The Queensland Greens election website (http://qld.greens.org.au/) has an RSS feed for media releases, and some CreativeCommons "remixed" images. No blogs or wikis as yet - these things require resources to set up. Maybe next time.

The system is built entriely on open source software: Plone running on Debian GNU/Linux.

I used to be a member of GreenPeace until I read their nuclear policies. You never see them protesting coal despite the fact that over 10,000 people die every year from it. Zero people died from nuclear energy last year.

These are the same people who painted fur seals in the mistaken belief it would save them from hunters prizing their lovely pelts. Instead the poisonous toxic paint destroyed their natural oil coating and the seals froze to death at sea. The hunters went off and killed a different colony of fur seals.

It was the environmentalists who successfully blocked homeowners from much needed backburning. Dead wood accumulated and we had some terrific forest fires as a result. Killing countless wild animals and even taking a few homes.

GreenPeace members have big hearts but nothing between the ears. I urge everyone to place your votes elsewhere.

"Zero people died from nuclear energy last year."

Apart from those dead and dying from the effects of Chernobyl?

Greenpeace and The Greens are two completely different organisation by the way.

Hi,

I think onlineopinion is missing an important point. Less than 0.1% of the population go to party websites during elections. People are basically not interested and don't bother. Qld Libs and Nationals are probably quite smart realising that a website campaigning tool is only a small part of the campaign not worth put too much effort in.

Also I just signed up to this forum. Dear me, onlineopinion.com.au need to take their own advice. The technology used is old, and it was far from user friendly compared to other blog/comment sites. Where is Web 2.0 here? Using a forum as a blog platform doesn't work guys!

Hi Bob222,

I'm Daniel Macpherson, editor of the National Forum's Australian e-Democracy site, an affiliate of Online Opinion.

I don't think we're missing the point at all.

First, I'm not sure where you got your "less than 0.1%" statistic. Last year, a report on cyber-campaigning for the 2004 federal election showed 10 per cent of the population "reported using the internet for election news, most of them doing so on several occasions or less" and "frequent users constitute just 3 percent". While these figures are low compared to other countries, they're still many times higher than the figure you suggest.

Following this, I think it's wrong to say people don't care. The same report stated that "having a web page had a significant effect on the vote, net of a wide range of other factors. Candidates who maintained a web page increased their first preference vote by just over 4 percent, net of individual and party resources, party membership and other aspects of campaigning."

I think it's more accurate to say Australian web campaigning is merely in an infant stage, rather than something people just don't care about. In the US and UK, web campaigning is now an important staple in the lead-up to an election. Recently, Pew Internet & American Life Project director Lee Rainie said most internet users now expected candidates to have an online presence. He said, "There isn’t any [political] consultant that I'm aware of now that doesn't walk in with a playbook that has a big thick tab in it on how to do web politics."

Reports also indicate a lot of US politicians are focusing more of their campaign budgets on internet advertising rather TV advertising, mainly because the costs are cheaper while still reaching a high number of people.

I can only see Australia following this trend. And already some candidates are using such technology. Victorian Liberal Candidate Clem Newton-Brown recently set up a blog to track his campaign progress in the lead-up to the Victorian election. Likewise, I know NSW MLC Penny Sharpe set up a blog this year.

It just ain't democracy - Neo-Economedia.

The Australian motto of a fair go in Politics appears to be flawed when major political parties are awarded $1.97 per vote.

The cost the Australian Tax payers is around the $60 000 000 dollar mark, paidout at the end of each election to those candidates who have received more than 4% + in the electoral votes.

Liberal and Labor normally pocket around $20 000 000 dollars each. With the outstanding amount going to other fringe parties such as the Greens.

It is disturbing to find that Corporate Media have already been given in advance a chunk of the presumed votes dividends for advertising the major parties.

It is then the media's job because of the large amount of future advertising contracts at stake, to push the political parties who has spent more advertising dollars with their business.

A communist agenda of mock and ridicule are part of the strategy to protect these lucrative contracts on behalf of those who are frightened of losing their jobs.

It time to Break the Bond

Hi Daniel Macpherson,

Thanks for your comments. I kind of agree where you are coming from and 10% may be the correct figure for across the board including crikey, ninemsn and all the other news related sites in regards to political news.

But what I am talking about is in regards to how many visitors the party websites get over the election period and whether they should bother pouring election funds into the website.

Ninemsn went down twice this week once for death of Steve and once for Peter Brock. This would have been 100,000's of visitors per minute visiting those news sites for those servers to be busy. Did the party sites receive the same - I doubt it!

In fact, if you ask the webmaster of TeamBeattie how many unique vistors they had over the 6 week election period, I have a good source that tells me you'll find it will be considerably less than 20,000 unique visitors - which far less than 0.1% of the voting population in QLD!

This shows that people are hardly interested in going to the party websites during the election period and hence my original point of whether the parties should bother going to the extent of all the bells and whistles for their websites.

Thanks for your comments.

Hi Bob22,

Interesting stats for the TeamBeattie site. A common method of measuring unique visitors is through the IP address of the visitor, in which case it is only really measuring "households". For example, all traffic from a university may appear as just one visitor - the IP address of the their web proxy. I expect there are better ways of measuring visitors using browser cookies. Can you tell us what TeamBeattie were using?

Hi Sams,

I don't know what TeamBeattie.com use (I am not the webmaster), I have just a good source in this area and the approximate amount of visitors.

I assume TeamBeattie would be using something similar to what most people use these days with unique visitors and if using say something like ASP.NET the server generates a unique session cookie for each visitor which makes it accurate to work out a new visitor based even if they share a proxy IP (same IP).

