Just took a quick look at Gordon Brown’s new website which was launched today to coincide with the start of his bid for leadership of the Labour Party and by default also Prime Minister (for the benefit of my non-British readers, yes I know this is ridiculous!).
Apart from the bizarre alterations to the RSS feed icon identified by Simon Collister at eDemocracy Update, the first thing that strikes me is the photo on the homepage. At first, I wondered if the photo had been doctored. That’s certainly what it looked like on Gordon Brown’s campaign site. However, when I saved the image and uploaded it to my own site it looked absolutely fine.
Not quite the scoop I was hoping for, but a demonstration of the generally dismissive attitude of British politicos to the Internet and technology.
Given the recent scandal involving a Labour Party local council candidate, who doctored a photo to try and prove he attended the national anti-war march in February 2003, you would have thought Brown’s e-campaign team would have been more careful.
Correcting this error would not have taken them much effort. Instead, Britain’s Prime Minister in waiting kicks off his campaign surrounded by a whiff of scandal and looks amateurish and unprofessional.
It’s odd that Gordon seems to have spent so little energy in putting a good campaign site together. I mean could you imagine a contender in the US having a site that didn’t offer social networking etc?? Does GB even have a campaign manager overseeing the web - data mining etc?? I doubt it.
I agree that Brown is unlikely to have even bothered putting together a web team. Although this is undoubtedly a purely tactical decision, i.e. he will win easily so why bother, I feel he would benefit politically by being on the cutting edge. It would be a strong statement, particularly for a man who believes so fervently in establishing Britain as a world leader. This was an opportunity for him to lead by example.
We should get a better idea of Brown’s attitude to technology and the Internet once he becomes PM. It will be interesting to see if he continues Blair’s extensive use of YouTube in recent weeks.