The Wardman Wire

A refreshing admission by Simon Dickson:

OK, I’m an idiot. The lengthy and fair-minded piece I wrote this morning about a speech by Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne at the RSA was a year late.

Osborne made some interesting points about the need ‘to recast the political settlement for the digital age.’ And now today, there’s an email doing the rounds (see Nick Booth’s piece) pointing out similarities between this 2007 speech and the one made by Tom Watson on Monday. Amusingly, it condemns the Watson speech as a ‘mashup’. But hold on. Surely it’s entirely in keeping with the whole ethos of open source, to take good ideas and build on them? Didn’t you say mass collaboration was a good thing?

Kudos up one notch for the Puffbox Man.

He makes some good points about Open Source Politics.

I made a few similar points in my reaction to Mr Gordon’s 2007 Budget Speech, using splogs as a metaphor:

I suppose that all political speeches should in fact be called SPLEECHES since they all follow at least some of the principles behind Spam Blogs, i.e.:

1. Get content from somewhere else.
2. Use it for your own benefit.
3. Do not attribute the source.
4. With the overall objective of promoting your own organisation.

That would be 4 out of 4 then for 90% of policy speeches I have ever heard !

Tags: budget speech, splog, simon dixon, puffbox, open source politics

[tags]budget speech, splog, simon dixon, puffbox, open source politics[/tags]