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The do not call list is finally available at www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca and it’s easy to register. I have call display so it was easy to spot telemarketer numbers, but their absence will be even better. I urge anyone who values their peace and quiet to sign up.

I will next post on Friday, October 3, the morning after the leaders’ English debate. I will be discussing online debate prepping and spinning here and in the US.

Yes I know all about how Facebook started as the online version of hardcopy handbooks intended to help Harvard students in residence meet one another, and yes I know how when it went beyond university campuses millions of people have joined, and yes I know how for many of them it has become the main vehicle of online existence.

I had a look at the official facebook profiles for Stephen Harper (with 15,000 supporters), Stephane Dion (13,000), Jack Layton (18,000), and Elizabeth May (3000). Looking to the US, as I did in my last post, these numbers are far less than the expected one-tenth of those of the candidates in the US: Obama-Biden at 1,900,000 supporters, John McCain at 540,000, and Sarah Palin at 407,000. But my question is what is there uniquely valuable in their facebook profiles. The profiles contain some of the personal information and links to ads and videos that you can find on their party websites or on YouTube. The profiles also give supporters a chance to post their own pictures and wall posts, if the politician enables that feature – which Harper doesn’t, but the other three do. But the posts on the wall are so numerous (406,000 for Obama-Biden and even 4000 for Stephane Dion) that they cannot represent communication among supporters. Are they simply messages of support or emails to the campaign office?

The more interactive political use of facebook appears to be groups organized around a cause, such as securing Elizabeth May’s participation in the leaders’ debate, or vote-swapping among Liberals, NDP, and Green supporters. Here the members of the group would seem to have actionable information to share with one another. The CBC’s Susan Ormiston reports a total of 400 partisan facebook groups in the election campaign. Again, more of the action would appear to be in these smaller self-organized groups than in the profiles organized by the candidates. As I understand it, that is how facebook is evolving, in that people use it to keep up with a manageable list of people who, at some level, do matter to them.

A facebook group thus seems very different from a YouTube post. When a facebook group gets too big, the objective of communication is not achieved. In contrast, the objective of a YouTube post is to get a message with political implications out to as many people as possible, so high view counts are important as indicator.

Am I missing the boat on this one? Is facebook the future of political web 2.0 or is it a dead end?

The use of YouTube has been the most important development in online politics in the last two years. At this point, YouTube has three political roles: showing gaffes committed by politicians, netizens creating videos supporting or opposing candidates, and candidates themselves posting ads. The most notorious political gaffe posted on YouTube was former Virginia Senator George Allen using the racist term “macaca,” which, with 700,000 views, was a key factor explaining why he is a former senator. The most famous support video is the “Yes We Can” Barack Obama music video, with over ten million views.

Already, a few posts have gotten lots of attention. In the area of gaffes, Conservative bloggers have seized on a clip of Elizabeth May discussing the difficulty of implementing a carbon tax, claiming she said Canadian voters are stupid, while she claims she said, or at least meant to say, that other politicians think Canadian voters are stupid. A reporter from CPAC accompanied Garth Turner going door-to-door and the “typical” voter he visited was the son of his campaign manager. The May episode has gotten about 20,000 views, the Turner episode about 5,000. The most popular Netizen-generated video is a cartoon of Harper talking to Bush on the phone, originally posted two years ago, and now up to 48,000 views, most in the last few days.

Finally, all parties have posted their ads on YouTube, with the most frequently viewed being the NDP’s recent ad attacking Stephen Harper (“A New Kind of Strong”) at 17,000, while the Conservative and Liberal ads extolling Stephen Harper and Stephane Dion, respectively, max at about 10,000 views. For the parties, these posts on YouTube are another way to reach voters, in addition to posting the ads on their own websites and running them on television. What I find disconcerting is that the parties often disable comments when posting on their ads on YouTube.

So far, these are healthy view counts, especially if multiplied by 10 to compare to those in the US. Still we haven’t had a truly viral post – an egregious gaffe, particularly in a debate, or a Netizen contribution so inspiring or hilarious that everyone wants to watch – but it’s only the second week. Regardless, YouTube videos are becoming increasingly important in Canadian election campaigns.

