Present Tense Shane Hegarty
This is the first general election in which the internet will be a battleground. Which means it's time for candidates and party leaders to get busy on the keyboard. Or, at least, to shanghai someone from the party's youth wing into doing it for them. And yet, looking at the results you wonder whether it's something of a phoney war.
Perhaps the most piquant example of an uncomfortable marriage of convenience can be found on the Rock the Vote website, which is aimed at getting the youth to the polls. The campaign has given the leaders of the six main parties a weekly blog. The first entries are up, and only a cynic would suggest that the leaders don't write these blogs themselves - fresh from a couple of hours playing World of Warcraft.
However, each of the blogs reads suspiciously like a slightly amended catch-all stump speech. As in, they'd have said pretty much the same thing if it were a campaign to get elderly voters out, except that the word "youth" would be replaced with "valued older members of the population".
(By the way, I was going to make a cheap gag about Shout "House" for the Vote or some such thing, but older people are more likely to write letters to the papers. So I won't.)
There are a couple of other obvious differences. Enda Kenny, for instance, wouldn't normally use the phrase "work our butts off", which he does at Rock the Vote in some fit of syntactical madness that makes it look as if he's writing it from one of Amsterdam's smokier spots.
McDowell's entry is ridiculously patronising: "It's a privilege to meet people, young and old, in every sector, from business people to students, from farmers to workers; both Irish and from overseas." Basically, he means it's a "privilege to meet people". As if he's spent the past five years in a sealed room. Or living with mountain gorillas.
Anyway, there's pretty much something for everybody to mock in the leaders' blogs. But they hint strongly that they've done this because it would be more noticeable if they hadn't done it.
Lower down the party ranks, several candidates have gone further and attempted proper blogs. The Green Party's Roderic O'Gorman, for instance, openly describes his experience of being "mauled on the Tonight with Vincent Browne show". Meanwhile, the parties have launched general campaign blogs, with Labour's including a diverting video featuring Pat Rabbitte almost getting clobbered by a rollerblader.
But as with all new blogs, there is always the danger of falling off the bandwagon after too vigorous a push-start. Some haven't been updated for months, while others bother only to stick up those interminable press statements that are usually targeted at the local press. The kind that reads: "Cllr Sean O'Sneachta welcomes the arrival of first swallow to east Waterford and pledges to attract thousands more." Then again, the local press is still a more powerful medium than any dutiful blog.
YouTube, meanwhile, is busy with video blogs - individual party political broadcasts, some edited to music, many of them filmed outside as the wind scrapes at the microphone. But YouTube brings problems. It reveals how many - or how few - times the video has been watched. And it invites comments that the politician can't mediate. Mary Lou McDonald's video attracted a well-wisher who quips that "the only good Fianna Fáiler is a dead Fianna Fáiler". And she'd surely prefer if YouTube would remove the remark that reads: "Would ye feck off, you don't even live in the area."
What really comes across from politicians' flirtations with the web is just how little the public is inclined to flirt back. Their blogs hunger for comments. Many of the videos have maintained a lonely vigil since their posting, hardly watched, barely remarked upon, perhaps reliant on the comforting five-star rating of a pseudonymous campaign manager.
With the exception of a series of short Labour campaign ads that have got a bit of a showing online, little has really made an impact. We wait for that online moment that changes something. That kills a campaign. Destroys a candidate. Revives another.
Besides, civilian bloggers still hold the whip hand and candidates' efforts are as likely to attract parody as they are plaudits. Mary Harney's video message ("Hello, it's nice to get this opportunity to talk to you") quickly became the subject of some sharp satire by "Politicalthicko", a bearded fellow in a Mary Harney wig, who mocks: "Hello, it's nice to get this opportunity to talk down to you." So, even the most minimal efforts might not yet be worth the meagre rewards, while tokenism invites only ridicule. It might be the first online election, but the only thing that really matters is that they work their butts off on the doorsteps, not the keyboard.