ELECTIONS 2.0
Posted in Blog, News, Tech by John
As we move in to the new year it seems impossible to switch on the news without realising that 2008 is ‘election year’. Over the last few weeks we’ve been following the progress of the US elections here at 383…not because we’re massive fans of McDonalds, ‘Soccer’ and dodgy foreign policy, but because an interesting ‘behind the scenes’ battle has emerged that has made the race a whole lot more interesting if you’re web geeks like us.
Taking a look at the main candidates websites it’s clear that this is the first election where the internet has been recognised as a key tool for winning votes. The power of social networking and other web trends has clearly been felt with each site providing a plethora of opportunities to subscribe, join, watch or follow your favourite candidate. The design of each site has clearly been well considered, with a large amount of live data, feeds and resources to keep voters hooked as the campaigns progress…
Ron Paul has sourced every social networking, sharing or blogging logo available to help design his homepage.
‘Team Hilary’ have kept it real. Offering, YouTube video for the kids and bumper stickers for the rednecks.
But, Barack Obama gets double points for the best design and also the coolest name.
Looking at the designs wether it’s Hilary Clintons YouTube channel, Barack Obama’s MySpace page or Ron Paul’s Facebook group it’s hard to escape the ‘2.0 ness’ of these elections.
The significance of these sites then is that just as TV changed politics in the 60s, the web has now become a powerful way of leveraging votes in 2008. Even more interesting is that on the Tech President site you can track how each of the candidates is performing online by viewing live scrapes of YouTube stats, Facebook supporters and Hitwise web traffic. A few years ago the public had to rely on the media or sample surveys as the best indicator for pre-election votes, now we have an inumerate amount of minute by minute live data to chew over….
So, as well as being an interesting exercise in using current web tools why am I blogging about it in the UK? Well, aside from the fact that I suspect it wont be long before we see Gordon Brown MySpace and David Cameron YouTube, it’s also a great indicator as to the value and popularity of the modern day web. Often in meetings we’re asked as designers how or why a company should bother to step beyond a basic ‘brochure site’ – the answer we give is that in most (although not every) case there is an appropriate technology that could complement their business and also engage their users a lot more than a big block of static text. Simply put, a website that networks, engages and evolves on a daily basis makes a much more interesting proposition to users than one that doesn’t.
