CitizenSpin

Blogwatch: Why is the BBC getting involved in blogging?

Why is the BBC getting involved in blogging? It's a question that was raised in a session I was running the other day. Followed by the comment: 'Blogging is for amateurs, and provides an easy way for them to put their opinions, however flaky, online.'

It's interesting that the comment came on the day that the Baghdad Burning blog was nominated for an award a measure of how some blogs can be credible and offer a new perspective, not often portrayed by 'big media'.
But it's not just individuals getting into blogging. Big business is there too ­ with GM, IBM, Microsoft etc. using the Internet to connect with consumers. Connecting in a way that allows consumers to enter into a dialogue.

The BBC too has just started to expand it's blogging operations. The first was political editor Nick Robinson, Paul Mason of Newsnight and the World Have Your Say programme from the World Service have recently joined him.

When the BBC already operates chat forums, message boards and community sites, and lets people add comments to some news stories ­ - so what's the point of adding blogs to the mix?

It's early days and hard to tell how blogs at the beeb may develop, but some of the ideas delegates suggested were inspiring. Blogs needn't be just personality based, but could also be built around events, or the genre of programme. They'd be more interactive ordinary web pages, provide more insight to the production process and journalistic process and more depth to programming.

It's similar to the way that big business is using blogs to get closer to consumers, big media can use blogs to engage with the audience in a more one-to-one way.

Matt

Do bloggers have any power?

As part of the Today Programme Christmas poll about who runs the country they broadcast a short discussion on bloggers, and what kind of power they wield.
Judy of adloyda and Tim Ireland of bloggerheads took part in the discussion and raised some interesting points:

> Britain leads the way in constructive use of weblogs – MP’s and councillors are engaging in public meetings which take place in cyberspace.
> This compares to the US where blogging is predominantly a tool for people to shout from outside of the system – making noise but not necessarily engaging in debate.
> Blogging also provides a forum for people to stand-up to the establishment and tell the real story – Iran and Iraq were quoted with bloggers playing a role in countering the news stories and the government line.

You can listen again to the discussion here.

Matt

Word of mouth is where it’s at, so is that blogs are better?

Word of mouth promotion is much more effective than TV and print advertising, according to leading researchers. The results of research carried out by Millward Brown – Understanding the role of Word of Mouth – was presented at the 2005 Word of Mouth Marketing Association conference.
Ian McKee of Vocanic posts the link to the presentation and points out:

“Another key fact they present (and remember they are well respected for their print and TV ad testing)  is a table of payback relative to investment of various media. 
Indexing below 1 are Print and TV at 0.74 and 0.97 respectively (ie they destroy value) and indexing above 1 are online 1.36  and word of mouth at a massive 2.46 – which means that according to Millward Brown WoM is over 2.5 times better than TV and 3.3 times better than print.”

When Ian and I last discussed word of mouth promotion, I explored the connection between word of mouth and blogging – blogging being a powerful channel for WoM. I suggested that PR departments are best placed to handle this relationship.
And just as PR has become more measurable over the past few years the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is hoping to improve the ability to track and quantify word of mouth marketing with a new set of standards.
ComScore Networks, GfK NOP, Millward Brown and Experian-owned Simmons Market Research Bureau were among those sitting on WOMMA’s Research and Metrics Council, which has published a terminology framework.
The framework is designed to provide a common language that can be used to plan, buy, and measure and describe word of mouth marketing. It also introduces the “WOMUnit” – the term given to a piece of marketing information exchanged between consumers. (Not so sure about the WOMUnit – Matt).
You can download the research here.
So are we any nearer to being able to quantify the impact that blogs can have?

Matt

Study warns politicians of blog power

The internet is an amazing way of bringing together people with common interests and concerns. I’ve written before about the BBC’s attempt at promoting political activism – a site which both brings people together and provides material for programmes if they raise significant issues or achieve anything.
Now research by the University of Technology of Compiègne (UTC) suggests that websites played an important role in swinging public opinion against Europe’s constitutional treaty in the recent referendum.
The Financial Times (13/07/2005) quotes Franck Ghitalla who led the study:

“I hope that politicians realise that the internet is a political territory that must be used. In terms of political marketing, the Yes campaign did not have a good strategy.”

Many of the sites set up during the French referendum on the European constitution contained a mass of documentary information. 2.5m web pages were analysed for the study. It also found that the web was mainly an instrument of the left – anti-globalisation campaigners, trade unionists and radical leftwing parties. The study concluded that few websites set up by established media organisations were deemed authoritative.

