Greens virtually win election

The Green Party is claiming an 'e-victory' after running the most creative and technologically advanced election campaign, Co-Leader Rod Donald says.

Yesterday, the Thursday before the election, the Greens main site had 12,000 visits, an outstanding record for a smaller party. In addition, the party's frogblog had grown to just under 5000 visits a day.

Hitwise results for Thursday reinforce the Greens' e-chievements. The Greens had almost 25% of Hitwise's political category (combined result for the Greens' site and Frogblog), putting the Greens in front of Labour and National even when their 'satellite' sites are included (eg TaxCuts, Keep Left or David Farrar sites). See figures and charts.

"The Greens website, which is regularly the most popular party political website in New Zealand, has more than trebled it's number of visitors over the last couple of months," Mr Donald says.

"We also welcome the positive review of our online presence by Netguide editor Nigel Horrocks on National Radio this morning (mp3, 40s 190 kb), where he described our web efforts as being at the forefront of political party efforts.

"We're particularly pleased to see that frogblog, the Green Party blog, has come from nowhere to be in the Top 10 in Hitwise's rankings. When combined with the main site, online visits to the Greens are right up there with the two big parties."

Green IT Spokesperson Nandor Tanczos says "online campaigning is important because it means we're destroying less forests and using less fossil fuel to get our message across and because the breadth of information it can deliver has a democratising influence. But the Green are also committed to greening cyberspace in terms of advocating open source and addressing toxic hardware waste."

The Greens e-campaign has also included

• the distribution of thousands of the first-ever multimedia manifesto, packed with video, music and policies;

• video streaming of the TV broadcasts, MP interviews and TV ads;
• highly creative web ads placed on many commercial sites;
• the first and most creative party political use of permission-based emails; and
• daily audioblogs with MPs and other guests on frogblog.