Election fever

Finally, the general election has rolled around. Get out and vote people! Polls open in a matter of hours in one of the closest fought elections in decades. And I'm bloody sick of it!

We've been working on the Guardian candidates widget thingy (formerly known as Aristotle) for nearly a year, and intensely for the past three or four months, gathering candidate info from the main parties, but because the list of nominations isn't finalised until a couple of weeks before the election there was a vast amount of work that couldn't be done until the past fortnight.

I just hope Guardian readers appreciate the mammoth amount of work that we (me, Holly and Lucy, and Lauren before us) put in. And the tech team of course! Thank goodness we can forget all about it after the weekend.

Unless there's a hung parliament, in which case we could be doing it all over again sooner than we think. Um...

The state of the union

President Obama will deliver his State of the Union address to the joint houses of Congress tonight. I've been compiling a few other famous speeches for the Datablog, so we can compare keywords, that sort of thing.

I've found the most amazing resource - the American Presidency Project based at the University of California. As well as every state of the union address ever made by a president, it houses over 80,000 digitised documents relating to US presidents, all in a searchable database. Love it!

Another reason not to vote Tory

I don't think many people would mistake me for a Conservative supporter, but this story in today's Guardian, and the accompanying comment piece by Tory candidate Dorothy Luckhurst, have convinced me that no woman should consider voting for them.

Elizabeth Truss, selected to represent South West Norfolk last week, is now being threatened with deselection for failing to notify selectors that five years ago she had an affair with an MP. In her article, Luckhurst describes being deselected for becoming pregnant, within marriage, without consulting her constituency association. She has regularly been questioned on how she will manage her career and her children, while male colleagues are never quizzed on their private lives.

It's as if Tory associations are still living in the last century, when fathers had no involvement with their children and women gave up work when they had them. What business is it of theirs what a woman does in her private life, so long as it doesn't impact on her job? David Cameron can attempt to modernise the Conservative Party but sadly it seems that at grassroots level it is as misogynistic and outdated as ever.

Stoopid Americans

So Middle America socked it to the president on Saturday, marching on Washington, banners in hand. Am I the only one who sees the ridiculousness of anti-immigrant rightwingers equating Obama with the Nazis? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Eurovision gets political

All right, I know it's riddled with political voting and has been for years, but this time it's serious. Viewers in Azerbaijan who voted for the Armenian song have apparently had a 'friendly' visit from the police.

The Swedish duck island could be yours!

The Telegraph has flogged the MPs' expenses story to death, temporarily boosting sales but discrediting their broadsheet reputation in the process. Obviously there's a serious issue underlying all the tabloid-style vendettas - the expenses system is badly broken and needs a complete overhaul.

The story has also had serious consequences - only 35% of registered voters bothered to turn out at the European elections last week, either through apathy or through some misguided idea of protest. The result is that the hateful BNP are now stronger than ever - hopefully their success will horrify people enough to get them to the polling station for the general election, when it's finally called.

But amid the claims of second home flipping and high cleaning bills, some humour has shone through. You can't help but be amused by Sir Peter Viggers, Conservative representative for Gosport, who tried to claim for the cost of a £1,645 Swedish duck island at his second home. The claim was quite rightly turned down by the expenses office (not much of a story there then), and Viggers, who paid for it himself, sheepishly admitted that the ducks hadn't liked it anyway and it was now in storage (the Telegraph had tracked down satellite photos of his pond, showing it was no longer there).

Now, the MP has declared that he will auction the duck island for charity. He might be leaving parliament at the next election but at least some ducks, somewhere, will get a shiny new home to call their own.

Guilty tourist

Peace mural, Falls Road - it was a bit weird taking tourist snaps, they used to be such contentious areas, I half expected someone to chuck bottles at us, and I wouldn't have blamed them.



Bobby Sands memorial, Falls Road



Memorial to the Queen Mum, Shankill Road

Stormont

Did a City Sightseeing tour on an open air bus this afternoon, it was a bit fresh but we just beat the rain!

Logan and Boris

Marina Hyde is unimpressed by the concept of baby celebrity lookalikes in the Guardian today. All I can say is thank goodness Logan doesn't look like Boris any more!

The Beast in a jam

The news focus this week is the G20 summit, and the protests surrounding it. Obviously it's a serious subject worthy of proper, intellectual discussion, but let's leave all that to the exprts and instead, enjoy this video of Obama's mammoth car failing to park at Downing Street.

If you insist on flying over something akin to the Batmobile (it allegedly carries machine guns and pints of Obama's blood, for use in an emergency) you really should consider the scale of British cul-de-sacs first.

