Tories Launch Facebook App

I'll admit, the idea intrigues me. However, I'll also admit that I had the same idea last Christmas when brainstorming a campaign I was working on at the time. Get people to donate their Facebook statuses or Tweets. Simple and yet the immediate potential to reach hundreds upon hundreds of people. Certainly interesting to say the least.

Well, in the run up to the European elections, the British Conservative Party has launched a new Facebook App and is asking its supporters to donate their Facebook statuses. The application allows the party to takeover your status and feed in its own message. Obviously all campaign orientated. At the same time, users can still update their statuses manually.

This is just the latest example of the Tory party moving online and capitalising on the cost-effectiveness of digital media. They have also recently used Google AdWords (PPC) to target searches relating to MPs expenses, and David Cameron has participated in Q&A sessions via CoveritLive and Twitter.

To counter all this online activity, the Labour has launched a website, cameronsconservatives.co.uk, to bolster their on-going campaign theme that David Cameron will cut public spending. However, all-in-all, the Labour party has focused far less attention online then their opposition.

This is the video that Labour produced:

Worst Job in the World

One of Brazil's most popular job sites, Emprego Certo, has just launched a new online campaign to highlight their service. Here we are shown the horrible story of a man whose occupation is not regulated, has no union, doesn’t allow weekends off and makes him work up to 14 hours day.

Shocking stuff.....

1930's Fashion Predictions for the Year 2000

Not sure it's worth saying anything - just have a look.

Chinese Government Blocks Twitter

News broke today that the Chinese government has begun blocking access to social networking sites such as Twitter, Flickr and Blogger in the aproach to the June 4th 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Since last Tuesday, Chinese people started reporting sudden outages in web services. The problems were found on both the sites themselves and through third party applications.

Strangely enough, many Chinese people don't even comment on these types of outages due to the regularity with which the government controls/changes access to social networking websites in the lead up to politically sensitive dates.

D-Day 65 Online

The Royal British Legion has enveiled their new site, www.dday65.org.uk, created by The Gate. The site is geared towards this Saturday's D-Day remembrance activities, and allows visitors to plant a virtual flag on a Google map of the Normandy beaches, with an accompanying message. The online activity will mirror the offline activities that will take place on the beaches themselves. Interestingly, users that plant a flag will recieve an email with the necessary link/embed code to add 'their flag' to a number of different social networking profiles.