Blogging the Party Line?

Posted on January 2, 2010 by Joe

Incendiary political blogger Guido Fawkesmade an interesting observation the other day that the Left are once again saying that 2010 will be their year to dominate the Blogosphere in a run up to an election and beyond. As he points out, they’ve also said this in 2007, and I remember similar thoughts being voiced when Labour first started playing with computers for campaigning back in the 1980s (as an ‘Old Labour’ member I was involved with Computing For Labour for a while, on and off up to my exit from the party in 1996).

The article started me thinking about the whole business of political blogging. Just to provide a quick view of where I personally come from politically…. I come from the left, but have found myself for the last decade inhabiting the territory of the Libertarian. I’ll get the joke out of the way now ‘Being a Libertarian is like being a Liberal; you can come up with lots of ‘out there’ policies because you’ll never have to bear the responsibility of putting them in to action’ 🙂 My own take on Libertarianism is minimum Government, maximum possible empowerment of communities to provide services locally, with national Government providing only the necessary services and infrastructure that it would be inefficient for local communities to provide. On a personal basis I try to practice what I preach by involving myself in local organisations and efforts to develop local economies and local structures of service provision.

Enough about me – back to the blogging. When a party member blogs they almost by definition need to watch what they say if they intend to adhere to the Party Line. Whilst this may not be important for the ‘rank and file’, if you’re anyone with influence or position in the Party, stating anything that is not doctrine will probably get you a slap on the wrist (or a boot up the bottom) from the powers that be, especially when it is viewed as being important for all to be singing from the same hymn sheet. Which frequently makes a political blog by ‘well known’ politicians as interesting as reading excerpts from the Manifesto document of that party. It’s highly unlikely you’ll find anything truly radical and rare that you’ll find anything that confronts the existing status quo within the Party.

My own attitude towards political blogging is to pay more attention to the more ‘independent thinkers’ outside the mainstream political parties, and also pay more attention to the ideas irrespective of who posts them. Politics isn’t about politicians or political bloggers, spin-doctors, media pundits or journalists; they just practice the business that modern mainstream politics has become. So, my advice would be to treat most blogs by ‘professional’ politicians as marketing efforts for the brand they’re working for. As for the other political blogs – go for ’em! Try them out, whether you agree or disagree with their viewpoint. It’s ideas that are important, not which doctrine they come from. There’s a good list of Political Blogs compiled by Iain Dale here.

Real Politics is about our day to day lives, and how we are permitted to live them – whether that permission comes in terms of laws, resources, money, media influence. The old labels are becoming just that – labels on political product that is less and less relevant. Perhaps the real winners in the political blogosphere for 2010 will be ‘none of the above’ but the ‘Real Politics’ blog posts of the rest of us.

The Social Media Numbers Game

Posted on January 1, 2010 by Joe

I’m old enough to have used an address book and still have a Rolodex on the phone table. When I actually sit down and think about the people with whom I have reasonably regular ‘quality’ contact in a 3 month period, either electronically or face to face, it probably amounts to no more than a hundred or so. I guess it’s safe to say that in the world of networking I’m a ‘quality over quantity’ sort of fellow. I’ve never been a great collector of large numbers of business cards or people details – collections are fine for stamps, coins and locomotive numbers but are kind of creepy for people. 🙂

Back in the late 1990s / early 2000s I used a networking site called Ecademy – I stopped after a while because it seemed that people were making contact with you purely from a sales oriented viewpoint. Allow me to explain – if I’m interested in AI, and someone brings something to my attention that’s even vaguely related to the field – that’s cracking! That’s exactly what I’m there for – and hopefully I’ll be able to reciprocate. On the other hand, if someone steams in with a ‘Hi, I’m Fred, I’m in marketing, blah, blah, blah’ I get the feeling I’m receiving a boilerplate message which is likely to end up as a boiler room selling attempt. The site seemed to encourage numbers of contacts over quality – and that’s one of the reasons why I eventually jacked it in.