Matt

Will podcasting do for audio what blogging did for text?

Is podcasting the latest subject of media hype, or will it become the audio equivalent of the online blog? That’s the question posed in The Economist’s – Intelligent Life (Summer 2005, p93).
Adam Curry is quoted as the ‘father of podcasting’, and his ‘Daily Source Code’ has 95,000 subscribers. And there is considerable excitement around the potential for growth – new research from The Diffusion Group (TDG) quoted by BBC News claims a US audience alone of 56 million by 2010. And that’s before you take into account Apple’s latest release of iTunes which includes a directory of 3,000 shows.
But the Economist article goes on to suggest that commercial interests will win out – and the commercial potential of podcasting will be exploited. On a small scale it highlights the Lascivious Biddies, a four woman band from New York, who let the audience join them backstage in their ‘Biddycast’. “The band was inspired to podcast when guest-appearances on other podcasts quintupled their album sales.”
At the other end of the scale I’ve already highlighted the growing interest of mainstream media – and my own employer, the BBC, has started trials of podcasting established programmes - my article here, and details of BBC trial here.
However, Charles Arthur writing in the Independent, takes a much more measured view – highlighting the shortcomings of the Podcast format:

“Podcasts take contend and put it into a form which can’t be indexed by search engines or be speed-read, and which you can’t hyperlink to (or from). A podcast sits proud of the flat expanse of the internet like a poppy in a field.”

So – a niche form of distribution for radio? An democratisation of broadcast media which will allow much more choice of programming? A fad which will be exploited by mainstream media? The Economist article asks: “Will big new players squash the eccentric vitality of the small-scale podcasters who started it all?”

Matt

Podcasting as a promotional tool

Enough of blogs! What about podcasting as a promotional tool?
I read that Virgin Atlantic is offering free podcasts to customers with content relevant to the Virgin routes. The first 4 podcasts are New York audio guides - produced by Loudish.com. As a radio producer I find this an interesting development.

The BBC is already podcasting many programmes. Highlights of the Today programme and From our own Correspondent. In fact the fantastic Peter Day devoted the whole of an edition of In Business to PodCasting back in May: listen again.

I’m planning a trip to the The Portable Media Expo conference in California in November. It's the first conference to examine podcasting – covering the complete range of business and marketing issues that must be addressed for podcasting, time-shifted media and portable content.

There is plenty of scope for the use of podcasting to enghance the BBC’s programme output:

• Reach new audiences:
  Podcasting provides opportunities to connect with new, hard to reach audiences. American research indicates that minority groups are more likely to own iPods/MP3 players than whites (16% of African Americans and Latinos compared to 9% of non-Latino whites in the US - Pew / Internet).
• New distribution opportunities:
  According to the US research - IPods/MP3 players are gadgets for well-off, 18% of those earning more than $75,000 own one (Pew / Internet). This provides an opportunity for some programmes / departments to connect with this upscale audience. For example – The Financial World tonight is broadcast on BBC Radio 5-Live, having previously on BBC Radio 4. It sits uncomfortably on the network. Would it make more sense to broadcast FWT as the programme of financial record as a podcast?
• New content for additional services and programme material
  Podcasting provides an opportunity to create additional content for audiences. This has not yet been explored; currently the BBC provides copies of programmes as broadcast for podcasts. There is a creative opportunity to look at what else could be provided – longer versions of interviews for speech programmes, artist profiles for music networks or a weekly digest for busy people who don’t catch a daily strand?

But the promotional aspects are fascinating. I’ve produced programmes for corporate radio which was delivered over phones and networked PC’s. This allowed staff to hear lively accessible content at their desktops – this kind of corporate broadcasting could adapt well to the iPod, and indeed the Virgin scheme which adds value in a way which complements the corporate offering is a very good idea. I wonder what other applications there could be for commercial podacsts – and if there’s a business in it for a BBC producer?
:-)
Matt

Media: The bloggers have all the best news

Media: The bloggers have all the best news: In America, the first major study of web diaries reveals that they are shaping the political landscape like never before, but what of their British counterparts?

From Guardian - 06/06/2005
Owen Gibson

The former CBS anchor Dan Rather last year experienced at first hand the power of the blogosphere. After his controversial report on the clouds over George W Bush's military service, US bloggers from both sides of the political spectrum swarmed all over the story.