One downside of the convenience of working online is the multiple varieties of online piracy. This post reports on two I’ve recently experienced.

My email provider, the University of Toronto Scarborough, for some reason decided that messages from the Canadian Internet Registration Agency reminding me to renew the domain name www.digitalstate.ca were junk, and didn’t transmit them to me. The one message that did get through told me that the deadline had passed and I had lost the domain name. And indeed the website, which had been used to promote my book Digital State at the Leading Edge, went dead. As soon as it became available, the domain name was acquired by a gang of pirates at www.dompro.com, which traffics in domain names. If you go to the site now, a similar gang called Name Drive is offering it for sale. I refused to play that game and acquired a new domain name for the book, which is www.digitalstate.org. The moral of the story is to work with your email provider to make sure that messages from CIRA aren’t considered junk.

The second story concerns an online conference call provider that I’ve been using, primarily for conference calls among the six authors of Digital State. The service is automated, so that all you do to arrange a conference call is dial their number at the prearranged time and enter the access code. Somehow someone got the moderator’s access code, which I had divulged to no one. They ran up a bill of $ 400 US on conference calls, most made in the early hours of a Sunday morning. The bill was automatically charged to my credit card. When the conference call provider’s invoice arrived in my email, I protested, and after a number of calls with customer service and accounting, the provider agreed to refund the charges, though due to exchange rate fluctuations and credit card transactions fees for currency changes, I received $30 (Canadian) less than I paid. No longer working on a multi-author collaboration, I cancelled my account with the online provider. The moral of this story is that if I ever do need a conference call provider in the future, I’ll avoid online options, and choose one that goes through an actual person.

And the moral of both stories is that there are lots of pirates out there in cyberspace, and you can’t be too careful about either your intellectual property, like a clever domain name, or your private information, like access codes or passwords.

Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown,
10 Downing St.

Prime Minister:

Events beyond your control have dominated the political agenda of your first week in office, likely leaving you little time to think about your website. But it is in moments of crisis that communication is most important.

Your predecessor Tony Blair was an expert communicator in traditional media, but had little facility with new media, and the Number 10 website during his ministry made that painfully obvious. It had a dull header (the great seal and text, all in black-and-white), no visual focal point, and was unable to decide whether it was a current or historical site, everywhere mixing news stories with historical content about the building and former PMs. One might argue that Blair’s communications office was actually doing you a favour by managing the site so ineptly, making it easy for you to give it a new look.

I’ve watched the site closely over the last week, and your communications office has made some significant steps to improve it. News stories about you are getting more attention, dominating the centre of the page. Much of the history has been moved to the right side bar, and material from Tony Blair has been consolidated into an archive. You have made frequent use of the newly-created Downing Street YouTube channel for broadcasts and you are web-casting your first Prime Minister’s question period. Clearly, the website is among your priorities – and it should be.

I would carry these steps further. Put all the historical material – and only the historical material – on the right side bar. Similarly, put your news – and only your news – on the middle of the page. Present your news in a challenge-response format: here’s what we’re doing about terrorism, global warming, and flooding in the north. Use the left sidebar to organize information relevant to different types of visitors such as citizens, the media, business, students, and foreign visitors.

In addition to putting your statements on the Downing Street YouTube channel and web-casting question period, start a v-blog and use it to post short informal statements. This can help you create a friendlier image than the former chancellor as policy-wonk. You need to use the new media to compete with opposition leader David Cameron [link], who is both younger and perceived as more youthful than you.
Finally, the header. I suggest putting the seal, or perhaps simply the number 10 in the middle, centred between “the website of Prime Minister Gordon Brown” on the left and “residence of the Prime Minister for three centuries” on the right. And there are many visuals you could use for background – the building, its rooms, images of Westminster and Whitehall.

The work of modernising (your spelling, sir) Britain includes modernising your website. Good luck.

Your faithful overseas new media observer,

Sandford Borins