There’s a General Election coming up. And I’m really not sure who I’m going to vote for. But that’s ok because this is going to be the UK’s first Election Campaign 2.0 where candidates and voters are going to be in constant two-way communication through the medium of the interweb. All I need to do is to hook up to the web feeds generated by all of my local candidates and within hours I’ll be able to make up my mind.
Or something like that.
Those nice people from YourNextMP have a list of the candidates currently standing in Battersea. Of course it might not be complete yet as candidates still have a few more days to register. But it’s enough to be going on with.
Let’s start with the current MP. Martin Linton has one of the smallest majorities in the country. In 2005 he beat Tory candidate Dominic Schofield by only 163 votes. Battersea has had a few boundary tweaks and that majority has been re-estimated to 332. Anyway, it’s small and you’d think that Martin Linton would be keen to get his message out to as many people as possible. I had him knocking on my door a couple of weeks ago and he’s sent me a letter telling me how to contact him during the campaign. But he doesn’t exactly appear to have embraced the digital era. He has a web site, of course, but there’s no web feed for it. If you go to the news page on the site, then there is a web feed but you have to view the page source in order to find it [Update: I was being slightly unfair there. The page does have autodiscovery configured correctly for the web feed – it just doesn’t seem to work in my version of Google Chrome. I see the web feed icon in Firefox]. The stories on the news page aren’t dated, but by reading the web feed you can see that the page was last updated on March 26th. Nothing at all since the election was called. He also has a Twitter page, but that was set up in February and has six entries, the last of which was posted on March 29th. All very disappointing.
But perhaps this lack off digital effort by Martin Linton can be explained by the even greater lack of effort made by his biggest rival, the Conservative candidate Jane Ellison. She has a web site, but as far as I can see there are no web feeds on it at all. Oh, actually, she republishes two on her news page – one from the Wandsworth Conservatives and one from the borough council (which is run by the Conservatives). I can find no other trace at all of digital engagement from Ms Ellison. No blog, no Twitter page, no Flickr account. Nothing to to get her message out to the digital natives of Battersea.
Moving to the other extreme, we should now look at Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat candidate. Ms Moran seems to have more internet presence than all of the other candidates combined. She has a web site, a Twitter page, a Flickr account and a YouTube account. And they all have web feeds. And she uses all of these methods to get her message out and interact with people. In particular, she’s very active on Twitter and she responds to many messages that people send her there. I might not end up voting for her, but it certainly won’t be because I don’t know anything about her.
Next we come to Guy Evans of the Green Party. Guy doesn’t even have web site. Perhaps Green Party policy is that computers are bad for the environment. But that also seems to be true of David Priestly of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party and Nicholas Rogers of the Jury Team. I can’t find any kind of internet presence for either of them.
That leaves us with the two independent candidates in the Battersea election. Tom Cox and Hugh Salmon. Cox seems to be winning on number of feeds (he has a blog, a Twitter page and a YouTube account) but he doesn’t seem to use any of them much. Salmon, on the other hand, only has a blog and a Twitter account, but his Twitter account is pretty active – certainly more active than Linton or Fox but nowhere near as active as Moran.
So we have (currently) eight candidates. And between them I’ve managed to find eleven web feeds). And what do you do when you have a number of web feeds that you want to follow? Of course you build a planet. So here’s my new Battersea GE2010 page which monitors and aggregates all of the feeds I’ve discussed above. Yes, my web design skills are rather rudimentary. Please offer to help if you think you can do better. And if you know of any candidates or feeds that I’ve missed, then please let me know.
There’s no reason why this approach couldn’t be used elsewhere. I built the page with Perlanet, which is free software so you could build something similar for your constituency. And there’s plenty of other tools for doing the same thing. Let me know if you do. I’ll set up a directory or something.
If this is supposed to be the first truely digital General Election then let’s see how true that is. From what I can see in Battersea, we’ve still got some distance to go. Maybe things will change in the next three weeks.
that looks like a cracking way for the less professional candidates to embarrass themselves online – what is Salmon apologising for on the second day of campaigning?we’ve been resectioned into battersea from putney and will be taking care to vote against Linton, on the grounds that when we complained at him sending us sweepstakes entry forms back in December (when he wasn’t our MP, we weren’t eligible for the sweepstakes and he forgot to put a stamp on it, costing us 1.60 each to receive it) he completely ignored our questions about the morality of offering a free TV to get people’s names for his mailing list or mailing people who weren’t his constituents at the time(he did post us the cash for the postal charge though). Anyone can be careless but dubious mailings are dubious mailings.