Two Clicks Away Can Be OK!

Cllr Andrew Milton (I don't know where he gets the time to keep up several blogs) seems to have got in first with news of Lewisham Council's landmark ruling (;->) about links to "potentially political content". Basically it says that the Council (even on web pages about individual councillors, like these two) can't include anything "political" (find long definition for yourself!); even though what we do as politicians must, I suppose, all be "political" (just as most things an electrician does are probably "electrical"). Even though our pages mention which parties we represent, it's not allowable to include links to the websites of each party.

But it is, since last week, allowable to link to a ("non-political") URL, which in turn includes links to something that might be "political" (such as a councillor's personal homepage or blog which, if we're doing what the voters, presumably, think we're paid for as some of their elected politicians, probably includes "politics"...). Thus "Two clicks away can be OK"!

I think this all makes the Council look a bit silly, and as if it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of information, references and the Web. But assuming our lawyers' interpretations are correct, it's the laws governing Lewisham (and all other local authorities) that are 'an ass'.

Andrew Milton has decided to use his personal blog as an intermediate link to his councillor's blog. Being of a more infrastructural turn of mind, I got the circular and swiftly registered the domains twoclicksaway.org and non-political.org, (£8.99 a year being a small price to pay for a good joke) and thought about the little web-service that I need to run on them, to create a content-free (and definitely politics-free) intermediate page. Then I can offer this to anyone who needs such a 'political firewall' (maybe there's a Chinese market... Hmmm!). Sometimes I wish I could be bothered to make lots of money out of ideas like this - but it seems a lot simpler to just do them on a sort of Open Source basis.