And after the White House released the relevant memos, which had purportedly been written by Bush's commander in the Texas Air National Guard, it was the blogging community that was credited with leading the news agenda as it speculated on their provenance. Two weeks later, CBS announced that the man who supplied the documents had admitted lying about their authenticity and Rather was forced to publicly apologise.

The furore around "Rathergate" brought the blogging phenomenon to the fore during the presidential election as well, and gave rise to a slew of newspaper stories suggesting that a seismic shift was taking place in the American media landscape. Could blogs, they asked, become the fifth estate?

In an effort to test that hypothesis, researchers from the respected Pew Internet & American Life Project have conducted the first in-depth academic study of 40 of the biggest and most respected political blogs and the extent to which they influence and are influenced by other media.

"We tracked not just the political blogs but also what the US mass media was saying and what general internet chatrooms were saying," explains Michael Cornfield, the senior research consultant on the project, named Buzz, Blogs and Beyond.

Its results show that bloggers are generally following another agenda, whether that of a political party or another medium, but also highlights the extent to which they can now influ ence the mainstream media on certain topics. "Sometimes blogs lead and can be very influential and other times they're followers," he says. While it remains too early to tell how the medium will develop, he says, the report offers an intriguing glimpse of how bloggers are starting to shape the US news agenda.

Rathergate showed that when bloggers were able to access primary evidence in the same way as newspaper journalists, they could run with a story. "One of the reasons they were so influential was because they were able to put up what they called 'the smoking memo'," says Cornfield, referring to a version of a document reconstructed using Word, and suggesting it had been faked.

"In one sense it's classic investigative journalism but what's new is that the clues are out there in the open. It would be as if the Watergate tapes themselves were online and we could all listen to them and hyperlink to them. This is the change."

According to the study, there are now "A-list" bloggers in the US, such as Andrew Sullivan and Buzz Machine's Jeff Jarvis, who are capable of setting the news agenda because they are habitually referred to by journalists in the mass media who rely on them to break stories. "Journalists, activists and political decision-makers have learned to consult political blogs as a guide to what is going on in the rest of the internet," the report notes.

Accordingly, for a certain breed of US political animal, blogs now perform the same function as mass market portals do for the rest of us - sifting and disseminating the morass of material on the web and pointing to interesting stories and primary sources elsewhere.

However, Cornfield also thinks it is important not to overstate the impact of blogs on political life. Apart from the relatively few and far between "swarms" such as Rathergate, he believes that blogs have had a limited impact on the national conversation. "The influence and impact of blogging has been felt much more by journalists than by politicians," he says, pointing out that a group such as the Swift Boat Veterans had a far greater impact on the election than the blogosphere.

The report notes that a number of other potential scandals - such as the apparent bulge in President Bush's jacket during the first presidential debate - failed to ignite in the same way. "For a conversation to acquire the intense simultaneity of buzz, and for buzz to register with force in public affairs, requires a number of other factors to be present, few of which are likely to be at the disposal of a single blogger, or even a blogging collective, ready to activate at will," it concludes.

Also, Cornfield says, the power of a particular blogger can quickly "wax and wane" depending on how hot a particular news story is and how much information they are able to acquire from other sources. On their own, the power of bloggers remains "circumstantial and contingent", the report argues.

In the UK, there was a feeling that the general election would provide domestic blogs with a similar spark to Rathergate. There was no shortage of primary material, such as the attorney -general's advice on the war in Iraq, but there was little sense that the internet impinged on the mainstream media.

While Belle de Jour got the mainstream media speculating on her (or his) identity, and the likes of Scary Duck greatly amuse, there is a sense that the Americans take their blogging more seriously than we do. With the odd exception (Guido Fawkes' Order-Order.com and Mick Fealty's Slugger O'Toole blog on Northern Ireland for example), there is little heavyweight comment and it is rare to see a blog break a story or substantially move it on.

One of the most persuasive theories for this contrast is the far more rambunctious nature of the British national and regional press compared to the mostly regional, generally staid, US titles. So, the argument goes, American bloggers are fulfilling a need for a heated national conversation among competing viewpoints, whereas we can arouse much the same feelings of empathy or revulsion by reading Richard Littlejohn or Polly Toynbee.

