Friday, June 22, 2007

Throwing the web away?

A few weeks ago it was reported that the man behind WebCameron, Sam Roake, had decided to move on away from CCHQ for bigger, and presumably better things. Since then WebCameron has had a massive overhaul, much of the interactivity of the site - which was groundbreaking and unprecedented - has been lost, and, as ConservativeHome points out today the frequency with which the site has been updated has meant it's "in danger of making the dead tree press look fast".

From a purely technical point of view, WebCameron has clearly become a much more controlled environment. It's not regressed to Web 1.0 but it is, undoubtedly a Web 1.5 site rather than a 2.0 one. All of the video embed code is still available, and the visual quality of the video has approved remarkably, but there is now a flatness to the site that there wasn't before.

This is both understandable and frustrating. The web provides politicians with the ability to interact, yet, at the highest level, when you interact with people in such an open and non-mediated environment you will, inevitability, attract those that you wish you could not. I have no reason to think that the changes on WebCameron happened because the level of interactivity had become too much, however, shying away from it may be OK now, but in the future I don't think it will be.

We're seeing the impact in the US already, where politicians are finding themselves faced with videos of what they've said, compared to what they've done, en masse. In a few years time the UK will catch up, and WebCameron had a chance to preempt that problem. It seems though that the loss of the so-called "tea boy" * (as some left-wing bloggers called him) may actually have ruined that chance.
* For clarification, Sam Roake was anything but a "tea boy" and losing him was not a good thing.

6 comments:

Flavious said...

Hrm, yes the confidence of the junior masses almost with your grasp, it seems the men python have the answer as always...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcxKIJTb3Hg

Anonymous said...

He was hardly a tea boy, and he was pushed out by control freaks.

dizzy said...

OH I know he wasn't a tea boy. As I said, it was some left wing bloggers who called him that.

Anonymous said...

You said Web 2.0.

You have been in too many meetings with marketing and management.

dizzy said...

Nah.. I am merely lowering myself to the language of the masses

Anonymous said...

The previous version of webcameron used to parse 'preview' and 'post' differently. I always had the impression that no-one had ever bothered to debug it.