Puffbox

I feel obliged to note that LabourSpace, Labour’s attempt to build a social network around policy discussion and campaigns, has relaunched. Again.

It’s less appalling – downplaying, quite dramatically, the voting up and down of campaign ideas which has failed over a two year period now to spark into any kind of life. But I’m genuinely amazed it’s still there at all.

Instead, the core content is now a pretty straightforward set of commentable pages, nothing you haven’t seen on a million blogs. Except that those million blogs handle it better. You don’t see the comment form until you press the ‘Leave a comment’ button… and then, you’re immediately presented with boxes for first name, surname, and email address. That’s right: no actual comment box.

Presentationally, it’s curious. It managed to spell the surname of its lead sponsor, Ed Miliband wrong at the very top of its homepage – corrected shortly after I tweeted about it, but even so. Its HTML page title and ‘hero’ graphic can’t even be consistent in the capitalisation of A Future Fair/fair for All/all. (Then again, the HTML page titles are universally awful: SEO clearly not a priority.)

(Update: there’s an interstitial page at www.labour.org.uk which introduces yet another different capitalisation: ‘A future fair for all’.)

Oh, and the site logo introduces a whole different slogan – ‘Be the change’. What’s the point of launching a campaign slogan if you’re not going to use it yourself?

LabourSpace has flopped. Several times now. Surely the best thing they could have done at this point was quietly ditch it – and put the effort into a ‘manifesto blog’, or a concentrated push on Facebook. Instead they drag the dead horse out for another public flogging.