the Reading Banner is an arsewipe, discuss

there, that's got your attention, but I am making a serious point. The Hansard Society has done an analysis of what people want from online communication and from communication by politicians, and here is an extract from an interview by Total Politics with Dr Andy Williamson, director of the Hansard Society's e-democracy programme.

What should politicians do to meet the requirements of an increasing political online community?Communicate – very simple. We have done a lot of research on how MPs communicate. This is mainly through publishing and the new research shows that people don’t want that. They want conversation – they want to be heard. They want to feel like what the MPs are saying is part of a wider conversation with the public and themselves. Not just issuing press releases and appearing for photo opportunities.What are the major differences between now and when the eDemocracy Programme was launched in 1997?What has changed is social media. There is now a culture of conversation online that didn’t exist 10 years ago when it was very much about publishing. The internet was an extra channel of publishing information and to a lesser degree there was the potential to then consult and engage through things like discussion boards. What’s happening now with the developments of Facebook and twitter is that the internet has become a parallel channel for the mainstream media. 10 years ago you were still relying on newspapers, television and radio to get a conversation that was based on their schedules and biases. Now you’ve got blogs, twitter, social media networks broadcasting the stuff around the story’s lifecycle and not the publisher’s lifecycle. Conversations happen when they happen not being based on deadlines.

Food for thought there boys, I hope. You have a good Labour candidate in Reading East who has been deliberately silenced and has no dialogue with the voters, you have, by design, possibly the worst candidate Labour in Reading has ever had in the West, whose only pastime, his old schoolfriends tell us, is calculating the decimal points of pi, and your communication strategies have not changed since the 1980s.

As Beth Ditto sings in "Heavy Cross" (on my new iPod hahahaha)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLLxdcrk0-s

"you say it's been done so undo it"

and

"the choice is yours, so choose"