Fianna Fail Bloggers
March 30th, 2007There has been a lot of publicity recently around Politicians blogging, particularly in the run-up to the General Election. Many people have said that Fianna Fail has been slow to take to the web, and other parties were using it better.
Over the last few months, I’ve been working with people throughout Fianna Fail to ensure the party makes the best use of the Internet at all levels of the campaign. This has seen a new Fianna Fail website launched, a new campaign site and a variety of content added to YouTube. I was involved at various levels in some of these, but most of the credit for the work done should go to Kevin, Seamus and Liam in Dublin. Sean Dorgan, General Secretary of Fianna Fail, was very supportive of the work as it went on, and ensured the necessary resources were put in place.
My main involvement with this project has been building a blog template for use by Fianna Fail candidates, and deploying a system that could be used by the candidates themselves. My main help in this project has been Cork North West TD Michael Moynihan and his Parliamentary Assistant Anthony Kelly. We’ve been working on his site since late last year, and have used it as the basis for the other Fianna Fail blogs. Siobhan Ambrose and Dara Calleary are both using the template now for their blogs, and a number of others are using it as a template for their websites. I hope to see a few more sites in place in the coming weeks.
The sites all use the excellent WordPress system, and the template is based on a heavily modified version of Kyle Neath’s Hemingway theme. Of course, these sites are all far from perfect, but we’ll keep working on them as the campaign goes on.
This election is going to be the first Irish election to see a major impact of the Internet. Blogging, videos through YouTube and the effective use of email have the potential to swing votes in very marginal constituencies, and effect the outcome of the election. Projects such as IrishElection.com, PoliticsInIreland.com and VoteTube.org are harnessing that potential.
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3 Responses to “Fianna Fail Bloggers”
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April 19th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Damien,
any reason why Michael Moynihan has commenting turned off on his site?
April 19th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Tom,
Oops. It’s not off, if you click on the title of the post that’ll take you to the individual page for the post, which has the box below for commenting.
That slip is my fault- I should have put the proper text on there about leaving a comment. I’ll get that done.
Cheers Tom,
Damien
April 19th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Tom,
That’s fixed now.
d