Brian Lamb: “[a] thing to keep in mind when assessing how politicos use blogs is that while blogs prize candour, informality and spontaneity, those qualities can be death to a politician. Citizens can complain about candidates spewing talking points like automatons all we want, but face it, every time a politician goes "off message" it is usually framed as a gaffe, and is exploited to the advantage of her or his opponent.”
Timothy Ng: “Since there's no chance that any of the other parties can hope to form any sort of government with the current perceptions that the general public has, I've devised an accurate assessment of each party. I shall have a peek into the source code of each party's website and have a look at their coding practices as well as the usability of the site in Mozilla Firefox on a Linux machine.”
Checking the source code of the HTML version of websites to see if it validates feels a little too old-school: table-free XHTML/CSS layouts are, to a large degree, the norm for new websites, and weblogs can claim at least partial responsibility for that, as the proof-of-concept for larger, less dynamic sites. More interesting these days are whether the parties are using RSS to let people syndicate and aggregate and even remix what they are producing in terms of a campaign message. The word 'remix' is no doubt frightening to political parties, who are more interested in getting the undiluted message out there than having someone use their video or audio or writing in a way or in a context they disagree with. But at least they might be interested in 'remix' in the fair use sense, of bloggers, podcasters and other Internet-based media doing their own reporting and bypassing large media organizations that just don't get it.
Tris Hussey: “There should be great, witty, partisan blogs on each of the official party websites and links to un-official (but supportive) blogs too. How about a nice OPML file of all the blogs supporting a particular party? That would be cool.”
I add emphasis to Tris' words because I think he has it half-right: parties and candidates should be linking to supportive weblogs, but also unsupportive ones, that is, weblogs that are either negatively against the party or for an opposing party, but also to weblogs by undecided or apathetic bloggers. I'm not undecided, but I still appreciated Ian Gregson leaving me a short note via my contact form. Of course he has an agenda, but rather than say "vote for me because I believe in a woman's right to choose"—no idea whether he believes that or not, just using that as an example—he effectively "I'm running for Parliament, let me know if you have any questions". So rather than linking to those who already support you, join and participate in the conversation, which includes those who aren't voting for you but might. That would make this a true "Canadian Federal Election 2.0", a change not necessarily in the technology being used but how parties and candidates reach out to their potential employers.
Robert Burnaby took a look at Burnaby-Douglas candidate websites, just as I did a couple days ago. This isn't the breakout year for parties and candidates using weblogs and other "Web 2.0" tools to get their message across, but at least, as Timothy points out, at least one party (NDP) is using an open source platform with RSS feeds, if not in a terribly informal voice.
