Club Bloggery 8: Scoring the e-lection

Just before the Australian federal election last Saturday, we managed to get our latest Club Bloggery piece out to ABC Online. It's now been eclipsed by more recent developments, of course, but still offers a pretty good overview of the campaign for (online) hearts and minds that was. Read it at our group blog Gatewatching, or at the ABC.

Scoring the e-lection

By Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, and Axel Bruns

This close to the election, it's customary for newspapers to recommend a vote one way or the other. We're not about to do that at Club Bloggery (although we would recommend thinking about the candidate who's been more responsive and available to your community), but we can do a summary of who has made the best running on the Internet, and understood and used its possibilities best.

In this spirit, we'd like to present our take on the losers, winners and those who have held steady on the net. This might not alter your vote, but it should give you pause: the Internet will only become more important in future campaigns, because for us "ordinary Australians", even those without reliable broadband access, the Internet is increasingly where we work, rest and play.

Losers

In general, it seems to us that the Internet as a campaigning tool really ambushed the conservative side of politics, but even the Nationals and Family First seem to do it better than the Liberals.

The PM's pre-campaign YouTube adventures - including the infamous "Good morning" salutation on his first effort - may have, as a novelty, gotten him some extra television time, but they showed how at sea the Liberals are with new media. They really didn't take account of the unique flavour of YouTube as a platform, and were staged in a familiar "campaign broadcast" style, that a lot of YouTube's users wouldn't even watch on television. The videos were begging for satirical repurposing, and they duly received it.

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