• 25 percent write blogs – that’s over 12 million British bloggers
• 60 percent read them – 31 million readers
• 1 in 3 UK adults agree with the statement “I could not live without the internet”

And if you want to show Political Scrapbook some social media love, you can do so on Facebook and Twitter.

Hat-tip: Mashable

*The research was conducted by market research company TORA but, clearly, a social media consultancy has a vested interest in exaggerating the importance of, um, social media!

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Scrapbook's biggest fan cutting the cake at our recent birthday bash

“You should remain aloof to it”, said one lefty blogger, forgetting for a moment that we are naked populists and crave approval. He was referring, of course, to the Iain Dale Total Politics Blog Poll.

Without a small handful of questions to weight responses to the profile of UK adults* it is a terrible way to compare competing tribes on the political blogosphere. But the political party and left/right lists will be pored over by hacks, even those who boycott the whole process [cough].

Yesterday was our birthday. It’s been a great twelve months, breaking two of the year’s biggest viral videos, terrorising cricetinae and torpedoing the Tories’ flagship social media campaign along the way. We would really appreciate our readers’ support at the virtual ballot box:

1. Compile a list of your favourite political blogs. You must select at least five and up to ten blogs
2. Rank them in order, starting at 1 for your absolute favourite
3. Email the list to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com

Now mosey over to your email and vote (for us!) *Or at least the profile of UK blog readers, which presumably leans strongly towards an ABC1, quality newspaper demographic. Hitwise would have this data.

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A friendly spook has been in touch with the following encoded transmission, intercepted by GCHQ in the early hours of this morning. It seems likely that torybear.com will undergo an, ahem, subtle be re-brand in the coming days:

The indications are clearly that TB read some Marx (and he liked it).

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The site of Tory toff Ian Liddell-Grainger features the “Excellent Pussy” blog, ostensibly written by his cat Mogg. ILG has reportedly used this feline nom de guerre to pursue poisonous vendettas not only against local government staff but also his own Conservative colleagues:

The details of the long-running row are complicated and possibly irrelevant to anyone living outside Somerset, but they include calling the [retired chief executive of Somerset Council] a total twit, Judas, a little man smaller than life and twice as creepy, mad, in need of medical help (with a helpful link to a Tourette’s website), plus false allegations of adultery, lying and corruption and an insulting YouTube video, now taken down. Another Tory MP, Bob Neill, even complained when his colleague invented a swear-laden harangue which he claimed Jones had addressed to Neill.

Liddell-Grainger should prove to be a ticking time bomb for Tory whips, who struggled to keep him under wraps during the election.

Unhinged isn’t the word.

Hat-tip: Grace Fletcher-Hackwood

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From the looks of things there are a few hours to go to register for Liberal Conspiracy’s Blog Nation conference, which takes place in London tomorrow (Saturday 26th). A veritable menagerie of specimens from lefty blog land will be in attendance, kicking off with a debate on “Oh shit, the tories are in power! Panic!” the “Coming battles and how we prepare for them”.

The most worthwhile parts of similar events are often the contacts made and the projects hatched at lunch/in the bar. So it’s refreshing to see LibCon editor Sunny Hundal set the agenda with a clear slant towards organising and discussion. For example, the session “Can the left work better together? And how?” has a format that oscillates the focus from the panel to the audience and back again. Time will be provided in the afternoon for anyone to pitch an idea for five minutes.

Scrapbook’s editor will also be outlining a proposal for a bloggers’ cooperative in the ”Upcoming projects and future direction” session, where Sian Berry and David Babbs (38 Degrees) will also be talking about political email lists and mobilising via email.

The whole thing is free but you have to register. So if this post whets your appetite, pop an email off to blognation@liberalconspiracy.org. If you’re unable to attend you can keep an eye on proceedings via the Twitter hashtag #blognation.

Hope to see you there.

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World cup festivities combined with a “long lunch” have evidently got the better of at least one politico. Microblogging under the influence Leaving your iPhone with mischievous blue bears is a dangerous affair, especially when your their commentary strays from “Ingerland” to, erm, other matters:

Perhaps the editor of the now defunct right wing blog Keep Right Online can compare notes with Nadine “sat on a wall with a bottle of wine” Dorries?

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With Sunder Katwala, Alastair Campbell and John Redwood lacing up their boots it seems that World Cup fever, a particularly virulent sporting malaise, has infected the British political blogosphere. Attempts at sporting insight (not to mention metaphors) have resulted in varying degrees of success. The output of the New Statesman, however, reflects the kind last seen in England’s qualifying campaigns of 1978 and 1994.

