Mark Blevis

With the polls just hours away from opening, and my hackals up over phone spam, I decided that it’s time to blog about the municipal election.

Phone SPAM

Several candidates for city councillor and mayor have been using pre-recorded phone spam as a way to reach voters. Voices that have called to talk at me or left their pre-recorded speech on my voice mail include Mayoral candidates Alex Munter and Bob Chiarelli, and Capital Ward candidate Jay Nordenstrom (note that Jay’s site automatically plays a video – argh!).

It’s bad enough that I have to run spam filters on my email inbox and my blog sites and still have to wade through the ones that slip through. I can’t imagine the phone companies offering a phone spam filtering service at no cost.

Online campaigning

For all the investment they put into their websites, there was an embarrassing absence of innovative uses of technology by the leading candidates for mayor.

• Larry O’Brien, who is currently leading the race, is the only one to advertise an RSS feed on his official campaign website and blog. No Podcast.
• Alex Munter has a blog, though there is no RSS link (or, if there is, I can’t find it). While his website boasts some Podcasts, it turns out he’s only hosting a couple of media files that can be played and downloaded (translation: not a Podcast).
• Bob Chiarelli completely missed the boat. He didn’t blog or Podcast. In fact, his site doesn’t even have a search function.

If I had more time, I’d have covered the use of technology in this election. Maybe next time.

Don’t forget to vote!