If that is cookie-based stats, rather than IP-based, then TeamBeattie's traffic was quite poor! As you may have guessed, one of my clients is a political party. Although I can't divulge figures, I can say that they gave TB a run for its money on web presence.

Another factor to consider for election websites is the vital role they play for the media and for party members. Also interesting is to what extent news "spreads" from people reading a website to others. The qualities of the kind of people that visit political websites is a key consideration in this.

Election website don't need to be expensive. I can put together a Plone website for costs in the order of thousands of dollars (rather than tens or hundreds of thousands) using free technology such as Plone. After a some training, my clients can then add and organise their own content through Plone's WYSIWYG editor, WebDAV, etc. Things like RSS feeds work out-of-the-box. In that sense, they make for fairly cheap publishing and advertising platforms, with a rapid workflow from spokespeople to the public.

My experience working with a political party is that despite what many people think, they more often than not can't get the media coverage that they want. Almost always, the media will only pick up on certain topics, leading to the very distorted perception of that party's policies and views. Websites are one of the few ways that a party can at least try to address this imbalance.

Hi Bob222,

Good to hear about your source on this. I wanted to make sure you didn't just pick some figure out of the air as some are prone to do. Yes, 20,000 unique visitors is a low figure for a website.

However, that doesn't change the point of Dann's article, which is to examine what the sites have and what they don't have.

Following that with the figure you present, what if the lack participatory Web 2.0 technology (which the article outlines) could account for the lack of visitors? What if an increase in Web 2.0 functionality could increase vistors to political sites? The internet is an interactive medium, which is why it seems logical and fitting to make websites as interactive as possible. And there are many examples of this is the UK and US.

Perhaps it's more than people just don't care, period, but more so the functionality of such sites doesn't cater to people browsing on the web... at the moment.

Also, it's interesting that you mention TeamBeattie's low stats but also say that the Coalition were smarter not focusing too much energy on their site without mentioning any of their stats. I had a look at the stats for both sites for Alexa users (Sadly, I don't have many insider sources) and the reach is significantly higher for TeamBeattie and the site has a better ranking. From this I also would assume the unique visitors figure for the Coalition site is lower too. Of course these figures only apply to people using Alexa, but I think the comparison is still applicable to websurfers in general.

So, I don't see how your reasoning stands that the Coalition is smarter when TeamBeattie is getting more traffic. Can you clarify your position on this?

- Daniel

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your comments and point of view.

The alexa search engine would only be used by a minority, in fact so much that I don't know of anyone in any of my circles both business, political or personal who use it!

The stats from this may be distorted because people may be going to those pages on the website by searching on terms (eg. water saving devices and may other issues that may not be directly related to the campaign).

Would you agree that the real success of the website in the campaign would be determined by not visitors alone (as anyone can drive traffic to a website with PPC and many other ways) but by:

1. How many people signed up for more information.

2. How many people went past the first page (paths)

and

3. How many people returned to the website more than once.

I mean Web 2.0 stuff is neat and fancy, but I don't agree it would really change peoples mind at the end of the day.

I don't really know how much any of the parties spent on the websites but I do agree with you they could be doing a lot more. But my reasoning is at end of the day how much difference would it make and may be the greens didn't really see the value in it, nor did the others.

The greens just had a simple solution to provide information and that worked. Web 2.0 and all the jazz is great for the web designers to charge more but it would have to be demonstrated quite well that this does make a difference.

For the QLD election if the greens or libs, or nats put millions into the website, would it really have made a huge difference to the outcome?

In this election I believe it would not have.

Bob222,

Firstly, you brought up a figure of 0.1% of the population coming to a website, which was your main piece of evidence for saying people aren't interested. But now you're saying "real success of the website in the campaign would be determined by not visitors alone". What was the point of bringing up vistors to a site in the first place when now you're saying that doesn't really matter compared to these new factors you've brought up? There seems to be some inconsistency in what you're acutally trying to prove here.

As for your main question, "For the QLD election if the greens or libs, or nats put millions into the website, would it really have made a huge difference to the outcome?" I don't think anyone can assume you have to spend millions on a website in order for it to be successful. But I do think you have to make it functional for people. And you have to give people a reason to keep coming to a site. And I think Web 2.0 technology provides more functionality and more of a reason to keep coming back than Web 1.0 technology. After all, O'Reilly Media (who coined the term "Web 2.0") says one of the facets of Web 2.0 is "network effects created by an architecture of participation". Keyword there is "participation".

Also, Web 2.0 technology doesn't cost a lot of money. It's not something you invest millions in. Setting up a blog or a wiki won't blow your budget. So, I don't see how you assume Web 2.0 will cost "millions".

And of course Web 2.0 won't change people's minds itself. It all depends on how a candidate uses such communication technology. However, I do think that Web 2.0 technology has significant advantages in connecting with voters than Web 1.0. As Dann pointed out, there are some risks and disadvantages -- especially where political opponents and spammers are concerned. But I still feel Web 2.0 is very useful to reach voters, and there's already examples of such participatory media both in Australia and abroad.

Stephen, thanks for the article. Like many things in Australia, Australia is significantly behind the US in relation to the effective use of the internet in political campaigning but I suspect this will change.

Having been a close observer in the US of both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential experience I would offer another point. In the United States, due to voluntary voting, the internet becomes much more significant as a voter mobilisation tool. While in Australia, compulsory voting limits the usefulness of that applicability, I think it is still extremely useful for minor or start-up political parties. In fact I would go as far to argue that a move to voluntary voting combined with a web 2.0/ 3.0 etc approach could radically transform the political landscape in this country.