The Washington Post discusses ways in which candidates in the US Presidential election are using evidence about users’ past browsing habits to target their online advertising.

MySociety provides a List ofUK Central government departments, executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies with rss feeds.

Barack Obama was nominated last night as the first black presidential candidate for a mainstream US political party. There has been a good deal of comment on what a historical moment this is (BBC, NY Times), and of course that will only increase if he gets elected in November.

This historical moment in American politics is a good time to reflect on the rapidity with which today’s certainties can pass into history. Segregation in the American south was still happening well within living memory, and people who elected the Parliament that decriminalised homosexuality have not yet reached retirement age. Today, we have a black presidential candidate and a gay Conservative as deputy mayor of London.

An appreciation of the scale and rapidity of social change, both now and in the more distant past, blows a fatal hole in political arguments based on some mythical past golden age, or the need for preserving social structures, or holding back the pattern of history. Rationalism and evidence are the only reliable guides.

A Moghul ruler, Emperor Akbar the Great, put it best when he said:

The case for innovation is so brilliantly clear as to be beyond dispute. For if the prophets themselves had not done new things, they would just have followed their ancestral gods.

• War at the gates of Europe should encourage the Union to make promotion of human rights a central part of its collective diplomacy - Le Monde.
• Analyzing every word a politician says is pointless - New Statesman

A report on Kablenet says that local authority election officers have almost universally backed a proposal to end the sale of electoral register data to marketing firms. I think this is a complete no-brainer - the income from the sale of registers is tiny, and the promise of junk mail is a deterrent to registration for some.

We’re almost back at the start of the political season, and presumably that will mean more speculation about the future of Gordon Brown. Earlier in August, Martin Kettle wrote about the prospect of a new Prime Minister in the Guardian. Should there be a general election if Gordon Brown is forced to step down? No, says Mr Kettle, because Governments depend on Parliamentary majorities, which a Straw or Miliband government would still have. His conclusion:

If you accept - which it is clear the angry, the disillusioned, the supercilious and the merely hostile do not - that Labour is entitled to defend and where possible advance its own collective self-interest within the rules of the political system, then it follows that Labour is entitled to change its leader again and then to stay on until a time of its own choosing, not that of its enemies. It may even be the more honourable course as well as the more politically advantageous one.

While I don’t argue with the constitutional rightness of his argument - British governments do depend on the support of the Commons, not the support of the general population - I think the democratic case is more complex than Mr Kettle suggests.

At base, this is another issue where a legal/constitutional position is up against a vaguer concept of popular legitimacy. The constitutional position is clear, the popular legitimacy one is less so. There are two main arguments as to why a new Prime Minister would not have popular legitimacy:

First, the argument that changing leaders now was not part of the deal at the election. Voters expected Tony Blair to go, and Gordon Brown to replace him. They didn’t expect anyone other than Brown to be Prime Minister at the time of the next election, and so any new Prime Minister should seek an immediate personal mandate.

This argument depends on the idea that people vote for personalities rather than parties at election time, and there is some evidence for that. Even if the research is mistaken, and voters are secret policy wonks, the parties have been putting personalities of leaders front and centre at election time for a while, so there is a plausible case that the terms of the sale are based to some extent on personality (whether that is philosophically a good thing or not).

The second argument is that the ‘natural’ electoral cycle is nearly at an end. If there were a challenge in late 2008, almost four years would have passed since the last election. As elections that governments think they might win are generally held every four years (1979-83-87 and 1997-2001-05), it seems to be against the spirit if not the letter of the law to change Prime Minister and then stay on till the bitter end.

These arguments are strong because they point out ways in which what a Government is going is contrary to the general way in which people expect things to be done. This is a particularly strong argument in a country without a written constitution, where practices enforced by public feeling often crystallise into accepted conventions. Why could there not be a Prime Minister from the House of Lords, for instance?

This is not to say that public disapproval outweighs the legal position as set out by Mr Kettle - democratic constitutions, even unwritten ones, are vital checks on popular passions. But if Mr Brown is replaced, the call the Government makes on election timing might be a little bit of constitution-writing in action.

• The Year of the Political Blogger has arrived - New York Times

• Councils using social media to connect with citizens - DavePress
• Medium Lobster (from Fafblog) talks us through the Veep candidates - Guardian
• EU summit to be held on Russia/Georgia crisis - Le Monde and BBC

The reaction to Number 10’s Clarkson video is an interesting example of the no-win situation for Governments in trying to vary the ways in which they interact with people.

For those who hadn’t seen it, there was a petition on the Downing Street site to ‘make Jeremy Clarkson Prime Minister’. This was, as you can tell, a joke petition (or put forward by someone without much knowledge of the British constitution).

So Number 10 put forward a joke response on YouTube - nothing extravagant, just some stock footage banged together in iMovie or something similar. It’s not going to win the Golden Rose of Montreux, but it’s a jokey response to a jokey petition. Fair enough for a slow August, you might think.

But what is the media story? An attack on the Government by the opposition, for ‘wasting public money’ on producing the response.

No wonder Governments get nervy and defensive about new methods of communications.

I’m in New York at the moment - and, though I haven’t been watching TV much, I’ve caught a couple of campaign ads.

I’m also enjoying the paper version of the New York Times - although all the content is online, I’m still enough of a fogey to prefer dead tree for reading on the subway.

Yesterday’s edition had two interesting articles on how US TV is trying to handle young and engaged voters.

Here’s an article on how the networks are trying to reach young people who don’t watch the evening news (average viewer age: 60+) but are still interested in politics.

Meanwhile, SaysMe.tv is offering people 25-second “my say” slots on cable for $6 and up. Not sure how that interplays with what political advertising rules there are in the US.

A republic, if you can keep it. BBC.