Mayor Idol # 4

A little wait for this one, as it has taken me a while to get round to doing it, but here is the final Conservative Mayor Idol, Warwick Lightfoot.  Lightfoot is a former government special advisor who has also served as a councillor in Kensington and Chelsea for a number of years.  And here's his website:

 

First thing to say: It's loooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnngggggggg..... And it isn't even in blog format (by which I mean having entries tagged and organised, and published in chronological order).  They just seem to have crammed loads of information on to the homepage, and it is a bit of a mess.  The obvious solution to this would be to have a nice, self-contained front page and a blog.  But the site has no blog, which is a big limiting feature.  Most of the content on the front page of the site comes from press releases.  Whilst these are clearly well-ordered and up-to-date (there is a release on today's tube strike for example), it also says something about the type of audience that the site is reaching out to - namely the mainstream media.

The site does have some nice features.  For example, it has podcasts on it (which are actually called podcasts and have an RSS feed).  And there is an RSS feed for content.  Although, once again, I am left wondering why anyone - unless they were a jounro - would subscribe to a dry, press release-based feed?  Successful political blogging, as everyone since Dean '04 has showed, is about personality and humour, as much as it is about policy and organisation.  Without that, I suspect that the number of people subscribing to a feed will be very low.

Overall, whilst the site, looks OK (aside from the extreme length of the homepage), has quite a lot of stuff on it, and, I have no doubt, would be useful to a journalist, something really, really big is missing - the site is almost completely lacking in interactive features.  Basically, these are limited to an email address, the ability to sign a supporters list and donating.  There is no option to publicly comment anywhere.  And as all the media is held on the site, and doesn't use a third party site such as YouTube, there is no possibility of commenting on or rating it.  There are not even online polls.  And, given the populist nature of London Mayoral contest, that really misses a trick.

Measuring online success

I've added this to my del.icio.us feed, but it seemed worth flagging up on its own, as it is so interesting. Spartan Internet has just launched an index of online political success. The index combines a whole host of measures - hits, tags on social bookmarks, outreach on social networking sites and search engine placement - to assess just how well candidates are doing online. At the moment, Barack Obama leads the line, with a score of 21.29 per cent, followed by Ron Paul (11.51 per cent) and Hillary Clinton (11.36 per cent).

Spartan's efforts are probably the most complete index, as they seek to amalgamate a range of measures, but they aren't the only people seeking to order data created from online presence. TechPresident has been counting Facebook and MySpace friends, and YouTube viewers, whilst Hitwise has been calculating scores for individual candidate websites based on the number of visits and search queries they receive. I reckon there are two things to remember about these measures. Firstly, these measures aren't an exact science - they are constructed with weightings and variable methodologies after all - and, as I blogged a while back, the real significance of online success is how it fits into the wider campaign.

[Originally published at nickanstead.com/blog] 

Mayor Idol # 2 and # 3

After my efforts at analyzing Boris's website (such as it was), I was hoping that the other, less famous, candidates for the Conservative mayoral nomination would do a bit better and maybe prove that the Internet really is the home of the underdog, and the place where the little guy can take on the political behemoth on something like even terms.

 

Well, Andrew Boff blew that theory out of the water, as his site manages to be worse the Boris Johnson's (once again, click on the thumbnails for more detail).  Actually though, it's not quite fair referring to Boff as the little guy.  Had Johnson not entered the race at the last minute, he probably would have been regarded as a big hitter.  Previously a councillor and then a GLA members, he ran for the mayoral nomination in 2000 and, thanks for unforeseen circumstances (Jeffrey Archer's little local difficulty), he found himself in the last two, against Steve Norris.  Although he lost, Boff made quite a name for himself, getting a fair amount of national press coverage.  He also very much fits into the mould of being a modernising, Cameron-type Conservative.  He was one of the first openly gay and prominent Conservatives, and his rhetoric is certainly very post-ideological and centrist in tone.

