Peter Booth is the chairman of the Brighton Kemptown Conservatives. He’s obviously latched onto the idea that digital communications and modern social networking software is the shape of the future. That could distinguish him from the more staid local Conservative Party councillors I guess. I can’t remember which of one of them complained about new media in the recent budget debate in the town hall but it was a revealing complaint against the Greens:
“You’ve got your blogs, you’ve got your twitters but do you really actually know anyone local?”
He’s launched a website which acts as a news aggregator of sorts for the Brighton Conservatives, called Brighton Kemptown Courier. Oddly this has included a link to a post I wrote criticising the local Conservatives for being racist. It’s pretty obvious that this is not a favourable review. The clue is in the title of the post: Silent opposition by Brighton & Hove Conservative Party to racist march. Here’s a screen dump of the the Brighton Kemptown Courier with the link to my blog post prominently displayed:
Click to enlarge image
Perhaps he’s fallen victim to a rogue reporter? Really though, you’d think he’d check wouldn’t you? The Conservative Party has had the advantage of unwavering support from the right-wing press for so long that they probably never had to learn any journalistic skills for themselves. At least they’re trying.
Peter Booth’s certainly trying. He’s managed to gather 135 followers on twitter. It’s quality, not quantity right? Bless.
I saw a spate of those paper.li sites popping up last year, but that fad seems to have passed now. It’s some kind of automated aggregator which seems to use links from someone’s twitter feed. I just tried to create a site to see in more detail how it worked and if you could apply filters, but clicking on “Start your paper” on their site doesn’t seem to work in Chrome. Genius.
Interesting. It seems that the ‘Kemptown Tories’ are somewhat perturbed by this post, judging by their twittering today. Perhaps they can’t work the filters either?