Jon Cruddas on the Phone... Web Exclusive.

Jon Cruddas MP for Barking and Dagenham, and also one of the candidates for the deputy leadership, has announced that he will be holding a conference early next week for bloggers and members of the facebook group.

Participants will be able to speak to Jon about his campaign plans, and there will be a Q&A session as part of the event. From what I hear, it will take place by phone, although I am yet to receive the full details.

This is a fantastic opportunity for bloggers to probe the mind of one of the most interesting deputy leadership candidates standing so far. It is also a web-exclusive, since there will be no mainstream media people involved (to the best of my knowledge).

I'm definitely going to particiate, and shall be blogging about it afterwards. It is a shame none of the other candidates have considered this a worthy way of interacting with the grassroots supporters, as it would have been brilliant to be able to do a blogging-interview series, of sorts. But Jon has made the decision to get involved, so I'll be supporting that, and hoping that the other candidates start to realise how useful such endeavours could be.

If you have any questions that you would like me to ask him, don't hesitate to post them here, and I'll do my best to get them asked. If you are a fellow blogger or facebooker, perhaps you would prefer to join the event yourself. Anyone can sign up to faceboook, and the Cruddas group is called "Cruddas for Deputy" - you can search for it once you have joined. The details of how to become involved were released there first, so its really worth joining if you want to stay ahead of the rest when it comes to knwoing what's going on, Marvin Gaye would say.

I may update this post over the weekend a I get more information about it.