Vote for cake!

India holds general elections next month, so the paper is preparing a graphic to show party support. It's not that interesting a topic to research, but I did come across a random fact for your delectation - in India, political parties must be represented by a symbol (I guess the equivalent of the party logos over here).

Not that fascinating maybe - the recognised parties have fairly standard bicycles, elephants and leaves - but check out the list of symbols that are still unclaimed (at the bottom of the PDF). Anyone fancy voting for a political party that uses an electric pole to represent itself, or a ceiling fan? How about a sewing machine? Can't see many voters turning out for the walking stick party (what does that say about your approach to politics?), or the battery torch one. I would definitely vote for the cake party though!

Jon Stewart rocks

Just a quicky - working on a Jon Stewart profile and came across this clip of his appearance on Crossfire in 2004. CNN's political 'debate' show met its demise only a few months later, when the new network head admitted Stewart had a point.

Anyone who wonders why The Daily Show is one of the most respected American political programmes around ("on Comedy Central, really?") should watch the clip.

Three princes

BBC Three's slightly batty but throughly watchable programme Undercover Princes debuted on BBC1 last night. Mani is the absolute star of the show!

Their quest may be entirely unrealistic (where in Brighton are you going to find an aristocratic lady/gentleman nice enough, and meek enough, to take home to daddy/the tribe/the royal advisors?), but it's fun watching them lose their inhibitions, and sad to think how much they miss out on by sticking with royal protocol back home.

Roll on the second series!

word of the day

Transatlanticism

Theme of the day - politics and the web

I'm not intentionally tackling a theme a day, honest!

Anyway, the papers may not have noticed by Newcastle City Council last month became the first British council to announce election results on Twitter. It's a bit of a gimmick but hey, if it gives the web generation greater access to politics on a local level then it has to be good.

You can find the council twitter feed here. I don't tweet, as it were - there's enough of me out there on Facebook and on here for anyone - but I'm a bit of a lurker and it is a joy to behold.

Clinton blogs!

Hillary Clinton has thrown herself into the new administration's aim of accessibility by blogging her trip to Asia.

US economic recovery stats

Continuing with their pledge of open government, and their impressive grasp of web 2.0, Obama's administration yesterday launched the Recovery.gov website. Once funds start flowing through the ARRA (the economic package just signed into law), anyone with internet access should be able to track exactly where the money is going. And see some pretty graphics too!

Should help to avoid the disaster that accompanied the Iraq reconstruction project a few years ago, which resulted in billions of dollars going missing. Long may this openness continue!

Open government (for now)

Following the trend of mentioning Obama in every blog this month, it's nice to see the White House plans to be more open than the previous administration; for the moment they've opened up the vast majority of the whitehouse.gov site to search engines (Bush's blocking software ran to 2,377 lines, Obama's runs to 2 so far).

Wonder how long that'll last?

Obama hearts librarians

My colleague Holly just sent me a link to a speech Obama gave to the ALA a few years ago, extolling librarians as the "guardians of truth and knowledge". Laura Bush may have gone back to the ranch (and she wasn't always popular with our creed anyway) but it seems librarians still have a champion in the White House.

Word clouds

Today's souvenir issue of the Guardian is interesting for more than the obvious reason (11 pages of Obama ephemera, what more could you want?): it's the first time I'm aware of that word clouds have been used in the paper.

Word clouds are increasingly common on the web; basically, they count the number of times each word is used in a given text, then map out the data into a nice little graphic - the bigger and darker the word, the more times it appears.

The Guardian have applied this to Obama's inaugural address, and to those of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt and George Bush. The results are interesting - Obama's most used words are nation, new, must, every, people, less, today and America. It's not hard to recognise that Obama's message is one of renewal, of starting over (change, the major drive of his campaign, doesn't feature, perhaps reflecting the reality he faces now he's in office). Peace and liberty come much further down the list.

Comparisons with former presidents are also interesting - Lincoln's key words were war, God and Union (it was delivered before the end of the civil war in 1865), whereas Roosevelt, speaking at the peak of the New Deal era, focused on government, democracy, people and progress. Perhaps surprisingly, Bush is the one who spoke of freedom and liberty (one flaw of word clouds is that there's no context - in this case, Bush used American freedom to stand for waging war abroad).

So far, so good, but the Guardian's graphic has one major drawback. Word clouds really come into their own when they are interactive, when each word is clickable so you can access the full body of data behind the image. This isn't possible on the printed page, so the full functionality of the graphic is lost.

You can read about word clouds at Wikipedia, watch an instructional video on YouTube or make your own courtesy of Wordle (the one above is a cloud of this blog).