Goodbye to del.icio.us and simpy: I don’t get anything out of these social bookmarking services so I’m leaving them. The reason I joined was to share my bookmarks quickly and simply with others, in the case of del.icio.us, with a view to collaborating with others on creating a resource, in the case of simpy and the smithspolitics group.

Yet as I still have a need for quick bookmarking and the global access a website provides me I’ve adopted a clone of the social bookmarking model, scuttle, and installed it here on robdyke.com.

Sarah Teather and other Brent Liberal Democrates have joined facebook. I’ve poked her, have you?

I wasn’t expecting to see our Sarah on Facebook… A few years ago electronic networking wasn’t on her list methods for constituency communications. How things change over time: the ubiquity of the term “social networking”, meaning a twittering, bebobuzzing space for me to show my face on the internet, has overtaken “blogging” in terms of its penetration into the nations daily lexicon.

Sarah sees Facebook as a compliment to her existing constituency working: “It’s important to be accessible to all my constituents, and there are lots of ways for people to meet me face to face.”

“Young people often have very strong opinions on local and national issues. Sites such as Facebook provide another way for me to hear their views. I can also use the site to tell young people about the work I am doing on their behalf. For lots of younger adults the internet is now the main way of keeping in touch. I hope that having a page on Facebook will encourage many more people to come forward with issues and campaigns they would like me to take up.”

But Facebook is a closed community, a members only space on the internet: at least MySpace member pages are public! These “Social websites expose class divide“. Blogging, i.e. online publishing with comments, is open and public and seeks to engage readers in a transparent dialog.
As we know from recent escapades that some people around Brent’s elected representatives like to engage in online ‘activism’… So I hope that Sarah’s Facebook account and our other MPs for that matter are only being operated by her and not by their teams. As we know from the Facebook terms of service, in the User Conduct section:

• In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to:
• register for more than one User account, register for a User account on behalf of an individual other than yourself, or register for a User account on behalf of any group or entity;
• impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity;
• impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity;

what’s happening with the stop the tower campaign? I’ve not received any emails from Barney nor have I picked up other campaign materials in the QP area these last weeks. i have seen that the Liberal Democrats are making a local election issue out of the QP tower plan - and with Cllr Davies being against, Cllr Nerva chairing a panel and Cllr Sayer making the decision, political representation from Team Red is lacking a bit too. As for Team Blue and Green I don’t know where they stand - but there is the opportunity to have an impact of these candidates over the coming weeks with some campaigning.

I have resurrected the Brent East Campaigning blog that I ran during the 2005 general election. it can be found at http://bec.robdyke.com - there I am posting and commenting on the topics that candidates seize upon as issues to campaign on in the Brent East area. but the site also has a wider purpose of supporting other/any campaigns in the Brent / Brent east area. stopthetower.co.uk is one of those campaigns. I have linked to the official site and the old blogger dot com website. but the official website is lacking in content and updates. I would like to help in bringing the stopthetower website up to date in order that this resource could be used as an information resource and campaigning tool both now during the run up to the local elections and in immediate aftermath (?) of the count.

I am prepared to do this in two ways. one I will upload copies of recent news letter and other articles to the website - to populate it, give it some bones and help the resource get started. I am then prepared to train some people in how to use the site and the tools. Some have had training and I am prepared to give others more in order that they can embrace and be empowered by these internet tools in their campaigning. Others who have used email services like HotMail will already have the skills to use the tools. I can help and support the use of them and the use of them will augment and extend the traditional methods of campaigning that are currently in use.

Read the Drupal README if you want to know what it is. Otherwise I’ll assume you understand the concepts of a FLOSS modular CMS/web-application generator in a LAMP environment.

Aspects of drupal of relevance to the IP Community Commission

• Aggregator: syndicating content
• Archive: view content by date
• Blog: a blog for every user
• Comment: allow comments on content
• Taxonomy: categories and classification schemes