So what's his site like?  All-in-all, it's not good.  Although Johnson's site was content-lite (and that's an understatement), but fairly pretty, Boff's is content-lite and ugly as sin.  The background is all white, the font's are all over the place and quite scratchy.  And the organization of the content is very poor, with seemingly random links, dotted around the middle of the page taking you to press releases. 

What content there is isn't that well put together either.  Boff's big headline at the moment is that he is going to campaign for more houses and family-friendly dwellings to be built; which seems like a pretty good and appealing idea.  But the tag line his press release has on it is: "Funding for new one- and two-bedroom, affordable flats in London would be slashed if Andrew Boff becomes the Conservative Mayor of London".  I don't think that advertising a desire to cut affordable housing is necessarily a vote winner, whatever the underlying argument is.

The one good thing about the site is that it has some functions of a pseudo-blog - RSS feeds are active on the page and you can comment on the stories that are highlighted (you will perhaps be unsurprised to hear that, thus far, no one has).  However, because the original "posts" are nothing more than press releases, they contain none of the familiarity or humour that marks the best political blogs, so the additional features are really not that useful.

 

This exercise isn't going so well so far, is it?  I'm going to press on and do another site in this post, run by Victoria Borwick, who is a councillor in Kensington and Chelsea.  And, I'm pleased to report, it's a much better site than either of the two I have previously commented on.  It's far from perfect - it hardly drips Web 2.0 action - but at least it has touched all the bases for what most people would now regard as the bare minimum for a website run by a politician campaigning for an office as significant as Mayor of London.  It has a blog, video and MP3 files, as well online polls and a nice feedback form through which the candidate can be contacted.  It is also fairly pretty, with a nice blue-green combo going on (although I would say the design is far from perfect; the front page for example is far too long and relies too much on overly long and not very nicely laid out sidebars).  

Two other interesting things about the site stand out and are worthy of note.  Firstly, the url.  Whilst other candidates have used their name or slogans based around their name, Borwick has gone for mayor-for-london.org.  That strikes me as a risky strategy, not least because it might make her harder to find for potential supporters; although she could presumably argue that, as a candidate with low name recognition, she might as well choose a generic name.  Secondly, her site links directly to 18 Doughty Street, the right-wing Internet TV channel.  This is something of a trail-blazing organisation (although estimates as to its impact vary, depending on how it is assessed).  What it shows is that Borwick is seeking to link her site to the wider Tory-leaning blogosphere, perhaps in the hope they can give her campaign some much needed momentum against the juggernaut of Johnson's candidacy. 

One more candidate to do, who I shall try to look at in the next few days.   

Extremism and the Dark Side of Facebook

Today the Globe and Mail ran an interesting story about a Canadian MP who received a threat over Facebook (pasted below).

"The vile message was posted, of all places, on Facebook. While this was new, the sentiments, sadly, were not. Once again, MP Ujjal Dosanjh had been targeted for a threat to his physical safety.

An e-mail sent late last week to the Vancouver MP's Facebook site said that he should be beaten "just like they did before," a chilling reference to the near-fatal beating Mr. Dosanjh received in 1985 after speaking out against violence within the Sikh community. It was the second reference to violence against the federal Liberals' foreign affairs critic and one-time NDP premier in recent months.

An editorial in an Ontario Sikh newspaper last May referred to the brutal attack on Mr. Dosanjh as a time when "some guru's loved one beat him well" and left it as an open question for readers to decide whether the beating was deserved or not.

Yesterday, an undeterred Mr. Dosanjh said the time has come for politicians of all stripes to wake up to the dangers such threats pose to the fabric of free speech in the country. "We like to believe these things can't happen in Canada. That's naive. They can happen here," Mr. Dosanjh said. "I've never been afraid in my life and I don't intend to be afraid. But the fact is, there are always dangers lurking out there and people need to speak out. We can't allow these hate-mongers to stifle the free expression of those they don't agree with."

