Last week was a cheery one for Labour techies, with Derek Draper starting up what I think is going to be a very useful part of the jigsaw for the left blogohemisphere in the UK, LabourList.org. So enthused was the party by this project that none other than Lord (né Peter) Mandelson threw caution to the wind and set off exploring Second Life.

Well, one week on and the project’s had a bit of a double pwnage from political opponents. The Daily Mail pranked Mandelson’s virtual life by making a clone avatar and hanging about SL, behaving inappropriately. They missed the more interesting points of SL by a couple of virtual miles, but then I guess nobody ever read the Mail for sci/tech (or much beyond hell-in-a-handcart whingefests and cringeworthy reader offers).

More interesting is the treatment LabourList itself has received. A shady bunch of activists have set up a duplicate at the similarly titled Labourist.org. It’s posing as a principled objection, but I think is more likely a neat spoiler. They’re not willing to say who they are, or where they are – no matter how Tim Ireland (who seems not a fan of either site to put it mildly) teases them, and all we know is that they seem to be vehemently against the idea of a political party’s supporters engaging with the party to set something up for other supporters of that party:

There is something deeply troubling about a quasi-official site, where content is provided by members of the Labour Government, edited by a former Labour party employee and where comment is allowed only by the handpicked few. LabourList.org requires registration and sharing of personal data in order to join their debate. Contributors are asked the screening question: “Are you a Labour Member?”. LABOURIST thinks this is just wrong.

Ergo, if Derek and his partisan mates want to talk to each other online, that’s somehow deeply sinister. The only valid and ethical course for LabourList correspondents is apparently to get out there and hug as many trolls as they can find – they have rights too. Oh yes, and to write content that isn’t so “heavily spun”. Well duh – until they said that I hadn’t realised that a site where every second word was ‘Labour’ might be expected to be slightly partisan.

Fair play to them though, as LabourList has stated its content can be reused. It’s the letter of the law if not the spirit. They’re supposedly in favour of open discussion, to the point where they’re reducing the capacity for any meaningful debate by splitting it across two unlinked pages. The real aim surely is just to be one more factor in trying to starve LL whilst it tries to get established, at which point they can close LI too, job done. As such it’s a kind of metatroll, a whole system designed to drone on about Labour spin.

LI has had plaudits for beating LL in the tech stakes, and it’s true the design is a *lot* more readable than LL’s clunky nav and messy centre column, but even though I’m a wild-eyed WordPresser myself (and natural favour the one-true-CMS over LL’s proprietary system), I’d question how well they’ve implemented it in the context of blogging. No spelled-out permalinks and no use of SEO tweaks for metadata mean LL (which has this) may well outperform them in search.

Blogging, as I believe Derek understands, is a very long game. Getting some of the inbound crap out of the way with this soft launch may have been a good idea, but it’s going to be really very hard for him to build the site. Convincing contributors who have important things to do that they all need to turn in a dozen good posts over many months before the trolls get bored, the stats build up, and the less blog-familar contributors properly find their groove. It would be easy for people to think their work was just so many pearls chucked before swine and will be pretty demoralising at times.

So my advice to LL (not that they need or want it – but when did that stop a blogger?) is to ignore LI – learn a bit from their design, sure – and move on. Let them syphon off those oh-so-valuable commenters who have such insightful points about (Za)NuLieBore and they might even do us a service. There’s enough to be doing on LabourList as it is.

Oh, and PS: Sack Schillings for the legal advice (not great blogskillz there – unless they promise they are really really very sorry).