Danish Political Parties homepages graded….
It’s been some busy weeks, and last week was no exception (hence the slow posting rate here), as Im preparing to take off to the Digital Arts & Cultures conference in Perth this week.
One of the more interesting (and time-consuming) tasks of last week was serving as an “expert” in a panel established by the Danish news magazine Mandag Morgen that asked us to look at the main homepages of the Danish Political Parties and grade them according to a number of criteria, such as userfriendliness, rhetorics, debate possibilities etc. We were not too impressed, so they mostly got below average - some parties in some areas even flunked. The results are published today, but since I dont subscribe to Mandag Morgen, I cant link to the article that talks about the analysis. But DR has a news item about it, where you can see the average grade for each party and in which Im quoted for saying (and truly believing) that the political parties need to move away from the traditional sender-to-receiver view of communication to a more interactive, user-activating form of communication.
PS. Sadly, a similar review of the homepages back in November 2004 brought about the exact same conclusions from a similar panel.
2 comments
Eksperter anmelder partiers websites
DR citerer Urban for at skrive, at Mandag Morgen har sat et hold til at vurdere danske partiers websites.
En af hovedkonklusionerne er, at partierne ikke har fattet Internettets sociale dimension. Partierne taler for meget og lytter for lidt.
Det få…
Andreas in his post (linked above) has a good point in that perhaps the conclusion would have been different if we had also looked at the weblogs by individual politicians. It indeed would have been interesting to look at them as well, but it would have been a HUGE work to take them into consideration too. However, I do believe that most people when they want to learn about a given party’s politics, will go to the homepage of the party first and then start looking for candidates unless they are already so tech-savy that they know the blog address of candidates. I tried finding my way to a candidate in my local area on all the websites we tested, and in almost all cases it took at least 2-3 clicks, some scrolling and then, on several sites, the only way to gain more information about the candidates was to send them an e-mail. So there is a lot of work (also) to be done in making candidates and their personal websites more visible on the main party homepages - not the least, if a lot of the “social action” takes place on the personal homepages/blogs/podcasts/ etc.
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