The Wardman Wire

If you enter the question “is the BNP racist ” into the Google search engine, and click the “I feel lucky” button, it will take you to the first result in the search.

At present this is an item on the BNP website which attempts to justify the British National Party’s position. The same happens if you type “is the BNP racist ” into the address bar of a web browser by mistake.

This article looks at the claims made in that article that the British National Party is not racist, through the lens of the claims made, and through the Constitution which forms the basis of the BNP’s own values.

A Twitter conversation about BBC Question Times started up on 23rd April with a few “political blog” people having an online debate, enlivened by David Starkey making a pitch for the pantomime villain slot on Question Time.

That has built up slowly each week, and after four weeks we have had the “MP Expenses” saga, we had 3000 Tweets during the programme itself on the #bbcqt hashtag and a lot more since from (my estimate) a couple of hundred people, including quite a few from outside the online politics niche.

This post is tracing where the Twitter hashtag has come from, and how it has grown over a month. It’s my own account, and I’ll be pleased to correct anything I’ve got wrong.

Micah Sifry has a piece about the main stream North American media not yet seeing the potential of political Twitter, other than as a new one way communication channel. We have this problem in the UK too, most famously in the case of columnist Rachel Sylvester.

For Micah, the key difference is between a politician thinking “what can I do with this“, and a group of people asking “what can we do with this”).

We’re still in the wake-up phase in the UK for political twitter too, but a Tweet from @tom_watson may now be worth more raw clickthroughs than a link from Iain Dale. My statistics are saying that a Tweet on @mattwardman generates anything between 15 and 75 clicks at present in the next two hours.

There’s a lot of potential out there. At present Tweetminster, CllrTweeps and other projects are building basic infrastructure documenting who is using Twitter. It will become far more interesting as others begin to build networks and communities, whether transient or permanent, using that information - and start to get things done.

The Problems

Interview Incomprehensibility

Politicians being interviewed talk over each other and interrupt each other while we want to listen to what they are actually saying. We need an incentive to undermine this yobbish tendency.

Who won the discussion or interview?

We have no easy way of determining the winner of any studio discussion. This leads to tedious arguments in bars and debate in the comment section of blog posts. It also makes it difficult for media managers to evaluate the performance of politicians under their control.

The Solution: Interrupt Count Analysis

This is very simple. the loser of any discussion is the one who interrupts their co-nterviewees the least.

The Interrupt Count is the number of any interruptions.

This is a devastatingly simple way of solving both problems above, and could even be displayed automatically on the Television Screen, or on “Quiz Show” style boards above each politician.

As a refinement, each interviewee’s micophone could be automatically turned off when their count reaches a predetermined number of interruptions.

The John Humphries Exception

John Humphries always interrupts everybody more than anyone else, therefore he is automatically declared the loser when he is the interviewer, regardless of any other factors - since it is assumed that the interviewees will have no time to speak or generate interrupt counts themselves.

Labourlist was one of a series of initiatives that came out of a move by Labour in the autumn of 2008 to “fight back online”. There are several news things which have started since then.

Go Fourth: An initiative to campaign for a fourth term “featuring” John Prescott. This will survive.

LabourList itself will, I think, survive with a new editor. I’m not saying what I think it will be like - but it will move under official (rather than unofficial - which meant that it couldn’t be controlled closely) Central Control, or have the apron strings cut.

Labour Women: “A space for Labour women to blog to their hearts’ content and increase women’s representation on the internet”. It was started by Jessica Asato after the “Labour 2.0″ conference. I hope this survives, since it is a good (and needed) project. At present it has had 46 posts since early March, but only one in April.

Alistair Campbell’s site. This will survive as a personal site.

I think the sites will plough their own furrows more. Labour List will probably have a new editor in a few days - unless Derek Draper owns all the intellectual property and digs his feet in, and who it will be will determine the credibility of the site.

If it was my decision, I’d give to one of the not-hugely-critical-but-still-independent bloggers who has wide respect but is their own person, and cut the apron strings. I’d also make sure that the new editor knows at least a little about blog culture.

It has been a sight to behold watching Dolly rewrite the book of “Blogging Lessons to Learn the Hard Way” in a period of barely 3 months.

The title of Top Political-niche Twit will go to (I think) Tom Watson, assuming he makes his Twitter feed public again when the dust has settled.

But my first step would be to dump Schillings as legal advisers.

This article is a continuation of my previous reflections on Twitter in Politics.

I have spent part of the last week or so building a new blog about Twitter and what can be done with it called Twexpert. As such I’ve been overexposed to the section (still small - 6 million) of the Net community that is using the service.

I thought it would be useful to revisit the list published 12 days ago by Mr Dale’s list of “Top Political Blogging Twits”, to have a look at the rate of change of Twitter use in the political niche. These are listed in the same order as they were on Iain’s site on February 19/20th. I collected data on the morning of the 4th March.

First I’ll list the data, then make some comments.