Reading an article in Computing Weekly this morning about employers monitoring the use of Facebook and other web 2.0 phenomena. Suddenly struck me that, one interesting example of social networking is the rise of the political blog - and how often you see ‘I’m posting this anonymously because I’m at work’ d’oh.. (tip: the network manager is all-seeing..)

There are a number of these on the left that I look at - in particular socialistunity.com as there’s a number of people I used to work with, and some who I still know who regularly contribute. It’s the ongoing addiction to the minutae of left group-lets. While it may be popular in some sectarian quarters to denounce these blogs (and then rather hypocritacally contribute to them under a variety of aliases) I find them a constantly useful source of information; and the debate is often the debate that *should* have happened on the left but for all sorts of reasons happened in private among people who trusted each other, rather more openly in meetings.

They’ve created a type of Samizdat that’s not existed on the left before; what may become of it? They also open up formally more closed and controlled organisations to a greater degree of transparency. Any goings on (and there are lots of them) can be instantly published and debated. I’m surprised this approach is criticised.

The next step for some of these groups would be to really show some ‘leadership’ (a favourite category) and pursue an open source socialism model; why not publish every week the number of unique hits to the website, weekly paper sales, actual membership figures. What’s their to hide? Could the internet be used to encourage a hitherto unseen honesty about actual ‘facts and figures’?