A post by Laurie Penny entitled “Why I despise the World Cup” actually manages to raise some fair points, such as how commercialised it has become. I don’t really understand why the Danish lager Carlsberg is supporting England – but I don’t think that’s why Laurie hates the World Cup. Pop music has become too commercialised, and I find that depressing, but that’s not why I hate Miley Cyrus*. I hate Miley Cyrus because her music makes me want to choke on the bile that collects in my mouth when I hear it.

Conceding “not everyone who displays an England flag is a fascist”, Penny then reveals she is a “card-carrying member of the sensitive, wheezy, malcoordinated phalanx of the population for whom the word “football” still evokes painful memories of organised sadism”. As a dyspraxic, Belle and Sebastian-loving, soon-to-be English student spending my gap year writing political blogs, I can empathise with this completely. My discomfort is acute owing to constant comparisons to my brother, who may yet become a professional “misogynist jock tossing a ball around”. Yet I still love football. Penny intellectualises her antipathy for football, as though there’s something wrong with simply disliking a sport.

Staggers’ political correspondent James Macintyre’s argument for a British football team lapses into some crass generalisations and weird inaccuracies. He accuses England fans of “leering” (at what? the football?) and dismisses the fact that England might reach the Quarter Finals – reserved for eight of the world’s best teams – as “dire”. When he says that supporters drink “cheap, English lager” I have two problems: firstly, we drink cheap foreign lager; and secondly, the word “English” is used in a derogatory manner there, which by his own definition (“Englishness is… a racial brand”) is a bit, well, Anglophobic?

As a regular NS reader and critical friend, however, I should assure Penny or Macintyre (the former of whom appreciated she’d “fallen into self-parody”) this is a defence of something I love.

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Alex Smith: Hi, David. I’m Alex from LabourList.
David Miliband: Hi, Alan.

Ironically enough, Miliband Snr has written for LabourList four times this year! Perhaps this demonstrates the extent to which some ministers may have been insulated from the Labour movement by their special advisers. Or, as LabourList’s newly installed deputy editor Mark Ferguson observes:

“Candidate briefing #fail?”

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Hats off to Liberal Conspiracy on being the first left wing blog to crack 100,000 readers in a single month. The site secured 129,927 unique visitors and 502,957 page views in May. This blog is flattered to be mentioned by LC editor Sunny Hundal in his roundup of news-breaking sites and chuffed with the more modest 27,484 visitors and 41,943 page views for Scrapbook during the same period, in which we also made it into Wikio’s top-40 political blogs for the first time.

It’s been a fun year since our launch in July 2009. We’ve built a following on Twitter and Facebook and, in the last few months in particular, stories have been ruffling feathers and gaining traction with the mainstream media. While the posts may not write themselves, a potentially unstable coalition government filled with nasty Tories and Orange Book Liberals is an appetising prospect for the online left.

We’ve canvassed opinion on ways to consolidate and plans for the summer include getting more contributors on board (if you enjoy muckraking then get in touch) and a redesign to scale for more content. In the words of another blogger, “you need to be posting three times a day – even if it’s crap!”

We may not make this a regular feature but here are our top posts for May:

1. Gordon Brown’s impassioned speech to Citizens UK
2. Labour Party website crashes under load of new membership applications
3. Has Caroline Spelman broken the ministerial code?
4. The coalition cabinet: announcements and rumours
5. Adam Boulton loses the plot vs Alastair Campbell

And since our launch last Summer:

1. Gordon Brown’s impassioned speech to Citizens UK
2. Labour Party website crashes under load of new membership applications
3. Conservative Party ‘Cash Gordon’ campaign was designed by US anti-healthcare lobbyists
4. Carol Vorderman metamorphosises into Sarah Palin on BBC Question Time
5. David Cameron uses Sky News camera lens to style his hair

So please keep reading, commenting and sending us stuff.

Thanks for all the clicks and re-tweets!

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As for the site design, perhaps he will follow the lead of Andy Burnham, winning over the ladies of the Labour movement with an 80s-crooner/teen idol cheesy grin?

Or maybe he will resurect the spirit of Labour’s mid-90s iconoclasm with a website that, erm, looks like it’s from 1994? Over to John McDonnell, whose john4leader.org.uk website was last updated 12 weeks ago when Gordon Brown was still Prime Minister:

We’ll have to wait and see.

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