StigmergicWeb

Sigh - didn’t we just go through this less than two years ago? I suppose the minority government lasted longer than many were expecting it would.

I’ve just bee taking a look at the web sites for our three major federal parties, and I’ve noticed a few interesting things about how the parties are using computer mediated communication tools in the campaign. I’ll post up some observations and thoughts during the course of the campaign.

To begin, I should state that I am a member in good standing of the New Democratic Party and I have worked in many federal and provincial campaigns. I have designed candidate web sites for campaigns, and did some of the work setting up the web site for the MLA for the Battlefords, the Honourable Len Taylor (and Len is one of the few people I know that is truly deserving of that title). And I’ll probably end up putting together a web site for our federal candidate in the Battlefords-Lloydminster riding. (Hmmm - what to use for a CMS - wordpress, drupal, or just the sheer anarchy of a wiki?)

So - my cursory observations thus far, having looked at the web sites for the Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP:

• Both the Conservatives and the Liberals prominently display the word blog on their web sites. I’m not sure how I feel about this - it feels to me like when a 50 year old high school principal wearing a suit and tie tries to use gangsta rap slang to impress the kids with how cool and hip he is. Look kids, I’ve got a blog. Maybe we can hook up later on MSN to talk about how much we support youth. To make matters worse, the Conservative blog does not have any author identified. Here’s a clue for political campaign managers - a blog without an author is called a press release! At least the Liberals are more honest, and they admit that the blog is written by Paul Martin’s speech writer.

  Throughout the campaign, Scott Feschuk — chief speechwriter to Paul Martin — will be filing reports from the road using his Blackberry, a wireless handheld device that enables political staffers to stay in touch, instantly communicate with the media and develop freakish, superstrong thumbs with which they can crush most European sedans.

  OK - I give them points for having a sense of humour, and for admitting that the blog is by a political lackey, not the leader himself. NDP blogs? I haven’t seen any yet. I hope that we see a real blog from Jack Layton sometime before the campaign is over.
• Podcasts - the Conservatives are podcasting, the Liberals say they are going to be podcasting, and the NDP don’t have any form of audio or video online. C’mon guys, we’re falling behind on this one.
• The NDP have a nice RSS link on the bottom of their page (yay team!), and when I hit my Subscribe with Bloglines bookmarklet on the Conservative site, about 10 different RSS feeds are listed. The Liberals seem to be somewhat RSS-less (its funnier if you say it phonetically)
• I may be wrong, but I think the NDP are using Drupal or a derivative for their site. I think it is deeply cool that we have a party using open source software for a content management system on their website (the software in the last campaign was an absolute usability nightmare).

More observations to come later. Is anyone else out there as happy as I am to have a federal election campaign to watch over the holidays?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 17:05 and is filed under Canada. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.