This article is a cross-post from the Wardman Wire.

We have a new Cablegate, in which Vince Cable the Business Minster has revealed that he was not carrying out his quasi-Judicial role in a takeover bid by News Corporation objectively, in the presence of Daily Telegraph undercover reporters:

I have blocked it, using the powers that I have got. And they are legal powers that I have got. I can’t politicise it, but for the people who know what is happening, this is a big thing. His whole empire is now under attack. So there are things like that, that being in Government…All we can do in opposition is protest.”

There are two angles which interest me around the intrusion of covert reporting into the Constituency Surgeries of MPs. Firstly, whether the covert reporting done was justified in the context, and then whether there will be a significant political impact.

Covert Reporting

The PCC Code of Practice states:

(*) 10 Clandestine devices and subterfuge

i) The press must not seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using hidden cameras or clandestine listening devices; or by intercepting private or mobile telephone calls, messages or emails; or by the unauthorised removal of documents or photographs; or by accessing digitally-held private information without consent.

ii) Engaging in misrepresentation or subterfuge, including by agents or intermediaries, can generally be justified only in the public interest and then only when the material cannot be obtained by other means.

but adds

The public interest

There may be exceptions to the clauses marked * where they can be demonstrated to be in the public interest.

1. The public interest includes, but is not confined to:
i) Detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety.
ii) Protecting public health and safety.
iii) Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an
individual or organisation.

2. There is a public interest in freedom of expression itself.

3. Whenever the public interest is invoked, the PCC will require editors to demonstrate fully that they reasonably believed that publication, or journalistic activity undertaken with a view to publication, would be in the public interest.

4. The PCC will consider the extent to which material is already in the
public domain, or will become so.

5. In cases involving children under 16, editors must demonstrate an exceptional public interest to over-ride the normally paramount interest of the child.

Given that the story has resulted in Vince Cable’s political role being heavily limited, and exposing his bias in a decision where he is required to be objective, I’d suggest that the subterfuge is very probably justified.

Impact on Constituency Surgeries

Politics is buried in mass lobbying from single issue campaigns by email (ask the people who run the House of Commons EMail system), demonstrations, and the rest. In this, the Constituency Surgery had given MPs at least one foot partly in touch with the ground.

As far as I am aware, this is the first time that covert recording has been used in a Constituency Surgery seriously to embarrass an MP, and I hope that MPs won’t be tempted to become much more cautious.

David Allen Green (aka Jack of Kent) has an interesting angle over at the New Statesman, pointing out that the newspapers would be fully aware of the views of Lib Dem Ministers:

… the Daily Telegraph’s lobby correspondents routinely hear what Liberal Democrat MPs are “really saying” about the Coalition. But because these conversations are on lobby terms, any criticisms will not be attributed to the MP in question.

but that therefore it was therefore necessary to record covertly somewhere else in order for direct ‘evidence’ to be obtained, and that this may form the thin end of a very long wedge. That “somewhere else” was the Constituency Surgery.

As a general rule, the constituency surgery of an MP should not be the place for secret recordings. That said, the confidentiality of the constituency surgery is there to protect the constituent, and not the MP (just as legal professional privilege is there to protect the client and not the lawyer). And so it is open for any constituent (real or supposed) to disclose what is said by an MP. So, on this basis, the Daily Telegraph’s secret recordings do not so far breach any grand political or legal principle.

However, there is some cause for concern. One suspects that the first use of interceptions of voicemails by tabloid reporters had a solid public interest basis; but it was quickly realised that such material was a rich seam to be mined just for trivial stories. Similarly, one hopes that newspapers do not now see constituency surgeries as “fair game”. The secret recording of a constituent would never be appropriate: there will always need to be a private space where a constituent can speak candidly to his or her Member of Parliament.

A variety of security measures would be available, ranging from verification of home addresses as being in the MP’s constituency to metal detectors and searches. Portable fingerprint scanners are now in use by the police routinely.

In a different context there was a conversation several years ago about whether the full Islamic veil was appropriate for an MP’s surgery, sparked off by Jack Straw.

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One of the areas which interests me is how independent publishers can cut through to build an audience, or drive a story into the wider public arena. This is a cross-post from the Wardman Wire.

