After the first week of the Ontario election campaign, the initial style differences in online campaigning between the Liberal and Progressive Conservative (PC) Parties are becoming decidedly more obvious.
The PC campaign site setup is still the only one inviting citizen participation, but continues to lack the corresponding degree of content produced outside the campaign.B There have been gains in the visual department as some of the photos in the photo pool seem to have been submitted by supporters.
The Tories have also significantly extended their external linking to media stories, and the "Media Buzz" page is updated with new entries at least once a day and does not lag behind the Liberal equivalent, "In the News."
With very few (if any) participatory features and unified on-the-message tone throughout, the Liberal site is likely to stay a traditional campaign site. The "Blog" is actually a photo gallery; the "Latest Online" page remains untouched, typos and all; and "Mole" - its attempts at humour and irreverence too weak to register - does not warrant a page of its own.
The Liberals' YouTube "Premier of Ontario" page has disabled its "Add Comment" feature and there is no channel for feedback. The creators of John Tory's page at YouTube, on the other hand, seem to have been comfortable enough to enable "Comments" and leave the negative comments from the visitors unedited.
Similarly, New Democrat Howard Hampton's YouTube account allows free comments and there is some conversation happening among visitors; however, the number of videos posted remains only one.
After a week's worth of e-newsletters from the Tories and the Liberals, one might argue that the general tone of the Conservative Web communication is somewhat more relaxed and focused. The Tories' daily communication highlights one campaign issue per e-mail. Visuals and links are used sparingly, and there are no subheadings or changes in font size.
The weekly round-up sums up daily campaigns thematically and is a no-frills, lean and focused narrative of the past week. Although the campaign communication had to deal with a couple of involuntary detours this past week, the newsletters were not turned into a ground for tactical damage control.
The Liberal daily campaign alert is still in search of an identity. Subheadings and links abound, and cover anything from premier's visits of the day to endorsements, policy highlights, criticism of the other two parties, overviews of latest party ads, and promoting particular site features.
One of the early editions of "Campaign Alert" contained a link invitation to check out the picture of campaign buses and, most peculiarly, the September 12 alert contains a congratulatory message to the winner of the Canadian Idol competition and a link to the CTV story about this important piece of news.
The graphics to "Donate," "Forward," "Volunteer," "See Ads" and "Platform" additionally encumber the newsletter and are displayed as a long column surrounded by empty space, once in English and then again in the French part of the message.
Overall, however, the Liberal weekly review message is better organized and easier on the eye. The organization of information is along geographical lines, with bullet points for each city visited in the last week and announcements made there.
If official Liberal campaigning is strictly Web 1.0, its unofficial, freelancing brigade does employ blogs, list-serves and DIY YouTube propaganda and is making itself very busy.
Greg Elmer and his collaborators at
Ryerson University's Infoscape Lab have been studying the creation and dissemination of election-related content via YouTube, Facebook and the blogosphere. Their numbers show that although each of the parties has the active unofficial wing, at the moment Liberal supporters are producing a greater amount of negative content than other partisans.
A number of partisan bloggers have gained notoriety and a continuous stream of site traffic, thanks to either opposition research or skills in swift-boating. Swift-boating is a U.S. electioneering term that denotes pure fabrication that manages to capture media attention and do electoral damage before it is disclosed as fabrication.
For more on how swift-boating works, see Eric Boehlert's
Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush.
Opposition research in the blogosphere is largely becoming the undertaking that aims to show why somebody's personality traits or history makes them unfit for office, rather than being concerned with demonstrating what's wrong with their policies.
A number of bloggers are read for signs of what direction the campaign communication might be taking. But the Internet can also be a perfect field for
Karl Rovian methods - whispering campaigns and generally making stuff up.
Venues that provide anonymity and the least amount of moderation can be extremely fertile to an ad hominem style of campaign moonlighting. That most of these attempts fail is cause for optimism, and those that succeed are all the more deserving of close scrutiny.
Related content:Politics 2.0: Web campaigning in the Ontario electionOntario Elections: An online kaleidoscope of campaign featuresWeb campaigning for Elections Ontario: What's in it for me?Political parties tap IT for election advantageBlog: Gearing up for the Ontario election
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