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2.0 Yes, Progressive campaigning, maybe not

As a citizen and a voter, the sites of most candidates feel the same.

Now every politician or public life wannabe, running for office, has a template website, all done by some young aspiring political team and/or campaign media advisor. It doesn’t have the sparkle no more. Take any reasonable website of a candidate running for U.S. Congress or Senate, political candidates and parties in Europe or local government elections. They are the same! (ok, if you exclude the name of the candidate and some coloring).

Now, any respectable campaign has: a newsletter, an RSS feed, a Blog, a podcast a page on facebook... twitter, youtube, myspace, flickr, digg, stumble upon, linked in, you name it its there.
All the sites have a contribute button, a volunteer button, host an event, join the newsletter, get involved, watch the webTV, see the calendar, the issues, the media …

Although I am not trying to argue that all these tools are not important in a campaign. They have become Stereotypical and Must do’s. The whole point of Internet campaigning is to utilize the tools given to provide something new, innovative and progressive.

Smaller campaigns seems to take more risk, like Bob Barr that asked site users to record a 27 second ad and send it to the campaign so as to show it raw as a campaign commercial to the main stream media. ( the 3 seconds remaining are for the necessary “I’m Bob Barr, and I approve of this message”. Cool!
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