Commentariat

Wardman Wire

A valuable lesson goes unlearnt
Just a few days ago the polls closed down to just 5 points and the snap election chatter began to creep out again. And why not too? After all, if the Tories cannot do better than a five point lead after all that Gordon Brown and this Labour government has been [...]

Is over at Brassneck.

Welcome to the 197th edition - slightly shorter than normal after last week’s Baby P editon… These are the best blog stories of the week as nominated by you. Nominations for next week should be sent via email to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.

The roundup is a compendium of last week’s outstanding posts in the British Blogosphere.

Via the Conspirators and Sandy Szwarc:

Researchers in England have inadvertently shown how silly the crisis of childhood obesity has become and how unrealistic the definitions are of overweight and obesity in children. We continually hear parents accused of being in denial and incapable of recognizing their children’s weight “problems.” It turns out, few doctors can correctly identify children in the overweight and obese categories, either.

…

Their interpretation of their study’s findings was to call for the need for formal training of medical professionals to enable them to better recognize and manage obesity.

There’s something unsettling in all of this, and I can’t decide whether it is unnecessary research projects, questioning why there is talk of “clinical observations” of obesity - which is presumably in a setting where scales are available, or in the inevitable knee-jerk “we need more training” conclusion of the bureaucratic paperwork-factory.

Click through on the title for all the papers.

Front Page Images here and on the Front Page are Courtesy of Sky News.

I’m not going to cover the pre-Budget Report in detail (although somebody else on the team might do so).

Instead I’m noting what I think is a significant development in the BBC approach - that of linking out systematically to Political Blogs, which are not all particularly well-known bloggers, either. For the BBC, this approach can add interest in what is a long session. There are links to around a dozen bloggers.

Also, the links are direct links which pass Google-juice, a practice that had been noted as missing on the BBC website recently. This is crucial for blogs to gain exposure.

The things missing from here are Northern Irish and Scottish blogs, and a Lib Dem MP, but the Lib Dems had an extra blogger linked.

A couple of mistakes. Twitter links should be to the individual message, as should blog links - and they quoted a paragraph from Richard Kelly including an inaccuracy.

Overall - probably 7 out of 10 in my view for this Live Blog. Not bad at all. I’ve listed all the blog links below the fold.

Via the Washington Post, one that I missed last week:

The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide dropped drastically today after a Web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations allegedy engaged in spam activity was taken offline, according to security firms that monitor spam distribution online.

While its gleaming, state-of-the-art, 30-story office tower in downtown San Jose, Calif., hardly looks like the staging ground for what could be called a full-scale cyber crime offensive, security experts have found that a relatively small firm at that location is home to servers that serve as a gateway for a significant portion of the world’s junk e-mail.
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The servers are operated by McColo Corp., which these experts say has emerged as a major U.S. hosting service for international firms and syndicates that are involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography via email.

But the company’s web site was not accessible today, when two Internet providers cut off MoColo’s connectivity to the Internet, security experts said. Immediately after McColo was unplugged, security companies charted a precipitous drop in spam volumes worldwide. E-mail security firm IronPort said spam levels fell by roughly 66 percent as of Tuesday evening.

Read it all.

Paul Bradshaw, who lectures in Journalism at Birmingham City University at is compiling a list of “the most significant events in the history of journalism blogging?” Examples Paul quotes include one over 5 yearsm, which is my favourite.

2007: Dave Winer wins his $2,000 bet (made in 2002) that blogs will rank higher than the New York Times for the top 5 news stories of 2007 (h/t Bob Stepno), demonstrating the importance of blogging in news distribution.

And here are some suggestions that I think should be on the list.

Paul Bradshaw, who lectures in Journalism at Birmingham City University at is compiling a list of “the most significant events in the history of journalism blogging?” Examples Paul quotes include one over 5 yearsm, which is my favourite.

2007: Dave Winer wins his $2,000 bet (made in 2002) that blogs will rank higher than the New York Times for the top 5 news stories of 2007 (h/t Bob Stepno), demonstrating the importance of blogging in news distribution.

And here are some suggestions that I think should be on the list.

Paul Bradshaw, who lectures in Journalism at Birmingham City University at is compiling a list of “the most significant events in the history of journalism blogging?” Examples Paul quotes include one over 5 yearsm, which is my favourite.

2007: Dave Winer wins his $2,000 bet (made in 2002) that blogs will rank higher than the New York Times for the top 5 news stories of 2007 (h/t Bob Stepno), demonstrating the importance of blogging in news distribution.

And here are some suggestions that I think should be on the list.

Click through on the title for all the papers.

Front Page Images here and on the Front Page are Courtesy of Sky News.

Most Terrorists Exist in the Minds of Political Marketeers…

…who want to avoid a proper debate.

