On Saturday June 2, 2007, Susan Delacourt of Toronto Star used research from the Lab's on-going Code Politics: Party Leaders and Partisans on YouTube [1] project to discuss the online reaction to new videos from the Liberals and Conservatives. The article is accessible on the Star's website: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/220723 [2].
Low-tech won the cyberspace race this week between Liberals and Conservatives, according to the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University, which has been tracking political fortunes on the Internet.
A series of three Web advertisements by the young Liberals, a takeoff on the Mac-PC commercials, as well as a homemade video of a speech by Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, got three to five times more traffic than the professional political ads released this week by the Conservatives, the lab found.
Infoscape also discovered that Tories seem more fascinated with Dion than Liberals are. Fifty per cent of the views of the Dion speech came from people who linked to it from a Tory Web log, compared to 14 per cent from folks who looked after it was promoted on the blog of Liberal Jason Cherniak.
Links:
[1] http://www.infoscapelab.ca/videopolitics
[2] http://www.thestar.com/News/article/220723