The most recent threats against Mr. Dosanjh follow his call for police to investigate a huge Sikh parade this spring that featured a float extolling Talwinder Singh Parmar as a martyr. Mr. Parmar, named in the Air India judgment as ringleader of the 1985 terrorist bombing plot that claimed 331 lives, was subsequently killed by police in India.

The Facebook e-mail that urged Mr. Dosanjh's beating referred to the veteran politician as "the biggest disgrace to the Sikh panth [community]. "It's disgusting to know that a person like you calls themselves a Sikh. ... you support those moderates." The sender's Facebook site contained pictures of some elderly Sikhs and the Sikh Golden Temple of Amritsar. The sender identified himself as Jag Singh.

Mr. Dosanjh, who has turned both recent threats over to the RCMP, said he is taking the Facebook warning far more seriously than the provocative editorial. "I hope it is a harmless crank. Nothing would make me happier. But this is a strong threat. More direct. You just never know. One has to be concerned," said Mr. Dosanjh, for years a consistent, outspoken opponent of Sikh extremism. "The fact that there have been two of these so close together tells me that there is a systematic campaign going on out there to intimidate and silence anyone who has the courage to speak out."

In 1998, Surrey, B.C., newspaper publisher Tara Singh Hayer, who wrote numerous scathing editorials against Sikh extremists and their sometimes violent quest for an independent Sikh homeland, was assassinated. Mr. Hayer's son David, a member of the provincial legislature, joined Mr. Dosanjh yesterday in urging politicians of all parties to begin speaking out more forcefully against groups who support such terrorism. David Hayer said that he, too, receives threats when he condemns supporters of Sikh violence. "All politicians have to stand up and say clearly that terrorism is wrong, and societies that promote terrorism are not acceptable," he said. "If we close our minds to it, then these kinds of threats will just continue."

Mr. Dosanjh, 59, said the many threats he has weathered over the years have taken a toll. "My kids were young in the 1980s when I used to receive dozens of threats. They've grown up with it," he said. "They're always worried about their father, and their father's always worried about them."
But neither the savage beating he received more than 20 years ago, nor the fire-bombing of his office in the 1990s, nor any of the numerous verbal threats have weakened his will to speak his mind. "I've lived through this stuff for years. If anything, it always makes me more determined to exercise my right to free speech," Mr. Dosanjh said."

Mayor Idol # 1

OK, so I'm going to be nowhere near as good at this as the past masters at the Biving's Report, but I thought it would be quite good fun anyway.  The Conservatives are running a slightly unusual contest  - for the UK, at least - to decide who is going to the their candidate for Mayor of London.  They are holding an open primary, wherein, if they register with the party, any Londoner is eligible to vote.  There are four candidates seeking the nomination: Andrew Boff, Victoria Borwick, Warwick Lightfoot and, of course, Boris Johnson.  It struck me, a few weeks after they all declared their candidacy, to have a look at their websites and see what I thought.  In such a contest, there really is only one person you can start with - Boris.  I have captured an image of his site below, which I have annotated.  You can click on the thumbnail to get an enlarged view.        

Boris is noted for being pretty web-savy and, almost uniquely amongst British political figures, his blog gets thousands of hits and hundred of comments.  For that reason I am pretty under whelmed by his efforts.  The page has a nice colour scheme and doesn't feel overcrowded - which is a good thing - but there is nothing there!  Actually, that's not quite true.  There are prominently displayed volunteer and donate options, which is obviously good, especially given that Boris is a populist politician and the London Mayoral contest is probably the single most populist contest going.  But the site has no features at all.  There is no video or YouTube stream, no link to the Boris for Mayor facebook group (which has nearly 5000 members), no blog (or even a link to his regular blog), or podcasts.  The whole thing looks like it was knocked together in half an hour - to the extent that there is even a typo in the candidate's name (note to Boris Johnson's staffer - the correct way to use an ownership apostrophe on a singular ending in s is to add 's i.e. Boris's, not Boris').  

