And another thing…

OF COURSE, it’s “just a bit of fun”, as they say. But Yoosk have launched an online vote to try to identify “Britain’s Best MP”.

Having been asked to participate, along with Douglas Carswell, Lynne Feathrstone, Chris Mullin, David Howarth, Bob Russell, Gisela Stewart and Jo Swinson, I agreed to appear on video, answering a series of set questions, which were put to all the candidates.

The results don’t actually mean anything, of course (especially since Douglas is beating me by a margin of more than two-to-one at the moment). But if I win, I will have a series of t-shirts, posters, mousemats and calenders produced to mark my achievement.

Vote here up until 31 December.

I ENJOYED my stint on The Westminster Hour last night, sharing a panel with Ed Vaizey, Lynne Featherstone and our host, Carolyn Quinn. If you missed it, you can listen to it here.

THE HANSARD Society’s panel on MPs and new media on Tuesday evening was videoed by Microsoft (the hosts of the seminar and the sponsors of the report, MPs online) and will be available online shortly, so I hope I can’t be accused of telling tales out of school…

The speakers were me, Douglas Carswell and Lynne Featherstone and LibDem MEP Graham Watson. It was a good discussion, and some of the points I made about the need to respect bloggers’ and commenters’ preference for anonymity will no doubt be debated further when the video goes online.

But it was comments by Graham Watson which will, I fear, come back to haunt him. He first of all admitted that his staff had trawled Facebook in order to generate “friends” for him – something I find quite ridiculous; is that really what Facebook is for, building a network of people you’ve never heard of so that you can win a “mine’s bigger than yours” competition?

Secondly, and more bizarrely, he boasted that he doesn’t update his own Twitter. “But the person who does it on my behalf knows me very well – my wife!”

If you’re going to “do” new media, you should do it honestly. Every person who follows Graham Watson on Twitter will now know that they’re not actually following him, but his wife pretending to be him. Does this matter? Not to Graham, obviously, but yes, I think it does. If I didn’t have the time to Twitter, I wouldn’t do it. But it’s only 140 characters, for crying out loud! How long does that take anyone?