I’ve noticed in recent days that I’m being followed by people who are following thousands of others. And the odd thing is most of them appear to be selling something that is as relevant to me as a comb to Sir Patrick Stewart. The ‘Bio’ of one such follower (soon to be ex-follower in my daily purge) – “A Business Dedicated to providing free online MLM training videos, articles, books and webinars”. If I received an email like this I’d call it spam – pure and simple. I know that Twitter has policies around spam, but my point is that most folks following 20,000 people seem to be in the MLM, ‘sales and marketing’, ‘social media consultancy’ sort of areas. They’re cold calling – they sure ain’t networking.

Bottom line – there is NO WAY, realistically, that the content generated by the 20,000 people these bods follow is ever registering in any meaningful manner with these people – I assume it’s simply being harvested electronically and searched for keywords that might suggest a sales lead.

Joe’s categorisation of Twitter users…

Vast number of followers, smallish number of followed – publisher / celeb.
Vast number of followers, vast number of followed – probably sales / mass marketing
Smallish followers, large number of followed – probably spammer
Smallish followers / smallish followed – personal / business networking

OK – it’s not a brilliant classification but it works for me. Just watch out if you’re in category 2 or 3 ‘cos I’m binning you!

Whilst I was drafting this yesterday, I came across this piece on the same topic: http://juliorvarela.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/when-twitter-numbers-are-meaningless/

Don’t get too hung up on your numbers on Twitter. If you’re following lots of people, just check WHY. Do they add value to your day? Amuse / entertain you? Educate you? Guide or enlighten you? If not, ditch ’em. And those following you – just take a look at their numbers and think about what I’ve said.

And I hope you don’t chuck me off your lists. 🙂

What goes in to a blog?

Posted on December 31, 2009 by Joe

I recently came across a couple of articles about blogging. Well, I’ll be honest – they were in my Twitter feed and I took a look at them to see what other people’s views were on the subject of content in blogs. It was sort of distressing to me – according to those particular authors I’m doing absolutely everything wrong. For example:

I mix subjects – I have technical stuff sitting side by side with personal stuff.
I rarely have articles that have ‘xxx ways to do yyy’ as the title.
I definitely don’t have a marketing plan for Joe’s Jottings

There were a few other items that cropped up in these pieces – enough to make me sit back in my chair (carefully moving Marvin the cat form behind me – he’s a big fellow and would not tolerate being squished) and think about this article. What goes in a blog?

I guess the bottom line answer is ‘What’s the blog about?’ If you’ve set out to write the world’s authoritative blog on Mousterian Variability then you will have a fairly shrewd idea of what’s good. A blog entry on your trip toLe Moustier is good, 500 words on your views on nearby spa towns, not so good in the consistency stakes. But if you’re writing a personal blog, then I’m afraid that as far as I’m concerned it should be a case of ‘publish and be damned’ – what you want to go in, goes in. After all, one definition of the word ‘blog’ is very straight forward:

“A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links”

and applying this definition I hit the spot a little better. Joe’s Jottings is indeed chronological, consists of personal thoughts and web links, and strives to be frequent. 🙂

Unfortunately for the digerati and the marketing types out there, my personal thoughts do tend to wander around somewhat and very rarely do they include a line that says ‘How can I market / monetise Joe’s Jottings’ and even less frequently do I bother about whether I think about technical stuff after non-technical stuff, and whether I remembered to include a 5 point list in my thinking every 20 minutes. People’s personal thoughts, to me the basis of a personal blog, don’t run like that. They’re the stream of everyday consciousness that makes us the interesting souls that we are. When we start filtering the contents of what is supposed to be our personal thoughts and writings to suit marketing demographics and audience statistics then we need not worry about censorship of the web – we’re already doing it nicely ourselves.

George Orwell wrote a column for the Tribune newspaper in the 1940s called ‘As I Please’ that would find political pieces next to home handyman tips, for example. And that was the way that Orwell thought – he was a writer, a political thinker, but also a chap who had other interests that he felt were important enough to him to get featured in his ‘weekly bloggings’ for Tribune.