For all that, Neil McIntosh, the assistant editor of Guardian Unlimited (responsible for introducing a series of blogs allied to this newspaper), says that a breakthrough Rathergate moment is inevitable sooner or later. "You'd be daft to say never. All that it takes is someone to see that a properly produced Private Eye-style blog would work brilliantly on the web. You'll get something like that in Britain." Cornfield also points to evidence of bloggers mobilising the "No" vote in the French referendum on the EU constitution as proof that it just takes the right kind of issue to spark interest.

Meanwhile, Cornfield notes a new threat to the burgeoning number of influential one-man-band political bloggers in the US - the growing tendency for mainstream media to cotton on to the possibilities. "If everyone blogs, what about that fictional soap-box blogger in Hyde Park? Who knows whether they'll be able to keep their mainsteam audience or they'll be pushed to the edge," he says. And given the pace of change online, it is entirely likely that a new technology will come along and supersede the blog, he adds. "Not many people are going to dive into a 300-page document, but they're more likely to dive into a two-page document. And once homemade video content takes off and is shared, they're perhaps even more likely to dive into that."

Copyright 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited
Date: 06/06/2005

DIY media - print, radio etc.

The amazing rise of the do-it-yourself economy
From Fortune - 30/05/2005 (1479 words)
Daniel Roth

IT'S DOUBTFUL THAT STEVE JOBS EVER FACED these kinds of interruptions. "Daddy, I want to take a picture," says Owen Misterovich, motioning to a digital camera on his father's desk. "Okay," says Pat Misterovich, handing it to his 5-year-old son, who proceeds to snap a few self-portraits. Then it's back to the work at hand: producing the next great MP3 music player. Only instead of the simple, elegant lines of the iPod, Misterovich's device will look just like a Pez dispenser. Oh, and instead of working from a corporate campus in Cupertino, Calif., with nearly 12,000 employees, Misterovich is a stay-at-home dad, creating his Pez MP3 player from the basement of his Springfield, Mo., home.

Misterovich is the former head of IT at the University of Detroit Mercy. He has few of the engineering skills necessary to build a device like this, no marketing experience, and absolutely no corporate infrastructure. And yet he's got two factories--one in China, one in the U.S.--vying to build the player. He has a small Austin company started by an ex-Apple engineer designing the innards. And on his blog, pezmp3.com, he uses prospective buyers--some 1,500 people have already expressed interest--as an R&D-center-meets-focus-group. What's better, he asks, AAA batteries or Li-Ion? In come dozens of replies ("Go for the AAA with a USB NiMh recharger if possible," suggests one reader). What's a good slogan? Some 50 ideas roll in (one of the best: "Candy for your ears"). By the end of this month the first prototype should be in Misterovich's hands. "I don't know that this product could have come to life years ago," he says. "I seriously doubt it. And if it did, it wouldn't have come through a guy in his basement."

It used to be that a tinkerer like Misterovich could, at best, hope to sell his idea to a big company. More likely, he'd entertain friends with his Pez-sized visions. But a number of factors are coming together to empower amateurs in a way never before possible, blurring the lines between those who make and those who take. Unlike the dot-com fortune hunters of the late 1990s, these do-it-yourselfers aren't deluding themselves with oversized visions of what they might achieve. Instead, they're simply finding a way--in this mass-produced, Wal-Mart world--to take power back, prove that they can make the products that they want to consume, have fun doing so, and, just maybe, make a few dollars. "What's happened is a tremendous change in awareness," says Eric von Hippel, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of the recent Democratizing Innovation. "Conventional wisdom is so strong (in business) about find-a-need-and-fill-it: 'We're the manufacturers; we design products; we ask users what they need; we do it.' That has begun to crack."

Numerous currents have converged to produce this reaction. Bloggers, those do-it-yourself journalists, showed big media that the barriers to entry (like owning a printing press, say) didn't much matter. Podcasters took radio into their own hands, creating audio shows and putting them online. Amateur music producers, using software that was once the province only of major labels, invented mash-ups: combining songs into totally new ones, then giving them away or selling them. And with the advent of services like Google AdSense, which let people easily put advertising on their sites, these tinkerers could--while not vaulting themselves into Bill Gates territory--at least break even.

"Before, only the rich had access to tools and so only the rich were professionals, and the rest were amateurs," says Noah Glass, the co-founder of Odeo, which offers a free service for making, hosting, and distributing podcasts. "But now, as the creation tools have become easier to use and more freely distributed through open source, through the Internet, through awareness, more people have more access to more tools, so the whole amateur-professional dichotomy is dissolving."

