The Open Agenda

I would like to start off by stating that I am NOT a staunch Tory supporter!

On Monday, 12th Jan 2008, the Channel 4 News article covering the rise of party political blogs and the launch of Labour’s new blog labourlist.org was quite interesting and resulted in a quite hilarious close to the program. The item opened with a brief history of political blogs and their influence on voters – particularly in the USA – mentioning the blogs maintained by senator John Kerry and President George W Bush during the 2004 presidential election. The article neatly flowed into a very short big-screen studio review of the very good Conservative blog, Conservativehome, which was launched way back in August 2005.

The Channel 4 News presenter, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, was then joined by Conservativehome editor, Tim Montgomerie, and editor of Labourlist, Derek Draper. Derek was immediately forced to defend the supposed aggressive tone of Labourlist. However, when it came to switch from Conservativehome to Labourlist by touching a big, blue “2″ button on the touch-screen, there seemed to be a technical problem. Krishnan, Tim and Derek managed to scramble to rescue some sort of discussion without the assistance of technology which thankfully didn’t descend into political argument.

Now, I’m fairly sure that, by now, Derek Draper must have been fuming with the Channel 4 technical support team. However, in the end it was the Labourlist technical department, or probably it’s hosting company, that was about to receive the hairdryer treatment. Krishnan’s closing words were “Oh! And by the way, earlier it seemed as though we had a technical problem with our big screen. However, it actually turns out that labourlist is down for the time being.”

On the flip-side I, like many others I’m sure, visited the site… eventually.

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