Instant Interactivity is Back: Chatrooms on Political Blogs

From the desk of admin ·May 9, 2008 at 7:41 pm · Filed under All WW, Announcements, Comment, Internet / Technical, Media, News - Current Affairs

One of the key benefits that came from the existence of 18 Doughty Street - whatever you thought of the overall balance (old bones that I am not interested in gnawing) - was the opportunity for political bloggers to talk and debate together, and to interact with the wider political blogosphere instantaneously.

If you like, a water cooler for political bloggers.

Cross Party Conversation

To a reasonable extent (and with all its limitations and problems), that conversation was cross-party - and recovered what (I am told) was something of the spirit of an older political blogosphere with fewer “silos”, rather than being partisan bish-bash-bosh.

Election Chatrooms

On election night Guido ran a chat room, and has now started doing them for Prime Minister’s Questions. So did Conservative Home (and I can’t find it).

Iain Dale has done a trial and is now moving into live interviews, and this evening is having a is having an Open House live chat.

Certain of the other innovations of 18 Doughty Street (of which there were a number) seem to me to have been picked up by big media, rather than feeding back into blogs. The best example is the use of video and video clips, which in my opinion is because there are no (and I mean zero) independent political blogs in this country with the resources necessary to make it happen.

Chat rooms - on the other hand - are one of the examples where we don’t need any significant resources of time, people or money.

Cover it Live

Cover it Live has provided the application used by all the examples I quote above. It has a free version, and can be installed easily.

Notionally it is an application for Live Reporting of events, but proved robust as a chat room. The only problem is that the chatroom owner can only set 10 participants to be unmoderated using the free service.

What Next?

I like

• That chat rooms are back.

I don’t like

• That so far blogs on the right are making all the running again.

I want to see

• Some Centre and Left blogs picking up on this trend, and hosting debates.
• Some real cross-spectrum debate and conversation. I think that Iain will do that, but let’s have the same thing hosted elsewhere as well.

And me?

• I’m looking at doing something, but I think that the Wardman Wire niche is probably for conversation about using blogs politically, rather than about politics; I don’t think we have the platform or profile to do - unless someone tells us something different.

Comments

Noticed by sweet Emily on election night…

From the desk of admin ·May 9, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under All WW, Announcements, Humour, Internet / Technical, Politics

I didn’t spot it before I’ve had Emily Maitlis listening to my Twitter feed. Click through for the full screenshot.

And it served as a prebuttal to Ms Mortimer’s “Naughty Boris planning to stay MP for a year” story on the BBC webpage - as it is in reverse time order. Sweet.

Comments

Matt Wardman Blogging Hiatus (almost) in May

From the desk of admin ·May 6, 2008 at 1:00 pm · Filed under All WW, Announcements

I’ve just reached 1500 posts since the blog started, so I’ll be taking a partial break during most of the rest of May (from the end of this week) to recharge my blogging batteries, and to do some thinking about the development of the Wardman Wire.

I’ll post more detail late this afternoon.

In the meantime, the average quality of the articles on the blog will rise - as everybody else will be continuing to post in my absence; a sort of blog article “Darwin Awards” effect.

Comments

Simon Barrow on the Roman Catholic Church and the Modern World

From the desk of admin ·May 1, 2008 at 11:30 am · Filed under All WW, Announcements, Human Rights / Freedom

Simon Barrow’s piece arrived late yesterday … for technical reasons to do with Google Mail attachments getting lost. So my apolologies - it was posted in the end.

Here is an extract from the piece, reflecting on the relationship between a traditionalist Roman Catholic approach, and the modern world.

Simon Barrow has been thinking about the tensions within the Roman Catholic Church between a traditional vision of authority, and a desire to engage with human rights and the modern world.

Whose rights, whose wrongs?

Benedict XVI’s recent, high profile visit to the United States highlighted the coincidence of two anniversaries. The first was his own inauguration on 24 April 2005 as 265th reigning Pope, Bishop of Rome, spiritual head of the 1.2 billion strong Roman Catholic Church, and Sovereign of the Vatican City State. The second, to be marked fully later this year, was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by UN General Assembly in resolution 217 A (III) on 10 December 1948.

The pontiff embodies three kinds of combined headship – the ecclesiastical, the spiritual and the political. As such, his office is the supreme expression of a Christendom vision of the relation of heavenly and temporal authority in one inherited throne, invested in locus Christi. Here is a universal claim to supervening moral authority, one that causes considerable controversy within and without.

The United Nations declaration, by contrast, is the result of an agreement among states and their peoples (what is somewhat vaguely deemed “the international community”) arising from a long historical struggle, involving people of many faiths and none. Its aim is to give practical expression to an inalienable sense of human dignity, worth and mutual obligation which can be seen to be grounded (though not without disputation) in significant strands of Jewish, Christian, humanist, secular and Muslim thought.

Read it all here.

Comments

Wardman Wire Election Coverage: Testing the Chat Room

From the desk of admin ·April 29, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Announcements

More on this later, but I just turned on the Wardman Wire Election 2008 Chatroom for testing if you would like a sneak preview.

It lives here this year: http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/chat-room/

On the night I will add all the relevant news feeds from Live Bloggers to the right hand sidebar, so it will be easy to keep track of the Election from that one page.

I’ll post more substantive detail later on today.

Comments

Which is the most visited website in the UK?

From the desk of admin ·April 28, 2008 at 7:35 pm · Filed under All WW, Announcements, Internet / Technical

I’m doing a short survey for an article for tomorrow: Which do you think is the most visited website in the UK?

Please drop your suggstions in the comments.

Comments (10)

Welsh Political Comment on Twitter

From the desk of admin ·April 28, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under All WW, Announcements, Online Media, Wales

As a trial I have set up a Twitter Feed of headlines from the Welsh Political Comment blog aggregator. Comments would be more than welcome.

I quite like the fact that the headlines go straight through to the original blog article, rather than via the politics-wales.co.uk website.

The Twitter Feed is configured to deliver a maximum of 5 headlines every half hour. That means that some may be missed, but is a limitation I cannot control without changing my service.

You can find the Twitter Feed at www.twitter.com/politics_wales (that is politics<underscore>wales - Twitter ban hyphens in account names).

I would welcome any comments (using the spiffy new comment features added to the Wardman Wire last weekend).

Comments