Entry #4 Election Tech

Tech News

Well the Canadian election has come and gone and with no surprises and no impact. We still have a crippled government with empty promises from the parties to work together. I was watching the CBC election coverage and its sad attempt at bringing tech into is coverage with the pathetic power point presentation that looked like the producers kid put it together. So I thought I would go over the Candidate tech attempts to reach us and see if they really understand what these social sites are or if they were doing it because everyone else is doing it.

Lets start from the bottom up and review what social sites each party used:

Elizabeth May leader of the Canadain Green Party

Well May's web site does not even use any of the new social sites. She does attempt to make here own twitter like micro blog on the front page but her lack of anything is a disgrace. get out of the 90's Elizabeth.

Jack Layton leader of the NDP

Jack uses three of the most popular social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Freind Feed. ALthought his attemp was lacluster his was the cloest to an effective use of social sies.The Facebook page that the NDP made looks clean with a lot of variety in the content available my one comment is, "Jack did you look at your site?" if you are using these sites to reach people you need to understand that these are not one way sites you need to go to them and comment on it, these are interactive sites. So the lack of any comments in response to peoples comments is a definite Oops.

The Twitter site for the NDP was very good the tweets were not just propaganda but were status updates about Jack and what he was doing so the NDP atleasted used this site for what it is for.

Gilles Duceppe leader of the Bloc Quebecois

Now I am not very good at french but using a few translators I was able to find a link to Gilles' Facebook page(which was not on the front page, No No No) and the first thing I noticed is a note from August 20th. Wow a dead give away this page is never looked at by Gilles.

Stéphane Dion the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party

The liberals did use Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace but looking at these where horrible. the sites were not updates regularly and face book and MySpace as well at Twitter were huge Harper hater propaganda sites. So if you were to go to these "social" sites to get a "social" opinion of Stéphan I would say Harper might want to invest in some protection.

As well as the irritating hate campaign Stéphane Dion would not even use is name in Twitter he used LiberalTour. I would have to give Stéphane Dion the most imperssional Social sites of all the canidates.

Stephen Harper the leader of the Conservitive party

Harper used the most social network including a social news site called Digg althought Harper used Facebook, Twitter, Freind Feed, and MySpace looking at all these sites it was quickly apperent that they were not monitored regularly and full of propaganda and very few personal updates. I do have to give Stephen Harper a thumbs up for using the most sites but none of them were really used effectivly.

So what does my rembling mean? Well even though the CBC said that the internet is becoming a big portion of a campaign, it is clearly visable that none of out canidates really understand these tools and do not use any of them effectivly to reach out to people in a more personnal and interactive way. So though our politions are tring to look up-to-date by using these solial sites it is quite easy to determine that the canidates only really familliar with old meadia and not new media.