You Can YouTube if You Want To, Minister

The Cabinet Office is to appoint a new "director of digital engagement" to oversee the Government's online communications strategy.

Andrew Stott, a senior civil servant and one of the Government's most experienced press officers, will carry out the role. His appointment is expected to be announced at midday today [Wednesday 13th, May].

Stott has been the Government's deputy chief information officer since 2004 and also oversaw the government's network of websites as head of service transformation at the e-government unit.

In his new role, he is likely to concentrate on improving the government's use of new technologies, including social networking sites and blogs, in an attempt to reach the audiences that use them.

From The Guardian.

Director of Digital Engagement, UK: a job posting

The successful applicant will:

• Develop a strategy and implementation plan for extending digital engagement across Government

• Work with communication, policy and delivery officials in Government departments to embed digital engagement in the day to day working of Government

• Work with Directors of Communication to ensure that digital media are included in the reporting of reaction to Government policy and initiatives

• Work closely with web teams to ensure that digital communications are making the most effective and efficient use of hardware and software

• Act as head of profession for civil servants working on digital engagement

• Ensure that digital engagement is always a leading part of Government consultation

• Introduce new techniques and software for digital engagement, such as ‘jams’ into Government

• Convene an expert advisory group made up of the leading experts on digital engagement to provide advice to Ministers and act as a sounding-board for the Government’s digital engagement strategy

• Work closely with the Ministerial Group on Digital Engagement, delivering the work agreed at Cabinet on digital engagement

Salary? £81,600 - 160,000


Apply here.


Tell the successful applicant what to do here.

Labour's Listing List?

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.

Jack Thurston goes long on that LabourList thing.

Google Grabs the Obama Dollars

Cher-ching.

Barack Obama's presidential campaign spent over $16 million on online advertising in 2008. John McCain's camp spent a fraction of that: around $3.6 million.

Google was far and away the winner, taking in an estimated $7.5 million of Obama ad dollars in 2008, about 45 percent of the campaign's digital ad spending, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Some of that money went toward display and text ads in Google's AdSense network, and some was used for ads appearing in search results on Google's site.

From ClickZ.

Let's Talk, a plea for Common Sense

The balanced BBC view on Andy Burham's Telegraph interview. Rory Cellan-Jones invites the culture minister to talk.

...yes, Andy Burnham's suggestion that Britain and the US could get together and impose some sort of web code does beg all sorts of questions. Who would decide what was permissible? How would trillions of constantly changing websites be policed? How would it work with existing ratings schemes such as PICS, set up by the W3C consortium? And isn't it up to parents, not the state, to watch over the way their children use the web?

Then again perhaps the blogosphere is underestimating the subtlety of Mr Burnham's approach. After all, it was unlikely to have been the primary audience he had in mind when he made his remarks to the Telegraph. He may be betting that millions of parents share his concerns, and sense of helplessness about the web. He is also probably correct in thinking that governments are more able these days to apply pressure on both ISPs and on major web international brands than web libertarians would like to think.

Early Oscar Contender in the Death of Newspapers category

It's a short short-list. '08 Remembered.

Derek Draper and the Labour new media blitz - minus women

There was an interesting post on Guido Fawkes last week about a new media breakfast being hosted by Derek Draper at which Blue State digital presented how Labour can use the internet to win the next British election. PR Week reported, after the event:

PR Week has learned that [Philip] Gould was present at a ‘new media breakfast’ meeting which took place in London this morning.

Also present was David Lammy, the Labour MP with the best connections to US president-elect Barack Obama.

The meeting was convened by Derek Draper, who is overseeing the party’s blogging initiative. It was attended by an assortment of Labour-supporting bloggers, PR professionals and political campaigners....

PR Week added:

A handpicked selection of 77 individuals were invited to attend the meeting and around 60 are thought to have attended.

Those who were invited but could not make it included Weber Shandwick European CEO Colin Byrne and Google European comms director D-J Collins, but both are understood to be fully behind of the initiative.

Guido kindly added the names of those who were invited:

Tom Watson, Colin Byrne, Sadie Smith, Mark Hanson, Simon Buckby, David Clark, Charlie Whelan, Chuka Umunna, Sue Macmillan, DJ Collins, Sarah Mulholland, Richard Angell, Ed Owen, Simon Alcock, Douglas Alexander, Patrick Diamond, Sunder Katwala, Gavin Hayes, Jessica Asato, Robert Philpot, Richard Huntington, Tristram Hunt, Ben Wegg-Prosser, Damian McBride, Andrew Dodgshon, Theo Blackwell, Tom Miller, Tim Allan, David Bradshaw, Stuart Bruce , Jag Singh, Matt Strong, Paul Simpson, Spencer Livermore, Ed Owen, Chris McShane, Matthew Taylor, Alex Finnegan, John Miles, Adam Dustagheer, Dan Thain, Mark Lucas, Luke Pollard, James Crabtree, Tim Shand, Alex Hilton, Simon Redfern, William Davies, Howard Dawber, Nick Anstead, Richard Lane, Jon Steinberg, Pete Bowyer, Steve Cowan, Hopi Sen, Luke Bozier, Andy Regan, Toby Flux, David Taylor, Chris McShane, Matthew McGregor, Noel Hatch, Sunny Hundal, Greg Jackson, Dave Prescott, Luke Akehurst, Phil Dilks, Jonathan Upton, Simon Fletcher, Tom Price, John Stolliday, Adrian McMenamin, Paul Hilder, Paul Miller, Ben Brandzel, Anthony Painter, Ravi Gurumurthy.

