How bloggers and new media will make their presence felt in the coming general election.

You can see why the political parties are nervous about the general election. The media playing field on which it will be fought has a new, unfamiliar terrain thanks to online competition. Local newspapers may have closed or slimmed down, but political bloggers have forced politicians to rethink their relationship with the press.

What was once a cosy, exclusive Fleet Street corps of lobby reporters must now include irreverent, self-made stars of the blogosphere such as Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale. And new technology, from the online video that exposed Alan Duncan’s belief that MPs were forced to live on “rations” to the Conservatives publishing shadow cabinet expenses in real time, has changed the public’s expectations.

Set-piece campaigns, for instance, are now more problematic than ever before. A £500,000 Conservative poster campaign featuring an apparently airbrushed David Cameron was intended to get the election year off to a flying start. Within a few days, dozens of photoshopped spoofs appeared on MyDavidCameron.com. But new media also presents politicians of all persuasions with a chance to talk more directly to the public than ever before. Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, is one of many who have become adept at using micro-blogging website Twitter to speak simultaneously to constituents and the media.

Mr Cameron himself has assiduously used websites such as Mumsnet to reach out directly – with varying levels of success – to specific groups of voters.

And blogging tools and idioms, too, have allowed nimble new pressure groups such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, widely seen as a deniable attack-dog of the Tory Right, to emerge.

The fact remains, however, that the audience for political blogs is fairly limited. It may no longer be possible to dismiss them as a small band of bedroom obsessives poring over the traditional media’s droppings, but newspapers will still lead in setting the tone of the popular campaign.

Yet while many newspapers will still drip daily scorn on Gordon Brown rather than Mr Cameron, the social media will also play a key role. The internet, after all, can provide good copy. It is for their impact on the sociology of the political class and the Fourth Estate that this generation of political bloggers will be remembered.

Since the 2005 election, we have raced past the tipping point. Facebook has 23 million British users. About half of the eligible voters are social networkers, sharing and seeking recommendations among peers rather than trusting broadcast messages. The real contest is not the three-way blogs/newspapers/politicians fight, but how effectively each can cast its bait into the social networking sites, and who will have the greatest effect.

So what can we expect from this campaign? There will be widgets explaining tactical voting options to more people than ever before. As a result, the numbers voting against parties rather than for them will increase. Small parties without the resources to hit doorsteps may use these tools to reach that swelling protest vote.

The major parties will have “deniable outriders” to do poisonous negative campaigning on their behalf. Politicians will get personally savaged. There will be more tenuous attack-oriented arguments – ones that journalists wouldn’t have touched in the past.

The most interesting contribution social media may make is that it could offer the Tories an opportunity to project themselves as a responsible government-in-waiting. Tory strategists have already acknowledged that public pessimism may hurt them: if things really are that bad, the Conservatives know there’s a risk that the public could put aside their distaste for Gordon Brown and stick with the devil they know.

This will be a “downswing” election dominated by spending cuts rather than promised tax-handouts. Being positive will be difficult, and attack-bloggers won’t exactly help. So to sell the idea that responsible positive action is possible in a restricted economic climate, parties need a “big idea”.

The Tories’ “post-bureaucratic age” narrative relies heavily upon dynamic collaboration, a hallmark of the social web. It aims to apply open-source thinking to convene good judgment from a disparate community and to cut waste by reducing pen-pushers and consultants and by automating processes.

One of the brains the Tories have turned to is MySociety founder Tom Steinberg. His fingerprints appear to be all over shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt’s pledge of £1 million in Cabinet Office funding to the best idea for crowd-sourcing public intelligence.Several politicians would be tempted by the reflexive offer to let voters “have your say”, but this is a cannier step. Mr Hunt is looking to get the public to help interpret and re-present government data.

The Conservatives need the social web to help create a positive, reassuring buzz around them. Offering a narrative that breaks the economic stalemate may be Cameron’s brightest hope. Playing a part in that may be the real impact that social media has on the 2010 election.

Paul Evans blogs at blog.localdemocracy.org.uk

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/

The rapid pace of technology is creating ‘micro-generations’, where teenagers are left behind by younger siblings, says James Delingpole.

