Monday, February 23, 2009
Last week I ruffled a few feathers with a post about the sorry state of Labour and the internet. One of my main points was that Labour seemed to be drawn into a battle of the blogs and was neglecting investment in a responsive email campaign. Thomas Gensemer, founder of Blue State Digital, the firm which helped run Barack Obama’s online campaign for the US Presidency, gave a talk a couple of days later at City University. He made the same point. Hopefully City will publish a video of the talk before too long. I watched it live on the web stream and it was compelling. Click on the image below to watch the talk.
Gensemer really understands this stuff. If only someone in the Labour Party did too.
Monday, February 16, 2009
It’s taken thirty-six years but last week it finally happened. I found myself - however I might wish for it to be otherwise - agreeing with an article in the Daily Mail. It was a stingingly accurate critique of the Labourlist group blog which has been online for a while now but was ‘launched’ last Thursday.
Labourlist is not something that I would normally spare much thought about. I’ve been happy to drift away from the day-to-day dogfights of British politics since I stood down as a Special Adviser at the 2001 General Election in an effort to reclaim my life and start up some of my own projects. But I have found something sickly compelling about the way Labourlist has unfolded into a tragi-comedy that reveals more than it should about the troubled relationship the Labour Party has with the internet. (more…)