What’s up in Ilford?
A burst of political blog reading, that’s what.
Hitwise has just released a report titled UK Online Media Round-up: April 2010 general election special. Alongside the report’s solid but unsurprising findings (lots of people searched online for Nick Clegg after the first TV debate, Guido Fawkes gets more readers than other political blogs etc.), it has a few that shed new light on the role of the internet in politics:
[Mosaic] Group O* – Liberal Opinions (broadly speaking, younger people with liberal social attitudes living in cities) are over-represented on each of the major parties sites, indicating a high level of curiosity with the political process.
A lot of traffic also flows between the [political] blogs themselves, with 1 in 5 people visiting either another blog or politics site after leaving a UK Political blog for the week ending 10th April. However, very little of that traffic actually goes to the political party homepages, implying that the conversation is taking place on the blogs and in the media, rather than on the parties’ official’ pages
[We have listed] the ten postal areas most over-represented as visitors to UK Political blogs, and it’s a pleasant surprise that the list isn’t dominated by London postcodes. Ilford, Warrington and Bolton all appear in the top five, implying that the citizens of those towns are well engaged with the online political debate.
Top of that list? IG – Ilford.
* Essentially the successor to the old Mosaic E group.
IG also reaches into Barking & Dagenham at one end (your possible culprit).
Other than the two Ilfords it occupies a substantial portion of Epping Forest and Chingford and Woodford Green, too.
I live (and blog) in an IG postcode!
It *is* part of London, administratively if not postally. Royal Mail decided on cost grounds not to change the outer boroughs’ postcodes to London ones when London’s boundaries expanded in 1965.
‘IG’ comes from the first letter of Ilford and the last letter of Barking, and as John says, extends well beyond Ilford itself.
Incidentally, the postcode lends its name to a vibrant online community, IG-Soc. It’s a great resource for Muslims in Redbridge, as well as anyone who’s interested in Muslim life in the borough. Political matters feature regularly.