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How have the political parties used the online medium to prepare for, and respond to last night’s debates in Canada and the US? They are similar on the preparation, sending out email messages to their supporters urging them to host a debate party and suggesting what to look for in the debate.

But the big difference between Canada and the US is in the parties’ reaction to the debates. Overnight, both the Obama and McCain sites have posted extensive quotes from supportive commentators and polling numbers. YouTube is already full of debate excerpts, analysis, and commentary. The Canadian scene, by contrast, is extremely disappointing. The party websites have very little reaction to the debates, either quotes from commentators or poll numbers. The latest ads still dominate their home pages. Almost nothing has been posted on YouTube about the debate, either by the parties or by the public.

What is happening this year? I can remember that in the 2003 Ontario leadership debate, opposition leader Dalton McGuinty gave a strong performance against a tired Premier Ernie Eves, and the Ontario Liberals had every bit of supportive commentary posted on their site by the next morning. Maybe this year the campaigns are already exhausted, or perhaps they’ve concluded that the debate was inconclusive, so they’ll continue to hammer away in their advertising. But I’m disappointed that none of the Canadian parties has yet seized on the debates as an important part of their campaign narrative.

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.

The world’s first cyber-crash happened in 2000 with the bursting of the Internet stock bubble. The damage was confined to one sector of the economy, however, and the subsequent reduction in interest rates provided quick stimulus that prevented a prolonged recession. As we now know, the reduction in interest rates created a real estate bubble in the US as well as some European countries, and the bursting of the real estate bubble is leading to a global recession. I call this a cyber-crash as well, because I believe information technology has made a major contribution to our current economic problems. Here are three themes about the current recession.

Interconnectedness

A priori, we wouldn’t expect that weakness in one sector, even in the world’s largest economy, would lead to a global recession, but we’ve discovered that the US housing market is closely connected to the financial sector in the US, which is closely connected to the financial sector in the rest of the world, which is closely connected to the real economy everywhere else. So the contagion is spreading quickly from the US economy to the rest of the world.

Technological Hubris

Technology has contributed to the problem in several ways. The increase in computational power has given financial engineers the ability to create more complex financial instruments in particular linked to dubious mortgages. Information flows faster and market players can react faster. Like the political world, immediacy has increased in the economic world. As a consequence, volatility has also increased. Unlike the political world, however, technology has not increased transparency; indeed, it has reduced it, as market players know less and less about what real assets the financial instruments they are trading actually represent.

The Public Sector: Ideology or Pragmatism

It is now clear that, in part due to its free market ideology, the Bush administration did not worry about how these developments allowed an increasing portion of the financial sector to operate outside traditional regulatory constraints. The need for restructuring to either avert or respond to bankruptcies (Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and who’s next?) has necessitated government involvement on an unanticipated scale.
Bush and Cheney are as clueless about the cyber-crash as they were about Hurricane Katrina. They seem entirely unable to think about society, rather than individuals. Fortunately, the key US economic players – Bernanke, Paulson, and FDIC Chair Sheila Bair – are more pragmatic than ideological. But will that be enough?