REVEALED: the Lib Dem Hive Mind – first pictures

The more eagle-eyed among you may have spotted that I’ve replaced my Politigg buttons with LibDig buttons. Built by LibDem codebodger Ryan Cullen, LibDig has the potential, in my opinion anyway, to be the biggest thing to happen to the Lib Dem Blogosphere since LibDemBlogs (which Ryan also built).

The beauty of LibDemBlogs, unlike anything else out there, is it’s democracy. Anyone who is a party member can have their feed included in the aggregator and as such unknowns can become must reads literally over a couple of weeks. The downside is that it does not seperate the wheat from the chaff, or perhaps somewhat more positively, of highlighting the best of the Lib Dem blogs. That function has been done by Stephen Tall with his weekly Golden Dozen, but even that has its disadvantages as Stephen himself has ruminated about on more than one occasion. It only highlights the most read, which is not neccessarily the best (as someone who has gamed the system simply by using “EXCLUSIVE” in a blog post on more than one occasion, I can testify to that). LibDigs is designed to complement LibDemBlogs rather than replace it by making it easier to find the “best” but in an equally democratic way. I hope that if it proves to be a success, Stephen will start using it for the basis of his five “recommended” posts.

So LibDig is about lauding the best of the Lib Dem blogosphere, but fundamentally it can also be used to recommend anything out there on the internet (Ryan has already built a bookmarklet to make this as simple as possible). And because its membership is restricted to party members (which – another plus – means you only need to use your login.libdems.org.uk login and don’t need to go through yet another registration process), what that means is that over time it can be used to build up a map of what Lib Dems consider to be the best of the internet.

For me, and I suspect many others, that is useful because I’m always looking for a good way to both find out what’s out there and to put things out myself. All social bookmarking websites are only as useful as who is using them. The problem I have with Digg is that its pool is so enormous I don’t get a look in. The problem with Politigg is that it is predominently used by rightwingers with their requisite obsessions about the beastliness of Gordon Brown, the EU and English Parliaments. I’d rather see what people with a similar political outlook to me consider to be important.

So thanks again to Ryan for building it, and I hope as many people as possible out there will begin bookmarking with it and adding LibDig buttons to their blogs (it has already been integrated with LibDemBlogs, LibDemVoice and FlockTogether which should give it a good kickstart). I’m just a little disappointed he didn’t use my suggestion of having a special section about the US Presidential Race called LibDigOnAPig.