Can Tweets and Tubes Inspire Pool Triumph? ; Blogs, Tweets and Virals Were the Stuff of a Madman's Dreams in the Last General Election. Will the Rise of the Internet Mark a Seismic Shift in Campaigning in the Westcountry, Graeme Demianyk Wonders

Summary

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IT has been dubbed the first e-election. The last time the country went to the polls, campaigning ran along conventional lines. Letter boxes snapped with leaflets shoved through doors, battlebuses thundered into town and no party leader worth the name would avoid raising a baby to the sky in the manner of a triumphant FA Cup winning captain. In other words, the usual opera of persuasion.

In 2005, newspapers had a strong and growing online presence and a small amount of tactical voting was organised online. But, in the intervening five years, something happened to politics. More specifically, Barack Obama happened.

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Extract

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Can Tweets and Tubes Inspire Pool Triumph? ; Blogs, Tweets and Virals Were the Stuff of a Madman's Dreams in the Last General Election. Will the Rise of the Internet Mark a Seismic Shift in Campaigning in the Westcountry, Graeme Demianyk Wonders

America's first black President used the web to build support and raise donations.

Videosharing website YouTube and social networking forum Facebook - both in their infancy in 2005 - were deployed to spectacular effect, generating a grassroots buzz that helped clear Obama's path to the White House.

This was politics embracing Web 2.0, an advanced way to use the Internet that involved sharing information, be it blogs, vi...

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