Ha! My question answered, indirectly by George Orwell. What goes in to a blog? Whatever you like…as you please.

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas? Not necessarily…

Posted on December 28, 2009 by Joe

Long before it was the title of a movie, it was a fairly well known saying.

In the UK it was more likely to be ‘What happens in Blackpool, stays in Blackpool’, or, as time passed, what happened in Estonia stays in Estonia. I was a mark of secrecy that was usually associated with the ceremonials of secret societies; it didn’t matter that you’d abseiled down Blackpool Tower naked except for a sock on your head, carrying a crate of beer and singing ‘Unchained Melody’ at 3am. If you found your boss in flagrante delicto with Myrtle from accounts, playing strip-poker, well, that’s something you were not going to be allowed to use in blackmail. Because of the simple, unwritten law of the hard playing world of the works outing / stag weekend / hen weekend / mate’s trip to Skegness.

‘What happens here, stays here’.

It used to be up there with the other rules of social nicety. Basically, if you did get up to alcohol fuelled high jinks on one of these events, you were OK. It wouldn’t get home or back to the office (unless you contracted some social disease, got pregnant or turned up in the local Magistrate’s Court or A&E). You might have shown yourself to your friends and colleagues as a hypocritical, deceitful, lecherous alcoholic but you were given the ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card of the event falling under the rule of ‘What happens here, stays here.’

Just to be serious for a moment, there are even ‘legitimate’ versions of the rule – self-development weekends, religious retreats, etc. What happens there, stays there, unless you want to share your OWN experiences – but no one else’s.

It’s an incredibly sensible rule for the latter type of event, and to be honest I reckon it can be a reasonably sensible code of behaviour to abide by for participants in the other events mentioned above.

And it’s a way of life and social behaviour that is slipping away. Whenever you go out these days there will inevitably be someone taking photographs which within 30 seconds show up on Facebook. I’m one of those people who hate having a photo taken – apart from looking 20 pounds heavier than I am, I always get photographed with a stupid expression on my face or doing something daft. That sort of thing showing up online is OK to deal with – it’s the other stuff that gives the running commentary of what happened, who spoke to who, who sat next to whom – even for a few minutes, etc. The minutiae of a social event that to be honest is of fuck-all relevance to anyone who wasn’t there. Those who are there, know what happened. Those who weren’t there, rarely need to know what happened except out of vicarious curiosity (OK…nosiness!)

I don’t necessarily want to be photographed when I’m slightly drunk at a non-work related, social event when I take a quick trip and spill drinks. What would once have been a momentary source of amusement for all who witnessed it that you probably wouldn’t even have remembered the following day now becomes a cast in stone moment on Facebook. If you’re REALLY unlucky and surrounded by geeks, it will also be Tweeted – which isn’t as bad as the Tweetstream is pretty ephemeral – but you get the idea.

Please people – just go back to taking and posting a nice big group photo at the beginning, share any candid snapshots between you and people who were there directly rather than through your 200 friend Facebook page, and let what happened in the pub, stay in the pub, in 2010.

Twitter hacked – not the end of the world, no surprise, and a badge of honour.

Posted on December 18, 2009 by Joe

There’s a scene in the movie ‘Blazing Saddles’ where the Waco Kid, being asked why he’s ended up in prison for drunkenness, bewails the fact that when he was the well known gun-slinger everyone wanted to try and get him, so they could be the new number one. He tells how he eventually hung up his guns when he heard a voice yelling ‘Draw’, turned around to fight, and nearly shot a 5 year old child.

He turns his back on the little brat, who then shoots the Waco Kid in the ass…..

Life in the online world gets like that, too.

