John Tory, domain-name hijacker?

Mathew Ingram, 28/09/07 at 3:49 PM EDT

Could the Liberal Party of Ontario have a claim against the Conservatives for "domain-name hijacking?"

Although it's not as common now as it was in the early days of the Internet, domain-name "hijacking" or domain-name "squatting" still exists. That's where someone registers www.thenewcoke.com because they know that Coke is going to want the URL -- and then they hold it hostage and wait for Coke to pay up for it. In some cases, interest groups will register a domain name that they know will be associated with something they don't like, and then post things that take advantage of the audience they get from people mistakenly coming to the site.

In the late 1990s, for example, a man opposed to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) registered the domain peta.org and then set up a website devoted to a parody group called People Eating Tasty Animals. The real PETA sued and a court eventually ordered that the domain name be turned over to the organization and the site taken down.

If you go to daltonmcguinty.ca, which you might think would be the personal site of Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty, you see a website that looks virtually identical to the one at dalton.ca (which is Mr. McGuinty's real website): it has a white background with a simple text menu and a black box with short, declarative sentences written in it -- except for the fact that it says the exact opposite of what the text on the real Dalton McGuinty website says (it also has a prominent red stamp that says "Not the real thing").

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), which administers domain names in Canada, has been known to take action in such cases: earlier this year, the agency forced a group of homeowners to take down the site they had set up at the domain name McKeeHomes.ca for the sole purpose of criticizing their builder (a company of the same name). In another recent cyber-squatting case, the CBC won control of the hockeynightincanada.ca domain name from an individual who had registered it and then tried to sell it to the corporation.

In case the Liberal Party wants to look into things a bit more, CIRA's dispute resolution policy is here.

(Thanks to Greg Elmer of Ryerson's Infoscape Research Lab for the tip).

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Who will win? Lay your bets

Mathew Ingram, 26/09/07 at 4:48 PM EDT

Maybe voting in an election just isn't exciting enough for you -- maybe you like to look at it as a game, or as an experiment in human psychology and crowd behaviour. If so, then one of a number of "election predictor" websites out there might be up your alley.

Someone from Hill & Knowlton emailed me recently to remind me of their site, the H&K Ontario Election Predictor. The public relations firm has been running similar sites for federal and provincial elections for several years now (they do them in other countries as well, including Australia).

According to the description at the website, the predictor "uses a mathematical formula based on the concept of proportional shift to generate seat predictions." As more and more people use the site and say what they think the final outcome will be, the predictor gets more data and then compares that with the results from the last election. The differences "are allocated proportionally on a riding by riding basis," the site says, and then the system determines if that means a change of party for any particular seat.

In effect, the H&K predictor is a handicapping system that looks at what parties won which seats in the previous election, then tries to predict how that will change in the current election based on user input. The site also has something new this year: a Facebook application, which you can easily install and tinker with on your Facebook page.

The University of British Columbia's business school has a similar tool, which is based on research that the school used to set up a virtual stock market. The Sauder School of Business Election Stock Market makes predictions about who will win overall "based on a prediction of the election result in each constituency," using what the site calls a "voter migration matrix." The matrix is based on the assumption that "voters change their opinion about candidates and parties in a similar way across the entire province [and] this 'swing' can be applied across all constituencies."

A website called DemocraticSpace.com, meanwhile, has its own predictor of election results, which takes the results from the most recent election and then alters them based on the aggregated results from the five most recent surveys from polling firms and is updated regularly.

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Green Party videos and Craigslist

Mathew Ingram, 24/09/07 at 3:52 PM EDT

Among the people keeping an eye on how the Ontario election unfolds online are Greg Elmer and his team at Ryerson's Infoscape Research Lab. Greg is an expert on media and cultural theory who is tracking how the Web and other "new media" are influencing the election campaign. Here are some of the Lab's recent updates:

-- one of the places to find no-holds-barred political discussion, even if it is somewhat profane at times, is the political discussion group on the Toronto branch of craigslist.org, the popular U.S.-based online classified site.

-- the Lab's research tracking shows that videos from the Green Party are drawing dramatically more viewers on YouTube than videos from the other parties; viewership is as much as 10 times higher, perhaps because the party was excluded from the official TV debates.

-- in a recent sample of blog posts from 100 top political blogs in Canada, the most talked-about issues were the exclusion of Green Party leader Frank de Jong from the all-party debate, and the referendum on the "mixed-member proportional" election proposal that is part of the campaign.

