My best bits for tons more fun!

Alex Wilcox is continuing to go up in my estimation, especially as today he has had a great idea about helping us all decide on our nominations for best blog postings, without which could so easily turn into the last good posting I remember reading.

He has asked bloggers to brazen out the blushes and come up with their own favourite postings from their own blogs and thereby helping us all to nominate from a position of knowledge rather than an online version of pin the tail on the donkey.

So here you go, here are what I consider my best bits:

I'm starting with What should MPs look like? On account of the fact that I am still excessively proud of this post and particularly that is won the CFGB best blog posting award back in March. I don't know whether a posting having already won an award get disqualified but I offer you up what the judging panel liked! And it made me realise just how much I could grin in one evening!

A few weeks later, I posed the question What sort of people do we want to be our candidates? This started quite an adult debate and certainly provided some food for thought. I do like postings that are more than polemics and actually get people thinking and talking and so I was quite pleased with this one. I've never made it on volume into the Lib Dem Voice Golden Dozen but this one got picked up in the five you might like to read slot.

Calling all men who don't like violence was me trying to publicise the problem of domestic violence, a topic that comes up far less than many but will effect 1 in 4 women at some point in their lifetime and so I guess it affects us all (given that most of know more than 4 women). I was also trying to set out some solutions via the White Ribbon Campaign. A rather sad comments thread, I think. This post also took part in the Carnival of Feminists.

Then I got wound up by a pretty inane comment piece in CiF about the increasing use of the word gay by the younger people on the planet and I asked Worrying about homophobia in schools? Don't be so gay. If memory services me correctly this got picked up in Liberal Conspiracy's Casting the Net.

Next comes Why Boris Johnson is a really, really bad idea, which a followed up with a few more posts on the topic and got me on Sky.Com News for the first time. I feel doomed to do a regular 'I told you so' post for the next 4 years.

On to US politics; this is the first time I have been remotely interested in US primaries but boy, was it primary season to watch! I think the diversity of candidates and choices was fantastic and just because the presidential candidates are in place there's no need to throw the idea of a female VP out with Hillary because Hillary isn't the only woman in the Democratic Party.

This one really depresses me, but I am concerned that we are getting a bit too complacent when it comes to getting enough female parliamentary candidates elected. Plenty of well meaning activity doesn't always lead to the right outcomes and the Electoral Reform Society suggests that there's no real chance at electing more women into parliament at the next election. An intense discussion between me, the Yorkshire gob and MattGB ensued, albeit some while after I posted the original post.

As you have probably guessed, I am a female political blogger and proud of it. Blogging is something that you grow into and now that I've been doing it for around 18 months, I can see it is just something that you have to plug away at. The rewards that might make you feel slightly less like a vanity publisher are going to be sometime in the future. However, every now and then there is a cry wondering why there is so little gender balance in Lib Dem Bloggers (much better since the CFGB Blogging Awards but still only 20% of Lib Dem bloggers are female). Well, that's because we've been looking for female political bloggers in the wrong place. This post isn't so much about a cogently argued notion (are any of them?) but more about me trying to leverage the network aspect of the web. I picked this up from a number of female bloggers and passed in on, including the BBC's iPM website who thought it might make an interesting story for their Saturday afternoon radio programme. Liberal Conspiracy also picked it up on their Casting the Net series.

And lastly, a bit more internal party organisation stuff in my piece on The Bones Commission which I had been trying not to write for some time but in the end my exasperation at the whole thing overcame my ability to resist criticising my favourite Lib Dem leader's communication skills!!!

And this was the cut down version of this post!!!