Return to Normality

I’m back.  I’m alive.  The election was won. (Thanks, Avril).

Took a bit longer to get back to blogging than expected, due to a bug in the upgrade of WordPress, but all sorted now.

Childers Election Poster

A few online things to note from the campaign – Liveblogs and Twitter really came to life during the counts & results phase.  IrishElection.com did brilliantly at that stage.  The weakness of these media is still there, though: there’s no way of knowing what the reliability of the source is.  In the noise, there are great, solid sources (like your correspondant), and sources that are full of shite (like the Libertas spinners).  However, that applied equally to RTÉ, who occasionally got their announcements wrong.

Blogs, Facebook and YouTube didn’t have much effect on the campaign.  Having talked to a few internet-enabled politicos who were managing candidate websites, the traffic levels on election day and the few days before were higher than normal, but still in the low hundreds region at the highest.

I’m off to Canada in a month’s time (via DC), where the possibility of an election can’t be discounted.  July 27th is the date they’re theorising about, which would give me a good week of campaigning!

On another note, check out my little brother’s blog – he’s travelling around Asia on the way to Australia, and has just completed a 21-day trek in the Himalayas.