Now I have no idea if this list is accurate, but notice only one fact: there are - I think - four women's names. Perhaps Guido was misinformed about the composition of the Labour leaning digerati?


Or perhaps Muscular technocracy is now the engine of British politics as well?


Those Big Beasts.

UK Parliament and Bloggers: a change is gonna come?

After initial scepticism at Westminster, the view now seems to be that e-journalism is here to stay and these bloggers should have passes, even though the print journalists take a broadly sniffy attitude to the likes of the Mole, while being happy enough to follow his lead.

Back to the green paper. It is likely it will make it easier for people to sue for libel by slashing the disproportionate costs of legal action, possibly by establishing a small claims court for libel.

More on small claims libel cases and a possible "blogger clamp down" here. From The Mole.

Word shout outs: hey misogyny, precipice & turmoil come on down

The most looked-up words in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2008 ...

...Seven of the ten – bailout, vet, socialism, maverick, rogue, misogyny, and bipartisan – have political associations.
The other three - turmoil, trepidation, and precipice –have appreared frequently this year in discussions of the stock market and the economy.

From Daily Writing Tips.

All I want for Christmas is a transparent system of politics, and perhaps technology can help

Is it the case that government - and democracy - suffers because it it described by bureaucrats rather than it’s users? Is there a case that ‘Open Government’ would be better served by employing a trusted third-party mediator (with a ‘public service’ remit) and asking them to describe government for the rest of us?

From Local Democracy. Maybe technology can do it?


GuidoFish, anyone?

The Economist & Boob Bait to Bubba

An older piece, but important in mythology of the 2008 election, I think.

Conservative intellectuals are also engaged in their own version of what Julian Benda dubbed la trahison des clercs, the treason of the learned. They have fallen into constructing cartoon images of “real Americans”, with their “volkish” wisdom and charming habit of dropping their “g”s. Mrs Palin was invented as a national political force by Beltway journalists from the Weekly Standard and the National Review who met her when they were on luxury cruises around Alaska, and then noisily championed her cause.

From the Economist.

And in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics.

Did the Economist come up with the Boob bait line, does anyone know?

Can US Right Learn How to Investigate Online?

"You'll see a lot more traffic on conservative blogs now that they're playing offense," said Owens, who also writes for PBS' Media Shift and on his own Bloggasm.com. "This may be the turning point for conservative blogs but they're lacking the investigative side or that community-organizing side. They're much more insular in their self-linking. The liberals are better at using other things online to help promote their causes. It's just a matter of older people coming online, with Facebook opening up beyond college students, etc."

Andrew Ratner in the Baltimore Sun.

Obama has email list of TEN million, used as collateral

"He's going to be the first president to be connected in this way, directly, with millions of Americans," Trippi said.

The nucleus of that effort is an e-mail database of more than 10 million supporters. The list is considered so valuable that the Obama camp briefly offered it as collateral during a cash-flow crunch late in the campaign, though it wound up never needing the loan, senior aides said. At least 3.1 million people on the list donated money to Obama.

From the Washington Post.

The Rapture (part 2) - P.J. O'Rourke sees the Light

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone- gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

P.J. O'Rourke in the Weekly Standard.

Bush to write a book?

Last night Bill Maher said that when Bush was asked about an autobiography he replied that he didn't know that much about cars.


Otherwise:

"If I were advising President Bush, given how the public feels about him right now, I think patience would probably be something that I would encourage," says Paul Bogaards, executive director of publicity for Alfred A. Knopf, which in 2004 released Bill Clinton's million-selling "My Life."

Bush publishing rumour round-up.

Presidents and the Press, when the campaigning never stops

Since the Clinton years, this has been the era of the permanent campaign, with the line between running for election and running the country practically erased. Bush took Karl Rove into the White House, turned policy into an arm of politics, and governed the same way he campaigned: treat the press as an out-of-favor interest group, control the message at all cost, repeat it incessantly regardless of changing facts, admit no mistakes, show no uncertainty, reward loyalists, and ignore critics or else, if necessary, destroy them. This approach to what’s known as strategic communications won Bush two elections; it also helped destroy his Presidency. Campaigning and governing are not the same. They are closer to being opposites.

George Packer in the New Yorker.

First drafting of the second draft of history: Bush "unlucky" & "battered"

Like fish?

"One of the things that has been conventionally done is to compare George W. Bush to Harry Truman, both of whom had upon leaving office dismal approval ratings and of course as it is well known by now, Harry Truman's reputation has, by virtually every account, not only improved, but I would say escalated nearly to the top of the list of greater American presidents," Kellerman added.

CNN gives us a sneak preview of the historians' take on Bush.

Context not Content was McCain's failing

The editing tricksters of YouTube helped defeat McCain whenever it starved him of context. Surrounded by peers, contemporaries, buddies, colleagues, fellow veterans — men like himself — McCain might have made more sense.

From the Medium at the NYT.

Images from the last US Election with Front Pages? Probably not.

Many more here. Thanks to NewsDesigner.

Blogger Tina Brown has good idea

Now can we please not risk any more catastrophes by letting this administration stick around? Just scrap the transition and let President Obama clean house right away like the Brits do at Number 10 Downing Street? In the country of my birth, the Prime Minister kisses the Queen’s hand and he’s in and the loser is on the way out with no time to make off with the silver.

Tina Brown in the Daily Beast.