-- a survey of the "blogosphere" shows that as far as bloggers are concerned, Dalton McGuinty lost the election debate.

-- the Facebook groups with the largest number of members include groups devoted to MMP (2,461 members), the idea of a student strike (1,550), and raising the minimum wage (1,254)

-- the Infoscape Research Lab also notes "the emergence of increasing numbers of video-bloggers, non campaign-related individuals who are posting cynical and humorous videos about the provincial election."

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Who cares about the Interweb?

Mathew Ingram, 21/09/07 at 2:08 PM EDT

Overheard by a reliable source, who was chatting with a very highly-placed member of the campaign staff of a certain political party involved in the current Ontario election -- after someone asked whether he (or she) was paying attention to what people said on blogs or elsewhere on the Internet:

"Not really. I'm more comfortable reading AM talk radio transcripts [in order to gauge public opinion] than a survey of Internet blogs. One or two elections from now, things might be different."

We wish this particular individual all the best. Hopefully, all the people riding their horse-and-buggies to the polling station will pick his (or her) candidate.

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In other news, one of the candidates that seems to have a pretty solid grasp of Campaign 2.0 techniques is Peter Shurman, the PC candidate for Thornhill in Toronto. His website makes full use of the entire suite of Web 2.0-style "social media" tools, including podcasts (which you can subscribe to via RSS or "really simple syndication" so they arrive in your feed reader or in iTunes automatically), a blog, a Facebook group and Flickr photos.

The podcasts seem like a natural move, since Mr. Shurman is a former broadcaster with CFRB 1010. The website also features handy buttons beside news releases and other info that make it easy to print, email and post an excerpt to a blog -- and visitors can click and save a release or other content to their account at del.icio.us, a "social bookmarking" tool. Even better, the blog actually appears to have been written by the candidate, which is unusual (most are written by assistants).

All of that, however, makes it seem even more odd that visitors can't post comments on the blog. They can post a comment on the podcasts and news releases and other things on the site, but not on the blog. Still waiting for a comment from the candidate on why that might be. Perhaps he's just shy.

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Why doesn't Dalton do email?

Mathew Ingram, 20/09/07 at 1:48 PM EDT

By now, it seems to be taken for granted that any politician who wants to be seen as current on technology trends -- not to mention wanting to actually interact with constituents on some other basis than the typical baby-kissing hospital visit, plowing match or ribbon-cutting event -- will have a website, and maybe even a blog, and possibly a Facebook account (even if someone else is in charge of changing the candidate's status message).

The Premier of Ontario, however, doesn't seem that interested in such things -- which you might have guessed from his comments in the past about how Facebook doesn't really serve any useful purpose and therefore it's okay to ban provincial workers from accessing it. I can understand him not liking Facebook, and maybe even not having a blog -- but it's somewhat troubling to hear that he doesn't even do email.

Leigh Himel, a digital marketing expert, wrote on her blog recently about her efforts to get a message to the premier. The exact nature of the message isn't really important (okay, it had to do with the province's attitude towards Toronto), but Ms. Himel felt compelled to share her thoughts with Mr. McGuinty. She couldn't comment on his "blog" because he doesn't have one, and the blog at the Liberal website doesn't allow comments (a flaw shared by many other political blogs).

So she looked around for an email address, and eventually found one -- but then discovered that it has been disabled. When you send a message to dalton.mcguinty@premier.gov.on.ca, you get an automated reply that tells you the email address doesn't work any more, and instead you have to go to the premier's website and type your message into an only feedback form. A note further informs you that "If my message back to you contains personal information, the government's privacy rules require that I send you my reply by regular mail."

Isn't that helpful? We can understand the premier and his staff being concerned about spam (aren't we all?), but this seems a little extreme. No email, no Facebook, no blog -- just a single, bleak, 1998-style feedback form on the website. You can do better, Mr. Premier.

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YouTube and the campaign trail

Mathew Ingram, 19/09/07 at 1:41 PM EDT

By now, every U.S. politician has not only heard of George Allen's "macaca" moment, but has committed the central lesson of that incident to heart: namely, that at virtually any moment someone with a cellphone could capture you saying or doing something that could torpedo your entire political career, and within minutes that video could be viewed by millions of people through the magic of YouTube and Facebook.

