In Westminster political blogging there are three unofficial party affiliated sites which try to be the public voice of the grassroots. ConservativeHome is the daddy of them all, LabourHome is a technically superior site with far inferior content and a lack of editorial direction. LibDemVoice is a bit too much of an outlet for Cowley Street stuff that could be put in press releases.

Guido has been hearing rumours about a new CameroonHome site which Fraser Nelson has outed as going under the title “Platform 10“. Ex-Dave-Babe Fiona Melville is the motivating force behind it, backed by a 15-strong editorial team of mainly ex-CCHQ staffers lined up as contributors, but apparently with no full time editor. Steve Hilton has, it is believed, wanted an alternative Conservative grassroots voice to counter-balance the critical but friendly voice of Tim Montgomerie. Guido guesses it won’t work unless it is honest about issues. That is the strength of ConservativeHome, it explores the issues critically, and in doing so has improved the Tory internal debate. If CameroonHome becomes just a platform for “Dave is Great” stories in the same way that LibDemVoice ignores the “Ming Problem” it will be just another boring e-Pravda adjunct of the official party site. We shall see…

346,444 pageloads from 255,504 unique visitors, “Oh, F**K” – Who’s That Girl?” was the most popular story. Iain Dale remains the top referrer and the top search term is still “Gordon Brown rocking horse“.

UPDATE : As someone pointed out in the comments, congratulations are due to Iain on winning more traffic than Guido last month. Guido has, to be fair, been distracted of late with two books* in the pipeline, overseeing Polish builders finishing off a new house, business pressures and just the tedium of Blair’s long goodbye sapping his enthusiasm for blogging.

Iain has beaten Guido some months in the past, competition is healthy and imminent developments in the Loans for Lordships scandal should see traffic explode. Guido will be all over it…

*The Big Red Book of New Labour Sleaze is out, the forthcoming Levy book is still some time from publication.

Yesterday morning Guido reported that Blair would resign as an MP. Today the rest of the Dead-Tree-Press is catching up and reporting that he will do so this afternoon. Tory party Chairman Frankie Maude put CCHQ on by-election alert after reading the story here yesterday morning.

Guido even managed to beat blogging Benedict Brogan, which is becoming increasingly difficult to do nowadays. Do keep up the rest of you…

The French press is even more craven in the reporting of political misdoings than our own tame/feral* Lobby. So it is no surprise that it was the French blogosphere, not the Paris press, that made it impossible to keep Socialist party leader François Hollande’s affair secret.

François had four children with Ségolène Royal (pictured left), the losing French Socialist Presidential candidate. He is having an affair with TV8′s political reporter, Valerie Trierweiler (pictured right). When announcing their split the elegant Ségolène said that now “he was free to enjoy his romantic life alone”.

France has strict privacy laws of the kind that some of our politicians would love to have over here. Blogs now make those laws almost impossible to enforce. Technological progress.

Hat-tip : EuroSoc

*You choose.

A below average 347,499 pageloads from 264,598 unique visitors. Iain Dale managed to overtake Guido’s traffic with a record (for him) 388,935 from 231,901 visitors this month. He will be chuffed.

Kite v Dale Round II : Melissa got Fisked and she didn’t like it. Tim Montgomerie and Alan Duncan get a swipe as well. Horrid Tory boys…

If you thought blogging had already gone mass market before, what do you think of the Telegraph offering free blog hosting? It is technically far ahead of the Guardian’s Comment is Free “blog”. Which always struck me as

(a) not a blog
(b) a mish-mash of variable quality writers.

Interesting to see how it develops and what the Telegraph thinks it will achieve by offering free MyTelegraph branded blogs to the masses. They get traffic, extra advertising revenue and you get a simple and restrictive blog in their gated community. Not sure how appealing that is as a proposition. Probably a place to start. Readers will have to invest a lot of time in finding writers they want to read and the noise to signal ratio will inevitably be high.

Until now the Telegraph’s blogging journalists have not been overwhelmed with comments and although Little and Large seems occasionally interesting, most of the blogs seem dead. (The giveaway is those digg et al voting buttons gathering dust and merely serving to emphasise that nobody diggs them.)

If an amateur citizen journalist blogger on MyTelegraph becomes a hit, how will the journos react? They are not exactly setting a tough standard to beat…

That process of renewal for New, New Labour is all about us. The frankly, until now, faltering LabourHome site has re-launched. Last time Guido looked it still had Labour Beta 0.0 policies and articles advocating socialism. How so very 80s…

They do make the point today that they are the only open-access tool for grassroots activists. ConservativeHome and LibDemVoice allow user comments but have editors. Anything goes on LabourHome and anybody can put up articles. The new site allows some editorial intervention in that better articles can be bumped up front and centre by the editors. This might spare online political junkies the necessity of wading through endless articles on “bringing back socialism” for more current issues.

Not sure the best way to relaunch is to put a picture of yesterday’s man on the front…

It will come as no surprise that Guido has no intention of abiding by any Code of Conduct as advocated by Tessa Jowell yesterday. She wants the bloggersphere (sic) to be “OurSpace”, a public commons. Well here is the bad news Tessa, this online space is private property.

To be fair she was advocating self – censorship rather than state – censorship. Iran and China have blogger Codes of Conduct that are voluntary. If you insult religion or undermine the party you are volunteering to go to jail. One woman’s incivility is another blogger’s freedom of speech. It may not be to the taste of politicians or self-appointed arbiters of blogging protocol, but that is how it is, freedom of speech means you will find people saying disagreeable things in disagreeable ways.

Online rudeness and rowdiness are not a threat to democracy, blogging is not even a parody of democracy, it is a bit of software that allows everyone with an internet connection to publish online easily. That is it. The revolution will not be blogged, but the advance of the citizen journalist means that, hopefully “the truth” will be more likely to come out in the future. It is certainly harder for those in power to manipulate the media when the media is more horizontally dispersed because it includes thousands more independent sources. Some of which you will inevitably not like.

Today is World Press Freedom day. Bloggers are in jail around the world for insulting the state, religion and the dignity of their rulers. It can’t happen here can it?

In general Guido doesn’t do local stories unless they have national implications because they are (a) of local interest only (b) incredibly involved (c) boring. Also they invariably involve tales of petty corruption which would require resources that Guido does not have to validate. The Sunday Times has the resources to put an undercover reporter into Labour’s Leeds party operation to uncover corrupt Postal Vote practises. Guido does not and sticks to Westminster stories.

There are plenty of local focus blogs that break local stories, Greenwich Watch does what it says on the tin to great effect and the annoyance of the local council. The blog billed as the “Welsh version of Guido Fawkes” goes from strength to strength. Despite a certain similarity www.ArsemblyWales.org will not be confused with the official ww.AssemblyWales.org. Some tribute sites are better than others. This one has a few other stylistic similarities that co-conspirators might recognise