Political parties are dipping their toes into the web to see if it's warm. The Tories have Webcameron, a substance-lite video diary and Labour has just launched a grassroots campaign site - labourspace.com - where supporters are encouraged to highlight and share the issues they care about, writes Alex Hilton.
On both sides, countless bloggers, independent of their party hierarchies, are conducting political battles across the web. Most notable of these maverick protagonists is Tim Montgomerie, former Chief of staff under Iain Duncan Smith, who has reinvented himself as the locus of British neo-conservatism.
His two projects, the ConservativeHome blog and the Internet TV station 18 Doughty Street, have, in a short period, become media outlets that cannot be ignored by Conservative HQ. A ConservativeHome campaign against the party's former CEO Mark MacGregor, lost him the reselection as candidate for the Thanet South constituency, which the Tories hope to gain at the next election.
Internet users don't want to be controlled and political parties can't bear to develop web applications that allow the freedom demanded by internet users. And because the parties are failing to embrace this mild anarchy of the internet, they are handing to unfettered bloggers and web-innovators a power that they won't easily yield.
Unwittingly, political parties are making space for a free market in web innovation that, at the next general election, will generate online communities, successful and unsuccessful virals, interactive web applications and games - expect politicians to pop up in online virtual realities like SecondLife for a start.
The web2.0 craze is offering political parties more possibilities than they have either the time or money to implement and so the mass of campaigners will be given free reign, unregulated by the Electoral Commission and irreverent towards codes of decency and etiquette. The danger for political parties is that, as they are left behind, they will all look increasingly like corporate dinosaurs, turning off the web generation they are so desperately seeking to court.
Alex Hilton of RecessMonkey who is advising several New Labour figures on using new media for campaigning
