e-Election: Week 4

Column By Alan Connor Daily Politics' internet correspondent

If your voice is small, but you want to be heard, you might want to think about virals.

The Daily Politics is on BBC Two every day during the election campaign from 1130 to 1230 The Daily Politics e-Election column: Week 3 e-Election column: Week 2 e-Election column: Week 1

Don't worry: we're not talking about viruses, those nasty attachments that bring down your computer.

Virals are the links that people email to each other at work.

Usually, they're daft ways of wasting time: older net users might recall with a shudder the Dancing Hamsters or Mahir Cagri - the Turkish accordionist whose home page screamed "I KISS YOU!!!!!!".

Now viral marketing is being used to spread political messages too, and it's easy to see why.

If your cause isn't hitting the news agenda, animations and quizzes are a good way of bringing people in to your site, especially if you don't have much money. And few issues are have been as dry and neglected as electoral reform.

Simple orders

Make Votes Count is an amalgam of various campaigning groups who would like to see changes to our "first past the post" system.

Each of them, such as The Fawcett Society and Charter 88, has its own site making its own points, but Make Votes count provides a focus, and to attract visitors, they've got together with the viral marketers at DMC and set up a page called Subservient Blair.

Subervient Blair does your bidding...

Visitors are confronted with a man in a rubber Tony Blair mask, awaiting your instructions.

Type in some simple orders, and the pretend-PM will be able to act out a surprising number of them.

Hit on a keyword like "Iraq", "Thatcher" or "Ugly Rumours", and things get a lot stranger. It's inventive and humorous, and is just about to get its millionth pair of eyeballs.

So how does this get across a message about electoral reform? Well, it doesn't, of course: Subservient Blair is the bait, and then readers are encouraged to click on to other pages, the most striking of which is called Do You Count?

Changing the system

Like many of the political websites we've been looking at, Do You Count? begins by asking you for your postcode.

But this time, it's different. Most people are told they're not among the one in 323 people whose vote can change the outcome of the election, and that they won't make a difference.

When you're unable to distinguish fact from fiction, it's probably a good thing that there is only one day left

It's a snappy way of making the claim that 425 seats could effectively be declared tomorrow, without the need for anyone to turn up and vote.

This isn't about wallowing in apathy - it's about changing the whole system.

But how do you explain such arcane matters as Single Transferable Vote, Proportional Representation, and Alternative Vote Plus without sending everyone to sleep?

Louder voices

The sites link on again to various sites where designers and Non-Governmental Organisations have pooled their resources to keep the conversation going. There are chatrooms, quizzes, and even a series of fun ranking exercises where alternative voting systems are explained using pop music or chocolate biscuits as examples.

The idea is that of all the people who come to see "Tony Blair" prancing around, a good proportion of them will leave better-informed, or even converted to the cause.

If you're angry about being told that you don't count, you can print off campaigning materials. Electoral reform is an issue that we talk about during campaigns when it's too late, then forget about for another four or five years.

Campaigners are using the web to get opinion-formers talking, to get the issue into the mainstream media and to recruit campaigners, so that maybe next time, their voice will be louder.

REALITY CHECK

Outside of electoral reform, the virals this time have been far more numerous, funnier and higher-tech than in 2001.

Technology's moved on a long way since then, and with the low cost of video and the relative ease of making animations, the ever-growing web population is better served in terms of satire and lampoonery.

And the feeling that you get from the majority of this year's virals is "is this for real?".

Austin Mitchell is the subject of his wife's blog

As each party has been unveiling a new election slogan, someone in a rival party has been altering the campaign literature or registering the URL of the slogan to spoof them.

The Michael Howard domain name which the Labour Party was cybersquatting is now host to a parody Michael Howard blog, and the "Alastair Campbell" weblog is continuing, even though we know now that its author is a 30-year-old woman who works for an online bookies.

Still building a large audience is Campaign To Re-Elect The Prime Minister, which hosts video footage which looks for all the world as if someone has bugged Tony Blair's office while he's being very candid about Iraq, and which has apparently bamboozled some American news agencies into thinking it's the real thing.

I was also delighted to read an article in The Mail On Sunday about the weblog called The Awful Life Of An MP's Wife. The site read to me like a good parody of the style one might expect of someone married to a "BBM" (backbench maverick), and contains funny descriptions of the reality behind political blogging:

"He has a keyboard such as are issued to children with learning difficulties. He blogs away on this. Then I connect it up to my computer, watch it transcribe itself at about fifty words a minute and email the chaos to his secretary. She spell checks it. He gets a double spaced print out from me. He edits this and faxes it to her and she then makes the corrections. He reads it all through again (no wonder it's funny) and passes it to a third member of staff and she posts it. Or doesn't."

So who is this master parodist? The Mail named the author¿ as Linda McDougall, TV producer and genuine, actual wife of Austin Mitchell.

When you're unable to distinguish fact from fiction, it's probably a good thing that there is only one day left.