We haven't had the Canadian equivalent of such a thing yet -- an amateur video of Toronto candidate Sarmite "Sam" Bulte's controversial constituency meeting from the last federal election is probably as close as we've come so far -- but the potential for one is always there.

U.S. candidate John Kerry no doubt felt pretty secure heading into a recent campaign stop at the University of Florida, until a student named Andrew Meyer got up to ask a question. After a fairly long-winded preamble about the 2004 U.S. election and about Iraq, the student began to ask a series of pointed questions, but was removed from the microphone by campus police. Someone with a video camera recorded the whole episode.

As he was being taken from the room, you can hear Meyer screaming as he is hit several times by a jolt of electricity from a Taser stun weapon, and there are gasps of astonishment from the crowd and shouts of "Oh my god" as he continues to yell in pain. While all this is happening, Senator Kerry says virtually nothing about the incident, and tries to continue with his comments as though nothing unusual was happening.

Within hours of the incident, the video was posted on dozens of websites, including one belonging to the student himself, where supporters were already in the process of organizing a protest on his behalf. By midday on Wednesday, the video clip posted on YouTube had been viewed more than 500,000 times.

Although it doesn't justify what occurred at the Kerry debtate, more than one commentator on the incident noted that Meyer seems to enjoy publicity, since his website is all about comedy videos and other material he has created with his friends. According to one report on ABC News, he can be heard asking someone nearby to videotape him before he gets to the microphone, and another person who said they were at the meeting described him rushing the mike with police in tow before he even asked a question. According to a police report, Meyer only reacted violently when cameras were filming him.

Staged or not, the incident is an example of what New York Times blogger Mike Nizza refers to as "Instant Political Martyrdom Via YouTube," and virtually every politician north or south of the border has to have that on his or her radar.

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Wikinews creating candidate interview database

Mathew Ingram, 18/09/07 at 12:52 PM EDT

Most people have probably heard of Wikipedia by now, but the "open-source encyclopedia" also has a journalistically-inclined sibling that is less well-known, called Wikinews. In the same way that Wikipedia allows anyone to add facts to an encyclopedia-style entry about a subject (which are then approved by a group of senior editors), Wikinews is designed to allow non-journalists to contribute to the creation of a news article about an event -- such as Hurricane Katrina or the terrorist bombings in London, England.

One Wikinews editor, a Toronto resident by the name of Nicholas Moreau, is using the site to create a database of interviews with the political candidates in the upcoming Ontario election -- all 400 of them (there's an example here). A graduate of the advertising and graphic design program at Humber College, he has written for the local newspaper in Brampton (among other things) and as a hobby is involved with Wikinews and is also the Canadian media contact for Wikimedia, the umbrella organization that oversees both Wikinews and Wikipedia.

"My political background essentially starts and ends with having a sign on my family's lawn during the last municipal election," Nicholas said in an e-mail. "The primary reason that I've chosen to do this coverage is that it's the most amount of useful content that I can create in the shortest amount of time. I could spend hours writing articles on topics that have only a fringe audience, or spend no more than 15 minutes per candidate and potentially serve thousands."

The Wikinews contributor says he did a similar series of interviews during the recent municipal election, and one incumbent's response to a question was quoted in a local newspaper.

Nicholas says that at the moment he is putting together the database of interviews himself, but that there are several "Wikinewsies" available that he can turn to for help if he is getting swamped. The interviews consist of a series of open-ended questions -- the same for each candidate -- and respondents are given as much space as they wish to answer. Wikinews edits the interviews "as little as possible, only for typographical considerations."

But can't the candidates lie?

"Yes, of course candidates can lie the whole way through the interview," says Nicholas. "But they can do that in their campaign material or in a debate as well. However, I were to notice a factual error in the responses, or a reader was to report it on the comment pages, I could and would insert an editor's note, calling them out on the incorrect statement."

The benefits of the Wikinews format, he says, are that:

1.  The raw response is available: "With the municipal elections, many of the respondents in each city had broken sentences, foul spelling, etc. While no one would vote strictly on written literacy, it helps raise doubts about some candidates' actual level of intelligence, as opposed to that of their team."

2.  Each candidate is given the same questions: "So that each candidate is treated with as much respect as every other. Most Green candidates have been thanking me on this point, as many claim they've otherwise been all but excluded locally in their riding."

3.  Voters can compare answers: "Voters can directly compare answers between articles, thanks to the structure, instead of fishing around in campaign material or formal articles."