In fact, I very much get the impression that this is placeholder page.  This indicates a couple of interesting things.  Firstly, if you look at American examples, candidates who announce their candidacy for high office will tend to have an all-singing, all-dancing website ready to go, so that when they announce their intention to run, it is just a case of flicking a switch to create an instant web-presense.  Maybe the lack of a better site indicates that Boris's decision to run really was as sudden as the media portrayed it, and not a cleverly planned political masterstroke.  And secondly, and quite depressingly, the state of this site possibly indicates the Internet is still deeply undervalued in British politics.  After all, even if Boris Johnson did only decide to run suddenly, it is more than a month since he announced that he was standing. On paper Boris, a politician who is popular because of who he is, and not because of his party affiliation or his beliefs, would seem absolutely perfect for a web-driven campaign.  Furthermore, the open primary model adopted by the Conservatives would seem to suit this kind of campaigning. It is really very strange that more effort has not been made.

I shall be back with more on the other candidates in the near future. 

Update on 2007-08-23 00:18 by Nick Anstead

OK... it suddenly occurred to me that readers outside the UK might not be that familiar with Boris Johnson, and as a result, the post above might only make limited sense.  Let's just say Boris is a phenomenon - a genuine political superstar.  He is probably the single most popular British politician of any party, despite the electoral disasters that have befallen his party in the past decade.   Some argue he is a lovable buffoon, whilst other claim his eccentric character hides a keen intellect.  However, he has never been immune from controversy, having had affairs whilst married and managing to insult the entire city of Liverpool.  But his reputation seems to thrive on it.  His Wikipedia entry gives a decent biography and this homemade YouTube mashup demonstrates the kind of politician Boris Johnson is, but also why people really like him. 

I also have to include my absolute favourite Boris clip.  It occurred when he was asked to play in a charity football match.  Boris entered into the spirit of it with his usual gusto (in case you aren't familiar with how he looks, he's the one with the very big, blonde hair).

Politics: Web 2.0: An International Conference - Call For Papers

Hosted by the New Political Communication Unit, Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London. http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk

April 17-18, 2008.

Call for papers

Has there been a shift in political use of the Internet and digital new media - a new Web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards Web 2.0 impact, if at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the communication of politics and policy? Does Web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for researchers to share and debate perspectives.

Potential themes could include (in no particular order):

• Theorizing Web 2.0.
• Changes in political journalism, news production, and consumption.
• Social networking (MySpace, Facebook) and election campaigning.
• Citizen activism from the local to the transnational.
• Blogs, wikis, and user-generated content.
• Changing social, cultural, and political identities.
• Social software and social media: design, technologies, tools, and techniques.
• Social network analysis.
• Surveillance, privacy, and security.
• Security, foreign policy and international communication.
• Hacktivism.
• Radical transparency.
• The impact of online video.
• E-government, web 2.0, and new models of public service delivery.
• New models of social and political collaboration and problem-solving.
• 'Little brother' phenomena.
• Political life in virtual worlds.
• Netroots versus the war room model of election campaigning.
• New challenges for media regulation.
• Collaborative production of political knowledge networks.
• Changing party, interest group, and social movement strategies.
• Web 2.0 and political marketing.
• Collective intelligence, smart mobs, crowdsourcing.
• Fragmenting audiences, the long tail, and the political economy of web 2.0 media.
• Civil society, civic engagement, and mobilization.
• Web 2.0, ICT4D and the changing digital divide.
• The politics of intellectual property.
• Hyperlocalism.
• The political aesthetics of Web 2.0.
  
  

Journal of Information Technology and Politics special issue

Conference presenters will be invited to submit their papers to a peer review process for publication in a special issue of the new Journal of Information Technology and Politics. http://www.jitp.net.

Submitting a paper or panel proposal

Paper proposals should be submitted via the secure online form.

Full panel proposals are also welcome. If you would like to propose a panel of three papers on a common theme, with or without a discussant, please email the proposal to the Conference Convenor: Dr. Andrew Chadwick (Andrew.Chadwick@rhul.ac.uk).

