Telegraph political blogging seminar

To the (incredibly swanky) Telegraph offices in Victoria last night for a seminar on "blogging and politics" featuring yours truly, Mick Fealty (of Slugger O'Toole), Tim Montgomerie (ConservativeHome), Iain Martin (The Telegraph), Alex Hilton (LabourHome) and chaired by the incredibly tall Iain Dale.

It was fun and interesting, and went in directions I hadn't predicted. For instance, from a starting point of "the Americans do this so much better than us" we discussed the difference between political fundraising in the two countries. The need to mobilise this kind of fundraising has turned the formal party sites in the US into something far more direct and alive than the dry, stiff efforts of our own leading parties (we even speculated that this lack of community on the main party sites might explain why the BNP's site get sooooo much more traffic).

This morphed into a fascinating conversation about fear. Tim Montgomerie, whom I'd never met before and who is very impressive, was impassioned and articulate on this, arguing that the British political parties were actually afraid of the electorate, and more importantly the mainstream media, and this informed everything they did online. Tim's argument was that the e-petition furore last year, where 1.5 million people signed a petition against road pricing, could have been a key moment, but the politicians bottled it, because they were afraid of both the voters and what the newspapers would say about them. Tom Loosemore added some fascinating stuff about how fear had stifled the community on the BBC, and that in almost ten years there hadn't been a significant problem or complaint. If you're a news organisation and you don't get a complaint for 10 years, Tom pointed out, you've been too timid.

Some other thoughts from the evening:

• One Telegraph writer (Christopher Hope, I think) said that all posts to the Telegraph blogs go to their legal team. Wow. That must be hugely expensive
• Alex Hilton made the rather bizarre point that the blogosphere "doesn't exist" and blogs "are just a content management system." To which I should have replied "the printing press was just a content management system, and that had a small impact." But didn't.
• Very good cartoonist Matt Buck said the British political blogosphere wouldn't really come to live until we had an election. There was some disagreement with that, but Iain Dale did point out that there was flowering of Welsh political blogging about the time of the launch of the Welsh assembly.
• There was a little self-flagellation about how bloggers were still in the main political insiders. Well, up to a point. But you've got to start somewhere.

All in all, an interesting and worthwhile evening. Thanks to Shane Richmond for organising.