I had planned to go on a pilgrimage of the significant places in the life of Thomas Tallis this Summer, to add some sense of emotional and geographical connection to my amateur study of his forty-part motet Spem in Alium. If you’re not familiar with the piece you can find a version here, though at 12 minutes long its about 2 mins too long for me.
So far, my pilgrimage hasn’t been possible – the year has been busy, and I’ve been learning more about the piece and its composer at a rate which has lead to a constantly changing stream of thoughts and opinions, each needing further work to understand better. I’d like my thoughts on the piece to have settled down a little before going to the places of Tallis’s life and death. In particular, if there is anyone out there of a historical bent who could make an educated guess as to the probable locations of Court in the years 1568/69, I’d really like to hear from you.
In the meantime, some of you might enjoy sharing this moment i just recorded where I indulge in the idea of an eighty party motet. I should’ve done my hair. I could’ve been less effusive. I shouldn’t peer over my glasses. Singing was a mistake. It could probably have used a script, but I thought I’d just fire up the camera and record this moment of late-night Bank Holiday early music geekery. Enjoy.
Update: I have heard a couple of people be quite sniffy about the King’s Singers version of Spem. They are, whisper it….. populist.
As there are only six singers in the group, they used multi-tracking to produce their recording. I find it one of the most interesting recordings. Fascinated then to see that they made a video when recording it, which gives some sense of the technical complexity (though a minor gripe is that it doesn’t show off the key antiphonal moments well). These guys either have an incredible sense of timing, or a metronome ticking in their headphones!
I ended my summary post with the question “how did the party websites become so universally dull?” It’s easy to leave a question floating, much more dangerous to attempt to answer it. Below, I lay out my thoughts not as a polished prescription, but as a conversation starter for the parties.
As we aproach a general election and I open a political party website, it can be a little like sitting next to a stranger on a long train journey. I might be lucky enough to find someone interesting and engaging, who is up for a stimulating conversation. If it goes really well, maybe we’ll exchange contact details, have a few drinks, and a beautiful friendship is born out of a chance encounter. Alternatively, I might get the latent drunk – peacefuly asleep until the very last minute, when he suddenly starts shouting meaningless babble over my head at no-one in particular.
Political party website content generally takes one of three forms. First is rolling news and comment – press releases, and web news stories. Second is information on campaigns and policies. Finally, information on conferences, and things like resources for activists – content for the internal audience.
Given that there will be a heavy supporter bias in the visitors to any political party site, rolling news well done is an opportunity to keep activists and supporters engaged and motivated. A balance is required between news and comment on the issues of the day, and news and comment on the party itself. This latter group of content – information about the people in HQ, the process stories, candidate selections, has a significant, and I would argue growing, pulling power. However, parties are too keen to push this news to infrequently produced paper newsletters, or to Home sites.
Generally, my preferred measure of global website popularity comes from compete.com, who in this case only record traffic for the BNP and the Conservatives.
According to compete.com, the Conservative Party saw 4,698 unique visitors in June 2009 to the BNP’s 3,343. Unfortunately, in this case Compete is not the best site to use – Compete’s figures massively under-report the actual traffic, probably because the majority of their data is gathered in the US.
Alexa
Without access to the likes of Hitwise, this forces me into the rather unpredictable world of Alexa. I don’t normally assign a great deal of weight to Alexa figures, and will avoid rehashing the arguments for and against their data here. However, I wasn’t prepared to use Alexa ranking as part of the scores, so they don’t have any bearing on the end result.
In the 2005 General Election the minor parties scored 6% of the vote in the Norwich North consistuency. After a febrile summer in Westminster politics their share of the vote rose to 28% in the recent by-election, and they could be ready to steal a march online too.
Over the past few weeks I have been studying the websites of the big British political parties. Generally ignoring their presence on social networking sites, or any microsites, I have examined the effectiveness of their core website – I wanted to know how serious each of the parties is about using their home on the ‘net to reach out to their key audiences. Political party websites receive relatively low levels of traffic, which is one of the reasons why the parties find it important to get out there on to the wider ‘net – if during your lunchbreak you quickly surf Facebook, perhaps a news website, or your email, you would probably never dream of including a political party in that list.
So the parties need to get out there and grab your attention wherever you are. Back at home however, the party’s own sites may get low traffic, but the visitors are generally high value. They include:
The media
Party activists / PPCs / staff / potential members of staff
Existing and potential voters (including members and supporters)
Political stakeholders (eg Electoral Commission)
These audiences are served through the provision of:
Means to join / support the party financially or through email
A database of candidates (and local / regional parties, outside of election time)
Policy information
Means to contact / interact with the party
I used nine tests to examine how well the parties are serving their audiences, and these are the results…
The best political party website in Britain
Relative to the rest of the field, the Conservatives come out as the clear winner, nearly 20% ahead of their nearest competitor. This is well deserved and no surprise, as it is by far the most fully resourced of the sites. Perhaps more surprising is that the nearest competitor is the BNP – and that the Labour party come bottom of the pile. The Liberal Democrats are beaten by both the BNP and UKIP.