My 11-year-old son, like all 11-year-old sons, thinks his Dad is incredibly, risibly out-of-touch. He mocks me for using words like “video” when I mean “DVD”, for preferring CDs to free downloads, for watching TV on the television instead of on the laptop, and for wearing my shirt with one top button undone when obviously it should be two.

But what the poor boy doesn’t yet realise is that the last laugh will be on me. Whereas it took me three decades to become the embarrassing fuddy-duddy I am now, he and his nine-year-old sister are going to be past their best in less than 10 years. Such is the weird side-effect of our fast-accelerating technology: you’re past it by the time you hit 20.

This phenomenon of the micro-generation gap – where 16 year-olds sneer at 19 year-olds for being oh-so-square, Daddy-O – came to light six months ago, in a widely publicised report written by a teenager on work experience at Morgan Stanley. Teenagers, revealed Matthew Robson (then 15), in a report named How Teenagers Consume Media, use their laptops as radios (streaming music from, say, Last FM so as to avoid adverts and DJ prattle), get round high cinema prices by watching pirated DVDs, prefer Facebook to Bebo, and never use Twitter, which they consider a hobby for old people like Stephen Fry.

The last two points came as an especial surprise to us oldsters, who imagined that teenagers Tweeted at least as regularly as we did, and that Facebook was more of a student-age thing while people of Robson’s age preferred MySpace. But we can hardly be blamed for failing to keep up with each tiny micro-trend: not when a new one seems to turn up every couple of years.

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences of technology,” Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project told The New York Times last week. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

I’ve noticed this even in the tiny gap – exactly two years – between my younger children. Girl (9) is totally smitten with her Nintendo DS, as are most of her schoolfriends. Boy (11) considers that particular games console so impossibly uncool he won’t even borrow it. For him the only device worth having is an Apple iTouch, just like all his friends have got. This, I get the impression, has less to do with the joy of playing the games themselves than the matchless pleasure of running up huge and pointless bills downloading new apps from iTunes.

Before Boy and Girl came along I used to get all my techno advice from my stepson, Jim. But at 23, Jim is starting to seem dangerously passé. The other day we were playing on our new joint Christmas present to ourselves – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – on his Xbox, and wondering why the gameplay seemed to end after so few levels. After further inquiry Jim found the answer. “Hey, things have changed,” he said. “Nobody plays games on their own any more. They fight other people. On the internet.”

This is confirmed by research from Pew. Teenagers are much more likely to play online games than are twentysomethings (78 per cent versus 50 per cent), and also more likely to send instant messages (68 per cent versus 59 per cent). Which makes Jim as much a prisoner of his generation as I am of mine. Like so many kids of his era, he takes enormous pride in his ability to write text messages at high speed, because that’s what people born in the mid-Eighties trained themselves to do. When they hit their early teens and got their first mobiles, texts were the affordable alternative to phone calls, as well as the best way of communicating without being overheard by your parents.

For teenagers now, though, texting has been largely superseded by instant messaging – as Stephanie Lipman, a 17-year-old Londoner, explains. “I did text for a while, but instant messaging is so much better – like a constant stream-of-consciousness. You don’t have to bother with ‘Hello. How are you?’ or any of that. You just have this series of conversations with your friends which you can add on to when you’re in the mood.”

As Stephanie says, she just happened to be the right age for the right trend. Like most of her friends she subscribes to BlackBerry Messenger. When she was younger, BlackBerries were things that only businessmen had, but she came of age just in time to catch the tipping point for their transformation into the must-have teen accessory.

And what of the even-younger generations? According to Mizuku Ito, of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, they’ll make less distinction between online friends and real friends, and will be more discerning about what they choose to take from popular culture. And according to Larry Rosen, a California professor, they’ll be better at multi-tasking: his research has shown that 16 to 18 year-olds can perform seven tasks on average in their free time (texting, checking Facebook, watching TV, etc), whereas people in their early 20s can only handle six, while those in their 30s perform about five and a half.