Apparently Twitter was hacked last night by an outfit called the Iranian Cyber Army. The story broke on the Mashable web site – I have to say that were I not receiving Tweets from Mashable I wouldn’t have known, as I’ve been getting (I think) Tweeted over the period of the hack and I can quite happily see their home page. The fact that this is now being reported as a DNS based attack means that it wasn’t so much Twitter that was walloped as that traffic to Twitter was diverted elsewhere for a while …

Anyway, let’s face it – this is a slap in the face to Twitter (indirectly) but isn’t the end of the world. At least some of us – if not most of us who’re not using the DNS system that was compromised – are still Tweeting and the world will not slide to DEFCON1 because the global inanity stream was temporarily interrupted for the Digerati.

But, assuming these chaps ARE who they claim to be – a group with Iranian sympathies – we shouldn’t be surprised. A campaign was organised through Twitter earlier this year to protest about the clamp down on civil rights in Iran. This attack may be regarded by the originators as ‘payback’ and goes to show that in Cyberspace, as in the real world, ‘people power’ is not a one way street. The big boys do sometimes have their day of successful protest as well. Governments can quite easily learn the fine arts of online civil disobedience, and do it with greater ease than the folks running the protest.

When people use a site as a base or launching ground for civil disobedience, campaigning or protest then it will become a target for those who object to the issues being promoted. That kickback may come in the form of debate, negative campaigning against the site, abuse of people on the site, legal efforts to remove or silence the site, or, as here, technical efforts to remove the site. Which means that more and more sites used by people to organise campaigns will either have to become ‘hardened’ to protect against attack or stop carrying legitimate material that someone, somewhere, is pissed enough about to want it removed.

We may be heading in to a period of ‘big boy’s rules’ in cyberspace where sites that permit the exposition of people power are simply taken down by this sort of online activity. But if that happens to your favourite site, and the cause is just, don’t be sad; regard it as a badge of honour that your activities have upset someone enough to want to take you down.

Remember the words of Winston Churchill ‘ ‘You have enemies; that’s good – it means that you have stood up for something sometime in your life’.

Wanna Blog? Get a train ticket…

Posted on November 25, 2009 by Joe

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that the blog has had a very patchy few days. Life, as John Lennon reputedly said, is what happens when you’re making other plans. I’d like to add that life is what happens when you step away from the keyboard and do cool stuff like go with your niece to ‘The Deep’ in Hull, go to see the Arctic Monkeys with my wife, attend meetings and do paid work – and generally do stuff involving the outside world.

However, it was bugging me that I was slipping on my personal target which was to blog most days – ideally every day – and so I’ve been extremely lucky today to have to travel up to Harrogate again – a total of around an hour and a half on the train each way – three hours of sitting in Northern Rail’s finest carriages. Wonderful!

And for once I’m not being sarcastic! I charged up the Netbook, didn’t pack the mobile broadband dongle and here I am between Wakefield and Leeds bashing out the second blog post of the morning in to Open Office. When I get home tonight I hope to have 4 or 5 posts based on ideas I’ve had over the last week but where I’ve not had time to actually type them out. I can then load them in to WordPress and publish as required. There are few distractions on a train journey (assuming you don’t end up sharing a carriage with football fans or small children) and if you disconnect any Internet access to your computer you can really settle down and get stuff done!

And that’s the trick – disconnect the Internet connection . I find that Twitter and Facebook can be real time thieves. What I’ve now started doing when I want to achieve anything on a train journey is to either leave the Broadband Modem at home or leave it in the bottom of my bag. I don’t have email installed as standard on my Netbook – only if I’m going to be away for a few days – and so there’s rarely a reason to be on-line when I’m really busy. If I need to check a link or get a reference, I’ll make a note in my Open Office document and when I’ve finished doing what I need to do I can go back on-line and tidy up such loose ends, By not having a live Internet connection running all the time, I don’t get tempted to go swanning off on to web sites, I save battery power and am generally more productive and focussed.

Maybe the next time I get REALLY far behind with things, or perhaps when I need to develop a stock pile of blog articles, I should just buy a day return to Edinburgh and spend the day on the train!

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