of video, a good example of what can be achieved cheaply and cost effectively is at Rocketboom.

For the small minority interested in video codecs, there’s quite an interesting demo of the differences at the Flash Video FAQ website.

Google Maps on your phone

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.

Latest polls…

Good to see the Lib Dems up to 24% in the latest IPSOS-MORI poll.

Looking at MORI’s long term trends (and using their unweighted figure of 23% for comparability), we seem to be up +1%pt vs. the General Election and up up +3%pts vs. the last poll before Ming became leader.

Five months after Paddy started, we were on 8%, up +1%pt vs. the last poll before Paddy became leader

Five months after Charles started, we were on 15%, up +1%pt vs. the last poll before Charles became leader.

Thirteen months after the 2001 General Election, we were on 16%, down -2%pts on MORI’s General Election poll.

There are arguments about MORI’s methodology, but with the exception of ICM (which looks like an outlier), the other polls also show no burning need to panic, with our polling up flat or slightly up since Ming took over. Generally long-term trends are by far the most useful things to look at with these polls since methodology makes short-term trends and absolute numbers unreliable bases for comparison.

Looking at the current political situation, Ming also has the non-trivial advantage of having done the important thing of being right on the major issues. Cameron’s failure to show any leadership in the face of the crisis in the Middle East will not have done him any favours in the long term. It all suggests that there is no need to panic just yet.