Two articles from the last month by the Heresiarch and Anna Raccoon form an interesting study in articles by political bloggers which gained widespread attention. Both of these pieces went viral via Twitter, rather than Facebook or any other social network.

Firstly, a piece, which caught the moment when the conviction of “Twitter Terrorist” Paul Chambers was confirmed. This piece achieved almost 1000 retweets.

This is the headline and abstract:

Heresy Corner: With the Conviction of Paul Chambers, it is now illegal to be English.

There is something deeply and shockingly offensive about the conviction of Paul Chambers for his Twitter joke, almost unbelievably reaffirmed today at the Crown Court in Doncaster. It goes beyond the normal anger anyone would feel at a blatant injustice, at a piece of prosecutorial and judicial overkill that sees the might of the state pitted against a harmless, unthreatening individual for no good reason.

Secondly, a piece from Anna Raccoon last week, about the case of Stephen Neary, who seems to have been caught up in a bureaucratic whirlpool through his autism:

The Orwellian Present – Never Mind the Future.

Steven Neary, Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, Welfare Deputyships and The Court of Protection

These numbers of tweets are 50-100 times more than will be achieved by a reasonably well-received article. As a comparison the last 6 articles on the Heresy Corner homepage this morning are showing 3, 5, 4, 9, 40 and 2 retweets.

My observations:

1 – Both are non party-aligned writers embedded in the political blog niche, but also cover political questions from a position of non-political knowledge, with a degree of authority/respect which has come from their own work over two years or more.

2 – In these instances, both are amateur or professional subject specialists in the areas they cover here, and have an established readership who are able to give a boost to a piece in the social media nexus. As a comparison, in the world of Internet Consultancy much time (and money) is spent trying to build initial traction for articles and websites to give them a boost into wider internet prominence.

3 – The importance of “connectors”. Anna Raccoon’s piece received a significant boost from Charon QC, who provides an important hub-site in the legal niche – which of course is one place where a real difference can be made to Stephen Neary’s situation.

4 – The “edge of the political blogosphere” has become very important – both for specialist sites writing about political questions, and political blogs who “do more than politics”.

5 – These are two different types of article. The Heresy Corner summarised the online reaction to the “I’l blow you’re airport sky high” Twitter Joke Trial case at the right time to catch the Zeitgeist, while Anna Raccoon’s piece is a campaigning piece trying to direct attention to a particular case, in an area of society she has written about on perhaps a dozen occasions.

6 – Several legal commentators (eg Jack of Kent in addition to Charon) have pointed out (correctly) that for campaigning piece to convert attention into action, there needs to be more complete information about both sides of the story. A spotlight can be directed onto a perceived abuse, but there needs to be objective investigation afterwards.

That is a good distinction; but the rub is that officialdom can prevent both sides of the story being available to the public, and often only react to media spotlights – not to problems which they have not been embarrassed about.

7 – Neither of these bloggers are deeply embedded in the Facebook ecosystem, which is a distinct difference from some other mainly political sites, which report Facebook as a major source of traffic (example). I’ll write more on this another time, because I think it is important.

8 – During November, when the Paul Chambers piece was published, Heresy Corner jumped from 134 in the Wikio blog ranks to number 15 (illustrated). This was after changes which introduced a “Twitter” factor into the Wikio rankings. I’d suggest that this level of volatility may illustrate that they’ve overdone it.

Wrapping Up

The missing link for independent publishers is the ability to translate incisive observation or reporting into an effective influence.

I’ll return to that subject soon.

Can I ask a favour from brave souls who’ve reached the end of this article. I need a couple of dozen Facebook “Likes” for my own site’s new Facebook page to gain access to all features. You can “Like” me at the bottom of the rh sidebar here.

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This is a shorter version of an article appearing on the Wardman Wire.

Plagiarism is an interesting game.

You can either rewrite the piece, find a bit more information, leave other bits out, and – if you’re the Daily Mail – reduce the reading age by a year or three.

Or you can acknowledge that the story came from somewhere else, and give a hat-tip for a nugget, or a small fee for an article.

Or you can try and ride both horses and end up sitting on your backside in the middle.