Deadline for all proposals: November 2, 2007.

Further information, including details of keynote speakers and plenary sessions will be released in early autumn. Details of accommodation packages will be released early in 2008.

About the New Political Communication Unit

Led by the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, the New Political Communication Unit was created in the Spring of 2007. Our research agenda consists of three strands:

• Comparative and international political communication: the Internet's impact on political mobilization, campaigning and identity; the relationship between media, war, new security challenges and conflict; audience reception studies in the context of the proliferation of media; the dynamic between citizens’ changing uses of media and a transforming news environment; citizen journalism; technology and mobilities.
• Communication and comparative governance: e-government, e-democracy and the changing interface between representative institutions, public bureaucracies and citizens; changing organizational practices shaped by new patterns of communication.
• Comparative and international communication policy: Internet and new media governance and regulation; privacy, surveillance and security, the political economy of new media; cultural diversity policy; digital divide and development issues.

We offer a taught Masters stream in New Political Communication and PhD supervision in our areas of expertise.

The Unit's network inside Royal Holloway incorporates academic staff from the Department of Politics and International Relations, the Department of Media Arts, the School of Management, the UNESCO Centre for ICT4D in the Department of Geography, the Department of Psychology and the Department of Computer Science.

Our external networks include scholars and practitioners in a wide variety of organisations and countries.

For more information, please visit our home page

About Royal Holloway

Royal Holloway is one of the major Colleges of the federal University of London and is among the elite group of ten university institutions whose departments all hold the top three ratings for research, with scores of 4, 5 and 5*. Our beautiful parkland campus is about 15 minutes by taxi from London Heathrow airport, and about 35 minutes from central London by train. For further information visit the College home page: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/

Cityware: social networking 2.0?

A while back I blogged on what might be happening at Facebook - in particular, the possibility that it might become the web 2.0, social network "operating system".  This seemed especially likely now that Facebook has opened up its site to allow third-party developers to write programmes to sit on top of their base interface. 

I have to say though, I hadn't predicted the sheer rate of development that is taking place.  Today, thanks to an article on the BBC, I discovered possibly the most exciting application I have seen thus far - Cityware.  This has been developed by researchers at the University of Bath, working with corporate partners Vodafone, HP Labs and Nokia.  Basically it is a three part system relying on Bluetooth data to interlock your Facebook profile, your mobile phone and data-collection nodes that have already been established. 

The logic is very simple; mobile devices, with bluetooth activated talk to each other and to the data collection nodes.  Through the information that is gathered by the nodes - namely the devices bluetooth identification code - these devices, and their relative proximity to each other, can be coupled up, creating a real time picture of how individuals interact on a daily basis.  At the moment, the number of nodes is quite limited, with Bath UCL and UCSD hosting nodes established by the software's designers.  However, the node software is publicly available and can be put on any bluetooth enabled PC.  So there are probably a larger number of nodes already and that figure should carry on increasing in campuses and offices around the world.  Furthermore, the developers are working on node software capable of running on mobile devices.   

This is potentially a pretty profound development.   So far, it seems we have been able to identify two principles that have organised social networks.  Firstly, they have been created through people importing their real world friends into online environments.  Secondly, they have been driven by people sharing an interest and, due to that interest, interacting online.  This technology points to something quite new - a bit tacky I know, but maybe something we could call social networking 2.0 - where a more complex picture of human interaction can be constructed, based not just upon who we "know" but who we interact with or even just pass by.  So for example, if I were to attend a conference with my bluetooth on my phone enabled, I would be able to track down the other people who were in the room, without having spoken to them on the day itself or collecting their contact details.  Because the key defining factors in the kind of social networking that Cityware lets you construct are proximity and location, a whole new range of possibilities emerges.

And in case you are wondering, I have installed it on my phone and my Facebook profile.  However, I won't be in London for a few days, so I shall report back if anything interesting happens (for anyone interested, the Facebook install page is here). 