As with Wikipedia, all of the content on Wikinews -- including the candidate interviews -- is available under a Creative Commons license, which means that anyone can reuse or remix the content without having to get permission.

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Facebook groups and campaign widgets

Mathew Ingram, 17/09/07 at 3:15 PM EDT

If you're looking for Campaign 2.0-type material (as I am), it quickly becomes apparent that finding Facebook groups that are relevant to the election can be a bit of a crapshoot.

Google searches don't really turn up pages on the Facebook site (although that is going to change, as the site has said it plans to allow Google to index individual profiles) and the search function in Facebook itself... well, leaves a little something to be desired. You can search, but it's difficult -- if not impossible -- to filter the pages full of results in any useful way. Obviously, the way you're supposed to find out about them is through social networking  :-)

That said, there are plenty of Facebook groups devoted to the Ontario election in some way. There are the usual "vote for X candidate" groups, most of which have only a few dozen members and little activity, and then there are the issue-specific and party-specific groups. Despite the fact that few people even understand what the proposal involves, the "Vote for MMP" group -- which is devoted to stirring up support for the "multi-member" representation model -- had a whopping 1,939 members at last check, more than all of the major party groups combined.

The NDP group supporting Howard Hampton had almost 500 members at last check, while the Conservative one supporting John Tory had more than 600 -- and discussion groups with topics such as "Dalton lies again!!!" The Conservative Party group itself had about 600 members as well. John Tory's personal campaign site only had 200 members, however, and no photos or videos had been uploaded. The discussion forum was similarly lifeless.

The Liberal party group -- called Paint It Red -- had more than 600 members, while a group called "Defeat Dalton McGuinty" had almost 200 members. There is even a group called "Dalton McGuinty Doesn't Know His Asshole From His Elbow," but it only has three members and no discussions underway. (the "Dalton McGuinty is Handsome" group has 67 members). 

The Ontario Young Liberals group has almost 600 members. There are groups devoted to criticizing John Tory's proposal to fund faith-based schools (98 members), and one devoted to improving the turnout on election day, which has just 42 members and virtually no discussion. Not surprisingly -- since Facebook started as a university-focused service -- a Group called "Freeze Ontario Tuition" has almost 900 members. One that advocates raising the minimum wage has more than 1,200 members, and one called "Stop McGuinty's Crusade Against Facebook" has almost 600 members.

The NDP, meanwhile, are one of the few parties to make the leap to developing their own Facebook application, or "widget." The app, which Facebook users can add to their pages just by clicking, displays headlines from the OntarioNDP.com site, as well as some other "helpful links." At last check, the widget had 11 users, and the page devoted to it said that the news feed had been temporarily disabled.

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YouTube, Facebook and RSS -- it's Campaign 2.0

Mathew Ingram, 13/09/07 at 11:56 AM EDT

In the old days, it was all about TV appearances and newspaper coverage. Now, an election just wouldn’t be the same without blogs, podcasts, YouTube clips and RSS feeds. The Ontario election is no different, although certain players have jumped on the “Web 2.0” bandwagon with more gusto than others.

The Tory campaign, for example, has a slick-looking video blog, its news release page has an RSS feed, and there’s a spot on the “Get involved” page where you can check out the party’s Flickr photos or become a member of its Facebook group.

At least one person on the Tory team also seems pretty savvy with the mashups as well: there’s a video clip on YouTube that uses snippets from The Simpsons to attack Premier Dalton McGuinty’s record in a fairly sophisticated way -- although the video has only been watched a few thousand times (in other words, it’s no Lonelygirl15 or Tay Zonday).

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be looking at how the parties and candidates use (or misuse) the Web, blogs, Facebook, YouTube and other forms of new media -- or “social media,” as some like to call it -- as well as how others are using those tools to support or attack them.

Is anyone making creative use of Facebook to get out the vote? Will we see an Ontario politician embarrassed by a cellphone video, as a U.S. candidate was not so long ago? Will we discover that a campaign worker has fiddled with the details of his candidate’s Wikipedia entry?

If you come across any examples of how the various parties and their candidates and supporters are using the Web -- in a positive or negative way -- I’d appreciate it if you could let me know. You can post a comment here, or you can email me at mingram@globeandmail.com (if you’d rather I didn’t use your name in print, please mention that in your email).

Campaign 2.0 has begun!

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