(from BBC News)

Did you vote? How do you feel about the result and its potential implications? Please complete our short electoral reform survey so we can work out how different things might have looked under PR, and whether there’s a case for electoral reform.

Back in Guildford it was an easy choice. In 2005 the incumbent MP was Sue Doughty; a Lib Dem who I’d voted for in 2001 and whose policies strongly reflected my beliefs – particularly in her opposition to the war in Iraq. She lost to shadow health minister Anne Milton, whose chief distinctions are to vote against gay rights and yet look like Julian Clary.

In Hove it’s a two-horse race between Tory Mike Weatherley and Labour MP Celia Barlow.

Stonewall research shows that Celia has a great voting record on lesbian, gay and bisexual equality issues, but a look at her entry on They Work For You reveals an MP who has also never voted against the Labour whip.

This means that Celia:

-Voted moderately against laws to stop climate change.
-Voted very strongly for allowing ministers to intervene in inquests.
-Voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war.
-Voted very strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws.
-Voted very strongly for replacing Trident.
-Voted very strongly for introducing ID cards.

So why would I vote tomorrow for a Labour candidate with whom I utterly disagree on some of the most important issues of the day?

I’m not sure that I can, but our electoral system is fucked: the alternative may be seeing the Conservatives come back into power – and knowing that I’m one of the few thousand people in perhaps 20 constituencies who could have done something to stop it.

GRAPHICS: both from BBC News

Doubtless the extra pixels will give their swingometer unrivalled accuracy, but it’s unlikely to do much elsewhere. Polling stations – invariably primary schools, Baptist churches and village halls – rarely prove cinematic in front of a hasty-put-together piece to camera, while vote-counting runs through dreary hours in a thousand strip-lit municipal centres. These places do not need HD.

Nor do our politicians, to whom it should be denied. We may suspect many of being self-interested, mildly corrupt, out of touch, high-handed, ignorant, duplicitous and even mendacious, but we know for a fact that there are no lookers among them.

I, for one, wouldn’t cyber-stalk the corridors of power.

As long as the meeting points between politicians and the public are run by PR people, we have a problem. Brown will likely lose – more because he can’t play the comfortable everyman than for anything else. Cameron talks a nice line in it, having apparently met everyone the other day. Clegg seemingly hopes that not being either of them will be enough.

And perhaps it will. “Vote for change” must have sounded like a great slogan a few months back, but I hope the Tories are regretting it come 7 May. We’re warned off a hung parliament, but what if it brings electoral reform – and with it an end to these meaningless politics of presentation, gesture and the party line?

So, no; we don’t need to see democracy in high definition. And in the days before we vote we don’t even need to see it.

We should just be listening, and thinking.

IMAGES by cole007, based on the transcript of the second leaders’ debate (on Sky).

And then there are the days you have.

Earlier in the week we noticed a News Distribution Service release that seemed distinctly familiar. In essence: England and Ireland link driving disqualifications, comes into force in February 2010.

I knew I’d covered it before. Sure enough I found my November 2008 Admiral News story and the release that it was based on. In essence: England and Ireland link driving disqualifications, comes into force in spring 2009.

Eleven months and two road safety ministers seperate the two releases, but all credit to Jim Fitzpatrick’s handover notes: Paul Clark manages to supply the same quote.

Cute, but not quite what I was expecting. Where’s the rescue then?

I’m reminded of the Network Computer, or NC, something that a consortium of manufacturers and the database company Oracle tried to foist on us in the late 90s. The NC was a ‘thin client’, without a disk, and with bugger-all in the way of software – the storage would be centralised on a remote server.

At the time, I was working at Bullfrog, and remember universal resistance to the idea. Why, people asked, would I let my code, my music, my software be stored remotely?

Data Dog

It’s still a valid question but, with basic, portable desktops that can run in a browser session, that seems to be where we’re headed. If so, how has that resistance been eroded? Are Google, Adobe, or the developers using Gears or Air more trustworthy than Oracle, who (I assume) would have stored the data from NCs? Or have we simply given up caring where our data is stored?

I reckon it’s a bit of both.

As Dave pointed out on my Facebook T&C post, most users probably don’t know or care that there are T&Cs attached to uploading their content to social sites. Not all services want control of the content you upload like Facebook does, though (and to be fair to Facebook I find it unlikely that they’d flex their user-p0wning licence without being nice enough to ask first). Flickr’s terms allow Yahoo to use your images to promote Flickr, but the license only exists until you delete the pictures.

Are we anywhere near the kind of reassurance a business would require? I think Scott’s right when he says that most businesses would be unhappy with an apps suite that might cache or store confidential information elsewhere. As for any developer allowing source code to live elsewhere, it’s just a non-starter.

But maybe there are exceptions. If I’m reading this Shane Richmond post right, The Telegraph was seriously considering dropping Office for Google Apps. Perhaps it has now.

The end of empire

Regardless, two things strike me about the erosion of Microsoft’s empire. First, it sounds like what’s happening in publishing (and in TV, music etc): huge and long-standing companies seeing their business shift or disappear within a few short years because technology and community conspire to make it redundant.

And second, I’m reminded of a question that Mark Higginson asked me: If changes in the way we create, consume and share information are taking away the conditions that created and supported the media and IT giants, won’t our form of government ultimately follow them into the history books?

IMAGE Flickr user bjortklingd