So, we have Exhibit A, from Dizzy Thinks:

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has a dedicated civil servant working on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012? Not particular shocking really, but there is an oddity.

According to an FoI release, one of the roles of this civil servant is the development of equalities impact assessment for the Queen’s celebratory bash. Why does a celebration for one person need an equalities impact assessment?

Mind you, as an eagle-eyed reader put to to me. Perhaps it’s because she’s (a) a woman, (b) a pensioner, (c) dependent on state benefits, and (d) married to an immigrant?

and Exhibit B, from the Daily Mail:

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has a dedicated civil servant working on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012. One of the roles of the civil servant is the development of an ‘equalities impact assessment’. Why does a ­celebration for one person need an equalities impact assessment? Is it because she’s a woman, a pensioner, relies on the state for handouts — and is married to a foreigner?

The two are nearly the same, and it’s only an item in a Diary column, for heaven’s sake. A tip would cost about twenty pounds or a gift voucher, and an acknowledgement would cost nothing.

(Hat-tip: Dizzy).
[Update: re-edited]

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John Rentoul of the Independent has the blog with the longest running single-blog meme in the known world. “Questions to which the answer is no” is now up to number 411 (“Will Barclays carry out its threat to leave UK?“),

I can’t compete with that, so I thought I’d start a list of Media Oops-es, i.e., cockups. This is all in the interest of media transparency, you understand. Shooting from the hip is just as big a problem for blogging journalists as it is for rednecks and Harriet Harman – though I suspect her invective was planned.

(Update: since this is about educating student journalists, I thought I would cross-post to the Online Journalism Blog in addition to the Wardman Wire).

The first one comes via Justin McKeating, who’s doing something slightly similar, though I suspect we’ll be tracking different bits of media silliness.

Rentoul came up with a slightly unflattering comparison:

A friend draws my attention to a resemblance I had not noticed.

Ed Miliband, he says, reminds him of Watto, the hovering, scuzzy garage owner on Tatooine who enslaves little boys in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, my favourite film of the six.

Miliband spoke in his speech to Labour conference of his being compared to “Wallace out of Wallace and Gromit” – although he department from the text issued, “I can see the resemblance”, to say: “I gather some people can see the resemblance.”

But I thought he looked more like Gromit – the dog who is cleverer than his master who expresses himself mainly by his eyebrows.

If he’d just left it there none of us would have made a fuss. But he thought better of it and deleted the piece. As Justin says:

It looks like the mighty John Rentoul thought better of comparing Ed Miliband to the Watto character from The Phantom Menace and pulled the post without comment. You now get a ‘page not found’ error when you click on the link. Particularly piquant was when Rentoul noted Watto is ‘scuzzy’ and ‘enslaves little boys’. And he deleted his tweet advertising his insightful blog post (we know it was there because somebody replied to it). What a shame, denying future students of journalism this exemplary example of the craft.

Who am I to deny an education to students of journalism? I love computer networks with memories; and also search engines with caches.

For the record, here’s the Milliman, who Rentoul (and everybody else) has previously compared to a panda:

The best bit is that the next Rentoul blog post was all about “tasteless metaphors“.

Pot. Kettle. White and black.

(Update: since this is about educating student journalists, I thought I would cross-post to the Online Journalism Blog).

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Jonathan McIntosh of Rebellious Pixels has just published a mashup of Donald Duck cartoons matched to a mashed-up Glenn Beck (of Fox News) voice track, called “Right Wing Radio Duck”.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfuwNU0jsk0]

Jonathan has taken dozens of segments from the cartoon archives, and dozens of voice clips from Glenn Back, to create a new jigsaw from existing pieces, satirising the North American Right.

This is work of studio quality. Alternatively, it can be produced by an individual in their bedroom, and can potentially in this case be a career-creating “splash”.

Either way, it demonstrates how high the bar can be raised. It also illustates the advantages of having a liberal set of copyright laws. How difficult would it be to make this in the UK?

Here’s the Youtube blurb:

“This is a re-imagined Donald Duck cartoon remix constructed using dozens of classic Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s to 1960s. Donald’s life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck.

“This transformative remix work constitutes a fair-use of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law. “Right Wing Radio Duck” by Jonathan McIntosh is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License – permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.”

