Campaign 2.0 – what in the hell?

iCampaign on iOnline

I never thought I’d dedicate more than 5 seconds to Politics in a year let alone find myself writing post after post – not about politics but about the Idiots 2.0.

I read the headline in the all new original i newspaper (iReport is not CNN´s idea!) that Manuela Ferreira Leite (yes the one that publicised women in chat and lovers encounters in Portugal) was hitting back. If Socrates had bought into Blue State Digital, then Ferreira Leite would go local – I couldn’t be bothered to dig deeper (I’m not a professional remember? This is amateur hour).

Agostinho Branquinho, let’s call him Mr White, believes that “this campaign will permit the increase in participation of the citizens” also adding that “now with the new platforms, they (the people) can act – they have a role to play”. Mr White is the PSD campaign manager. This is painful to write.

Well, those “platforms” aren’t new nor are their use, so what has changed? Well Politics is now getting involved in web 2.0 – never too late really, but they aren’t abandoning their usual approach of getting knee deep as soon as they can pronounce the names of a few of the tools in use.

There is little or no Search engine Optimization employed on this site – if you just look at the urls why bother to go further;
The official site is Politica De Verdade, the flickr account Retrato da Verdade, the YouTube channel Canal Da Verdade (29 years old?) and the *press release* twitter account – a_verdade. You go figure – too clever for me! I just have problems typing the site url in.
What happened to Ferreira Leite the person? Why not use FerreiraLeite on Twitter? I know I registered it and have not abused of it at all but Mr. White can easily steal it back by spending a few minutes on the line with Mr. Twitter.
And so they killed Ferreira Leite off but why do that? Politics should know you can’t erase the past. There are always the visual memories.

I don’t really know what’s worse – the political mess or the lack of journalism in those that report on the *facts*. When you read the new iEverything paper (except everything iApple) you get the idea that copying and pasting press releases is back in fashion. Shame no one bothered to dig deeper as that is what traditional media should be about.

When I read the Campaign 2.0 article, what I really wanted was an in depth analysis of social networks and politics and not the Cheese Cake version.