Citizen engineers are taking this even further, trying their hand not just in the digital world but in the physical world too. Much as eBay transformed distribution, they're redefining design and manufacture. The infrastructure is there: Yahoo Groups make it easier for people to trade ideas and learn quickly; free or cheap computer-aided-design (CAD) programs allow users to cobble together blueprints; and inexpensive manufacturing in China allows the idea to go from file to factory. There are even websites like Alibaba.com that will help these small-timers find Chinese factories eager for their work, meaning that the amateur nation has its own Match.com.

This may seem like a lot of effort to, say, create a funny-looking MP3 player. But that's not this group's ethos. "DIYers do things for irrational reasons," says Saul Griffith. "If it's your passion and your love, you don't count how many hours you spend doing it. That's why so many of these things end up being great."

Griffith should know. A dedicated kite-surfer--the sport involves riding a small board through water while attached to a parachute-like "kite"--he was unhappy with the goods on the market. In 2001 he started Zeroprestige.com, a website where he posted his kite designs. Soon other amateurs submitted their own concepts, and sail manufacturers with excess capacity offered to make kites from the plans. The amateur designers kept coming back to make exactly what they wanted to buy. And though no one got rich, a few small businesses popped up to sell the finished products. Since then, kites have become commodities, but Griffith hasn't let go of the spirit. His four-person engineering company, Squid Labs, is launching a site this summer tentatively called iFabricate, "a Wikipedia for atoms," he says, referring to the user-created online encyclopedia. Do-it-yourselfers of all stripes will be able to go to the site to trade ideas and work together, get easy access to programs for manipulating materials, and eventually use it to pool their resources for buying raw materials from suppliers.

A few large companies, too, are finding ways to tap into the movement. While most of the leading-edge DIYers view open-source software as their inspiration, Microsoft sees a role for itself. The company's Visual Studio Express software--slated for official release later this year--is designed to bring coding to the masses. Microsoft is also talking about working with things like Phidgets, inexpensive, easily manipulated electronic parts like RFID components--a radio chip expected to supplant the bar code--that would allow you to, say, make your own keyless home-entry system. Microsoft estimates there are six million professional developers and 18 million amateurs: hobbyists, tinkerers, students. The company hopes to make Visual Studio Express the Esperanto of amateur builders. Brian Keller, product manager for Visual Studio, says he looks forward to the day when "my mom can sit down and watch a video and learn how to build an RFID reader for herself."

For those moms who can't wait for the video, publisher O'Reilly Media recently launched what has already become the bible of this new movement, a magazine called Make. It features page after page of geeked-out--but not unachievable--how-tos; the latest issue details the finer points of crafting your own printed circuitboard or building your own teleprompter (anticipating the inevitable rise of video blogging). O'Reilly initially estimated that it could snare about 10,000 people willing to pay the steep $ 35 a year for the quarterly. Now, four months after the launch--and with almost no advertising--it already has 25,000 subscribers.

To be fair, all this amateur energy isn't exactly a new force. When exciting technologies emerge, Americans have always pounced and created something original. In his 1936 New Yorker article "Farewell, My Lovely," E.B. White eulogized the Model T and the creativity it inspired in its owners: "When you bought a Ford, you figured you had a start--a vibrant, spirited framework to which could be screwed an almost limitless assortment of decorative and functional hardware Gadget bred gadget. Owners not only bought ready-made gadgets, they invented gadgets to meet special needs." The difference today is simply the technology, says University of Virginia technology historian Bernie Carlson: "I would call it the Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau theme, that it's as important to produce as it is to consume."

And so Misterovich, from his not-quite-Walden, keeps at his goal of building the kind of MP3 player that he wants to carry around. One with a collectible head and AAA batteries and a user-created slogan. And even if he pulls it off, it's doubtful that he'll get rich. That's fine with him. The purpose in the amateur economy isn't always the same as in the big-company economy. "My main goal is not to lose my house," he says. "You put it on the line and you want to be rewarded. But when it comes down to it, I just don't want to go broke. It's an amateur attitude--you're doing it for the love." ?

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Copyright 2005 Time Inc.
Date: 30/05/2005
Publication: Fortune

The People's News Source

The People's News Source
From Time - 06/06/2005
Donald Macintyre/ Seoul., With reporting by Yooseung Kim/Seoul

When Korean university student Chang Je Hyung did a brief stint at Samsung's office in Berlin last year, it made him angry. He had to help prepare a holiday trip to Germany for chairman Lee Kun Hee and his family. According to Chang, dozens of Samsung employees spent two months sweating over details of the private visit, even going to fancy restaurants to try out food the chairman might eat. Instead of tipping off the mainstream media, Chang sent a first-person account to online newspaper OhmyNews earlier this year. It created a sensation.

