Irish Political News

Click through on the title for all the papers.

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

These are the preliminary Wikio overall rankings for UK blogs for October. The full set (which may change slightly) are due out soon after the end of the month. I have no idea how soon that will be.

These rankings are based on links from blog articles on monitored blogs, and that blogroll links are ignored. There have been some changes to the algorithm to take links from blogs over the previous 9 months into account (rather than 4), and the value attached to a link gradually reduces (on a straight line basis) as it gets older.

Click through on the title for the rankings.

Feedback on Radio 4 carried a fairly balanced discussion about the Russell Brand / Bill Brewer / Peter Gurney / Andrew Sachs / Peter Davy / Jonathon Ross / Dan'l Whiddon / Daily Mail / Harry Hawke / Lesley Douglas / Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all / BBC / Jan Stewer scrummage.

The segment is quite long - 20 minutes, but it covers most of the different aspects and contains most viewpoints.

Click through on the title for the audio segment.

There will be a new column starting on the Wardman Wire on Mondays next week.

It will be written as a tag team by Mick Fealty of Slugger O Toole and Mark Pack, who is the Head of Innovations for the Liberal Democrats.

The column will be about "the things that make politics work online" - which may be websites, or tools, or ways of organising, or anything else deemed relevant. It's a broad brief, and will also contain a proportion of articles cross-posted here because they both usually write in substantially different niches to the ones covered here.

There may be the odd intrusion from other contributors.

My "supposed to be weekly but didn't quite always make it" Blog Platform column will be moving back to its old Sunday slot.

I've blogged about the Cynical Dragon calling Paul Flynn MP a "cock"
(with justification) on several occasions.

I just realised that "Paul Flynn" is an anagram of "Pull Fanny"

Some things just ... fit.

On the blogs this issue seems to be turning into a "we hate the Daily Mail" festival. Here's the general narrative (one example). Liberal Conspiracy's blog roundup yesterday:

So…Russell Brand prank calls an old guy, during a near recession, and it’s the PM and Leader of the Opposition’s job to wade in, sparking the BBC to suspend him, because of days of front page tabloid over-reaction. Hoax call a police force on the other hand and you get little more than slight coverage in the tabloids. I despair, as such here are my highly subjective links for the day…

I really think that a lot of people have got the right end of the wrong stick on this one.