Puffbox

I have to completely disagree with Tech Digest. Slick, catchy and media-savvy this advert for a Nigerian chap running for governor of Lagos State may be… but it leaves me absolutely cold.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=eH_9KoZrEYo]

I stand by my comment last week… amateur TV, like the promo made by Northern Ireland Green Party man Brian Wilson, works much better in making me wanting to trust – and hence vote for – someone.

If you’re on the wrong side of the Irish Sea, it’s easy to have missed the fact there’s an election next week. Yes, next week. Northern Ireland goes to the polls on Wednesday, to elect 108 members to the new Stormont Assembly. Well, possibly not 108 members – there are a few awkward ones standing in several constituencies, who could (theoretically) end up representing all of them, if they’re lucky on the day.

I thought I’d have a quick look at the political parties’ sites, to see who – if anyone – was embracing the social thing… and again, it’s Ian Paisley’s DUP who come out best when it comes to new media. For a party with such traditional conservative values, it might come as a bit of a surprise; but they’ve got a good track record of good web work. They are running a daily(ish) video blog, hosted at Youtube, with a free SMS service for campaign updates.

The Ulster Unionist Party, led these days by Reg Empey (who, inevitably, isn’t an MP), does have a blog of sorts, but it’s lacking some of the ingredients you’d expect, like RSS or even comments. A few nice (and substantial) written pieces by some of their candidates, though.

The more moderate pro-Irish party, Mark Durkan’s SDLP has gone down the Blogger route, but it feels a bit of a token gesture to be honest. At least it’s better than Sinn Fein’s Assembly Election Blog page, though, which currently features a whole one item, posted by an anonymous ‘election worker’. Dig a bit deeper, though, and you make a startling discovery: Sinn Fein on Bebo! They also have a bit of video content on Youtube – featuring an interview with Gerry Adams, in which he doesn’t sound entirely convinced by this internet malarkey.

But the most surprisingly engaging thing I’ve found so far is the personal site of Brian Wilson (no, not the Beach Boy), who is standing for the Green Party in the North Down constituency – and actually has a decent chance of getting in. He has done a short YouTube video, which is pretty amateur, padded out (one suspects) with still photos snatched off Google… but he makes a very well presented pitch, and he’s a very good speaker on camera. Rough around the edges, certainly – but despite that, and possibly because of that, it works.

Inevitably, all the best coverage will be on the BBC next week, but you might also want to check the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland. Counting won’t start until the next day, and can take ages, given the Single Transferable Vote system.

This was on the cards for some time… the BBC has (finally!) announced a deal to put ‘short clips of BBC content’ on three Youtube channels – one for news, which will carry advertising and hence won’t be available to UK viewers; and two for entertainment, one for promotional ‘DVD extra’ kind of stuff, and one for longer clips from the BBC archive. The deal will run for ‘several’ years, and is non-exclusive. Ashley Highfield is quite clear on it though: it’s purely a promotional channel for the Beeb, not a full-on distribution mechanism.

As such, it’s not a particularly exciting announcement (in itself). ‘Controversially,’ says BBC news itself, ‘the BBC Worldwide page – adverts and all – can be seen in the UK.’ This might work out as the thin end of a wedge, but I don’t imagine people manning barricades over it. From my own perspective, I’m trying to get a high-profile client to bite the Youtube bullet at the moment, and this should help.

Sky News is absolutely loving this ‘contaminated petrol‘ story. The Sky News Centre (if they still call it that?) is located just off the A4 in west London, right next to a big Tesco’s – which, conveniently, has a petrol station. As you can see from this map, the two couldn’t really be closer together.

So it’s time to come clean, guys… all these live reports from ‘West London’ are actually from that very same Tesco’s, on your very doorstep. If the camera’s battery pack runs out, you could probably run a household extension cable out one of the fire doors. To be honest, once you know the area, it’s amazing how much is actually filmed in the immediate vicinity…

BT Tradespace is a project, launched a few weeks ago, which hadn’t come onto my radar until today. Currently in beta, it’s ‘a new service by BT to enable small businesses to create an online presence in minutes, with no technical knowledge needed, that they can use to promote themselves using blogging, podcasting, photos, and many other features.’

Translation: it comes across as a Myspace kind of thing, driven by Microsoft’s Sharepoint technology, with a bit of Digg thrown in. The heart of the service is the blogging component, labelled ‘News & views’ – presumably so as not to scare the non-tech audience away. There are components for photo sharing, events calendars, and ‘featured items’ – plus the ability to upload podcasts, which is surely beyond most of their target audience? Lots of RSS feeds everywhere too, which (of course) we like. Microsoft’s Virtual Earth mapping is built in, and you can have the site owner’s ‘business card’ sent to you by email or text message. There’s also the ability to make a free phone call to the site owner… but I haven’t investigated it yet.

I’ve actually had real trouble getting into it. Mostly, that was my foolish preference for Firefox; a quick switch to IE, and it all worked nicely. (Only to be expected from a Sharepoint-based system, I suppose.) But partly also because I know how these things work already, and I’m looking for the established – admittedly geeky – jargon. Still, everything seems to be there, albeit sometimes under a different name.

It’s an interesting project – still in its earliest days, with membership only just into three digits. But it costs nothing to sign up to… so why not give it a shot? Get in there quick, and grab yourname.bttradespace.com while you still can.

The BBC has started an Election 07 blog, with the ‘political editors from across the UK’ covering developments ‘throughout the Assembly and Parliament elections’. Currently it’s dominated by next week’s Northern Ireland elections, and hence by NI political editor, Mark Devenport. To an Ulster native like myself, that makes it extra interesting – but I can imagine it turning off a lot of people. Ulster politics is an acquired taste, and is almost certainly incomprehensible to the outsider. I don’t think it works to lump it in with Scotland and Wales.

The guys at the Telegraph deserve a nod for their marking of St David’s Day…

Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus to all our Welsh viewers. Now, please do us a favour and sort out the train line around Newport. I spent far too long there, before and after my beloved Arsenal’s Carling Cup Final appearance on Sunday.

Now, what do we get for St Paddy’s, chaps?

I’ve been having a few problems with a Netgear wireless network base unit. With the normal support channels not really helping me, I resorted to contacting the Customer Service staff. The Netgear UK website declares:

Should you have any customer service issues, please feel free to contact UK Customer Services at: [email protected]. Please allow up to 24 hours for a response during normal business hours Monday to Friday. Please note that the team responding to this email address are not technical support.

I did contact them. And more than two and a half weeks later, despite numerous follow-ups, I’m still waiting for an acknowledgement of my complaint. There’s a serious problem with either the website editing, or the company’s concept of Customer Service. Neither should be excusable.

Update: would you believe it, I’ve just had a response, and a very positive one too. See, the power of blogging? 😉