Obama Online

Barack seems to be getting it right online

Aside from Obama being the best thing from the US since Bagels and Stevie Ray Vaughan, he is without doubt running the most savvy online political movement to date. BBC, Time and CNN have all made numerous reports detailing how Obama’s new online approach to US political campaigning really has seperated the men from the boys.

Whilst the body of Obama’s online presence is constructed from thousands of Gigabytes of user-generated content, from You Tube videos, support sites, Facebook groups, to myspace pages and countless other online facets. What has really struck me is the sheer quality of his campaign site and how it perfectly caps and drives the overall online support from his ad-hoc online campaigners.

On review www.barackobama.com is a beautifully crafted site. Evidence of strong IA and design promotes excellent useability and user engagement. It’s only is obvious that the site has been well concieved but equally well executed. Aside from the numerous XHTML validation errors (does Barack not care about the screen reader users of the world? Or Section 508 for that matter!) they’ve utilized a good selection of Javascript-features - using my much loved jQuery from John Resig - and really embraced the interactive state of the modern web.

All-in-all I think www.barackobama.com is a vast improvement over any of the political campaign sites of the past. The British parties really have a serious way to go, as New Labor online certainly isn’t a good reflection of technological embracement. And irrelevant of his online presence or pretty website, I really do hope he wins the Presidency!

p.s. I’ve only just noticed the more than slight similarity between the Mc Cain Chips and John Mccain logos!