OPEN

* Correction – see footnote *

This is not going to turn into a political blog, despite yesterday’s stirring debate around the rights and wrongs of David Miliband’s blog.

I will add a final word from Ellee Seymour’s blog that caused me to raise an eyebrow with all the portentousness of Roger Moore. She rightly points out that after lighting the blue touch paper on the blog issue with a combination ofa parliamentary question about how much the blog cost and some creative accounting estimates to create a story worth carrying for the Independent, the Lib Dems have left it to the Tories do the running on the issue:

   

I have this evening looked at all the Lib Dem sites on Iain’s blogroll, not one of the 13 listed have breathed a word about it. I checked the two New Statesman New Media shortlisted Lib Dem MPs, Jo Swinson and Stephen Tall*, surely they would be on the ball, be privy to some inside info to add to the debate. Nope.

Maybe they realised there wasn’t much of a story here, or were suddenly concerned about revealing how much help they got with their own blogs and websites?

The Lib Dems could do with having a good think about their online strategy too. Despite the awards mentioned by Ellee above, their online presence is very Web 1.0 as far as I can see. Politicians of all parties need to think more about how to become part of conversations online.

: : The Independent diarist who carried this story last week, notes that Mr Miliband’s blog is up for a New Statesman award of its own. Fair play to him, I say – he’s still the first Government minister to have ago at the new medium…

* Rob Blackie at Blue Rubicon has kindly pointed out that Stephen Tall is a councillor not an MP.  Thanks, Rob.

Tags: UK, politics, Liberal Democrats, Labour, Conservative, David Miliband, blog