puffbox

On the political parties’ sites…

I’ve been looking at the various political party websites today, planning a possible enhancement to my onepolitics website. A few nuggets you might be interested in…

• Plaid Cymru are on Twitter. Only a token effort, and only 9 mates. But it’s a start. (And its bilingual.) To their credit, they’ve also got presences on YouTube, Facebook and Flickr (details here).
• The SNP don’t seem to have a YouTube presence. Seems odd, when they were among the first to get into it. (Anyone know of it?)
• One thing the SNP do have, and it makes me a little uncomfortable, is a News Aggregator on their main party site. Why uncomfortable? Because it’s effectively just republishing an RSS feed from www.scotland.gov.uk (using Drupal’s built-in aggregation tool, by the look of it). Yet another blurring of the line between government and politics… and very awkward, where independence is an important characteristic (eg National Statistics stuff).
• and most worrying of all… if you look for the site of Ian Paisley Peter Robinson’s DUP, and you happen to be running Google’s Desktop search app, you get presented with this.

• Alan in Belfast at 7:13 pm on 4 June 2008

  Over in Norn Iron, Dawn Purvis from the lesser-known PUP is now twittering too.

• Simon at 10:48 pm on 4 June 2008

  Thanks Alan… Blimey, she’s thrown herself right into it, too. I make it 23 updates in her first two days!

• Geraint at 10:57 pm on 4 June 2008

  Plaid Cymru also have a MySpace site.

• Scottish Roundup » Blog Archive » Britishness, Barack and Blah at 12:47 pm on 8 June 2008

  [...] while we’re thinking about politics online, Simon Dickson at Puffbox takes a look at the presence of UK political parties on the Net. And Holyrood Watcher takes a long, [...]

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