Cartoon: Wellington Grey

The battle over the economy and the way to fix it seems to be growing. Both sides are aiming to win the hearts and minds of the average voter.
The Conservatives have a very clever - one could almost say iconic - poster:

And Labour have a more indepth propaganda campaign, trying to portray David Cameron as [...]

I’ve written before about the absurdity of the US electoral system that leaves more than two months between the election of the President and them actually taking office, and this is an example of it

Disgraced media tycoon Conrad Black is seeking clemency from outgoing US President George W. Bush.
Black, 64, is serving a six-and-a-half-year jail [...]

I’ve been looking at the excellent proposal for the Free Our Bills project from MySociety.

This is a project/campaign aimed at making information about forthcoming legislation more easily accessible and useable. This is the brief outline from the MySociety website. They point out the process whereby legislation “emerges”:

As bills are written they go through various stages. Towards the very end of the process, they are dumped out in a format that is sent to the printers, and which is converted to HTML so that it can be put up on the Parliamentary website.

MySociety wants standard and open information formats (i.e., ones that processed by outsiders) to be used throughout that process - so that they can tell us what is happening, and we can then scrutinise legislation more effectively.

The whole country and it’s Mother-in-Law is currently talking about disengagement from politics being one of the big problems in politics at present. Given that MySociety has a track record of doing useful things, I support the campaign.

With so many TV shows based around judges - either in the studio or the massed ranks texting in their votes - we seem to be training ourselves daily to pass judgement on people we’ve never met. Someone I know has suffered a torrent of online abuse this week for a public statement of his Christian faith. And because we know judging is so common, we also become experts at concealing stuff that might get judged by others.

Wouldn’t we be a better society if we could be open about our deepest beliefs, fears and weaknesses without being jumped on? Fear and criticism can create a ghetto mentality, where no critics are admitted, which in turn makes entrenched beliefs less and less open to reason. Witch hunts don’t find witches, they just create devils out of those who pursue them.

The Thunderdragon doesn’t care who is a BNP member; I’d like to explain why TD should.
TD says, in short, that the BNP is a legitimate political party and membership of a party should, therefore, not impact on what job you can have. I think this is patent rubbish; some jobs have to take account of [...]

For some time there has been conversation about the need to look at the Quality and Engagement of audiences for media websites.

This article looks at one of the data items available via the Quantcast.com service, which segments your audience by loyalty. The free service can also identify which organisations and businesses are sending visitors to a website.

I look at the data for national newspapers, and also for this site and journalism.co.uk.

For months and years we have seen a long and meaningless debate about which national newspaper website had the biggest “unique users pen1s” when in fact the competing organs have been the same size to within a tiny fraction, and it would have been more practical to argue about who had the smallest brain and the most desperate need to generate copy.

We now have - in the ABCe traffic figures for October - a difference which is worth noting among the national newspaper websites.

The Guardian is ahead by slightly over 10%.

This is the first of two articles about web audiences for national newspaper websites - I’ll comment on the quality of audiences later today.

The BBC Trust has rejected a proposal to spend £68m launching a local web-video service in 60 Cities across the country.

Good. This was a step too far, especially as Local News media is better placed to closely engage with with local people and has started using online video creatively in some places.

Click through on the title for all the papers.

Front Page Images here and on the Front Page are Courtesy of Sky News.

“Unfortunately the 2 groups with most airtime at the moment are Christian Voice (enough said) and the National Secular Society (who want everyone to think that all Christians are like Christian Voice).”

David Keen

I really couldn’t care less about the publication of a list of BNP members. I mean, seriously, who cares? Let’s make this clear: the BNP are a legitimate political party. However distasteful we may find their political beliefs, they have a right to hold them and to be a member of a political party that [...]

Since I started writing the Wardman Wire, I’ve used series of articles to give extended coverage and analysis.

In the summer I installed a new Wordpress Plugin called “Organise Series“. More recently I had to take it down due to a new version of Wordpress. I’ve been able to reinstall it now, so series of posts are back. The plugin displays a list of related posts that cut across categories and tags in the body of a single post (example ).

It also allows the display of the whole series as an archive.

I’ve got some debris to clear out (articles that appear in series where they shouldn’t), and there are a few design issues (e.g., what happens to images that get moved), but it means that many hundreds of crosslinks between related articles are back.

I have covered the rundown of the bookshop chain that used to be known as SPCK over several months.

The SSG News Blog is carrying a story of some leaked correspondence from the time when the management of the bookshop at Durham Cathedral was transferred from the Society of Saint Stephen the Great to the newly created company “Durham Cathedral Shop Management Limited”. I reproduce the relevant part of the article.

Someone is amused by Nick Griffin and his stolen membership list.