As a contrast, this below is an agitprop video produced by Lib Dem campaigners within a few hours of Gordon Brown’s decision to back away from holding an Election in Autumn 2007. This one was made so quickly, that they used a US version of “The Grand Old Duke of York”.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l22kHO5jdRU]

This video did not circulate outside the political/media community.

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Salon Sunday is an experimental live chat on the Wardman Wire blog at 8pm on Sundays, aiming to encourage conversations across politics, media, technical and other online niches.

This Sunday our interviewee will be Philip John, who founded the Lichfield Blog. The blog is a local news blog opened after the local newspaper closed down, and focuses on “all things Cathedral city since January 2009“. The site has three main editors, a host of contributors, and currently attracts a readership in excess of 10k unique visitors each month. You can read more about the site here, or follow on Twitter at lichfieldblog or philipjohn.

Phil also has an interest in the future of news media – for example what is going to happen to local media, and what opportunities will be opened up when Rupert Murdoch introduces the Times Online paywall – and is convenor of the West Midlands Future of News group.

I’ll publish a longer profile of the blog on Friday at around lunchtime at the Wardman Wire.

If you have any questions to put down in advance, or want to be kept up to date by email, please make a comment below, please leave a comment below.

I’ve tried a couple of different formats for these experimental webchats – one heavily Twitter based, the other having a podcast interview published first followed by an informal chat. This week I’m announcing the interviewee a bit earlier in the week.

This week the pattern, starting at 8pm, will be:

1. 20-30 minutes interview about the Lichfield Blog.
2. 30 minutes follow up conversation.

Any help in promoting the event is welcome.

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[Update - title edited. You can see the original in the filename]

This is an investigative/process piece looking at the development of a story that High Wycombe Council has spent money specifically creating a cemetary extension for Muslims, and the tensions that were stirred up in its wake. It is a piece by Alan Wilson, Area Bishop of Buckingham, a long established blogger.

I’m cross-posting it as an example of the type of narrative that bloggers can do very well, combining opinion with reporting to undermine a popular myth, and with critique of mainstream reporting along the way.

The key point I draw from the story is that a more distributed media gives a greater opportunity for “chinese whispers”, where questionable rumours to become the established orthodoxy by media sites and blogs reporting that “x has reported that y has happened” rather than going to the original source to find out if it *did* happen. Then a (dishonourable) justification is possible that “our story is accurate – we just reported what that other site was saying”.

That process also gives a deniable route for Publicists to leak claims and rumours into the public domain, and alliances of websites and blogs to promote claims which meet their political objectives. It is down to the standards of individuals, whether bloggers or reporters, how much depth of context we provide in each case.

One interesting question is how bloggers can adapt traditional journalistic values and practices in an approach which includes more elements than straight reporting. Equally, the wider media faces a similar challenge, in that opinion has become blurred into reporting in most news publications. This piece is clearly opinionated, but I think it avoids being a pure opinion piece.

This is the type of blogging that goes on day-in-day-out and doesn’t usually make the national papers, or draw the attention of the politicians or campaigning groups.

I’ve reposted the article including pictures to show Bishop Alan’s blogging style.

At the last census, High Wycombe’s population was 92,300, of whom 10,838 were Muslim (11·7 %). If you prick them, do they not bleed? Like the rest of us, Muslims die. Therefore it can come as no surprise that there is a demand for Muslim burials in High Wycombe. The Local Authority has to meet this. Population is growing, and room running out. It would suit Hysterical Islamophobics to be able to say space had been clawed back from consecrated ground in the local graveyard; but that would be barmy because the other 88% of the population also continue to die, so there’s absolutely no sense in not extending the graveyard, and land is available.

Enter the Bucks Free Press with a story called “High Wycombe Cemetery Extension agreed for Muslim Burials.” This downpedals the fact that a cemetery extension was needed anyway, and points out that Muslims like be buried facing Mecca whilst omitting, curiously, to point out

1. It doesn’t cost any more to bury people in new ground facing any particular direction
2. The site in question snakes round a hillside in all directions, and where the majority orientation has been East, Mecca is basically East of High Wycombe anyway
3. Since 11·3% of the town’s ratepayers are Muslim, they surely have the same right to be buried according to their wishes, if possible, as everybody else.

