Random Thoughts 12: Shout out to Ismail, Summers, Tod and Duffett

No posts for a few days so I thought I would catch up with the first dozen edition of my ‘Random Thoughts’ posts featuring a few name checks of people who have done cool things on the internet recently.

I was really pleased to see the excellent Islington Councillor Tracy Ismail profiled in Liberal Democrat Voice’s Local Liberal Heroes series. I ran a Committee Room from her home during the 2006 local elections and she was very tolerant of my minor explosion of panic when we had a significant computer failure half way though the day. As a novice candidate then she displayed qualities of calmness and taking things in her stride which I imagine have helped make her a very effective local councillor!

Talking of great female politicians, this week saw the launch of the Counting Women In campaign that aims to work towards the equal representation of women at all levels of politics.

I noticed that another excellent Lib Dem played a key role in exposing a PR scam that hoodwinked several national papers last week. William Summers (@william_summers), the party’s candidate for North West Norfolk at the last election and the creator of the What The Hell Have The Lib Dems Done? website, spotted that the ‘customer’ featured as the accidental purchaser of a 7ft monster slipper (I’m not kidding) bore an uncanny resemblance to the web manager of the ‘Monster Slippers’ company itself. Polly Curtis on the Reality Check blog has the full story.

Finally, some photos. I rather liked the look of the new ‘Liberal Drinks’ beer mats available from Martin Tod (@mpntod):

I also thought Helen Duffett’s (@helenduffett) emergency replacement for Twitter for those suffering from Blackberry failure during the recent outage was a winner:

This content was originally posted on my old Strange Thoughts blog.