Two I prepared earlier

One benefit of having worked with the media for over a decade is that I see some stories reappearing that I started some years ago.

Here are two stories from years ago that are still regularly appearing.

Tax manuals getting longer

After a conversation with a tax specialist back in 2000 who said that ‘tax manuals just get thicker each year’ I came up with the idea of simply measuring how many pages the main Tolleys tax manuals had. It started as a small diary piece in the FT, but is now an annual media staple, reported on the front page of the Telegraph’s business section this morning.

Crack squirrels

After seeing a squirrel in my Brixton front garden I wrote an obviously tongue in cheek piece on the Urban75 website about what would happen if it got addicted to crack. The ‘if’ rapidly got lost and was picked by first by the South London Press, and then by virtually the whole national media. I’m particularly proud that it cropped up in a ‘Saxondale’ section by Steve Coogan. It still crops up occasionally, such as in this Londonist interview with Mike Slocombe recently.

You can see the full story develop here on Urban75.

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Useful website of the week

Mapspread - which is extremely helpful at uploading data from a spreadsheet and plotting it on a Google map. It then gives you a bit of code that you can use to embed the map.

There's a simple example here where Tam (my partner) has used it to show local residents in the Crofton Park / Honor Oak Park area what problems she has recently reported to the council.

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I want to be Dennis Thatcher

Actually not the Conservative bit. Or the golfing.

But I would love Tam to be Prime Minister.

And the first step towards that is getting Tam elected as an MP.

I'm very proud to say that last night Tam got selected as the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate for Lewisham Deptford.

Tam is determined not to just win more votes for the Liberal Democrats in Lewisham - but to also make Lewisham a fairer, freer and safer, place while doing it.

The good news is that we were in second place at the last General Election in 2005, the local Labour party are complacent, and people are increasingly voting against Labour locally.

The bad news is that Lewisham Deptford is a Liberal Democrat constituency that has very little money, while Labour party locally still receives thousands of pounds from big unions to help fight elections.

So I'm writing to you to ask if you could donate some money or some time to help Tam get elected.

£25 would pay for printing and delivering 500 leaflets campaigning for things like better schools in Lewisham and effective action to cut crime. If you can donate now we can immediately get going in the next few days.

Simply click below to donate money, or reply to this email with offers of help.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=7123324

Thank you very much in advance,

Rob.

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How has the Prime Minister got almost a million Twitter followers?

@DowningStreet

No.10 Downing Street, much less noticed than Stephen Fry's following on Twitter, has amassed almost a million followers on Twitter.

This must count as by far and away the biggest, and least noticed, success of Downing Street's digital team.

I take my hat off to them for this. Why on earth aren't they crowing about it more though?

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Using the internet for better public consultation

Steph Gray's blog has a great presentation that he gave yesterday on the future of public consultations, and how the internet can help engage a wider range of people, improve the quality of ideas generated and significantly change the policy process.

I particularly like the Simply Understand blog which translates official policy speak into readable English.

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Rob has got Posterous automatically cross posting emails to Facebook, blog and Twitter. :)

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Posterous

I’m very impressed.

I can email post@posterous.com and it automatically creates a blog for me. And my first blog posting.

It then, after a quick set up, cross posts this to my Blogger blog.

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