Douglas Carswell is part of a new breed of MP.  He believes in a strong parliament, open primaries, and a recall mechanism to enable constituents to change MP without having to change party. He also believes in blogging.

Yesterday he wrote with two pieces of advice for new MPs.  Firstly to represent their constituents, not just their party.  He links to this article by Fraser Nelson highlighting why 3 Labour MPs bucked the trend and won their marginal seats.  Labour MPs who voted in Parliament with their consciences not their parties.  His second piece of advice is to blog.

Good advice.

[Cross-posted from www.gallomanor.com]

I was in Diss, Norfolk last night as part of our www.norfolkhomepage.org.uk project.  We had invited various community organisations to the library to learn about how they could get involved in the project.  Primarily we showed people like Trevor that he could easily set up a blog for his Diss Badminton Club to help get new members and build more of a club around his existing membership.  We explored ideas with Kevin about how the Mere Players could make more of their newsletters without abandoning their existing Flash based site. With a blog they’ll soon feature in the top searches for Diss Drama.

To help explain the power of using a platform like Wordpress I showed people the site I created for my wife – beautifulbirthdaycakes.co.uk.  I explained how that previously her Flickr site had received 2,000 views in a couple of years through the Flickr community, through friends and through flyers.  With a GoogleLocal listing she got some traffic through Google.

Her new site created on Wordpress however is just six weeks old.  Already she has had over 2,000 visits, over 7,000 page views and business has gone through the roof.  She is on the front page for Google and Bing searches on “Birthday Cakes in Bath” and that will only improve.

What struck me last night, and not for the first time, was that people still have this ingrained view of what a blog is.  When I showed the cake site to one lady she blurted out, “That’s not a blog! A blog is boring with lots of text.”

Wordpress.com still promotes itself to bloggers and offers:

“Express yourself. Start a blog.”

It’s a website that is easy to update and optimised for search engines.  End of.  Let’s not label it with something that puts people off.

According to some sources there are more than 2 blogs sites created every second.  We went through the 100 million blog mark a year or two ago.  Many if not most of those blogs have stopped publishing.  Many bloggers wonder if it is worth carrying on.  Chris Blattman on the 2nd anniversary of his blog did just that and decided to carry on. Why?

I like blogging

We say at the end of the CivicSurf Guide to blogging that it can be addictive.  It can be an enjoyable activity.

I don’t have the time to advise all the students I’d like, or harangue policymakers one by one. The blog is a technology, one that makes me orders of magnitude more productive.

Bloggers worry that they haven’t got time to blog.  It is about prioritising.  Chris acknowledges that for him blogging costs him 15 to 30 minutes of research paper writing, but that is worth giving up in order to influence students and policymakers.  He knows that to wield that influence without a blog would take far more time.

Writing daily forces me to read things more carefully and critically, and distill ideas to their essential points.

Who doesn’t need to distil their ideas into more coherent and concise statements?

I learn because you send me interesting things to read

Blogging can expand the range of ideas you come into contact with.

my mother has stopped asking what I do for a living

If only my mother would start to use a computer!

Although Chris is an academic blogger much of what he says should make sense to a civic leader, particularly the part that blogging allows him a greater influence than he could otherwise have and that the time investment pays off.

(h/t Owen Abroad)

DFID Blogs Website

Just over twelve months ago we were frantically getting the first set of DFID Bloggers up to speed on using Wordpress and the difference between blogging and drafting briefing documents.  We were working hard to make sure they had posts up in time for Blog Action Day.

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.

Last year it was on poverty and therefore very relevant to DFID’s agenda.  This year – today – the issue is Climate Change.  Again DFID has Climate Change very high on it’s list of priorities.  They are working to help advise the developing world on how to reduce their carbon footprint and supporting it in dealing with the effects of climate change.

So we’ve been working with a group of DFID staff working on Climate Change to get them started this week and to keep them going in the run up to Copenhagen in December and hopefully beyond.