Chalk up another scoop for OhmyNews, the feisty phenomenon that is rewriting the rules for Korean media and, if founder Oh Yeon Ho has his way, may soon be doing the same outside Korea as well. Part blog, part professional news agency, OhmyNews gets up to 70% of its copy from some 38,000 "citizen reporters" like Chang--basically anyone with a story and a laptop to write it on. Editors vet the articles, rejecting nearly one-third. Launched in 2000, it has snowballed into a kind of raucous online mall for Korea's wired younger generation--a place to get news, absorb the buzz or just hang out. It is also giving young Koreans a political voice, upending the conservative traditional media models of their parents' generation.

Oh isn't ready to stop there. An English-language edition launched last year draws on more than 300 "world citizen reporters," and he wants to have 10,000 by next year. He's getting ready to launch OhmyNews in Japanese this year and is eyeing a Chinese version. The vision: turn OhmyNews into the world's water cooler, where anybody can talk about issues like global warming and North Korean nukes. Says Oh: "OhmyNewsshould be the epicenter of world public opinion."

Sounds ambitious, but the website is already extremely influential at home. After two schoolgirls were crushed to death in 2002 by a U.S. military vehicle, OhmyNews provided blanket coverage, triggering widespread demonstrations against the U.S. troop presence. As South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun rode the surge of anti-U.S. sentiment to victory in the 2002 election, OhmyNews portrayed him as the voice of the younger generation. Roh gave his first exclusive interview as President to the online upstart.

With Wikipedia offering a similar citizens' news service, OhmyNews won't be alone in international cyberspace. But Oh has already pulled off a trick that has proved elusive for many other online media outlets: turned a profit. OhmyNews says it made about $ 400,000 last year, more than two-thirds from advertising. Mainstream media will be watching closely--as will big conglomerates with anything to hide. --By Donald Macintyre/ Seoul. With reporting by Yooseung Kim/Seoul

Copyright 2005 Time Inc.
Date: 06/06/2005

UK election blogging

The Editor: What they said in ... the election blogs
From Guardian - 07/05/2005
William Cederwell

Labour may have enjoyed a historic third consecutive election win on Friday, but there was only muted cheer from the election blogs. A common complaint - as aired by "Enigmatic" at the election2005.bravereflections blog - was the "wild" distortion caused by the first-past-the-post electoral system. "So, it's four/five more years of New Labour. Well, tarnished Labour, to be precise. The really bad news is that we have, again, a government which only about 36% of the nation supports. Read that again. For every Labour voter there are two who didn't vote Labour."

Labour "are still going to end up with a 10% majority of the seats", wrote "Sliver" at sliver.objective2k.com . And "the Tories with 33% get around 50 more seats but that percentage of the vote is exactly the same as it was last time. The Liberal Democrats get a consistent 6-7% (going as high as 17%) swing against Labour . . . yet only come out with 10 or so more seats."

So which party had most cause to be triumphant? None of them, reckoned the self-confessed "utopian, dreamy anarcho-capitalist", Guido Fawkes, at 5thnovember.blogspot.com . "Labour's victory came on the back of the smallest winning share of the vote ever recorded." The "poor showing" of the Lib Dems meant they were "not a real alternative", and "the Tories failed to break 200 seats, which was the target. So no victory parade for them."

Perhaps the real winners were "the 'others' - smaller parties and independent candidates" who scooped a "remarkable 8%", reckoned redpepper.blogs.com . "A similar pattern has been seen elsewhere in western Europe," where "major parties have been haemorrhaging support".

For a sense of triumph, one had to visit toryscum.com , which crowed: "Michael Howard conceded defeat at 4.20am this morning. Our work here is done."

A posting at the notapathetic.com message board, meanwhile, had a sharp word for the abstainers. "If you don't like any of the political parties, either join one to change it, set up your own, or stand yourself as an independent. Or return to this website and change your posting to I'm too lazy and stupid to do anything about my own dissatisfaction." William Cederwell

The Wrap is Guardian Unlimited's unique digest of the best of the British newspapers. An annual subscription - 260 issues - costs 14.95. guardian.co.uk/thewrap

Copyright 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited
Date: 07/05/2005
Publication: Guardian