The Wardman Wire

You are browsing the archives of Internet / Technical.

In the spring there was a great kerfuffle over an anonymous blogging Civil Servant called Civil Serf.

At the time Tom Watson MP asked for advice on his blog about what guidance should be given to Civil Servants making comment and participating in communities online. He’s now come out with a “Code of Practice”. Here it is, verbatim:

Principles for participation online

1. Be credible

• Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.

2. Be consistent

• Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.

3. Be responsive

• When you gain insight, share it where appropriate.

4. Be integrated

• Wherever possible, align online participation with other offline communications.

5. Be a civil servant

• Remember that you are an ambassador for your organisation. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency.

This week Blog Platform is about a new group blog that is being launched about now. A number of bloggers with a technical background on the Internet have got together to start a new blog called poligeeks.co.uk. This is the description:

“A collective of geeky people that are into politics too. We help other bloggers like Guido and Iain Dale on the right as well as LabourHome and and others on both sides with their geeky stuff. We thought it might be nice to have our own collective blog where we could speak geek and share ideas.”

Here is the introductory article by Mike Rouse.

Yesterday I had a look at Monitoring the Commentariat for free. Iain Dale has translated that as:

“Matt Wardman thinks he can put Editorial Intelligence out of business.”

Now there’s another challenge. In the spirit of enquiry and to encourage enterprise (!) I thought I’d do a quick minute rundown of Editorial Intelligence’s services and a few of their potential free competitors.

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.

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

A month ago the Wardman Wire was hacked, probably via a vulnerability in a software package. We have now recovered to our former level of referrals from Google; here is the graph. I have posted the data going back to the start of the year for context.