EightBlack.

Until this morning, I had never heard of that name.

And perhaps safe to say, that unless any of you follow US politics, neither had you.

As soon as I typed his first name “Barack” into the Google toolbar, Google knew the rest and gave me the right result. Clever.

According to Peter Ruehl from the Australian Financial Review, Obama is something of an anomaly in US politics. People like him.

He speaks well. He doesn’t have any enemies. And he hasn’t shot one of his mates on a hunting trip, as Dick Cheney did to Harry Whittington a while back. A lot of people want him to run for President and after the quick reading I did this morning, I think it’s not a bad idea. Certainly beats the alternative.

I went to his website. There’s a personal greeting, his photo and access to all his past speeches via podcast - that even had the written transcripts. There’s even an opt-in box to sign up for email alerts. Go Barack!

Now I’m not comfortable admitting this, but I decided to compare Obama’s web presence to that of our number 2 ranking politician - Peter Costello. I’m not comfortable for a variety of reasons (one is probably the fact that I don’t even vote) but I digress.

Costello’s website is about as inspiring as a prostrate exam - sure you can find out all about him, there are copies of his speeches (no podcasts or audio) and because it’s Costello, certainly no personal warmth to the site itself (mainly because warmth and Costello are about as likely as Osama Bin Laden joining the UN).

Politicians are master sales people. They have to be. But there’s a marketing chasm between a little unknown Senator in Illinois and the second most powerful person in Australia.

One understands the web and one doesn’t.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 7:11 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.