487,676 page views off 366,364 unique visitors – well it was a short month. Read ‘em and weep Three Line Whoopsies…

The Centre for Policies Studies recently had to correct a pamphlet which implied the Telegraph’s political bloggers* were now beating Guido in terms of audience size. Coincidentally the pamphlet’s author was a Telegraph hack. Turns out that claim is true only if you add the traffic of all fifty (50) Telegraph blogs together. Only then do they just barely beat Guido in terms of audience size. 50 hacks, £10 million lost invested in the new media platform. No wonder Shane Richmond is sulking with Guido. Barclay brothers take note…

Guido is showing Wikileaks some love with Google-Juice. The IP address http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks is the internet postcode for Wikileaks. A judge has ordered the web authorities to remove the website URL address from the internet so this is the only way directly access it now. This is where Guido uploads important documents (like that Northern Rock memo) and others they don’t want you to see…

Coincidentally Guido will be in London on Tuesday to speak to the Manifesto Club. The theme is “Thought Crime – from the Lyrical Terrorist to Beenie Man”. Guido will be putting the case for the freedom to offend everyone except the truth – alongside Hari Kunzru, novelist and deputy president of English PEN, Aki Nawaz, the front man of the group Fun-Da-Mental (famous as a ‘suicide bomb rapper’) and Brendan O’Neill from the Spiked clique of lefties turned libertarian

Apparently there will be readings from literature that has been banned over the past century. Guido might even try to crack a few Bernard Manning jokes.

When: Tuesday 26 February
Time: Doors open 7pm; event begins 8pm; bar open till 11pm
Where: Corbet Place bar, 15 Hanbury St, London E1 6QR
Cost: Free to Manifesto Club members; £5 non-members (pay on the door) – or join the Manifesto Club.

Guido is happy to report that, in response to demand, his cutting edge political and economic news analysis is now distributed worldwide directly into dealing rooms via Bloomberg’s terminal network – the fastest-growing real-time financial information network in the world.

Guido is now more accessible to the world’s central banks, investment institutions, commercial banks, government offices and agencies, law firms, corporations and news organisations in over 150 countries.

The Telegraph’s leader writer, Robert Colvile, has written a very well judged pamphlet “Politics, Policy and the Internet“ for the Centre for Policy Studies. Guido comes in for some praise for shaking things up a little in the Lobby and some criticism for letting the co-conspirators throw tomatoes at politicians and use rude words. Fair enough, but that’s the way we like it here isn’t it? This chart on page 7 caught Guido’s eye, it is based on industry data from Hitwise. Can you spot one missing blog that might have slightly more market share? As it is it shows Colvile’s Telegraph colleagues to be the most successful political bloggers in Britain.

Colvile also got quite a lot of coverage for saying that the BNP’s website was the most popular politics site. It wasn’t. Can you guess which gossipy politics site beat them all with the most visitors last month?

Guido contacted Robert Colvile immediately on seeing the chart, he blamed the CPS and insisted that he had told them to include Guido in the chart. The CPS’s Tim Knox told Guido “sorry” and that they would correct it immediately. Of course if Guido has been included it would put all those millions spent by the Telegraph on new media in a different light – wouldn’t it? To come second to one not-always-sober Guy with a lap-top after losing £10 million on developing your website last year?

This grumble aside, it is still worth reading, particularly the point about voters now expecting government to be as good as Google. Responsive instantly, open and transparent. Something that Guido would have emphasised, is the idea of the blogosphere as the Gramscian “site of struggle” for the politico-media world’s mindshare. In this world new media can compete vigorously with Big media. In the U.S. the Drudge Report, according to the respected Pew Research Centre, is the second most important online source of campaign information in politics, behind only the New York Times and ahead of the Washington Post. So it will be over here too, and the readers will still enjoy insulting the politicians…

Guido thought that this attempt to take Gordon Brown to Court by a UKIP member for breach of contract over not holding a referendum on the EU Constitution was crazy. It was in the manifesto and a manifesto commitment is a promise. So they do have a case of sorts but with little chance of success methinks.

But it was absolutely worth it for the admission in Court by Gordon’s barrister that you should not believe a word Gordon writes in the manifesto. Q.E.D.

Incidentally, the quote was taken down in Court and blogged before any broadcaster, newswire or newsroom got it out by Is There More to Life than Shoes? Good work pussycat…

Guido has dumped Bloglines for Google Reader for all his RSS needs. Works much better on his phone…

Last month saw 529,338 page-loads off 386,417 unique visitors. Despite the competition from more and more Big Media blogs; Adam, Ben, Kevin, Sam, Coffee House and the Three Line Whoops, Guido’s readership keeps on growing year-on-year. 40% up on January 2007 (379,964 off 267,123) and more than quadrupling since January 2006 (101,273 off 69,536). Compare that to Kevin Maguire’s Daily Mirror, where circulation is down some 25% over the same period. They don’t call it the “Dead-Tree-Press” for nothing…

Traffic surged as readers sought to follow developments in the Hain saga, and the most popular story summarised Guido’s Role in Hain’s Demise, in fact 6 out of the 10 top stories were Hain stories. No surprise there.

Guido will be among the geeks.gov.uk on Saturday trying to rein in some of the starry-eyed types from the eGovernment crowd. As someone who was around for the first internet boom, and only lost half his NAV in the tech crash, it will be Guido’s self-appointed role to try and keep them all on terra firma, particularly the ones spending your taxes.

Since there will be a lot of Whitehall geeks attending maybe Guido will find out why his blog is blocked in some parts of Whitehall for lower grades and not for higher Civil Service grades. Is it because they are scared of leaks or just people monging about on the blog all day?

Guido will be discouraging the eVisionaries from doing things that should be done by the private sector and encouraging them to be open and realistic. Spending millions on sites that no one visits is never a good idea…

ConservativeHome is not taking the Speccie’s critically successful entry into online discussion (with CoffeeHouse) lying down. It too has now launched a multi-authored comment site. CentreRight.Com’s groundbreaking advance is to not have reader comments. Now the Dead-Tree-Press is all full of unpaid commentators maybe the truly avant garde Web 3.0 thing to do is to remove the interactivity…

Guido is sceptical about multi-authored blogs. They have to have a tight-focus to be successful. Waffling about anything and everything doesn’t work. Good luck, but Guido is reaching info overload…

This month Guido had 418,459 off 304,701 visits, pipping Iain Dale who had 412,459 off 235,869 in December. Not bad considering Guido had a week off last month. The stats for 2007 show over four million pageloads from three million unique visitors for the year. Using the stricter “absolute visitors” metric gives 561,352 different individuals* visiting this blog over the year.

The two most popular posts of the year were both video posts, something Guido will be trying to do more of this year. Expect a few GuyNews.TV specials…