Help! The Copyright Board is making me a criminal

Last month the Canadian Copyright Board decided to reconsider placing a levy of up to $75 on iPods. This isn’t the first time. The levy was put in place in 2003, but was struck down by the courts which said that it was the job of Parliamentarians to decide what should be levied. This didn’t stop the Copyright Board which, as Michael Geist reports thinks that they levy could also be “applied to cellphones and personal computers, and warning that excluding the iPod from the levy system would "instantly makes the conduct of millions of Canadians illegal, and even possibly criminal."

See: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/

The wisdom of the crowds says...

I recently reviewed James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of the Crowds for the Journal of Information Technology and Politics.  The crowd thesis is of interest because it permeates many online processes and activities.  A really obvious example, that virtually everyone will be familiar with, is Google.  The search engine essentially takes information, created by the online behaviour of millions of people undertaking billions of actions, and organises it into a useful format, prioritising websites on that basis.  One aspect of this process is to be found in the Google toolbar, as detailed in a Slate article today.  If you half fill the box, Google uses the searches that other people have made before you to offer suggestions as to what you might like to search for.  So for example, if you type in “Tom Cruise” the additional suggestions are: Movie, short, height, katie holmes, films and on oprah.  You get the idea.  But then this got me thinking… what would the suggestions be if I typed in some of our more famous political leaders?  Here we go (and I warn you some of them are slightly weird):

Gordon Brown - estate agents, rocking horse, mp, associates, for Britain, biography, glass eye, estate agent, wiki 

Tony Blair - wikipedia, biography, resignation, speech, resigns, wiki, catholic, speeches, steps down

David Cameron - mp, gikandi, blog, zionist, wikipedia, wiki, ’s wife, biography, wife

Ming Campbell - No suggestions

George Bush - watch, quotes, watch stolen, jokes, intercontinental airport, albania, in albania, senior, airport, ’s watch

Bill Clinton - biography, quotes, foundation, impeach, scandal, library, wiki, harvard, bio, birthday

Hillary Clinton - for president, campaign, 2008, website, biography, jokes, campaign song, president, quotes, botox

Barack Obama - biography, muslim, for president, religion, bio, campaign, quotes, wikipedia, website, myspace

John Edwards - for president, psychic, campaign, house, haircut, wife, home, crossing over, 2008, wiki

[First published at nickanstead.com/blog] 

Heroes Schmeroes

What is it with American TV drama and sentimental dialogue? I have just watched the first two episodes of NBC’s Heroes. Just about every conversation in this latest mega series followed a simple pattern:

1. Someone will fly off in a rage, not listening to the other character.
2. They realise they've overstepped a mark, so they pause. The camerawork and tempo indicate they are reflecting, genuinely (emotion being the index of truthfulness – an epistemological black hole).
3. They sigh, possibly look at their shoes, then say, "Look, I'm sorry, its just...". And then they reveal some inner emotional turmoil as an excuse and as an appeal for understanding.
4. Finally they make a joke, smile, shrug, and everything's ok, but it happens again in the next scene, and the one after that

This is a mode of conversation based on interiority. The TV character reveals their interior, their emotions, and appeal to others’ interior states (‘heart to heart’). The episode degenerates into a series of touching moments. Plot lines cannot move on until a person’s interior state has been fully revealed and acknowledged by others. Things slow down and get stuck because someone won’t accept, or isn’t aware of, how their daughter or brother or boyfriend feels. This might be acceptable in something like Grey’s Anatomy, but in a series about superheroes?

Is there a generation growing up talking this way? Perhaps it is flippant to suggest scriptwriters are particularly prone to certain kinds of therapy? What if this mode of conversation seeps into other genres, even into news and current affairs? Have newscasters begun to reveal their emotional response to events as if audiences expect this now?

* Exceptions in the first episodes were some of those scenes involving the Japanese character Hiro.