But it isn’t just the Climate Change group that are contributing to Blog Action Day.  Already Sarah Sanyahumbi has posted about late monsoons in Nepal and Neil Squires reflects on how the floods in 2000 that left much of Mozambique underwater make the country understand the need to be prepared better than most.

One of the aspects of the ongoing reorganisation of Local Government (i.e. scrapping of District Councils) is that Parish and Town Councils should become relatively more important in our democratic processes. I met Justin Griggs, (@JustinGriggs) Head of Policy and Development, of the National Association of Local Councils (NALC) at the recent LocalGovCamp in Birmingham. He’s acutely aware that the image of Parish and Town Councillors (Local Cllrs) is not exactly dynamic and go-getting despite in some cases Town Councils are representing towns like Salisbury with 70,000 residents.

He is very keen to get some of those councillors online. The benefits could be enormous.  Not only would it help the councils start conversations with their communities and boost their profile, but it would also help the councillors network amongst themselves.  Blogs and social networks would be a quick and easy way for town and parish councils to share information, success stories and help each other achieve what they want.  This peer networking aspect of blogging is useful but not often mentioned.

To help NALC along the way we sent them 40 copies of the CivicSurf DVD to go to each of the 38 county associations that filter information down to the town and parish councils.  Hopefully it’ll get shown and a few more of our democratic representatives will benefit from blogging.  Maybe some coaching might be in order.

The best PR is the PR that is unsolicited and comes out of the blue.

A comment was posted this morning on the IDeA’s Policy & Performance blog:

The CivicSurf DVD is a fantastic introduction. And that’s not just my opinion. We invited our councillors to a 45 minute session and showed the film after a very brief introduction about online communities. The fact that they saw ‘people like them’ in similar circumstances got the key points across very effectively, and it generated some great questions and comments. I prepared a document that gave links to social media tools, blogs by elected representatives and online community websites to encourage further investigation and play. One councillor is now blogging regularly. But all who attended now have a better understanding of the possibilities for online engagement. Long story short, thumbs up to CivicSurf.

It was written by an Australian Local Govt Officer who requested a CivicSurf DVD a few months back.  I’m really delighted that the film helped convince his elected representatives within just 45 minutes.  It is exactly what it was made for.

You can follow the councillors (and some others) on Twitter: @OzGovLocalClrs

Tony Tomkinson has been looking at his blogstats. In 12 months he’s had over 5,000 visits and he has analysed them by post.  Nothing earth-shattering there.  No rocket science involved.  No records broken.  You might say it is quite dull.

Dull to you and me perhaps, but to Tony it is very interesting  indeed, because it shows what his constituents are interested in and for a civic leader that is the way to get re-elected.

Liz Azyan is conducting some research into Local Government and Social Media.  On her beautifully themed blog she has just posted an interview with Cllr James Cousins about his blog.  It is well worth a read.

It was interesting to read that he had the self-discipline to run the blog unpublished for 6 weeks or so to build a few posts and to be sure in himself that he wanted to launch the blog.

Front cover of Consultation Document

It’s a fairly important part of the DCLG White Paper Consultation process for CivicSurf.  The Code of Practice on Local Authority Publicity has been blamed by many as a major obstacle to helping councillors use blogs.  This consultation is a chance to make your views clear on the matter.

I’ll be reading this over Christmas and posting some thoughts and responding in the New Year.

It’s not because she’s young.

It’s not that she’s seriously ill

It’s not that I don’t know what it is that’s made her helpless.

It’s not that the only reason that she is standing is because her husband is struggling to hold her up.

It’s not when she goes into a seizure and becomes incontinent.

It’s not me being covered in her urine as I help her husband lower her to the floor on the crowded landing.

It’s not the possibility that she could die from this illness or be permanently disabled.

It’s not the way she looks at me with utter terror in her eyes.

None of those things kept me awake tonight.

It’s the sound of her four young children behind me, wailing in fear as they realise that their mother isn’t playing a game.

Tom Reynolds blogs at Random Acts of Reality.  He writes authoritatively and authentically about life as an Emergency Medical Technician (Ambulance paramedic type).  Today’s post goes straight for the tear ducts.