In Tuesday night's US vice-presidential debate Dick Cheney made rather an unfortunate slip of the tongue. Instead of directing people to factcheck.org, a non-partisan site run by a US university, he urged people to visit factcheck.com, a commercial site registered in the Cayman Islands. The domain owners were unable to cope with the deluge of hits - more than 100 a second - so redirected it to the website of billionaire George Soros, a leading critic of Bush and Cheney.

Three PR lessons from this:

1) Make sure your spokesperson is well briefed and cites the right web address/phone number in any interview.
2) If you're setting up a website then buy up as many of the similar domains (.info, .biz, .org.uk, .me) as are available or you can afford. Also look at commonplace mispellings.
3) If you're going to promote your website in a very high-profile way then make sure your infrastructure can cope with the extra traffic that might be generated.

Was very busy last week catching up on both council and work issues after attending Labour Party conference. Major council event of the week was news that Leeds South Homes had received its two-star rating which means we at last get the cash we need to carry out essential improvements to our council housing stock.

I'm still angry about last week's vote at Labour Party conference in support of a fourth option. I've read a lot of the propaganda being peddled by Unison and the Save Council Housing campaign and believe that these people's views are the most dangerous and damaging to the very people they should be representing. Their opposition is based more on dated Marxist ideology than it is on delivering real improvements in council housing. The ALMO option has many benefits including providing more localised services which are more responsive to the needs of local people and putting tenants in the driving seat with positions of real power on the board of directors.

I also attended what I hope is my last planning meeting (I've come off to go on the neighbourhoods and housing scrutiny board). One of the items we looked at is the massive new housing development off Sharp Lane in Middleton. I'm not happy that these green fields are being used for housing at all, but that was a decision taken over ten years ago long before I was a councillor. Given that we are stuck with it I think that overall it is a good scheme that has my support. There are details that need to be considered such as how to minimise the increase in traffic on Sharp House Farm Road and how the new estate integrates with the old Middleton estate.

I also participated in the first meeting of a new Labour Party 'policy group'. I can't really blog much about this as I know this blog is read by several members of the Rainbow Coalition in Leeds.

I'm just going through my council mail and one of the items is the 'National Census of Local Authority Councillors 2004'. The last survey was in 2001 and I attended the modern councillor conference where the results were announced. The results were depressing and showed that the average 21st century councillor was far from represenative of the diversity of our communities. The average councillor was a 58 year old white male. I fear that not much has improved since then.

The letter accompanying this year's survey says that it can be completed on-line. I dutifully type in the URL and am confronted not by the on-line survey I expected but a simple Word document. It's not even set up as a proper Word form but is simply an ordinary document. It's obviously been put together by people who lack even the most basic technical research skills. I normally hold the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) in very high regard but in this case am very disappointed. It means that when the results finally come out I am going to be less confident about quoting them as my faith in how they have been gathered has been seriously knocked.