Oh. My. Heavens. David Cameron – who, for those finding it hard to remember anything about Conservative party politics without falling asleep, is the current party leader – has a new video blog, ‘webcameron.‘ Complete with dinky little logo, curved corners, what I’ll pretend are gradient fills, pink text highlights, del.icio.us buttons, and an almost-hidden ‘beta’ badge.
This isn’t New Labour, this is Conservatives 2.0.
The site’s been running since early in the month, documenting a trip to India, but today they’ve posted a welcome/intro piece from David, washing up in his kitchen while his kids pester him. It’s… well, making speeches isn’t the same as presenting to a camera, and he’s bound to find it hard. Either that, or it really is massively contrived. Time will tell.
[update: the site’s been built by Head London, who mention all manner of trendy websites in their post on the matter. One thing I didn’t notice as I recoiled in horror from the cheese quotient was the Open Blog, which appears to be a moderated public-posting thing.
My biggest question about all this is whether Cameron’s going to be able to stomach video blogging in the long run. Having somebody film you in your kitchen just after breakfast is tremendously intrusive – does he really want to go the distance with that? Yikes. I’d also be fascinated to see just how many layers of communications management are involved; he’s clearly not self-shooting, which implies that somebody’s editing. How quickly can they turn around a video blog post, when it’s not just Cameron talking to a webcam?
More to the point – would he continue video blogging from Number 10?
Meanwhile, there’s a bit more information from The Guardian. This isn’t so web 2.0 that they didn’t issue press releases or give journos early access, it seems.]
the back ground’s all too sqeaky-clean and they’ve plucked the lable off the ecover washing up liquid – so full production values in action then, webcam it ain’t. Yet another attempt to get politicians to appear human.