Would you rather I use another more specific example? How about Iain Dale publishing incitement to murder? Phil Hendren publishing my unlisted phone number and/or calling my house late at night and waking my kids in the process? Paul Staines publishing endless comments from a range of anonymous tosspots accusing anyone they don’t like (including Gordon Brown) of being secretly gay?

How about something from across the pond? A mother gets involved in a petty dispute between her daughter and another girl; she poses as a young boy on MySpace and pretends to befriend/fancy the other girl. Later, the pretend boy turns on that young girl and suggests that the world would be better off without her… and that very afternoon she kills herself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Meier

This kind of crap undermines the credibility of bloggers… and rarely leads anywhere pleasant.

And if you want to discuss the Milton matter I think you need to have a good hard think about the potential impact of your name, image and whereabouts published next to a claim that you’re a paedophile.

For some reason I believed that our sights were set a little higher than a students’ union election. When Harry Cole starts running for any meaningful position perhaps then I’d agree that trying to link him as complicit in the comments of the “commentators” on the blog might be worth 5 minutes of contemplation.

a) you really are naive, and,

b) you have no conception of what this is actually all about and need to do some boning up on what went on in the US blogosphere during the Bush-Kerry campaign in 2004.

Sunny:

Yes, this kind of thing does have an impact due to the persistence of on-line publishing.

Currently, six of the first ten links of on a global Google search for “Centre for Open Politics”, in quotes, lead to the articles on here, at the Ministry or to articles linking to these one. The same goes for a UK only search, with a slightly different selection of links while, if you leave out the quotes, its two of the first ten on both searches.

TLDs are a factor in Google search rankings, so if I cross post the same article here and at the Ministry, then all other things being equal, the article posted here will rank higher on a global search because that’s weighted towards TLDs like .com, .org and .net, while the one at MoT will rank higher on a UK search because its a .uk domain.

For a lot of people, their main source of politics news is still either the print edition of the dead trees or their websites, and most of them are still more than a little ungenerous when it comes to linking to external websites because that’s seen as driving traffic off their site (and away from their advertising). So, what generally happens is that people who pick up on a mention of a name, like the Centre for Open Politics or Harry Cole and want to know more, feed that name into Google to see what shakes loose and… you should get the rest.

And, of course, what goes for Joe Soap the Guardian reader goes double for jobbing journos looking for a quick bit of background colour for a story.

One way or another, any thoughts that Cole might have had of slipping under the radar are now blown away, before he’s even got his site up and running properly.

The trouble is that yesterday’s nobody is tomorrow’s MP, campaign manager or leading blogger. Did anyone back in 1986 think of Paul Staines as anything other than another prat from the FCS? If these antics are tolerated at first then breaking the habit becomes so much harder. Think of it as a form of parenting

But other than that, why are we giving so much attention to a bunch of nobodies? Who cares what they think? The likes of Guido will always link to such false-flag operations for their own agendas. It doesn’t really have much impact though, does it?

“Some people commenting on the blog clearly think it is someone running for election. If this was the case would they ruin their chances by starting a blog like this?”

Who could resist such a logical argument?

I also note that, like Iain Dale, Harry Cole just happened to win every online popularity poll that he himself was running. What a clever boy.

Great work, Unity.