The potential—and limits—of the internet in political campaigning

THE transatlantic trade in political tactics has not always been one-way. In 1994 America’s Republican Party adopted a Westminster-style policy manifesto for its conquering mid-term election campaign. Thanks to Barack Obama, though, the British have more recently been relegated to taking notes. The part played by internet campaigning in his rise from upstart senator to president has been studied forensically by the Labour Party, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Veterans of the Obama campaign often sweep through London to show the natives how to use new media to organise activists, raise money and communicate with voters. There is talk of Britain being on the verge of its first truly digital election.

Measured against these hopes, the coming campaign will disappoint, and not because British politicians are irredeemably analog. Labour and Tory insiders agree that the Obama model is hard to export beyond America’s unusual polity, with its weak party organisations, primary races and endless, costly campaigns. “Almost any other Western democracy would be a more useful comparator for us,” says one. ...

Scouring blogs for useful information

“I NOTICED that the doormat was at a slightly crooked angle. I reached down and moved the mat back into its correct place.” Thus began a recent entry on The dullest blog in the world. Although this publication is something of a satire on the internet’s inane blogs, scientists are finding—to their surprise—that useful information can actually be mined from the tedium of the blogosphere.

Andrew Gordon and his colleagues at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles have been trying to teach computers about cause and effect. Computers are not good at dealing with causality. They can identify particular events but working out relationships is more difficult. This is particularly true when it comes to using computers to analyse the human experience. ...

The joy of unlimited communication

WHAT will the future of social networking look like? Imagine this: your digital video recorder automatically copies a television show that several of your friends were talking about on a social network before the show went on air. Or this: you get into your car, switch on its navigation system and ask it to guide you to a friend’s house. As you pull out of the driveway, the network to which you both belong automatically alerts her that you are on your way. And this: as you are buying a pair of running shoes that you think one of your friends might be interested in, you can send a picture to their network page with a couple of clicks on a keypad next to the checkout counter.

Networking types like to talk about the idea that there is a pervasive social element in all of the things people interact with. Listen to them long enough and you come away with the impression that your teapot will soon be twittering about what you had for breakfast. Some of the ideas outlined above may sound far-fetched, but a service such as Facebook Connect, which already lets people export their social graph of online relationships to other web-enabled gizmos, suggests they are not completely outlandish. Everything from cars to cookers could ultimately have social connectivity embedded in it. ...