Next, as is the way with Flat Earth News, this scoop (that Muslims in High Wycombe die like everybody else – Shock! Horror!) is routed, via This is Local London, to the Daily Telegraph.

The Telegraph spins the story, by adding an anonymous local resident saying “Yet again many thousands of pounds [are] being spent pandering to the local Muslim community.” Apparently burying the dead is pandering to them.
I disagree. I don’t think High Wycombe is ready for Sky Burials quite yet.

The Telegraph also carries, final killer element, a quotation from the Bishop of Buckingham – oh, that’s me! – pointing out that people of all faiths and none are regularly buried in consecrated ground. This is hardly news, since it’s an obligation laid on the Church since time immemorial and legislated in the Burials Act 1880. The established church is delighted, of course, to fufil this basic civic obligation.

But, final link in the chain, the Telegraph story fulfils its purpose. On Saturday evening I receive a furious email from a gentleman in the North West. He had the character and decency to give his name, but can’t have expected me to use it publicly, so I won’t. I believe my correspondent is a good and decent man. This is his reading of the Telegraph:

Having just read an article where it states you are delighted to serve the Muslim community in allowing an extension of Muslim graves facing Mecca into the main graveyard in High Wycombe, Bucks. I would like to express my disgust at your support of such an action given how Christians throughout the world have and are still being persecuted by Muslims on the instruction of Islam.

I would ask you Sir, where was your support for Christians when Muslims desecrated the graveyard in St. Johns Church, Longsight, Manchester by destroying all the gravestones to make way for a mosque car park. The silence of the media and the Church on this issue, has been absolutely deafening.

By your appeasement and support for Islam you are feeding a hungry lion and when there is no more food to give it, it will turn on you, as can be seen in how Coptics are treated in their own cities in Egypt, a once Christian country. Not only are Muslims taken over our Churches they now want to invade our graveyards and the Church is sitting back and not only saying nothing but encouraging such actions.

It is an absolute disgrace and a very sad day for Christians in this once Christian country

I have to point out to him that I didn’t actually say what he thinks I did. This isn’t a churchyard so it’s none of my business who is buried there. But then my eye is caught by his tale of St John’s Longsight, which I had never heard of before, not being a recipient of Manchester BNP publicity. A video has been posted on the Internet of what I believe is called hard nogging being used as substrate for a carpark, with the strong implication that it is made up of Christian gravestones. This is the message my friend in the north West received, that Muslims have been “destroying all the gravestones to make way for a Mosque car park.”

Trouble is, the gravestones are still there. Indeed, you can see them here. The basic answer to my friend’s question (“where was my support for Christians…?) is that the whole story was a canard, a fiction designed to whip up inter-religious hatred. My correspondent, good and decent man that he is, bought the lie. The Daily Telegraph story in its sexed up form catalysed a response in him, and so the panjandrum of fear, suspicion and hatred gathers momentum.

I had to remind him, as the Christian he professes to be, that the Ninth Commandment is a Christian value. He does not care to admit that he bore false witness, although he patently did, and he goes on to suggest “the bottom line is not about this or any other story put out by the British press.”

Really?

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Following on from last week’s experimental webchat about how different people make a small or a large income from their political blogs (debate starter, actual webchat), I am running another one this evening at 8pm.

There will be a Sunday Salon tomorrow (June 6th at 8pm), looking at different aspects of linking, promotion, how people read blogs and the interaction of blogs and Twitter.

The chat will be hosted at the Wardman Wire using CoverItLive. I will put out a few key points to Twitter using the hashtag #onlinepolitics, but the main debate will be on the blog.

As a discussion starter, this post includes a podcast interview (35 minutes) I recorded earlier this week with Dan Levy, who manages the UK website of Wikio.

We covered everything from the history of Wikio to how the rankings are compiled, how the Wikio service is used, and what developments will be happening in the future.

Any help in promoting the event is welcome. This will be the pattern:

1. Article published to give a focus for the debate.
2. Webchat on Sunday night 8pm-9pm.
3. Publication of lightly edited script on the Wardman Wire, and circulation by email of a short analysis.

