Blogs made more in-roads into the political dictionary this week with the (Beta, of course) launch of webcameron, David Cameron’s new site. It’s only been up a couple of days so posts are still a little thin on the ground and I’m sure he’s still getting used to the idea. Design firm Head London have made a pretty good job of it all, and it fairly sings web 2.0. Everything is there - count them - Tag Cloud, Flickr feed, YouTube-style videos, guest blogs, widgets, PodCasts. Unfortunately there are a couple of non-Web2.0 code issues - a double doctype, inline styles and javascript in the hrefs, but it is light years ahead of what we would normally expect from a politician’s site.
The design is nice and clean, keeping away from the oh-so-obvious party-blue, and giving us a site it is actually pleasurable to be on. There is even a video clip of a conversation between (I assume) a guy from Head London and Mr Cameron regarding the sections of the site which haven’t launched and how they were going to deal with the high volume of comments. Now I would have thought that they would have given this a bit of thought beforehand, making sure that the early adopters weren’t left hanging waiting for replies. I’m sure there are several people employed full-time just moderating the comments, which all have to be approved before publication.
I hope that this site continues to be updated and isn’t left to be another fashion-following fad. Whether this is a good movement for politics itself I’m not sure - is it heading too far towards personality-led politics - but it does make the party more human, something which many large companies have already discovered.