My own prediction, from watching my 9 and my 11 year-old in action, is that kids will give up on conventional television. Boy and Girl now watch all their programmes via the internet on laptops, so that they can see exactly what they want when they want: Girl goes for Horrible Histories or cookery programmes on BBC iPlayer; Boy downloads the latest episodes of The Simpsons from the US. No one showed them how to do this, and they’re not especially techno-minded: they just intuited it in that scary way children do.

Will they all abandon printed books and start reading everything on Kindle? Or will it be the next micro-generation that does that? And will there be some kind of retro backlash where, in a statement of difference, kids start gravitating back to books and old-fashioned texting, or even vinyl LPs for their superior, warm, analogue sound?

The truth is we just don’t know, and anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. As The Spectator’s techno guru Rory Sutherland, aka Wiki Man, points out, there’s not even consistency among age groups around the world. “For example, US kids were much earlier adopters of instant messaging than British kids, except in odd pockets like Cleveland, Ohio – where texting was huge. And in Japan eBay isn’t big, but Yahoo is colossal. And in Poland, they don’t Tweet, they Gadu Gadu, while in India and Brazil they prefer Orkut to Facebook.”

All we can say with confidence about future technologies is that they’re not going to be the disaster we Luddite oldies instinctively fear. (Remember the fuss about how texting was going to wipe out a generation’s literacy, thanks to abbreviations like gr8? These were largely an urban myth: hardly anyone used them, and those who did were shown by research to be children with the higher reading ages.) And that, in another couple of years, we’re going to find ourselves more passé than we could ever have imagined.

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/

Microsoft is placing big bets on Office 2010 changing life for small businesses.
Microsoft is shifting its focus from selling small businesses licences to install its software to a subscription model as it prepares for the launch of Office 2010. The biggest innovations in Office 2010 are associated with mobile phone and internet connectivity.

Robert Epstein, head of small business, Microsoft UK, told Your Business that he expected the addition of web-based applications to the Office range to radically change the way that small businesses buy and use IT.

The applications will let businesses access, edit and share their Word, Excel and Powerpoint files remotely through the internet even if the software is not installed on their laptops or smart phones.

A standard bundle of software, which includes hosted Exchange email that can be accessed via an internet browser anywhere, costs £6.71 a month with a 12 month contract. (e-mail only is £3.36)

Mr Epstein said Microsoft was “recommending” that all small businesses take a serious look at this way of buying IT and services rather than acquiring hardware like servers that had to be maintained.

”For a small business the obvious offering we are recommending is the online route,” he said. “It makes an awful lot of sense.”

”We could be aiming towards 20pc usage within 12 to 18 months in some shape or form,” he added.

Firms with security concerns about using software and saving data on an outside system may decide it is not appropriate, said Mr Epstein. Those that had paid for bespoke applications to work with their software are also likely to prefer to have the software installed on their own IT systems.

Analyst firm Gartner is predicting that working with internet-hosted software, known as Cloud computing, will be the hot technology trend in 2010, but Microsoft believes that most small businesses do not know about the potential. “The awareness of this is incredibly low. There’s a completely new way of acquiring and using IT,” said Mr Epstein.

Unlike some software service providers, Microsoft will allow businesses to use both installed Microsoft software and its software that is hosted on the internet.

It means that businesses could chose to move just new members of staff onto the online service rather than junking their existing systems overnight.

Microsoft has been selling web-based software to small businesses for some time, including its Microsoft Office Live Web software that lets firms create websites and, for a fee, access documents and manage customer information online.

But Mr Epstein said the latest updates now gave small businesses access to sophisticated business process tools in the office and remotely and the ability to better manage the demands of the increasing flow of information about customers and suppliers.

”It’s the big leveller for small business. That capability when the snow hits to convert that crucial meeting in room five to a video conference online with document sharing over your phone, web browser or PC,” said Mr Epstein.

Microsoft cut the cost of its existing subscription-based services by over 30% in November and has just announced lower than expected US prices for its five Office 2010 packages.

It was announced as new pricing and the change varied across the individual products. In a move that may appeal to start ups and home-based businesses, those buying Business and Office Professional are able to install the software on both their PC and laptops. However, only the entry level Office Home and Student version is available as a family pack, allowing usage on three PCs in one household. This version does not contain Outlook.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/

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