Last month at conference, in two of our conference fringes, speakers highlighted useful online services set to revolutionise politics.

At our first fringe, “Campaigning after Rennard,” James Graham thought that TheStraightChoice (reviewed by LDV here), a website that allows members of the public to upload the leaflets they have received through their letterbox, had the potential to revolutionise politics. No more would politicos be able to put out close-to-the-knuckle material in relative obscurity. From now on, James argued, we’d all have to assume that at least one blogger would read our leaflet, and at least one journalist would read the blogger, and eventually, our campaigning infelicities would make a short hop to haunt us via front page local news.

Later in the week, at our “Beyond Twitter” fringe, we were very pleased to welcome Richard Pope to our platform to talk about the work he does as a programmer with MySociety. Quite by chance, it transpired that one of his side projects is indeed The Straight Choice. At the fringe meeting he confided that the website, and a number of similarly public spirited sites, were vulnerable to cease and desist notices. They all shared a post-code lookup service that hadn’t forked out the requisite money to Royal Mail PLC for permission to use the national post-code database.

Now Richard writes:

As you know I run TheStraightChoice. The website has been effectively shut down today, along with PlanningAlerts.com and various other sites, by the Royal Mail. They have served a cease-and-desist notice to the postcode lookup service ErnestMarpes.com (I help run EM) which powers both sites.

And he points us at a number of other websites with further information, including

• EarnestMarples.com
• Open Rights Group
• Tom Watson
• The Guardian

A goodly number of them point out the particular folly of the Royal Mail simultaneously trying to shut down a service that helps you find jobs, whilst trying to make a sizeable number of their workforce redundant.

With postcodes so increasingly important to national life, it’s ridiculous that they are not public data that is, as a minimum, free to use for non-profit organisations.

I’m happy to extend t’Voice’s muscle to backing the campaign to bring back these useful websites. Tell all your friends.

It’s Thursday, it’s 10.35 pm … it’s BBC1’s Question Time.

For the Liberal Democrats, perennial favourite former party leader Charles Kennedy will be responding to public questions Joining Charlie will be Ben Bradshaw, Theresa May, Dr David Starkey and Dambisa Moyo

If you’re tuning in, you can join the simultanous online Twitter debate here at #bbcqt, or the LDV debate in the thread below. Meanwhile Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson will be liveblogging events via CoverItLive at his own blog.

Welcome to a belated Daily View on this fine first day of the month. 1st October marks the 166th anniversary of the News of the World; the anniversary of the death of Ned Sherrin; and we say happy birthday to comedian Harry Hill.

Two big news stories

Earthquake hits stricken Sumatra (Guardian)

A second powerful earthquake has hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a day after the first devastating quake left more than 500 dead, thousands of people buried in rubble and a major city cut off from the outside world.

Today’s quake, of magnitude 6.9, struck in the early hours about 180 miles from the epicentre of yesterday’s more powerful tremor out at sea.

Cervical cancer jab girl Natalie Morton died from large chest tumour

You can’t help but feel sorry for this poor young woman who dropped dead from a chest tumour at school, not something you wish on anyone. But the unsavoury tabloid scramble to link her death to a vaguely controversial vaccination programme has been deeply unedifying, and hasn’t helped anyone, least of all the family and friends. The ensuing comments on all the news articles I’ve seen have been a scary eye-opening experience.

Natalie Morton, the schoolgirl who died after receiving a vaccine as part of a national immunisation campaign, died from a large malignant tumour in her chest.

Her sudden death was unconnected with her cervical cancer jab, an inquest in Coventry was told today.

See also: Mark Pack on SEO and cancer jabs.

Two must-read blog posts

Charlotte Gore on the bin strike in Leeds

I’m getting in touch with the people involved to write more about this, but in the meantime I’m drawing attention to a new Facebook group: Leeds Tax Payers against the Bin Strike. If you live in Leeds and you want people to actually take your bins away, please join up and spread the word.

(Interesting to my mind for the long battle in the comments – How does Charlotte know what she says she knows – and where she is being accused of ultra-loyalism. Also interesting because Councils across the country are facing issues similar to this as a result of “single status” campaigns to make sure that women’s work in local government is remunerated at the same rate as men’s work – which, to grossly oversimplify, means massive pay rises for dinner ladies and cleaners and pay cuts for binmen and street sweepers.

Stuart Bonar’s cut out’n’keep guide to Labour’s unfunded pledges

I’m not saying I oppose the idea of these policies, but money doesn’t grow on trees… when Lib Dems announce a new policy we spell out how it will be funded – Labour cannot just list a whole raft of costly new policies without explaining how it will be paid for.

Seen a good post lately? Why not give a link and a review in the comments.