jackthurston.com

Last week I ruffled a few feathers with a post about the sorry state of Labour and the internet. One of my main points was that Labour seemed to be drawn into a battle of the blogs and was neglecting investment in a responsive email campaign. Thomas Gensemer, founder of Blue State Digital, the firm which helped run Barack Obama’s online campaign for the US Presidency, gave a talk a couple of days later at City University. He made the same point. Hopefully City will publish a video of the talk before too long. I watched it live on the web stream and it was compelling. Click on the image below to watch the talk.

Gensemer really understands this stuff. If only someone in the Labour Party did too.

It’s taken thirty-six years but last week it finally happened. I found myself - however I might wish for it to be otherwise - agreeing with an article in the Daily Mail. It was a stingingly accurate critique of the Labourlist group blog which has been online for a while now but was ‘launched’ last Thursday.

Labourlist is not something that I would normally spare much thought about. I’ve been happy to drift away from the day-to-day dogfights of British politics since I stood down as a Special Adviser at the 2001 General Election in an effort to reclaim my life and start up some of my own projects. But I have found something sickly compelling about the way Labourlist has unfolded into a tragi-comedy that reveals more than it should about the troubled relationship the Labour Party has with the internet. (more…)

Each month the Mayor of London faces a grilling from the London Assembly, a kind of Mayor’s Question Time. It lasts up to a few hours and there is a webcast of it. But the image quality is spectacularly bad:

I suppose this is what people mean when they talk about ‘faceless officialdom’. It’s only recognisable as Boris Johnson by his trademark shock of blonde hair. And this is not just a one-off error, ALL the GLA webcasts are like this, with the faces blurred out like they used to do when represenatives of Sinn Féin were on the TV. You wouldn’t know it, but here is my representative on the GLA Val Shawcross chairing the Transport Scrutiny Committee on 9 September 2008:

Compare London’s foggy blur with the very clear feed of Prime Minister’s Questions:

The Mayor’s Question Time ought to be a showcase event for democratically holding to account the man who runs the world’s greatest city. You’d think they could set up a half-decent camera, and give its lens a wipe every now and then, wouldn’t you?

Make no mistake, I thought Gordon Brown’s speech today at the Labour Party Conference was his best for a decade. With all the pressure on him from the economic downturn, flatlining opinion polls and the machinations of rebel Labour MPs, he did a great job of balancing the essential elements of a good Leader’s speech: the personal story, a couple of mildly self-deprecating jokes, ‘fessing up to past mistakes and shortcomings, relating a single big theme (fairness) to real life situations, giving the opposition a good thrashing and generally helping the party feel good about itself. But one phrase that struck a strange note with me: ‘new age’ - a concept so central to the overall message that it even features in the speech’s notional title: “A Fair Britain for the New Age”. I thought I’d investigate. (more…)

In a post earlier this week, I referred to my ‘weekly diet’ of podcasts and I thought it was only fair to open up the larder. I have been podcasting the radio show I present since May 2005. Initially I didn’t know what podcasting was or how to do it. A kind listener explained and helped me set it up. For a long time I harboured suspicions that it was just something for the early adopters out there and was never going to go mainstream. That was until BBC Radio 4 issued an edict that presenters had to say the word ‘podcast’ every thirty seconds. In the past 6 months I’ve become a true convert, particularly on a three week solo cycle-camping trip in France, where spoken-word podcasts were regular evening listening. I’d add that not owning a television set also helps free up time for radio and podcast listening.

Just like blogs, there are a thousand awful and pointless podcasts out there for every one worth listening to. There’s also this thing called podfade, in which a podcast starts off really well then becomes less regular, less interesting before it runs silently into the sands of the presenter’s own guilt and self-loathing. In other words, not every podcast stays the course or lives up to its early promise. Then again, there are podcasts that get better with time, usually amateur productions in which the presenter(s) get more comfortable in the role and find their niche. In short, a lot of filtering, and scratching and sniffing is required. Beside the iTunes Music Store podcast area, a recommendation from a friend is probably the best way of finding out about what’s good.

It’s clear that not all of these are strictly speaking podcasts, rather radio broadcasts which are subsequently made available as podcasts. I don’t see that as a disqualification. So here goes, you can read the list after the jump. (more…)

The London Festival of Architecture goes from strength to strength and this year runs from 20 June to 20 July.

Along with the exhibitions, talks, guided walks, debates and parties there is a series of excellent architectural podwalks produced by Ruby Wright. I did one about my neighbourhood, entitled ‘Backstreets of Southwark’. It was featured on BBC Radio 4’s iPM programme on 14 June.

The walk passes both cutting edge and utilitarian architecture, secret pocket parks, an unconsecrated boneyard where 15,000 people lie buried, the wine bar where local magistrates go after hard day on the bench, the remains of the debtors prison where Charles Dickens’s father was banged up in 1824 and much more.

It’s about 2 miles long and starts and finishes at Southwark tube station, on the Jubilee Line. A map of the route (including a GPX trace) is over here.

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/SouthwarkPodwalk/SouthwarkPodwalk_64kb.mp3]

Download including various file formats (128kb MP3, 64kb MP3, Ogg Vorbis) from here.

I spent Saturday at “barcampUKgovweb” and met a very interesting group of people who care about how government behaves online. Among the 60 or so participants, there was a roughly even split between people working for government, people working for companies and people who are - for want of a better term - civic hackers. (more…)

Many Eyes is a web-based data visualisation tool that is still in alpha but already looks impressive. It’s very simple. You cut and paste data (numbers or text) and then choose from a variety of data visualisation tools to make your dataset come to live. We hope to be doing some cool things with it over at caphealthcheck.eu and farmsubsidy.org. In the meantime, here is a rather silly visualisation of the most frequently used words in speeches made by the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Conservative Party Leader David Cameron. Can you tell whose words are whose? Answer after the jump.

Many Eyes has got some glitches but it seems a lot better than its rival Swivel. Here is a good comparative review of both.

(more…)

At noon today at a meeting at the Trimdon Labour Club in his constituency, Tony Blair told a group of his friends and political supporters (link requires Real Player) that he has tendered his resignation as leader of the Labour Party and will be stepping down as Prime Minister on 27 June after ten years and eight weeks in the job. The much-trailed announcement is all-but-certain to result in a smooth handover of power to Chancellor Gordon Brown who will lead the Labour Party into the next General Election slated for 2009. (more…)

British campaigners against European Union plans to outlaw imperial measures like pounds and ounces have claimed victory, according to news reports today. The self-styled ‘metric martyrs’ say they have say they have won the battle to keep Britain imperial, after confirmation from the European Commission’s industry commissioner, Gunther Verheugen, that dual marking of goods in imperial and metric would “continue indefinitely”. Previously the Commission had set a 2009 deadline for the phasing out of imperial measures still widely used in British greengrocers, butchers and supermarkets. (more…)