| Late last year and this year has seen a huge increase in the use of the internet by the USA political parties and action groups. From the Dean campaign to the (somewhat fake) weblogs from the Presidential Election candidates, to Kerry's donation drive, to bloggers at the Democratic Convention, to local activist websites, it feels like they've finally embraced the Internet as a means to do politics. By contrast, the UK's political use of the net is primitive and stuck in a time warp from 5-8 years ago. There are some bright spots in sites like They Work For You but that's about it. Quite a lot of MPs have websites. But they are generally static, driven by Frontpage and rarely updated. The main sites are formulaic with no community, no route to talk back, no attempt to engage. Amazingly the Conservatives have an RSS feed of news but they are alone. There's surprisingly few weblogs that focus on UK Politics. Generally the Internet side of UK politics looks about as apathetic and uninterested as the offline side. So what I'm looking for is people who can help change this. Specifically, - An email writing campaign at anyone involved to encourage them to build interactive community sites and to get the current sites to generate RSS from the existing news pages. This includes the major media. The BBC, Independant, Scotsman have RSS feeds. That's all. The Telegraph and Guardian have some feeds but nothing specifically on Politics. - People who can build and host community sites for local political chapters and activist groups. - People prepared to lobby their MP or councillors to start a blog. And if they won't, to start a blog on their behalf. - People who can try and get themselves accredited to the upcoming party Conferences as "Blogging Journalists" and then provide an alternate view to the traditional big media TV clip of "Auld Lang Syne". - New and interesting hacks that leverage the existing sites in the style of FaxYourMP or Public Whip. I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas. The aim is to try and drag UK politics into the 21st century. If enough (any!) people come forwards, we can at least start a club here on Ecademy and then whatever else it takes. As a start I threw together a site over the weekend that provides an aggregated view of all the news and Blog sites I could find in UK Politics. This was inspired by a US site that did the same thing for the Democratic party convention. [from: JB Ecademy] |
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[ 09-Aug-04 2:40pm ]
