The new range of interactive online tools, known collectively as Web 2.0, provides campaigning organisations with the opportunity to interact with their members and supporters, who can now actively contribute instead of simply being passive consumers of websites. This is a great way to mobilise grassroots energy. Instead of the organisation just producing content itself, it provides a publishing platform to harness and amplify the productive powers of its supporters.

Blogs

Rather than a standard website, it makes sense for organisations to invest in a blogging platform such as WordPress, which is a content management platform for blogs. Group blogging in particular can be very powerful, where a group of like-minded people or staff decide to share their thoughts on a particular subject through a single website. No longer are they writing about issues in isolation – they have become a movement.

Microblogs

As well as full-length blogs with articles and opinion pieces, micro-blogging platforms such as Facebook and Twitter which allow users to share thoughts or links are becoming increasingly important media. The strength of Twitter as a campaigning platform is being demonstrated in Iran, where it is clear that a crowd of people regularly contributing a few words in the same subject area can create political momentum, particularly if the campaigners are also willing to put their bodies on the line like the brave Iranians. In many ways Twitter is akin to mobile phone (SMS) texting, and like texting can be used as a real-time tool to co-ordinate protests, but its advantage over texting is that it is one-to-many (multicast).

Wikis

Wikis are another important innovation. A Wiki is a document with multiple editors, where the edits are clearly time-stamped and marked with the name of the editor. Wikis are dynamic, living documents, and are a great platform for debate, policy-making and planning. The history of all the revisions of a Wiki is conserved, and the Wiki can be ‘reverted’ to a previous version if the group prefers. The best-known use of Wikis is Wikipedia, the publicly-editable online encyclopedia. One of the characteristics of Wikipedia is that its articles typically rank very high in Google searches, and therefore receive a large number of readers or ‘hits’. A Director of ROHITA has spent time editing the Wikipedia entry for the private finance initiative (PFI). The PFI article now ranks first, above to the Department of Health’s page, and before links to PFI on the Parliament and guardian.co.uk websites. This makes for a good ‘return on investment’ for time spent editing the page. As well as public Wikis such as Wikipedia, it is also possible for groups and companies to run private Wikis, to encourage and document debate, policy-making and planning.

Feeds

All blogs publish feeds that readers can subscribe to. ROHITA uses the Google Feedburner service to customise the feeds of our customers’ blogs and make them easier to use. By subscribing directly to blog feeds using a tool such as Google Reader, it is possible to bypass conventional media outlets. A feed reader is an ‘aggregator’, aggregating diverse news sources into a single ‘channel’.