Club Bloggery 7: Election Flops on YouTube

Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, and I have now posted the seventh instalment of our ABC series Club Bloggery, covering the online dimensions of the Australian election campaign. Just to mix things up a bit, this week we had a look at what's been happening on YouTube over the past few weeks, and found that (perhaps unsurprisingly) the more interesting developments are in DIY campaign advertising and mash-ups. Plenty of links included with the story, which we've also posted to our group blog Gatewatching - I encourage you to see for yourselves!

Election Flops on YouTube

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

In an election campaign as drawn out as this, you'd have to have excellent memory to remember the hype around John Howard's use of YouTube to make policy announcements. Some months ago, the media were all over the story - but unfortunately for the Prime Minister, much like the widely-predicted poll 'narrowing', the YouTube effect has been missing in action.

That's not to say that YouTube and similar sites haven't played a role in the campaign - but certainly not to the extent they've already featured in the U.S. presidential primaries, where debates between the candidates on either side of the political divide have invited citizens to pose their questions via YouTube, and where some politicians even announced their intention to run for President on the site.

American politics has also seen the phenomenon of ObamaGirl (and a few less successful imitations) - a kind of virtual groupie for key Democrat contender Barack Obama which contributed markedly to highlighting differences between the fresh-faced Obama and his major Democrat rival, the experienced but (we presume) hardly politically 'sexy' former first lady Hillary Clinton.

While we might count our blessings that a JohnnieGirl or KevvieGirl hasn't emerged in the Australian campaign, the relative unimportance of YouTube to the election requires some further explanation. In part, it may be due to the comparatively atrocious quality of Australian broadband, which generally continues to stunt the development of bandwidth-heavy applications in this country.

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