If you add a comment below I will email you with a reminder in future.

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(Cross-posted from the Wardman Wire.)

This looks like an excellent start. The Coalition Government has just published the COINS database, which is the detailed database of Government spending:

The release of COINS data is just the first step in the Government’s commitment to data transparency on Government spending.

You can get the database from the data.gov website here. There are explanations to help you get to grips with it here.

Tim Almond notes (via chat) that it is a 68mb zipped file which extracts to 4GB, i.e., huge. It will require significant database tools to get to grips with this, but I’m predicting that easier ways of querying may be created by someone in 48 hours. Here is the full statement:

COINS: publishing data from the database

The release of COINS data is just the first step in the Government’s commitment to data transparency on Government spending.

The data is available from Data.gov.uk (opens in new window) but the following guidance explains more about the release.

What is COINS?

COINS – the Combined On-line Information System – is used by the Treasury to collect financial data from across the public sector to support fiscal management, the production of Parliamentary Supply Estimates and public expenditure statistics, the preparation of Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) and to meet data requirements of the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Up to nine years of data can be actively maintained – five historic (or outturn) years, the current year and up to three future (or plan) years depending on the timing of the latest spending review. COINS is a consolidation system rather than an accounts application, and so it does not hold details of individual financial transactions by departments.

Why are you doing this?

The coalition agreement made clear that this Government believes in removing the cloak of secrecy from government and throwing open the doors of public bodies, enabling the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account. Nowhere is this truer than in being transparent about the way in which the Government spends your money. The release of COINS data is just the first step in the Government’s commitment to data transparency on Government spending.

As the Prime Minister has made clear, by November, all new items of central government spending over £25,000 will be published online and by January of next year, all new items of local government spending over £500 will be published on a council-by-council basis.

Who might find the data useful?

COINS contains millions of rows of data; as a consequence the files are large and the data held within the files complex. Using these download files will require some degree of technical competence and expertise in handling and manipulating large volumes of data. It is likely that these data will be most easily used by organisations that have the relevant expertise, rather than individuals. Having access to this data, institutions and experts will be able to process it and present it in a way that is more accessible to the general public. In addition, subsets of data from the COINS database will also be made available in more accessible formats by August 2010.

Downloading the data

The COINS data are provided in two files for each financial year; the ‘fact table’ (fact table extract 200x xx.txt) and the ‘adjustment table’ (adjustment table extract 200x xx .txt). The contents of these two files are explained in ‘What is COINS data?’.

The ‘fact tables’ are approximately 70MB. With a fast broadband link of 8mbps, it will take approximately 10 minutes to download this file. The ‘adjustment tables’ are approximately 40MB, and this will take approximately 5 minutes to download. Both these files have been compressed using ZIP archival. When unzipped the file sizes will decompress and expand significantly to sizes of around 5GB and 0.5GB respectively.

The data are provided in a txt file format. The structure of the data is similar to a csv (comma separated variable) file with a string of characters being formed to represent each row, with each field separated by an ‘@’. We estimate that there are around 3.5 million rows in the ‘fact tables’, and around 500,000 rows in the ‘adjustment tables’. While the contents of the latter can be loaded into Excel 2007, the former is too large for the Excel software. In order to read the data, they will need to be uploaded into appropriate database software.

We need some crowd-sourced hackery here to prevent everyone reinventing the wheel. If you want to be in on the start of this conversation, try chatting to Tim on twitter.

The next step will need to be a regular and reliable process to allow meaningful continuing analysis.

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The Wikio rankings are a measure of how much blogs are being “talked about” on other independent sites, and are produced by Wikio for a number of categories of blogs in Europe and North America, including politics, techology, culture and even Wine and Beer.

The Wikio ranking is measured by incoming editorial links (i.e., not blogrolls) from blogs registered with Wikio which appear in RSS feeds. To be clear (again), this is no measure of traffic. Links are weighted by time, prominence of the linking blog, and prominence of the link in the linking article.

There is also a toolkit, Wikio Labs, which allows you to dig down into the detail to the level of individual links.

This month I have advanced notice of the “Overall” rankings, which are below.

(Disclosure: I am the “Host” of the UK Wikio Politics rankings. The position is unpaid.)

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